Ms. Kennedy Regrets.(Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat)(Essay)

Last Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy attended the Presidential Inauguration. The sun was shining on the Capitol, the sky was blue, the Marine Band was playing. Barack Obama, for whom she had campaigned ardently for nearly a year, believing him to be a leader who would inspire the country to greatness in the way that her father did, was about to become President. If ever there was a day to bolster a person's resolve to become a senator, this was it. And indeed Caroline Kennedy appeared stirred and happy and as determined as ever to become a part of the moment.

Then, on Wednesday, something happened to change her mind. That evening, she called Governor David Paterson--whose prerogative it was to appoint Hillary Clinton's successor to the Senate--to withdraw her name from consideration. What the something was, almost nobody knew. It was clearly not so serious as to be decisive, because she appeared to waver--people from the Kennedy circle at first denied that she was out of the running, and apparently people in Paterson's camp tried to persuade her to put herself back in again. But by midnight on Wednesday her decision was final: she was out.

The announcement took everybody by surprise. Even her closest friends had had no idea on Tuesday that it was coming. What could have happened? Nobody believed it was about Ted Kennedy's collapse, as the Times initially reported. That didn't make any sense--he'd been seriously ill for months. And his staff was said to be angry that his illness was being blamed. It was reported, on Thursday afternoon, that she had a household-employee problem and a tax problem, but even this, true or not, didn't answer all the questions: given that Paterson (according to some, contradicted by others, in a blizzard of claims and counterclaims) had apparently urged her to reconsider her decision, he evidently didn't regard the problem as disqualifying. By Friday morning, the situation had degenerated into open warfare, with some in Paterson's camp claiming that he hadn't meant to pick her anyway, and some in Kennedy's camp claiming that he had meant to pick her, that there was no nanny problem, and that the Governor was destroying an American icon out of pique. "This is a governor who lost his chief of staff a couple of months ago to the weirdest tax scandal imaginable, whose first day required him and his wife to discuss the affairs that they had during their marriage and whether or not government money was used for the hotel rooms, and he has people pushing vile comments about Caroline Kennedy?" Lawrence O'Donnell, a friend of hers and a political analyst for MSNBC, says. "And when they get into that phrase 'not ready for prime time'? This is the 'not ready for prime time' governor you're watching."

As for Caroline Kennedy's last-minute withdrawal, her friends were left to speculate. Had she suddenly panicked? Had she realized that she'd be signing on for more and more misery, of which the past few weeks had been just a foretaste? That her days would consist of drudgery--fund-raising phone calls, trudging up to frozen, decrepit towns she'd never heard of? That there would be no more leisurely summers in the Hamptons, no more spontaneous long lunches with friends, no more undisclosed finances? Had she realized, in short, that she wanted her old life back?

A couple of weeks before Christmas, just before she declared her interest in the Senate, she went to the birthday party of a friend she'd known since high school. Several other of her oldest, most trusted friends were there. All of them thought she'd be a great senator; they were very supportive of her making a bid. But when they asked her about her decision to run she looked scared and panicky and couldn't talk about it. She folded her arms over her chest, a guest recalled, and disappeared into herself--a characteristic gesture. Even before things started to go sour, in other words, she was apprehensive about what lay ahead. Then, a week or two later, after the tabloids and the upstate papers had at her, she attended another friend's birthday party and looked as though she'd just disembarked from a very steep and terrifying roller coaster: shaken, startled, roughed up.

Her coming out had gone worse than even her detractors could have hoped. She gave a few interviews to the press and became famous for saying "you know" two hundred times in thirty minutes. An aide to Mayor Bloomberg tried to secure endorsements for her by telling people that she was going to be the next senator, so they'd better get on board early, but his aggressiveness backfired and turned people against her. Local politicians made snippy comments. Representative Gary Ackerman, of New York's Fifth District, in Queens and Long Island, compared her to J. Lo. "One of the things that we have to observe is that DNA in this business can take you just so far," Ackerman said, on "Face the Nation." "You know, Rembrandt was a great artist. His brother Murray, on the other hand--Murray Rembrandt wouldn't paint a house."

In late December, New York voters preferred her for the Senate seat to Andrew Cuomo by thirty-three per cent to twenty-nine, but by early January, according to one poll, they preferred Cuomo by fifty-eight per cent to twenty-seven. Governor Paterson had clearly become irritated with the situation. "The notion that I have to take Caroline is not coming from me," he told the Buffalo News. "Why do you all pay so much attention to her? She's just another person. So what?" A Democratic Party consultant told the News, "He's not responding well to outside pressure. He's telling people, it would seem, that it's his decision and he doesn't like being pushed around." Even the favorable comments she received did not always redound to her benefit. "I somehow can't see her as being corrupt. It's not her legacy," Marie Owen, a sixty-nine-year-old flute player who lives on the Upper West Side, told the Times, when asked what she thought about the prospect of Caroline Kennedy's becoming a senator. "I kind of like the idea, maybe because I'm old."