This was the year that Congressman Joe Kennedy was to become governor of Massachusetts in the November elections, but he suddenly dropped out of politics altogether. His eldest sister, Kathleen, sometimes called "the forgotten Kennedy", is now campaigning to keep her job as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland.
She is profiled in the Washington magazine, Capital Style, as "The Last Viable Kennedy". The blurb says: "With her male relatives in various depths of disrepute, Kathleen Townsend could be the last Kennedy of her generation to have a real political future."
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, or KKT as she is shorthanded by her staff, once sought the Congress seat in the Boston area that Joe won in 1986, but as a Kennedy man he got the "family franchise". She stood instead, and became the first Kennedy to lose in a general election. But she found new strengths, telling an interviewer: "The women's movement made an enormous difference in my life. It opened up strengths in me I didn't realise I had . . . I felt I could be a leader in a way I didn't feel nearly as strongly before."
Now 12 years later she has a solid political record in Maryland and is being mentioned as a strong candidate for governor in 2002 when the present incumbent, Parris Glendening, has to stand down.
But first the Glendening and KKT ticket has to win re-election next November. Maryland is strongly Democrat, but Glendening is not widely popular and has snubbed President Clinton by rescinding his invitation to him for a fund-raiser and refusing to attend a school function with him.
KKT turned up, however, and was also at the Irish-American celebration for the President at the White House the evening the Starr report was unleashed. So was her uncle, Senator Ted, and her aunt, Jean Kennedy Smith. The Kennedys are standing by their President.
As the eldest child of Bobby Kennedy, Kathleen had Democratic politics in her blood. She was 12 when her Uncle Jack was assassinated. Her father wrote to her two days later: "Dear Kathleen, you seem to understand that Jack died and was buried today. As the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren, you have a special responsibility now - a special responsibility to John and Joe. Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy."
Five years later Bobby was assassinated. She got to the hospital while he was still in a coma.
Her dead father, 30 years later, is never far from her thoughts, according to associates. A Maryland political insider is quoted as saying: "You can't talk to her for half an hour without her mentioning her dad. You can't talk about the weather with her without a mention of Robert Kennedy. It has a real hold on her."
As Lieutenant Governor she has special responsibility for combating crime and favours the death penalty as a deterrent. One interviewer asked her if this was because her father's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, is still in prison. "It is as if the question triggered a switch inside Townsend," the Boston Globe reporter wrote. "Her face whitens and she appears near tears. `It's horrible, keeping him alive all these years,' she says softly, angrily, as she turns her face aside."
Her office in Maryland's state house in Annapolis is full of photographs of her father as well as of her four daughters, Meaghan (20), Maeve (18), Kate (14) and Kerry (6). Her husband, David Townsend, teaches in the nearby St John's College.
In Harvard she fell in love with her literature tutor and married him. They moved to New Mexico where she took a law degree. In 1982 she managed uncle Teddy's Senate campaign.
In Baltimore, Maryland, after her political setback, she settled into public service posts including one in education. Under President Clinton she became a deputy attorney general in Washington and was surprisingly selected by Glendening to be his running mate in 1994.
She had a demoralising start in her new post when Glendening sent her to address a rally for the homeless but did not tell her he had just cut aid to the disabled poor. She now oversees Maryland's criminal justice system. Her "hotspots" initiative of targeting 36 high-crime, high-risk areas for intensive surveillance has been hailed as a "national model" by the US Attorney General, Janet Reno.
A shrewd political journalist, Joe Klein, has called KKT "the best and the brightest of the young Kennedys". But "she is not a naturally flashy person; she doesn't ripple charisma, as some of her more dramatic siblings do. She does have the Kennedy look - the hawk nose and prominent teeth - and she carries in her DNA the part of her father that was, arguably, the most attractive: a deep and impatient moral intensity."
Her cousin, Patrick Kennedy, is up for re-election in November for his Rhode Island seat in the US House of Representatives and is being mentioned as running for the Senate in 2000, perhaps his father's Senate seat in Massachusetts if Teddy decides to call it a day.
Perhaps Kathleen may turn her sights towards Massachusetts again and this time not let the Kennedy males elbow her out.