Congressman edges Kennedy name back into politics

It's another wrong turn for Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy III, who was raised among political royalty but is just another lost freshman on Capitol Hill six weeks after taking office. His family served in Washington for most of the past six decades, but this Kennedy exits elevators on the wrong floor, struggles to locate bathrooms and has yet to make many friends.

“It's kind of that freshman hazing ritual where nobody really will tell you where you are,” the 32-year-old Kennedy said on a recent walk to the Capitol. “It was actually yesterday where I made it over from my office through the underground tunnels and actually popped up where I thought I was going to pop up in the Capitol. First time. I was very proud of myself.”

Indeed, carrying the weight of his family name and a self-deprecating sense of humor, he is living in relative obscurity as he eases the Kennedy brand back into national politics. It was a brand without a face following the 2011 retirement of his troubled cousin, Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, whose departure created the Kennedy family's first extended absence from elective office since John F. Kennedy became a congressman in 1947.

The boy-faced Joe Kennedy III, a redhead with little political experience, is quietly bringing the name back.

He has no entourage. He shies away from national media interviews. He introduces himself simply as “Joe.” And there is little sign of entitlement when he talks about a new career in public service.

“This is gotta be on my own,” says Kennedy, a former state prosecutor and Peace Corps volunteer. “People have got to get to know me, they gotta get to know who I am, what I stand for, what my values are. And I recognize that takes time.”

He mentions the credibility his great-uncle Ted Kennedy built up over decades as a senator from Massachusetts in a career so accomplished that he earned the nickname “the liberal lion.” Even some of the Senate's most conservative members respected him, the younger Kennedy pointed out.

“That just isn't something that's going to be given to you,” he says. “It's something you gotta go earn.”

The Kennedy label, of course, evokes intrigue just as it stirs whispers of scandal, death and elitism. Patrick Kennedy left office after high-profile struggles with substance abuse and mental health. Sen. Ted Kennedy's legacy is marred by the 1969 car accident on Chappaquiddick Island that left a woman dead.

And Joe Kennedy III never met his grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, who served as U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator from New York, or his great-uncle President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated more than a decade before his birth.

The young Kennedy flashes his family's youthful good looks, ease with people and prosecutorial wit. But he also has an aw-shucks manner at times that won him the affection of colleagues when he served as Sen. Ted Kennedy's volunteer state campaign chair in 2006.

“He's a little in awe of where he is already, which is the best kind of representative to be,” said Stephanie Cutter, a senior aide for President Barack Obama's campaign who had worked for Ted Kennedy. “I think a lot of other people think he should be in a rush. But I don't think he thinks so.”

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