Get Ready for KKT

The "next Kennedy."

She is, they say, the "next Kennedy"-the member of the clan who will emerge as torchbearer for what the Kennedys and their enthusiasts like to call "The Dream." What is "The Dream"? You know: kindness to black people; reverence for nature; contempt for Republicans; that sort of thing. After the death of JFK's son in July, a nostalgia for what was praiseworthy about "Camelot" enveloped the nation. There was even some talk that this "next Kennedy" might make a vice-presidential running mate for Al Gore. She is not quite ready for the big time; but she is getting there, fairly quickly.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is lieutenant governor of Maryland-not exactly a glamour position, but one from which she is impressing Democrats around the country. She is the eldest grandchild of old Joe and Rose Kennedy, the first child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. She is the first Kennedy woman to have stood for office; the first Kennedy of either flavor to have lost a general election; the first Kennedy of her generation known to have departed, even a smidgen, from orthodox left- liberalism. She is that rare thing-a true "New Democrat," distinguishable from Old ones like her Uncle Ted. The journalist and sometimes-Anonymous novelist Joe Klein has dubbed her "the best and the brightest of the young Kennedys." This may not strike you as towering praise, but it is worth a lot in certain circles.

KKT, as she is known (the finest Kennedys have swell initials), is far from your average Kennedy kid. She is sometimes referred to as "the un- Kennedy," or "Clean Kathleen." When she was younger, her brothers, apparently appalled by her concern for virtue, mocked her as "The Nun." Everyone who knows her remarks on how normal she is, not just for a Kennedy, but for anyone. The near-universal opinion is that she is friendly, humble, and thoroughly decent. She has a wide-eyed desire for good government and good citizenship that recalls a more innocent time. Her late cousin, JFK Jr., labeled a couple of his other RFK cousins "poster boys for bad behavior." Kathleen, as even her Republican opponents are happy to concede, is a poster girl for good behavior.

She was born on the Fourth of July in 1951, named after one of her aunts, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, who had died in a plane crash. She was 12 when her uncle, the president, was killed. Her father, the attorney general, wrote her a famous letter about her responsibility to her family and country. Framed and displayed in her home, it is a subject of everything written about her. In 1968, just before she turned 17, her father, too, was killed. She conducted herself-then and subsequently-with exemplary poise and dignity.

Kathleen went to Radcliffe, where she fell in love with a graduate student, David Townsend. After they married, they moved to New Mexico, where he taught at St. John's College in Santa Fe and she attended the University of New Mexico Law School. They were a couple who belonged to the age: He made her wedding ring; they used natural childbirth, at home; they buried the placenta under a tree-a southwestern tradition, so they claim. Kathleen began to practice "environmental law," when everyone on the left and his brother were doing it. Later, in Massachusetts, she managed one of Ted Kennedy's reelection campaigns and worked in the state government under Michael Dukakis. In 1984, the Townsends moved to Maryland. He joined the faculty of St. John's, Annapolis; she began her political career in earnest.

KKT ran for Congress in 1986. She had not been reared to consider herself a potential officeholder-that was for the boys. Only slowly had it dawned on her that she could. Her campaign, of course, made national news, as she jogged from house to house in her tennis shoes, the very image of exuberant Democratic activism. She was rather awkward and ungainly, indifferent to her appearance. Detractors called her dowdy, and worse. Her speaking style was cause for derision as well: high- pitched and flighty. At first, she tried to go straight, calling herself Kathleen Townsend. When it became clear that she needed her middle name, she hauled it out, in a big way. She got thumped in November-but she has clung to the "Kennedy" ever since.

After her defeat, KKT burrowed in the Maryland Department of Education. There, she hit on one of her signature issues: "character education." Dismayed at what was, really, the triumph of secular liberalism in the classroom, she called for the reinstatement of values-even morals, if you please. In a 1990 article for The Washington Monthly, a "neoliberal" (or New Democrat) journal, she attacked a teacher's guide put out by the National Education Association that condemned "attempts to inculcate a set of given virtues," such as the Boy Scout's code. She also blasted an educationist who criticized the concept of honoring parents, and another who associated patriotism with the Third Reich. "These comments are typical of the ideas your children's teachers are trained on," she fumed. "Do we really want our kids to revile Boy Scouts, abandon family ties, and believe that character-building is for Nazis?"