Townsend deflects more personal questions, choosing not to revisit how she learned of her father's death - she was back home in school at the time, while he and her mother were campaigning in California. Rather, she speaks about how she took to heart the example he set, when his brother was assassinated. Shortly thereafter, he wrote her a note, telling her that as the oldest Kennedy grandchild, she had "a particular responsibility" to be kind and to work for her country.
"I saw how my father reacted to his own brother's death. He did not react in bitterness or with revenge," she says. "He was very, very sad, but you had to go on. You had to be kind to your family. You had to keep working.
"That was a clear path to me on what I had to do when my own father died," Townsend says. "You can retreat and be devastated. Or you can transform it into wisdom."
That summer, she went to work on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, where she helped build a science center.
Today, she teaches at Georgetown University, serves on a number of boards and, last year, wrote a book, Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way. She has been in the news lately as a superdelegate - she still supports Hillary Clinton, although her mother, her uncle, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, and cousins Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Maria Shriver are all in Barack Obama's camp. "She deserves three more weeks" of primary contests is all Townsend will say on that matter.
Still, her father's legacy hovers over this campaign, 40 years later. His image, in a sepia-toned photograph, looks down from every newsstand: Vanity Fair has a cover story on him this month, calling his "The Last Good Campaign" in a pointed rebuke of the current one.
For his daughter, the public spotlight that shone on her family, even during their most tragic, private moments, is not something to bemoan, but to accept and even welcome.
"In many people's cases, when someone dies, they die in obscurity," she says. "You survive the loss alone.
"The blessing I had [is], hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't say to me, your father got me involved in politics, or I met him in Washington, he was a great listener," Townsend says. "I was fortunate. His spirit is living with us."
jean.marbella@baltsun.com
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