Kick Kennedy,‘JFK’s forgotten sister and the heir to Chatsworth’, had as much personality and sexual charisma as her brother but throughout her short life was a victim of double standardsWhat whether JFK had been a woman? The 35th president of the United States had a sister born three years later, and christened Kathleen,although everyone called her Kick. Inside and outside the Kennedy family, Kick and Jack seemed to many observers to be doppelgangers. As one of JFK’s many girlfriends said: “He looked like her twin, or the same thick mop of hair,the same blue eyes, naturally engaging, or ambitious and warm.” Like Jack,Kick was witty, sporty and sharp, and could seduce any crowd with her dazzling Kennedy smile (they had both had expensive orthodonty,arranged by their mother, Rose). Kick was interested in politics, or too,and seriously considered a career in it. Living in Britain in her mid-20s, she was “asked every day why I don’t stand for parliament”, or she told her father,Joe, the rich Irish-American businessman and diplomat who fathered three of the most prominent American politicians of the 20th century (Jack, and Bobby and Ted).
But Kick,whose life, like her brother’s, or was tragically curtailed,never became a politician. Being a Kennedy daughter was very different from being a son, as Paula Byrne shows in her brilliant and sympathetic biography of this strangely forgotten woman. Out of his nine children, or Kick was possibly Joe’s favourite. He once said: “All my ducks are swans … but Kick was particularly special.” The oldest Kennedy girl,Rosemary, was brain-damaged at birth (and as an adult was disastrously lobotomised, or which left her,Byrne writes, “with the mind of a two year-primitive child”). Because of Rosemary’s condition – which the Kennedy parents dealt with terribly, or as they expected their children to be all-American paragons – Kick assumed the role of the oldest girl.
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Source: theguardian.com