The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 30 August 2009
In the article below, we stated that Joseph Kennedy joined Roosevelt's cabinet, but he never held a cabinet-level post. We also said Mussolini came to power in 1921; it was 1922.
She was born into the American dream, one of the most seductive fantasies ever. In 1921 Eunice Kennedy came into a world that's as remote as the steam engine: Chaplin was starring in The Kid, and Mussolini had just become Il Duce. F Scott Fitzgerald would write of this decade that "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history". Almost 90 years on, the questions remain: has the dream of originality and self-reinvention that inspired the life of Eunice Kennedy Shriver gone the way of the silent movie? Do the transformations of the last, American century render her remarkable career a swansong for a vanished world? Is her death a closing chapter in the saga of America's tragic royal family?
Eunice was first and last a Kennedy. She had high cheekbones and thick copper hair, characteristics she shared with her brother Jack. As a woman in a man's world, her participation in the Kennedy dramas would always be as an observer, a point of view that suited her intelligence. She was a member of a clan, raised to participate in public life in a way that might be timeless if the society which has honoured it were not in such a state of flux. In its day, however, the American dream has been one of the world's great inspirations. Perhaps the amazing thing is that it has lasted so long in the face of so much change and adversity.
In 1605, responding to excitement about the New World, Ben Jonson collaborated on a play, Eastward Ho!, in which Seagull, a smooth-talking sea captain, tantalises a would-be emigrant, Spendall, with tall tales of America: "A whole country of English is there, man. I tell thee, gold is more plentiful than copper is with us ..." Finally, says Seagull, clinching the argument: "You shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers."
Hundreds of years later, this was the dream - fabulous riches and, even more astonishing, egalitarian liberty - that lured Patrick Kennedy (JFK's great-grandfather), a penniless Irish sharecropper, to the cold, black wharves of Boston in 1848. A staggering 4.7 million Irishmen emigrated to the US in the 19th century. He was joining not only the "shanty Irish" but also an emerging aristocracy of working Americans, a belligerent community that was shaping the politics, cutting the deals, and fighting its way to the front.
By the mid-century the American Irish had carved a dominant role in big-city politics, the unions and the Catholic church. Dickens, visiting New York, observed: "The Irish element is acquiring such enormous influence that it seems unfair to stigmatise as 'American' the other monstrous things that one also sees."
JFK visited relatives in Wexford shortly before his assassination, and today his family takes immense pride in being Irish. But it was not always so. His father, Joe Kennedy, born in the Irish ghetto of east Boston in 1888, scorned his origins. Fiercely bright and incandescent with self-belief, he got himself into Harvard by sheer competitive drive. Then he discovered the limits to his dreams.
As an Irish Catholic, he was excluded from the inner circles of the university, and developed a raw sensitivity to the very word "Irish". Later he advised his children to remake themselves: "It's not who you are that counts," he would say, "but what other people think you are."
This could have been written by his near contemporary and fellow Irishman, the mid-westerner, F Scott Fitzgerald, who had gone to Princeton on family money and emerged as the chronicler of Jazz Age America. Joe Kennedy was like a character from Gatsby. "You can go to Harvard, and it doesn't mean a damn thing," he told a friend. "The only thing these people understand is money." So, setting out to make his fortune, he did it three times over. First, at 25, he became "the youngest bank president in the world", married Rose Fitzgerald, the mayor's daughter, and set up home in Brookline, a Protestant suburb. Rose kept house in Boston; Joe made money in New York.
Joe Kennedy made his fortune just as the America that his Irish imagination so mythologised was disappearing. There were new cars and highways, new movies and celebrities. There was the thrill of speed and flight, the wild riffs of jazz, and the furtive squalor of the speakeasy.
Kennedy made one fortune as a movie producer and bootlegger, and another on the unregulated Wall Street before, as he put it, "they pass a law against it". Then he closed the deal by pulling his money out of the market just before the Great Crash of October 1929.
Now he was poised for an assault on the summit of the American dream. He joined FDR's cabinet, breathed the seductive air of the White House and was sent to London as American ambassador. But his Nazi sympathies betrayed him. In 1941 he was forced to resign in disgrace. Cut short in mid-career, Joe Kennedy's hopes of transforming his Irish family into something of great national consequence burned more fiercely than ever.
Kennedy's dream was a story that F Scott Fitzgerald told many times in his fiction: a man hopelessly in love with an impossible dream, the fatal American cocktail of great expectations and tantalising promises. In everyday terms, this boiled down to the belief that, by taking thought in the pursuit of happiness, it was possible to live out a myth that was larger than life. From here it was a short step to Camelot.
But Fitzgerald knew, as Joe Kennedy did not, that the dream must fail and become cruelly exposed as a hollow fantasy. Gatsby is a self-made man who is revealed to be a criminal fraud. Kennedy, who also devoted himself to "the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty", was a self-invented man who focused his glittering eye on politics. When he failed, he turned the blowtorch of his ambition on to his children. Now Camelot begins in earnest.
Rose Kennedy had five children in six years. Eventually, after a childbearing hiatus attributable to Joe's infidelities in Hollywood, there were nine of them at the Kennedy table, born between 1915 and 1932. Almost from birth, the first boy, Joe Jnr, was cast as a future president.
Sickly John Fitzgerald, the second son, appeared in 1917. Rosemary, a year later, had depressive mental health problems, and would endure a terrible life in the over-achieving family, not helped by her father's decision to authorise a lobotomy in 1941. Then came Kathleen ("Kick"), and Eunice in 1921.
The Kennedy family moved out of Boston to a summer estate on Cape Cod, the oceanside town of Hyannisport - "High-anus" to the locals, according to Norman Mailer. In 1925 and 1932 two more boys - Bobby and Teddy - joined the Kennedy table. It was such a large family that the children ate at two sittings, one for the older boys, one for the younger. Eunice was the swing child, who ate at both and became, in the words of the Washington Post, "a kind of fulcrum in the family".
There is sometimes a side to American self-advancement that exhibits an almost Roman discipline. Their responsibility to the Kennedy dream was drilled into family members at meal times. There were news items posted on bulletin boards in the kitchen - raw material for dinnertime conversation - and maps on the dining room wall for Joe Kennedy to expound his heterodox geopolitical views. Every night there would be an argument about something, each opinion sharpened by the sibling rivalry of a large and self-confident family, goaded by the ebullient self-confident figure of Daddy Joe.
One of JFK's friends recalled this extraordinary upbringing: "These people just had a feeling that they existed outside the laws of nature. There was no other group so handsome, so engaged. There was endless action, endless talk, endless competition. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened, and it rubbed off on people who came into contact with them."
It's hard to imagine much tranquillity or ease at Hyannisport, apart from the security of Joe's fabulous wealth. "The big thing we learned from Daddy," Eunice once said, "was win. Don't come in second or third - that doesn't count - but win, win, win." His children would pay a high price for his competitive instincts.
"Where else but in gothic fiction," wrote the playwright Clare Boothe Luce, "where else among real people could one encounter such triumphs and tragedies, such beauty and charm and ambition and pride and human wreckage, such dedication to the best and lapses into the mire of life; such vulgar, noble, driven, generous, self-centered, loving, suspicious, devious, honorable, vulnerable, indomitable people?" Small wonder the Kennedys attracted the fascinated, and slightly appalled, attention of Gore Vidal, William Styron and Norman Mailer. The myth of Camelot began with the awed commentary of America's best writers. Mailer saw JFK as "Superman" with "a jewel of a political machine, all discipline and savvy and go-go-go". He "had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of 50 yards. It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time."
Eunice was spared the worst of this relentless inheritance. She was a girl, and in Joe Kennedy's worldview women were for the boudoir not the boardroom. Throughout his life he conducted several affairs, notably with the film star Gloria Swanson. Praising Eunice in his own chauvinistic way, he once said she was "the brightest and the best" of his five daughters, and would have made "one hell of a politician" if "she had been born with balls".
Commenting on Eunice's remarkable qualities, another observer wrote that "all the Kennedys were blocked, totally blocked emotionally, but Eunice survived the best" - possibly through the strength of her marriage to Sargent Shriver.
Eunice met Sargent Shriver on the political cocktail circuit. Her future husband was a former naval officer, like Jack, imbued with a strong sense of public service. A devout Roman Catholic, Shriver was one of the founders of the Peace Corps, and took from his faith the obligations of charity and serving others.
In 1962, dismayed by the fate of their sister Rosemary, the couple set up Camp Shriver in their Maryland home, a summer retreat for the mentally handicapped. It was the beginning of a profound commitment to the rights of the mentally disabled that developed into her lifelong work for the Special Olympics.
Eunice had all the Kennedy glamour, but with a life-saving dash of emotional intelligence. Somehow she avoided the nemesis that swallowed so many of her siblings, starting with Joe Jnr, killed during the second world war. But she was no softy. The film director Nora Ephron described Eunice as "all the things that Kennedy women are - long, lean, athletic, toothy, pearl-necklaced, prolific, clannish, energetic. She is also a few things that Kennedy women are not - intellectual, witty, and committed in a whole, social sense that none of her sisters or sisters-in-law can match."
Before she found her vocation as a champion of the mentally impaired, Eunice was always a cheerleader for Jack Kennedy's political ambitions. JFKs presidency, the fulfilment of his father's ruthless drive, was swiftly made into myth by a family steeped in self-promotion, almost before it was cut down by the assassin's bullets in Dealey Plaza. Even when the silent cortege and the riderless horse had departed Pennsylvania Avenue, and the president's body laid to rest in Arlington, his widow was still at it. Every night, she told Theodore H White, the presidential historian, "before we'd go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records, and the lines he loved to hear were: 'Don't let it be forgot/ that once there was a spot/ for one brief shining moment/that was known as Camelot'."
Inevitably, there was a revisionist backlash. The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh describes the fabled 1,000 days as an orgy of womanising, CIA dirty tricks and presidential greed. In Hersh's account, 22 November 1963 becomes almost a moment of "rough justice" for a villain and a bully, patterned after his father's flawed character. Yet JFKs presidency was blessed by Clio, the muse of history, with a rush of events, many of them the direct result of the cold war: Cuba, Berlin, Vietnam, the Nasa space programme. Even disasters, like the Bay of Pigs, acquired extra glamour in the bright glare of the Kennedy machine.
America is a country founded more than most on the written word and, like Obama today, Kennedy was skilled at coining memorable rhetoric. His inaugural speech - "Ask not what America will do for you, but what, together, we can do for the freedom of man" - is almost a mission statement for his family's version of the American dream.
In her discreet way, Eunice also had the Kennedy sangfroid. When the rumour reached her that her brother had been shot, she was lunching in a restaurant with her husband, who told her, "Something has happened to Jack." Eunice calmly ordered her meal with the stoical comment: "There have been so many crises in Jack's life - he'll pull through."
The Kennedy clan rallied for the national emergency that followed, and sealed the myth in amber, at least for the short term. What really broke the family was the shooting of Bobby Kennedy five years later in 1968. He had been the family's anchor, a strong father and husband through the darkest days. Eunice withdrew into philanthropy, private life and the consolations of her Roman Catholic faith, devoting herself to her five young children. Other Kennedys went off the rails. Ted's political career sank, with Mary Jo Kopechne, in the midnight waters of Chappaquiddick. Gore Vidal, no friend of the family, observed in an interview with Playboy, that in 10 years "the magic of the Kennedy name will have faded. By 1976 Camelot will be not only forgot but unrestorable".
It was a plausible prediction. The America of Eunice's Boston childhood had not matured into the noble fulfilment of a dream. By the 1970s it seemed more like the horrible realisation of a nightmare. First there was the shame of retreat from Vietnam. Then Nixon's Watergate crimes. Carter's feeble presidency petered out with the further humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan debauched the economy; Clinton betrayed the office of president, and the Bush family's obsession with oil dragged the country into an illegal war. Simultaneously, the Kennedy dynasty's decline seemed to echo the national crisis: after Ted's disgrace came the death of John-John in a senseless plane crash, the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith and the druggy, sexual squalor of many junior Kennedy lives, punctuated by the kind of sad deaths that revived tabloid talk of "the Kennedy curse".
Today, echoing Gore Vidal, many Americans are asking: is the Kennedy spell broken? Can the family continue to serve the American dream of social progress and individual self-improvement. Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post cannot see a new generation to follow their parents' contribution, and says: "I think it's over."
Possibly there are just different avenues for the family's influence. Eunice's daughter Maria is married to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the "Governator" of California, and it's often overlooked that the Kennedy connection played a decisive role in both his political campaigns. His mother-in-law was fulsome in her praise of a man who is, on paper, a Republican.
As the family gathered in Hyannisport to bury Eunice, there was a poignant absentee, the terminally ill figure of Edward Kennedy, fighting a desperate rearguard action against brain cancer. Still, Ted has not given up. He recently told a degree ceremony at Harvard that he had always believed that "America must sail towards the shores of liberty and justice for all. There is no end to that journey, only the next great voyage. We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we made".
F Scott Fitzgerald put it more poetically in a famous conclusion to an American masterpiece: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Meanwhile, America always responds to a new myth, and a new star. It may have found one in Barack Obama. Like the Kennedys he speaks of family hopes and dreams. In a 21st century idiom, but exhibiting the same iron resolve, Dreams From My Father is just possibly that original tale of reinvention that Americans are looking for.
Portriat of a dynasty: key members of the Kennedy clan
Joseph Kennedy Sr
1888-1969
A successful businessman and leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community, Joe was famously ambitious for his nine children. In 1938 he was appointed United States ambassador to Great Britain.
Rose Kennedy née Fitzgerald
1890-1995
Rose was the eldest daughter of John F Fitzgerald, Boston's Democratic mayor and the town's most famous politician. She and Joe married in 1914. She is one of a few American women to have the title "countess" bestowed upon her by the Pope: in 1951 Pope Pius XII paid tribute to her "exemplary motherhood and many charitable works".
Joseph P Kennedy Jr
1915-44
His father was convinced that his eldest son would be the first Catholic president yet Joe Junior, a navy pilot, died during the second world war when a bomber he was piloting exploded.
John F Kennedy
1917-63
John, who went by the name of Jack, was elected the 35th president of the United States in 1960, defeating Nixon in a close-won victory. He and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis brought a glamour to the White House that led to his administration being termed "Camelot". His time in office saw the Cuban missile crisis, the building of the Berlin wall and America's escalating involvement in the Vietnam war. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963.
Rosemary Kennedy
1918-2005
Rosemary's wayward behaviour at a young age caused Joe Kennedy to take the decision to have her lobotomised in 1941. The operation was disastrous and meant Rosemary had to be institutionalised for the rest of her life.
Kathleen Kennedy
1920-48
The notion of a "Kennedy curse" took hold on the public imagination when Kathleen was killed in a plane crash over the French Alps.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
1921-2009
Eunice Kennedy married Robert Sargent Shriver Jr, the former Peace Corps director who was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972 and ran, again unsuccessfully, in the primaries for Democratic presidential candidate in 1976. Eunice's sister's institutionalisation is thought to have impelled her to found the Special Olympics in 1968. She is survived by siblings Jean and Ted.
Patricia Kennedy Lawford
1924-2006
Pat married the actor Peter Lawford in 1954 and divorced him in 1966. She founded the National Committee for the Literary Arts and left behind four children and 10 grandchildren when she died from pneumonia at 82.
Robert F Kennedy
1925-68
Bobby served as US attorney general and as a US senator from New York. He married Ethel Skakel in 1950 and they had 11 children. His assassination in 1968 in Los Angeles when running for president bore echoes of his brother's death five years earlier.
Jean Kennedy Smith
1928-
Regarded as the shyest of the Kennedy children, Jean served five years as ambassador to Ireland in the Clinton administration. In 2007 she received the Gold Medal Award from the Éire Society of Boston for her peace efforts in Northern Ireland and for her work with disabled children.
Edward Moore Kennedy
1932-
Ted has served as US senator from Massachusetts since 1962 and has campaigned strongly for universal healthcare in the US, a goal he described in Newsweek last month as 'the cause of my life'. In May 2008, he suffered a seizure and was found to be suffering from a malignant brain tumour. He continues to receive treatment.
Hermione Hoby