Meet the scandal-hit fiercely competitive RFKs

You might think Kennedys are Kennedys, and to some extent, from a distance, that is true. Close-up, however, there is plenty of rivalry and internecine warfare among the different branches of the family.

The RFK faction are by far the biggest — Bobby and Ethel had 11 kids, and more than their fair share of scandal, including one son’s death by drug overdose, another’s arrest for heroin possession, Joe’s incident at Nantucket, along with a general trend of overindulgence among the sons that has sent several of them into rehab.

Jackie Kennedy was said to have been shocked by the lax, indulged upbringing of Bobby and Ethel’s kids — and apparently used them as a blueprint of what not to do with her own children.

Ethel, herself the child of two wealthy alcoholics, apparently grew up virtually wild, and the RFK kids wandered in and out at will, demanding meals whenever they wanted them — cooks often lasted no more than a week — and the childrens’ pets had the run of the house.

Unlike many of the RFK kids, Jackie’s two children (another child died very young), John (pictured below) and Caroline, stayed away from politics. John Kennedy Jnr, the golden boy, a lawyer and publisher of George magazine, might have moved that way, but he died, tragically in 1999, aged 38, when his aeroplane crashed, killing him and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, with no children.

Of Caroline Kennedy’s three children, Rose is an actress, Tatiana a jour studying nalist and Jack, law at Harvard, is just 25. from you. Because if it is not, people will tell’.” On the wall of his congressional office is a poster of the text of a speech Bobby Kennedy gave in 1966: “You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain, but history will judge you. And, as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to enrich the lives of your fellow man.”

So, is Joe III for real? “We’ll find out in what will be an especially long, gruelling, campaign,” says Larry Tye. “But so far he seems just the kind of bridge-builder Bobby was half a century ago — between islands of blacks, browns and blue-collars; between terrified parents and estranged youths; and between the establishment he’d grown up in versus the New Politics he heralded — at a moment when America was comparably riven.”

Perhaps most significantly, “his grandmother, 90-year-old Ethel Kennedy, is convinced Joe is the closest thing that the family or this country has produced to her beloved Bobby”.