WOMAN-trouble is nothing new to the Kennedys and it is usually handled efficiently. The most political of families has become adept at draping the weighty cloak of dynastic inevitability over any grubby scandal.
Last week, US Congress Representative Joseph P. Kennedy attempted to carry on that tradition. "It is a big family," the 44-year-old politician remarked in a Washington speech. "There is always going to be a few little problems along the way.
Mr Kennedy's "little problems" are called Michael Kennedy and Sheila Rauch Kennedy. Michael. Joe's 39-year-old brother. currently faces allegations of an affair with his children's 14-year-old babysitter further evidence of testosterone-poisoning in the Kennedy blood-stream, many observers conclude.
But Sheila Rauch Kennedy, Mr Kennedy's respectable 47-year-old ex-wife and the mother of their twin sons, is a potentially bigger embarrassment. For the first time, a woman who cannot be dismissed as a gold-digging bimbo has broken with tradition by publicly fighting the annulment of her marriage. In doing so, she has not only damaged Joseph Kennedy's political career, she has also ended an era of unquestioned male privilege and unquestioning female silence.
The woman who was called a "nobody" by her husband is currently refuting that assessment with a nation-wide book tour. Shattered Faith, Ms Rauch Kennedy's recently published bestseller, is primarily an indictment of annulment that includes a history of church rulings on marriage, the stories of women hurt by annulment and the author's personal experience. Readers anticipating smutty details of life in Kennedyland will be disappointed by the author's focus on the Catholic church. But this story of marriage dissolution cannot avoid being the story of a marriage and Joseph Kennedy does not emerge unsullied from its pages.
"...by the end of our marriage I had simply become afraid of him," Sheila Rauch Kennedy writes of her former husband who, she recalls, was "not endowed with patience" and "has never exactly been an advocate for equality between the sexes
None of which was news to the woman who dated Joseph Kennedy for nine years before marrying him in 1979. They met two years after his father, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated and their courtship had its own traumas. Joseph Kennedy was a passenger on an aircraft hijacked in the Middle East and in 1973 the Jeep he was driving on Nantucket flipped over, paralysing his companion Pamela Kelly.
As a Harvard graduate and the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia banker, Rauch Kennedy was familiar with the behaviour of the American aristocracy. The behaviour of her husband when he entered politics in 1986, however, gradually became unacceptable. "It was like the family was there as a prop for his career," she recently told The Boston Globe. There was no pinning Joe down on anything, even if he was going to be home for a meal . .. I was in the way of something he wanted."
She divorced him in 1991 following a two-year separation. Joseph Kennedy married his aide. Beth Kelly. in a civil ceremony in 1993 and petitioned for a Catholic church annulment of his first marriage. Despite Rauch Kennedy's public opposition, the Boston Archdiocese granted that annulment last year. She has appealed to the Vatican and its decision is still pending.
SHEILA Rauch Kennedy does not sound or act like an embittered ex-wife. She did not ask her former husband for alimony and of his relationship with Beth kelly she writes "I liked Beth . . . For me the sooner Beth and Joe married the better; for what really mattered was that she was genuinely fond of our children and they of her... I knew I was lucky."
Conceding that her marriage broke down, however, is not the same as saying that it never existed. "I remember thinking that Joe must simply be out of his mind," she recalls of the day she received the annulment notification, "How could he possibly believe that the marriage that produced our children had never been valid?"
She was not the only woman asking that question. In 1993, when her annulment row was publicised, Rauch Kennedy received over loo letters from women who felt betrayed by the church's process. Many of them were Catholics (Rauch Kennedy is Episcopalian) and all were mothers whose marriages had lasted for over 20 years. "When the church declared that the unions to which they had dedicated their lives had never existed, their faith in the institution and in themselves was shattered," she writes.
It was, an unlikely development the Catholic church being chided by educated. independent women for being insufficiently strict. But Shattered Faith insists many of those women saw their church, the entity they had once, trusted above all, others, as one more institution that had abandoned traditional values for short term gain and social convenience Joseph Kennedy may have had a different perspective. Of course I believe we had a true marriage." Rauch Kennedy quotes him telling her in 1993, "I don't believe this stuff. It's just Catholic gobbledygook." The Rev. Andrew Greeley, professor of social science at the University of Chicago, was more respectful in The New York Times when he recently described annulment as the church's "act of compassion".
However others may describe it, Sheila Rauch Kennedy sees annulment as hypocrisy, a dishonest way for the church to slip divorced American Catholics back into the church by a theological side door. "The American Catholic church annually grants over 60,000 `annulments', three-quarters of the total granted throughout the world," Rauch Kennedy notes. "In roughly 90 per cent of all cases, officials rule that in the eyes of God the marriage never truly existed." Consequently, the children of annuled marriages retain their legitimate status while "they nevertheless have become the offspring of unions that never existed".
Joseph Kennedy has declined to speak about his first marriage or its annulment. In a press statement he called the latter "a very personal matter" and concluded "I understand Sheila's feelings. and I respect her right to express them". His supporters insist that the congressman's chances of becoming governor of Massachusetts in 1998 are unaffected by Rauch-Kennedy's revelations, but polls show Kennedy's huge lead over Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci vanishing in recent weeks.
"These younger Kennedys haven't got the emotional hold on the voter that Ted has "Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara says, referring to Senator Edward Kennedy, "and even Kennedy-backers like my mother are deeply offended by Joe's contemptuous attitude to his wile." And Mrs McNamara matters. As President Clinton recognised to his advantage, female voters have changed the political landscape in the US and are vital to Mr Kennedy's Democratic party. Put simply, losing the women often means losing the election.
Sheila Rauch Kennedy denies that Shattered Faith is an attempt to sabotage her ex-husband's gubernatorial campaign. "This isn't an election year," she responded. "It would be a lot worse if we did it next year but I just don't work that way."
At the moment she is relying on Rome to restore her faith in a church that she sees as, having betrayed it's most devoted members. Shattered Faith contends that, like the Kennedy dynasty, the Catholic church made the mistake of taking its female faithful for granted. One of those institutions may soon learn the cost of that error.