In a rambling wood-frame house about an hour outside New York City, 14 women and girls (and one baby boy) gather for a Saturday afternoon photo shoot. It's a boisterous multi-ringed circus: Four girls whisper secrets and dance to Beyoncé, while three young women, 16 to 28, feed chocolate cake to their toddler cousins and an impossibly limber 30-year-old does pretzel-like yoga poses. In the midst of this activity, four adult sisters--they're the mothers of everyone else in the room--trade advice. "How does this look?" asks one of the sisters, of the outfit she's chosen for the shoot. "Really? Not great," replies the eldest sibling--prompting the younger to dash to the wardrobe trailer to change.
In this casual atmosphere, it's easy to forget that these 14 females are members of America's most famous political dynasty. They're the daughters and granddaughters of Robert F. Kennedy (he also had seven sons), who was assassinated 40 years ago this month during his historic campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president. His murder, by a lone gunman named Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, came four and a half years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas--and only eight weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on a motel balcony in Memphis.
Youthful and passionate, "Bobby" embodied a fresh style of politics: He was an antipoverty and antiwar crusader, a voice for minorities--our first "rock star" candidate. "He would come home from campaigning with his fingers red and swollen because of people reaching up, almost desperate to touch him," recalls his daughter Kerry Kennedy, 48, who has turned over her house for today's shoot.
"Over the decades," says Kerry, "people from all walks of life have told me, 'When your father died, so did my hope.'" But hope hasn't died, of course. Bobby's daughters and granddaughters carry it forward with their activism, public service and determination to make the world a better place. In a rare group interview--"We've never had so much of our family in one place, without men. There's a rare and unique energy in the air with so many of the women together," says Kerry--Glamour talks to these amazing females. Collectively they've lived through so much: unspeakable family pain, social upheaval, women's changing roles. How could they not have amassed priceless life lessons? Here, they share truths we can all live by.
You can forgive even the worst in others
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, 56, is Bobby's eldest daughter. The former lieutenant governor of Maryland, she is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of Failing America's Faithful.
Three weeks after my father died, I went to work on a Navajo reservation whose soaring teen suicide rate my father had been concerned about. I was 16; I was crying a lot. My mother wanted me to stay home--but he had taught me to turn my grief outward. When my uncle [John Kennedy] was killed, my father gave me a handwritten note that ended with this simple request: "Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy." Grief gives you two choices. You can curse your fate and be angry. Or you can use that grief to reach out to others.
Rory Kennedy, 39, is Bobby's daughter. She produces, writes and directs award-winning documentaries on social issues.
I believe you need to confront pain and suffering in the hard times and that avoidance is not the way to go through life. My father was someone who didn't avoid difficulty. On the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, he went into the African American community and talked about suffering: theirs, and his own after his brother's death. And even though I never knew my father [Ethel Kennedy was about three months pregnant with Rory when Bobby was assassinated] I learned that from him. For my film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, I interviewed a man whose father had been tortured [to death] by our soldiers. I owed it to that grieving man not only to let myself feel devastated by what happened to his father but to communicate that devastation to others. Otherwise, his pain and suffering would have gone unnoticed by the world.
Kerry Kennedy, 48, is Bobby's daughter. She is a human rights attorney and founder of the Center for Human Rights at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. Kerry has written two books: Speak Truth to Power and Being Catholic Now.
I've learned powerful lessons about the nature of forgiveness from human rights defenders. For example, for the greater good of his country, Kofi Woods emerged from a torture chamber in Liberia to later defend the very men who had brutalized him. Those who suffer profoundly are granted profound wisdom. Forgiveness is a gift, and central to faith. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me: Forgiving doesn't mean turning yourself into a doormat.... It's like someone is sitting in a dank room...but outside the sun is shining.... Forgiveness is like opening the curtains...a chance for a new beginning.
Cara Kennedy Cuomo, 13, is Kerry's daughter.
In our school production of Speak Truth to Power [a play based on Kerry's book that's now touring the world], I portrayed Desmond Tutu talking about a town in South Africa where the police massacred innocent people. Later, the police asked for forgiveness and the townspeople welcomed them back into the community. It's amazing to think people can overcome their anger and loss, and inspiring to know they can all be nice to one another.
Kathleen: We've had other tragedies, and you try to learn from them. [In 1984 Kathleen's younger brother David died of a drug overdose at age 29. Another brother, Michael, died in a 1997 skiing accident when he was 39.] When David died we, like countless other families, learned the horrible ultimate lesson about the grip of addiction. It's not that we were unaware of it before, and it's not that we didn't try to help before--as much as we knew how in the early 1980s. I asked myself over and over again: What could I have done differently? How could I have been more effective? Here was this wonderful kid, this sweet, lovely, sensitive young man, lost to us. I've worked with crime victims and seen families devastated by death. Every family suffers; we all struggle with how to transform that suffering into something that redeems those who are still alive.
