Looking at Mark, it would be hard to mistake the features - hair, teeth, the whole Kennedy package. But the sunny Shrivers have always maintained a distance between their ambitions and the rest of the clan. When R.F.K. ran for President in 1968, Sargent Shriver refused to give up his post as L.B.J.'s ambassador to France to come home and campaign for him. Ted paid him back four years later by objecting to George McGovern's choice of Shriver as a running mate. And when Shriver ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 1976, Ted didn't lift a finger for his brother-in-law.

Mark, however, is a polite, hard-working cousin who, in the view of the larger clan, has earned the right to enter the family business. He was raised in the district he seeks to represent, founded a widely praised program in Baltimore for inner-city youth and did his time in the state assembly.

Yet he has his own uneasy relationship with being a Kennedy. Mark bristles when it is suggested he is running on his name, but he hasn't forged much of an individual identity. He's against the death penalty, in favor of education spending - dependably Kennedyesque. The family has in fact been crucial to Mark in his bid to unseat popular Republican Congresswoman Connie Morella next year. Uncle Ted has given two fund raisers on his behalf so far. His campaign has appropriated two time-honored Kennedy themes: money and influence. Mark has outraised his three primary opponents combined, in a race that Democrats know will be expensive if they are to have a prayer of beating Morella.

Mark's candidacy presents an excruciating dilemma for many Maryland Democrats. His primary opponent is State Senator Christopher Van Hollen, 42, a hero to environmentalists, education groups and gun-control advocates - the voters that Democrats will need to defeat Morella. There's talk of a Solomonic solution: redistricting Montgomery County into two so that Van Hollen can run in the heavily Democratic parts and Shriver can vie with Morella for the rest. If that doesn't happen, Kathleen could lend a hand by tapping Van Hollen for the second spot on her ticket. It helps to have friends - and especially family - in the right places.

DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS

PATRICK KENNEDY

For a decade, Patrick Kennedy's career was set on fast forward. He had lived in Rhode Island just a year and was only a college sophomore when he decided to take on a 10-year incumbent for the state legislature in 1988. "Who's Patrick Kennedy?" Jack Skeffington asked when he heard about his upstart primary opponent. "Is it a big deal?"

A very big deal, as it turned out. Ted detailed a top staff member to the campaign and called nearly every day to urge his son to work harder. Patrick knocked on 3,000 doors and spent an unheard-of $93,000 - $73 for every vote he got - to win a $300-a-year job. On Election Day, Ted, Joan and John Jr. stationed themselves at polling places with hired photographers and Polaroid cameras, posing for souvenir snapshots with voters. Even Skeffington's campaign manager had one taken. Patrick won in a landslide, and on election night Ted phoned Jackie and Rose to announce that it had been his "happiest election."

Patrick was 26 the first time he was asked on television whether he would someday like to run for President, and he didn't hedge: "Yes." When he arrived in Washington as a freshman Congressman in 1995, the only question seemed to be when he would make his move for the Senate. Ted made no secret of his dream to see his son serve alongside him.

It wasn't charisma that fueled the buzz. Speechmaking so terrified Patrick that colleagues recall seeing his hands shake from across the chamber. But he was determined to win their respect - and their gratitude. When Patrick took over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1998, they all got to share in the fund-raising clout of the Kennedy name. Donors who gave the party $100,000 or more got a weekend at the family compound in Hyannis Port. And Patrick worked harder than anyone else ever had at the job, giving up his committee assignments, leaving leadership meetings early so he could go dial for dollars. "He was awesome," says House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. "Seven days a week, 18 hours a day." The result: congressional Democrats raised more than $90 million - nearly triple what they ever had before.

But the effort kept Patrick away from his district for long stretches and took its toll on his popularity. Polls last winter showed his approval ratings in Rhode Island sliding below 50% after two angry incidents became public. In March 2000, he was videotaped shoving a Los Angeles airport security guard; in August, he had an argument with a girlfriend aboard a rented yacht that brought Coast Guard intervention.

As Patrick sees it now, he has a choice. "There's no mortal blow here. It's really a question of whether I react or I respond," he told Time. "One is steeped in self-appraisal and maturity, and one is kind of superficial and temporary. I'm responding; I'm not reacting." He left the campaign committee, shook up his staff and brought back trusted family political advisers. He became a different kind of Congressman - one who acknowledged some frailties that made him seem more human, less like a Kennedy fund-raising machine. Having gone public with the fact that he has sought therapy and taken medication to combat depression, he champions legislation to improve mental-health services. He took back his Appropriations Committee seat, and he sends home regular reports about getting new buses for the Rhode Island transit authority, dock repairs for Prudence Island and fancy digital radios for the Pawtucket police.

As Patrick redoubled his fund-raising efforts to meet a possible 2002 challenge from term-limited G.O.P. Governor Lincoln Almond, the family pitched in. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were hosts for a concert at Manhattan's Russian Tea Room that hauled in $100,000. A clambake at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port cleared $75,000. In March, Patrick made a surprise appearance onstage at the Providence Newspaper Guild Follies. Dressed in a sailor suit, he sang a rewrite of the Gilligan's Island theme. ("I'd asked a gal whom I had met/To take an evening cruise./ Little did I know that it/Would make the evening news./And boy did I get bruised.") He joked that when he returned to Rhode Island after giving up the Democratic fund-raising job, he saw his own face on a milk carton.

Patrick's friends say the setbacks have liberated him from the expectations that have defined his political career. "Not just the expectations of others," says an adviser, "but the expectations of his own family." Last year, for the first time in his life, Patrick passed up an advancement opportunity, opting not to run for the seat left open by Senator John Chafee's death. For now, he says, "I've gotta be in my own skin." He says he feels "free from having to cringe. There's no sense hiding anything, because it's all out there. It makes you honest about your frailties, because guess what? You've got to get to a place where you can deal with them. There's no running away from them in this business."

THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

JOE KENNEDY II/MAX KENNEDY

To be a successful Kennedy in public life, it helps to have already come to terms with what it means to be a Kennedy in private life. Both Joe II, the firstborn male of the third generation, and Max, the younger brother born too late to know his father as anything but an icon, seemed to feel entitled to hold