Feckless Youth

Atlantic, The, September, 2006 by Christopher Hitchens

There was something more than tawdry about the detention in Washington last May of Representative Patrick Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island. Having long been the butt of jokes about his inability to find his way to the Capitol unaided, he smashed his car into a Hill security barrier at 2:45 in the morning, claiming to be in a hurry to vote long after all his fellow congressmen were in bed.

Avoiding an on-the-spot sobriety test, and later dodging allegations about his attendance at the nearby Hawk ’n Dove drinking establishment, he claimed a just-then-fashionable addiction to the sleep aid Ambien and vanished into the Mayo Clinic. On his emergence, he gave a press conference at Brown University and asserted that he’d received no special treatment from the police. “I expect at...

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