Nation: DEATH OF THE FOUNDER

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TEN years ago this weekend, they gathered before a fireplace in Hyannisport to rough out plans for J.F.K.'s run for the presidency. They all were there, handsome as Irish thoroughbreds, their eyes bright as dimes—Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Pat, Ethel, Jackie, Joe and Rose. Together, attended by their Irish mafia, the Kennedys burst upon the decade to become its dominating political myth.

The family was the realization of Joe Kennedy's dreams of glory. "The measure of a man's success in life," said the founding father, "is not the money he's made. It's the kind of family he's raised." Joe Kennedy amassed a fortune of some $400 million (see box, p. 23), but he was also an astonishing success as a progenitor. Yet the patriarch's glory was brief. One day last week was the sixth anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination. Another would have been Robert Kennedy's 44th birthday. And on a third, the family gathered to bury Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who died of heart failure at 81.

It is possible that Ted Kennedy, the one surviving son, will eventually emerge from the penumbra of Chappaquiddick to run for the presidency. If he does so, he will be alone in a way that neither his brothers nor his father could ever have anticipated. For now, with a tragic theatrical economy—assassins on cue, the paterfamilias dying like Priam after seeing his sons slaughtered, the calendar neatly pinching off the decade—the myth of the Kennedys is at least temporarily ended.

Few fathers have ever set out so deliberately to found a political dynasty—although the Kennedys were too close together to be called dynastic. The denouement of his dream was especially bitter for a man whose tough pride in name and faith in success amounted almost to hubris. For most of the decade of his sons' triumphs, he was paralyzed and speechless following a stroke the year after Jack's inauguration.

All of the other decades of his life, Joe Kennedy was a remarkably shrewd, hearty and charming man. He had the serenity of a man totally devoted to his family and the detachment of a lucidly ruthless financier. He moved with an Irish swagger among Presidents, movie stars and corporation bosses, but bequeathed to his sons some of his East Boston toughness. He frequently concealed his taste for classical music lest it be thought effete. One night in the '30s he was listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on a phonograph when a pair of his cronies requested some "hi-di-ho." Scowled Kennedy: "You dumb bastards don't appreciate culture."

Behind the Lines. Joe Kennedy had the fortune to be born in a Boston where, the Yankee hegemony notwithstanding, political and financial power was beginning to be possible for an Irishman. His grandfather had fled the potato famine in 1848; his father, Patrick J. Kennedy, became a saloon owner and Massachusetts state senator. Pat Kennedy had the money and savvy to send Joe to Boston Latin School and then across the river to Harvard, deep behind the Brahmin lines. Emerging from Harvard in 1912, Kennedy told friends that he would be a millionaire at 35—and he just made the deadline.