David Anthony Kennedy, 28, the troubled son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was found dead yesterday in a hotel room in Palm Beach, where he had gone to spend the Easter weekend with his grandmother.
David, the fourth of 11 children of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, had a history of drug abuse that dated back almost to the time of his father's assassination in 1968.
David, almost 13, had accompanied his parents to Los Angeles for the June 4 California Democratic primary. Early that day, David and his father, then a U.S. senator from New York who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, went swimming in the Pacific, and the senator rescued his son from a heavy undertow.
David was upstairs in his father's Ambassador Hotel room that night watching election returns on television when the cameras showed the aftermath of his father being shot in the head.
Tragedy has become almost common for the Kennedy family. David was 8 when his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963. In 1969, another uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), was involved in an auto accident in which a passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, died when the senator drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts.
Another uncle, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died in World War II when his plane exploded over the English Channel.
Edward Kennedy issued a brief statement yesterday: "David Anthony Kennedy died today at the age of 28. This is a very difficult time for all the members of the family, including David's mother, Ethel, and his brothers and sisters, who tried so hard to help him in recent years. All of us loved him very much. With trust in God, we all pray David has finally found a peace he did not find in life."
An aide to Sen. Kennedy, Robert Shrum, said that on hearing the news early yesterday afternoon the senator went directly to Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy's home in McLean, to be with her and David's brothers and sisters, who were gathering there. Shrum said David's body will be returned to Washington as soon as possible.
Police said David Kennedy checked into the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach, not far from the winter mansion of his grandmother, Rose Kennedy--the 93-year-old matriarch of the Kennedy family--last Friday.
The two-story hotel, which has 117 rooms around a center courtyard and pool, is three blocks north of the fashionable Worth Avenue shopping district and about a block from the ocean. A reservations clerk said that rates for single rooms in the 1928 wood-stucco building range from $93 to $135 per night.
A hotel spokesman told Associated Press that Kennedy's body was found by Elizabeth Barnett, a front-desk secretary.
Josephine Dampier, the hotel manager's secretary, said she asked Barnett to check the room because someone identifying herself as Mrs. Kennedy called from Boston around 11:30 a.m. and "asked if I'd mind checking David's room because none of the family had seen him last night and he was supposed to be on a plane to Boston this morning." It was not clear who made the phone call.
Capt. Shetron said police received a rescue call at 11:35 a.m. and arrived to find Kennedy dead on the floor in his room.
Kennedy dropped out of Harvard in 1979. He was an intern at The Atlantic magazine in late 1982 and early 1983, and last summer reenrolled at Harvard, but dropped out again.
People who knew him at Harvard said it was well known that he had used drugs, including heroin, for many years. One student who lived on the floor above him at Harvard's Winthrop House added that Kennedy was rarely seen without a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
In 1973 David, then 17, broke his back in an automobile accident in which his brother, Joseph, was fined for negligent driving. A close friend of David at Harvard said he told her "the first time he felt good after his father died was in the hospital after the accident when they gave him morphine."
Another of David's brothers, Robert Jr., also has had drug problems. Last month he was given a two-year suspended sentence in South Dakota for possession of heroin.
David's drug habit became public knowledge in 1979, the year he first dropped out of Harvard, when he was robbed of $30 at a Harlem hotel that police described as being a rendezvous spot for drug peddlers and their customers. Neighborhood residents told reporters at the time that drug dealers knew young Kennedy well as "White James."
A week later, on Sept. 12, 1979, he was hospitalized in Boston in serious condition with a rare heart infection sometimes associated with narcotics abuse.
On Jan. 22, 1980, it was reported that the Kennedy family had hired a California drug-treatment expert to live with David in a round-the-clock, one-on-one drug-therapy program. The expert was Donald F. Juhl of the Aquarian Effort, a nonprofit drug-treatment center in Sacramento.
One friend who knew Kennedy for 10 years said, "David may have been the most brilliant of all the Kennedy children. It was a raw intelligence . . . frightening in some ways . . . . You could talk to him about literature, politics, damned near anything. When he was on, his mind was razor sharp. But the addiction destroyed everything, the good included."
The friend, who asked not to be identified, said he last saw Kennedy about a year ago after the drug treatment, and said he "looked terrific. But in David's case, there was nothing to connect to in life. Even free of the drug influence, there was a deep, overpowering sense of nihilism in his personality. No person, no job, no hobby could give him something to plug into."
He said that when David failed to keep in touch, he was reluctant to question family members about him, afraid that he might have returned to drugs.
"To be so alone, to be so bereft of anything that's going to help you in life . . . it's more than many of us can overcome," he said. "Even after the drug treatment, when he seemed happier, there always was that look in his eyes of someone who is mortally wounded."
Michael Curtis, a senior editor at The Atlantic who knew Kennedy, said, "I was struck by the seriousness of his wish to go back to Harvard and his wish to put all of this behind him . . . . During his few months here, he made a number of friends . . . . Everybody who worked with him was touched by him and wanted him to make it."
Curtis said he did not know why David dropped out of Harvard a second time last year. He said David came by the magazine about a month ago looking "very happy" to tell him he was starting a travel business.
The May issue of Playboy magazine featured an article excerpted from "The Kennedys," an upcoming book by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. The article is entitled, "The Young Kennedys: The Decline of an American Dynasty."
The book, which has been criticized by members of the Kennedy family, says that after Robert Kennedy's assassination Ethel Kennedy punished the children "constantly and capriciously, almost as if she blamed them for reminding her of her dead husband."
Once, a few days after David's 13th birthday, Ethel beat David and Bobby Jr. with a hairbrush, the first such punishment they could remember, according to the book. "I can't stand it any more," she reportedly said. "You guys have got to get away from here."
The authors said that in 1970, two years after the assassination of his father, David said his relationship with his mother grew especially tense.
"Her idea was that it didn't really matter whether or not I had actually done anything," David was quoted as saying. "I would do it sooner or later so she might as well get heavy with me in advance. I remember it clearly: this was the point in my life when everything began to turn against me."
The book said that in 1970, David and his cousin Chris Lawford--both 15 at the time--hitchhiked to New York and panhandled in Grand Central Station.
"It was great being just ordinary people and not Kennedys," David is quoted in the book as saying. "Also, it wasn't bad money. At one point we were making about $40 an hour." Kennedy told the authors that he and his cousin took the money to Central Park, where they bought $2 bags of heroin and snorted it.
