Running was too big a risk - for Smith and for the family's aura of invincibility. (Only one family member, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, has ever lost a general election.) Smith is the fifth member of the clan this year to float a trial balloon, then pop it. Almost as many have entered races to stay. Four Kennedys by birth or marriage are running - two for Governor, two for Congress. Should they all prevail, there will be five family members in federal or statewide office - the most ever - including patriarch Ted Kennedy, who won an easy re-election last year and is at the height of his power in the Senate. Not bad for a dynasty that enjoyed its heyday before most living Americans were born.

The 559,000 people who stood in line to see the Jacqueline Kennedy show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City testify to the enduring power of Kennedy nostalgia, and the flock of Kennedy books coming this fall (and they come every fall, as surely as touch football and Cape Cod rain) demonstrate the family's enduring power in the marketplace (hot title: The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Caroline Kennedy). But that exhibit and those books summon the magic of departed Kennedys - J.F.K. and Jackie, R.F.K., J.F.K. Jr. The story of the new generation isn't about magic; it is about making peace with a myth that can kill you if you let it. The Kennedys have been downsized, not only by their frailties but also by what politics has become. Most of the third-generation cousins do public-service work that doesn't require voter approval. Tim Shriver runs the Special Olympics, Will Smith fights to ban land mines, and Rory Kennedy makes films about poverty, addiction and human rights. Robert Kennedy Jr. made headlines last month when he was jailed in Puerto Rico for breaking into a bombing range to protest U.S. military exercises on Vieques Island. While he was in prison, his wife Mary gave birth to their sixth child; they named him Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy. After Bobby returned home, he won a major battle in his long crusade to clean up the Hudson River. If such causes appear modest next to staring down the Russians, integrating the South or going to the moon, they are not. They are simply of their time.

The best place to see how the Kennedy past serves the Kennedy present may be the leafy Maryland estate of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, J.F.K.'s brother-in-law and sister. One recent summer Sunday afternoon found Arnold Schwarzenegger strolling across his in-laws' park-size lawn in a lavender polo shirt and pondering the $28 cigar someone had handed him. "The most dangerous thing," he chortled, "is Democrats with money." Eunice and her television-star daughter Maria, Schwarzenegger's wife, were working the driveway, where people were arriving by the hundreds. And over by the rented pony ride, a Today show camera crew was trailing Maria's cousin, the woman everyone expects to be the next Governor of Maryland. "We really come from a wonderful family," said Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

That "family picnic" was the second fund raiser there in less than a week for Mark Kennedy Shriver, who is looking to step up to Congress from the Maryland state assembly. A month before, the $10-a-head "50th-birthday party" the Shrivers threw for Kathleen backed up traffic more than a mile as nearly 5,000 people showed up for R.F.K.'s eldest.

Is it any wonder that no credible opponent of either party has stepped forward to challenge her? "There is a classic Kennedy formula," says Brown University political scientist Darrell West. "It's based on media, money and scaring off the opposition."

Counting the in-laws, the family has the potential to stretch its brand of celebrity politicians from coast to coast. Schwarzenegger, the clan's lone Republican, took a pass on next year's California Governor's race but says he'll probably run for something someday. Andrew Cuomo, who is married to R.F.K.'s daughter Kerry, has his own pedigree as the son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, but in trying to avenge his dad's gubernatorial loss to George Pataki, he's relying almost as much on his Camelot connection. "Why do we love Andrew Cuomo?" TV's Rosie O'Donnell asked 1,000 people at Cuomo's $1.5 million fund raiser in Manhattan this summer. "He had the good sense to marry a Kennedy."

Is it noblesse oblige that propels some Kennedys toward elected office, or a sense of divine right? Do they represent the last gasp of an old order, or the first breath of a new one? "I definitely would not be where I am today if it weren't for my family name and connections," says Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy, 34, who used that name and those connections to shatter fund-raising records last year as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "I often joke that I'm the best example of why there should be campaign-finance reform."

But the rules of the game have changed, even for the Kennedys. Patrick, Ted's younger son, recalls Caroline's reaction to the news that he was mentoring two cousins considering congressional races: "Mark and Max coming to you for advice? God help us." But he says there are some insights that only a Kennedy can offer another Kennedy, and chief among them is this: "Disabuse yourself of the notion that there's this machine out there that just kind of materializes when you say, 'Yes - go!' Growing up watching politics as my cousins and I did, you had this warped sense that that's all you needed to do. That was the way it was for my father's generation."

That ol' Kennedy invincibility is getting noticeably shopworn - even in Massachusetts, where Kennedys have been on the ballot 20 times and never defeated. Not next year. Two prospective candidates and sons of R.F.K. - former Congressman Joe Kennedy II and his younger brother Max - backed away from what could have been brutal races. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.) "It's not there for Joe and the others. There are too many problems," says a Kennedy friend. "And they're not prone to taking the kind of chances they would have at one time."

Who can blame them? No one understands better than the Kennedys what it costs to go into politics. If they seize what has been held up as a birthright, they must also accept the diminishing, suffocating comparisons that come with walking in the footprints of giants. "They're all competing with icons and legends," says political consultant David Axelrod, who has worked with several of them. That is partly what is drawing them away from Massachusetts, where, as Patrick puts it, "whatever I did, I would be trampling on hallowed ground." But that's only the beginning of what it takes to be a Kennedy in politics today. For this generation, it is as much about carving out an identity as about cashing in on a legacy. And the first part is the hardest by far.

THE NEWEST NEW KENNEDY

MARK KENNEDY SHRIVER