Privacy Issue Something Kennedy Familiar With
Consider this novel twist on the privacy issue. You are the plaintiff in a landmark case involving abortion rights or workplace surveillance or the videotaping of a private sex act. You have been through a long, grueling court fight. “Hard Copy” and “Oprah” are clamoring for you to go on and discuss how you “feel” about this personal violation. You decline, politely but firmly.
The next person who knocks on your door for an interview is, of all people, Caroline Kennedy. Do you slam it shut this time? Or do you slap your forehead and think, “Whoa, Toto. I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore”?
“Here’s what I think,” says Kennedy, biting delicately into a club sandwich at a Boston hotel last week. “Sure, they might be intrigued because of who I am. That’s interesting for about the first five minutes. But then they get beyond that and want to talk about themselves.”
“One or two have even read our first book,” offers Kennedy’s co-author, Ellen Alderman. “That helps.”
“Our extremely dry first book,” quips Kennedy.
“Balanced and thoughtful,” Alderman corrects.
The two 37-year-old authors and law school classmates - one among the most famous public figures in America, the other happily removed from the public eye and living in Portland, Maine, - have come to Boston to promote their book “The Right to Privacy” (Knopf), a sequel of sorts to “In Our Defense,” their look at the Bill of Rights in action, published in 1991.
Written for the general public, the new book, like its predecessor, uses a case-study format to examine how notions of privacy (a word never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, interestingly enough) are increasingly being shaped by cutting-edge issues like medical ethics and computer technology.
Some of the stories detailed are explosively personal, like the 1970s saga of the Chicago-area women arrested on minor traffic violations who were subjected to full body-cavity searches. Most readers, like the authors, are shocked to learn that such practices went on for years before any of the victims complained.
The idea for the book, the authors say, was born on their last book tour. Over and over again they were asked about cameras in the courtroom, reproductive rights and other issues that touch on a theme with which Kennedy herself is all too familiar - where and how the right to be left alone clashes with other agendas, institutional and otherwise.
“When you step back, all the cases we write about are connected by a common thread,” says Kennedy. “How much control does the individual have, and how much of the information about us that’s out there is under our control?”