True, Bobby was just a little weeney wanting to be a great big hot dog. After he was appointed U.S. Attorney General with no expererience, no qualifications except having his brother as President, Bobby even went after the mafia, and the mob and his family knew each other. (Jack even shared a mistress with Sam Giaconna, while he was in the White House.)
Bobby was the original 98-lb weakling that thought family power and money could let him act like a tough guy, and he made enemies with impunity. His behavior after his brother's assasination was curious. He went through a terrible personal time, by all accounts, but even as the Attorney General, he stayed away completely from the Warren Commission investigation. Odd, because one would think that a vengeful Bobby Kennedy would want to know who/who all killed his older brother. But Bobby stayed completely away from it....
This was a Catholic family. An imperfect one, yes, but from all indications, it went beyond simple cultural heritage.
What a masterful example of understatement.
Joseph Kennedy Sr. was the generational curser and the moneybags that promoted/demoted his own children in one of the most blatant hunger-drives for power in American history. Joe's bootlegging and mafia contacts have come to light over the years, as well as his personal crassness. One example of his crass family behavior, out of countless others, was when he took his Hollywood starlet mistress, Gloria Swanson, on a boat cruise with his wife and all their children. Swanson later remarked in her autobiography that she couldn't tell if Joe's wife, Rose, was an idiot or just purposely blind during that incredible family vacation. Swanson also wrote that ol' Joe ripped her off for $5 million while "managing" her career in Hollywood. He'd even send her fur coats and diamonds, which she later found were billed to her. The old SOB told her that he could prove he had been faithful to her, because 4 years passed between Jean and Teddy's births. His second-born son, Jack, would later have to warn his sisters' visiting friends to lock their bedroom doors at night because his father was known to barge in - and the old bugger tried to molest at least one of them.
Rose left him when Joe Jr. and Jack were little, and her father sent her back because divorce was unthinkable. She became nothing more than a brood mare, and spent a large amount of her time and Joe's money traveling to Paris and other European site-seeing areas, leaving her family alone. The kids grew up knowing that Dad was all-powerful, and as a young JFK once remarked to a friend, "My mother is a nothing."
Joe decided on his own to try the new surgical technique of lobotomy on his eldest daughter, which he'd read had been successful at calming overly-excitable mental patients, and he had it done while Rosemary's mother was gone without bothering to tell Rose. Rosemary had been mildly retarded before the operation; she wrote pitifully adoring letters to her father during his ambassadorship to pre-WWII Great Britain, and was presented at Court with her younger sister, Kathleen. But later after the operation, Rosemary was profoundly retarded, incontinent, and certainly unable to read or write. Rose was said to be furious when she found out, but only she and her daughter Eunice ever visited Rosemary, who has been cared for by Catholic nuns in Winconsin ever since. Rosemary Kennedy is still alive to this day, but mercifully she has been spared from any gawkers.
This is no knock on Catholics, so hopefully no one will take it as so. The Kennedy family has been endlessly examined and it is well-known they are/have been mostly disfunctional. With that ruthless founding father, they would have been so in any other religion. Any reading of the family history leads back to the founding father and his wild desire for money and power, while proudly getting away with and then flaunting everything he could. His amoral and tawdry hijinks are legendary. In short, there were no moral family role models for his decendants, just the overwhelming belief that money could buy anything and get you out of any trouble. It's called hubris, but with a capital "H". Hubris caught up with ol' Joe because he suffered a stroke in 1962, and his wife wasn't concerned enough to have him taken to a hospital until several hours afterwards. He was side-lined by his family, and put in the care of a family niece who said that he wasn't given the therapy he hadn't to help him function better. But he was still knowlegeable, and sat through the assasinations of two of his sons, and the Chappaquic disgrace of the youngest son. He died not long after that, paralyzed and unable to still protect and guide his biological extensions.
Sorry for the rant, but all the media attention on the 40th anniversity of JFK's assasination is a little much. His weak showing in a Berlin meeting with Nikita Kruschev led that Soviet premier to think JFK would put up with nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was the result. His dabblings in Viet Nam, including the go-along with the assasination of Diem, were disasterous, and he is grossly over-rated for his interest in civil rights. His womanizing in the White House and elsewhere were so great that even his trusted press contacts might not have protected him from exposure had he not been killed in Dallas in Nov., 1963.
JFK had a sad childhood in so many ways, in part because of his chronic health problems. He did show great personal bravery in WWII after carelessly allowing his PT boat to be the only PT boat not in a battle to be run over at night by a Japanese destroyer, and JFK valiently struggled through health conditions that would have put anyone else in a nursing home or a grave. He also took anphetamines provided by his Dr. to keep going during his White House years.
The Kennedy lifestyle was nothing anyone should envy because the price for the moneied lifestyle and power also caused great personal destruction. Just look at them. The origins of "Kennedy Family Curse" are so obvious that folklore doesn't require a witch doctor to cast the spell, it was the founding pater & mater.