Power comes from your ability to reward friends and punish enemies. With the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009, and the defeat of Patrick Kennedy in 2010, their ability to reward or punish is greatly diminished, yet they still act with the arrogance that assumes they still have all their old power. Their fall will be ugly.
Last paragraph sums it up well.
“Nobody can blame the Kennedy family for caring deeply about how its members are portrayed. But shouldn’t they voice their objections in public? Caroline Kennedy could quite easily make the case that she doesn’t think the miniseries depicts her family fairly. It’s not as if she doesn’t have ample access to the media. She could have said that she didn’t think her brother would have wanted me to write a book about him. Why not let the marketplace of ideas go about its business? All these back-room campaigns, these anonymous machinations, suggest a lack of faith in the American public — maybe even in the Kennedy legacy itself. It is elitist in the worst sense of the word, and it winds up inflicting far more damage to the legacy than any book or movie possibly could.”