The Next Kennedy

BALTIMORE
On a June afternoon, the streets of Baltimore sweat like the inside of a humidifier. But the shirt-clinging stickiness does not hamper Maryland's lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. As befits a member of the tribe of Robert F. Kennedy (now 51, Kathleen is his oldest child), she has no discernible body fat and is an avid outdoorswoman who once climbed the Matterhorn in the snow. At the run-down Arena Playhouse, she plows through the door, all thatch and teeth and factory-issue Kennedy vigor.

Trailing behind her is Maryland's fireplug senator Barbara Mikulski, as well as Martin Sheen, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family, who is introduced as "the real president" since he plays a tastefully liberal commander in chief on television's "The West Wing." Both are campaigning for Townsend in her quest to become Maryland's next governor this fall. The lobby fills with well-wishers and journalists. In broken English, a Japanese reporter asks Townsend how it feels to be regarded as one of the only successes left in the Kennedy family. She cocks her head, then affectionately cups his face. "I guess it's better than the alternative," she says. "No success."

Inside, the teenage members of an inner-city after-school dance/theater troupe go through their warm-up paces. Townsend's head juts up and down like a fishing bob, as the sound system blasts Michael Jackson. Not every Kennedy campaign would welcome a reporter from a conservative political magazine to watch its candidate's every move. But as I run into Alan Fleischmann, Townsend's personable chief of staff, he acts as if they've just won a contest. "We're delighted you're writing about Kathleen," he says, directing my attention to a recent National Review piece that praised the scandal-free, moderate Townsend as a Kennedy conservatives "do not have to abhor."

Around Annapolis, Fleischmann is known as everything from "Rasputin" to "The Nanny" for his interjections and interceptions whenever difficult questions, and sometimes not so difficult ones, are directed his boss's way. One wouldn't expect to find him in action here. First, this is a low-pressure gig, a goodwill tour in which Townsend is supposed to introduce Sheen while taking victory laps for funding this particular after-school program. Second, this is the ideal Kennedy milieu, with all the celebrities and chipper, at-risk children.

After her introduction, Sheen takes the stage. He talks to the amateur thespians gathered at his feet about their "craft," trying awkwardly to speak their language: Shakespeare, he says, "is like the rap of its day." As Sheen expounds on his MC Shakespeare theory, Townsend's eyes dart nervously and habitually to Fleischmann, who, like a third-base coach, gives her visual and verbal cues, though none seem necessary since the only task at hand is not falling off the stage.

As the program concludes, Sheen and Townsend take a seat on the floor, surrounded by the children, who sing-shout a spiritual, "Hosanna, Forever We Worship You." A devout Catholic who often discusses matters spiritual, Townsend shows no concern over the commingling of church and state. She and Sheen join in, attempting to clap with the children. The children clap. Then the visitors clap. One girl tries to give Sheen an on-the-spot rhythm tutorial, until the hopeless Sheen collapses in laughter. But Townsend doesn't even notice. She lumbers along in erratic clip-clops like a wounded Clydesdale, happily off the beat.

In many ways, Townsend has spent her entire life clapping off the beat. She became the only Kennedy to lose an election when she ran for Congress two years after moving to Maryland in 1986. In a family where everyone was expected to wait their turn, but females never got one, she is the only Kennedy woman to hold elective office--as Parris Glendening's lieutenant governor since 1994. Then there are the nicknames differentiating her from the rest of the clan, everything from "Clean Kathleen" to "The Nun," which the married mother of four briefly considered becoming.

Of all the RFK idolaters--more than her siblings, more even than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.--Kathleen is said to hold her father dearest. Sixteen years old when he was killed, she was mature enough to know that she lost not just a dad, but what one biographer described as the Kennedy who most defined Kennedyness. She was old enough to appreciate his civil rights stances, his melancholic post-JFK soul-searching, his strict regimen requiring his children to recite current events and poetry at dinner, and his exhilarating adventures in which he'd lead his brood hurtling down ski slopes, through white-water rapids, and along a backyard zipwire set up by Uncle Jack's Green Berets at Hickory Hill, the Bobby Kennedy estate in McLean, Virginia.