The Whole World Knows `Willie' -- Nephew Of Ted Kennedy Always Seemed To Elude Celebrity - Until Now

NEW YORK - At his father's funeral last August, William Kennedy Smith revealed a quality no one knew he had: That old Kennedy magic.

The tall, dark-haired, clear-eyed Smith spoke as the second son of the Kennedy clan's least-visible family. He poured out a blend of humor and inspiration that evoked echoes of the young man's famous uncles.

George McGovern, Senate colleague of the late Robert Kennedy, remembers the moment. "He handled himself unusually well," he says. "He deeply moved the congregation."

Smith told those at the funeral that he had struggled to decide what to say about his father, Stephen Smith, long-time helmsman of Kennedy campaigns, finances and scandal control.

Then his uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., told him a story that perfectly personified his dad. "And then," Willie Smith told the mourners, "I heard my father's voice say to me, `Steal Teddy's story.' "

The mourners laughed and nodded. Says Bill Haddad, loyal aide to the Kennedys, "It was Willie's coming of age."

Now, eight months later, everyone knows of William Kennedy Smith. Not as a keeper of the Kennedy magic, however. Now he is the reminder of the Kennedy curse.

Smith, 30, Duke University graduate, fourth-year Georgetown medical student, stands accused of raping a 29-year-old Jupiter woman over Easter weekend at the Kennedy family home in Palm Beach. Smith called the woman's story a "damnable lie."

He is, nevertheless, preparing to go to Palm Beach to be fingerprinted, photographed and booked on charges of rape and assault.

"I didn't commit an offense of any kind," he insisted to reporters yesterday at the offices of his lawyers.

Palm Beach Police Chief Joseph Terlizzese said Smith's attorneys "intend to surrender their client to the Palm Beach Police Department early next week."

At that time, Smith will be required to post $10,000 bond, the standard amount for an out-of-state resident charged with a second-degree felony.

In the aftermath of the accusation, a fortress of silence seals off Smith. None of his relatives will discuss his biography. Most friends speak only in guarded, and glowing, terms.

Yet at the same time, an undercurrent of negative accounts of Smith is beginning to flow in the supermarket tabloids. The uproar, though, makes it almost impossible to determine the veracity and motive.

Out of the tempest emerges an outline of this once nearly anonymous, now infamous, Kennedy.

William Kennedy Smith was born Sept. 4, 1960, the second son of Stephen Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith. In the hospital, his diaper sported a Kennedy campaign button. Two months later, Uncle John was elected president.

His mother, Jean Ann, eighth of nine children born to Joe and Rose Kennedy, grew up with the rising glory of the Kennedy legend.

She was a toddler when her father maneuvered a fortune out of the stock market crash of 1929; a school girl when Joe Kennedy served as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain; and a Manhattanville College student when brother Jack became the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Jean Kennedy played matchmaker in her family, introducing her brothers Bobby and Ted to their future wives. For herself, she chose Steve Smith, son of a wealthy Brooklyn barge owner, grandson of a three-term New York congressman.

Compact and commanding, Stephen Smith was a savvy Irish Catholic with a head for politics and a nose for money - just like his father-in-law. After Joe Kennedy suffered a debilitating stroke in 1962, Smith began to steer the Kennedy empire. His name remained virtually unknown. His power became considerable.

"Steve Smith was everybody's favorite Kennedy, and that included the Kennedys," said Smith's old friend Dick Tuck.

Willie Smith grew up in New York City with his older brother Steve Jr., and adopted sisters Amanda and Kym. They lived first in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and later in a townhouse on East 62nd Street between Second and Third avenues. It is a block of picture-book houses built in the decade following the Civil War.

Growing up, Willie got most of his education at exclusive Manhattan day schools. On weekends, the family drove to their farm in Pawling, N.Y., on the Connecticut border, where Willie rode horses and explored the woods.

As a child, Willie passed his summers boating and swimming and rambling around the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. But that ceased June 5, 1968, the day of Robert Kennedy's assassination.

Years later, he would tell the Chronicle, the Duke University newspaper, "The strongest childhood impressions I have are of funerals."

The next summer, 1969, Willie's older cousins began getting into trouble around Hyannis Port - they called themselves the Hyannis Port Terrors. That summer, the shadow of Ted Kennedy's involvement in the drowning death of a young woman at Chappaquiddick blackened the Cape Cod gatherings.

Stephen Smith, the father, bought a house in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and the Smiths began summering on Long Island. Willie was, nonetheless, what a Kennedy was expected to be - handsome and athletic. He played tennis, he swam, he water-skied, he played touch football. In the winter, he skied the slopes.

The move to Bridgehampton may have helped the Smiths keep some order in their lives, says Haddad, the onetime family aide. Willie "never got swept up into the kind of limelight or lifestyle that some of the other members of the family went through. He and his brother never seemed to be a part of that. They led a very kind of quiet life."

Indeed, as a Kennedy, Smith was called on now and then to appear on a dais on behalf of a worthy cause. But sitting up front seemed to make him uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, he was a frequent and enthusiastic volunteer for a number of charities dear to the family. Smith helped out at Special Olympics track meets and worked with disabled children in Washington's Very Special Arts program.

In 1979, he enrolled at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he lived on campus in York dormitory. His roommate, Mark Mirkin, is now a West Palm Beach lawyer. "I'll never forget the day he walked in the room," Mirkin said. "I thought he had these Kennedy-like cheekbones. But he just said he was Willie Smith. Then he hauled in his luggage, and I saw his middle name on it. I said, `With those cheekbones and that luggage, you could pass for a Kennedy.' Then he said he was one. ... He was a great guy. We got along just fine."

Smith took a semester off to work on Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential bid against Jimmy Carter.

Smith's dad ran the campaign, and 29 Kennedy cousins worked for their uncle. "I never really felt exposed to being a celebrity until the campaign, when it was your role to be a celebrity," Willie Smith told the Duke newspaper. The campaign, he said then, was "the best thing I've done in my life. It was worth 20 years in school."

When Kennedy lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Smith went back to Duke, moving off-campus into a nondescript student apartment. Smith made it through Duke as just another blue-eyed fellow in boat shoes and rumpled cotton button-down shirts. He majored in history and drove a battered red sports car.

According to Duke officialdom, Smith joined no clubs, no fraternities and won no honors. He graduated in the autumn of 1983 without posing for a yearbook photo. Professors recall giving him solid B's.

He drifted for a time, wondering what his career would be. He flirted briefly with investment banking, then quit and traveled, doing charity work in New Mexico and Central America. Eventually, he decided to be a doctor, enrolling at Georgetown University Medical School.

Smith is less than three weeks from completing his final year of medical school at Georgetown, and school officials yesterday had no immediate comment on what impact the charges might have on Smith's status.

Medicine was a subject Willie Smith knew first-hand. While he pored over his medical books at Georgetown, his father's alma mater, Stephen Smith fought lung cancer. Until then, the Smiths were one of the few branches of the family that had not been sundered by death or divorce.

Smith told a Knight-Ridder Newspapers reporter three years ago that his attraction to medicine may have been at least in part to "concerns which I probably got from" the lives of his uncles and father.

Virginia Smith, no relation, was his Georgetown neighbor. The two met two years ago when Virginia was walking Max, her white Samoyed, to the grocery store and the dog broke loose.

"Willie caught him and held him for me," she said. "We began talking."

A friendship developed. Like others, she described Smith as shy in groups, outgoing one-on-one. And like others, she said he never flashed his famous family connections.

"He was very discreet," she said. "You didn't know his background at all, he wasn't one to share it."

"He was a sweetheart. ... I just feel sorry for him and hope it's not true," she said.

But stories persist that Smith is something less than a gentleman.

Palm Beach police checked and dismissed rumors that Smith assaulted women in Massachusetts and Washington.

Few facts are undisputed in the case.

It's known that Sen. Kennedy, his son Patrick Kennedy, and Smith partied into the early morning hours of March 30 at Au Bar, a Palm Beach night spot. That a 29-year-old Jupiter, Fla., woman met Smith there. And that the two of them returned to the Kennedy estate.

From that point, the stories diverge.

Smith has gone underground. He's back in school, but wasn't seen in public until Tuesday, when he met with his attorney in Washington. He speaks through attorneys. The Kennedys have set up a damage control center. They tell their friends not to talk.

But Haddad, the former family aide, said Willie now needs someone he can't have: his dad.

"This would have been the kind of situation for Steve," Haddad said. "He would have gotten to the bottom of this very damned quickly and found out what to do. It's a shame Willie doesn't have him now."

-- Material from Associated Press was added tothis report.