I love seeing the V13 buses that go up Calle Aribau in Barcelona to Plaza Kennedy. On your front screen appears that almost magical name… Kennedy. It is a hypnotic and iconic composition of consonants and vowels and has enormous meaning.
My memory reaches to the black and white images of the burial of President John Kennedy in the Telesprint of my parents’ house, and throughout my life the themes related to this saga of Massachusetts princes and New England kings have haunted me. remarkably interested.
A few years ago it was a surprise to receive an involuntary shove followed by immediate excuses from John John, JFK’s son, in a midtown Manhattan bar in 1986, and it was a news shock to learn of the terrible plane crash in which he perished. in July 1999 off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, with his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and sister-in-law Lauren.
A few months earlier, in January 1998, another Kennedy, Michael, died skiing down a slope in Aspen, Colorado, while playing football on the snow, skis on but no sticks. A tree got in his way. Michael was 39 years old and the son of Senator Robert Kennedy and a nephew of JFK.
It was also a special surprise, and a very pleasant one, to run into Caroline Kennedy, John John’s sister, in an elevator at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in October 2016. Carolina was then the US ambassador to Japan. She there, surrounded by American escorts, she inevitably crossed her gaze with mine and smiled shyly.
Kennedy is a proper name of the 20th century. And his strength has penetrated this new century as a synonym of hope, change, justice and social equality. Barack Obama picked up that message, and Edward Kennedy, Ted, the younger brother of JFK and RFK, also did the same.
Ted, yes, was marked after the death of his secretary Mary Jo Kopechne in the waters of Chappaquiddick in July 1969, but he dedicated his entire existence to improving the lives of his compatriots from his seat in the Senate. Ted died in 2009, aged 77, never having released Mari Jo’s death.
It was surprising to see the implicit support of the Kennedy clan for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s candidacy, when the actor ran for governor in California, with the full support of his wife Maria Shriver, daughter of Eunice Kennedy, Ted’s sister. Patrick Kennedy, one of Schwarzenegger’s legitimate sons, was right when he said: “Being Kennedy is more than a legacy, it is mythology.”
Now, in order not to break the sign of the times, where populists and extremist ideas have occupied the political and social scene on both sides of the Atlantic, a Kennedy appears who has nothing to do with his family’s legacy.
Robert F. Kennedy, 69, the nephew of the assassinated president and son of Robert Kennedy, is running for the White House. And his speech has horrified not only his family, but the entire Democratic party, where voices have been raised about whether this Kennedy has taken the wrong side and whether his speech does not make life difficult for President Joe Biden.
A denier on the subject of Covid and an anti-vaccine militant, this Kennedy compared confinement to the Holocaust. And not only that. He denies global warming and wants to keep the borders closed to immigrants. It is the sign of the times. Populism and demagogy. And not even the Kennedys are spared from this damn fever.
