Tackling Those Family Issues

Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II - not at all pleased with his cousin’s decision to air the normally tight-lipped family’s dirty linen - hinted the family football game might get a little rough when he took the field Saturday with cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. at the clan’s Hyannis Port compound.

Indeed, Joseph Kennedy got hurt, spraining his foot. He is expected to be on crutches the next couple of weeks. But his spokeswoman, Darcy Lee, insists it had nothing to do with family rivalry. “They were on the same team,” she said of the pair. “It was all in fun.”

Joseph Kennedy, D-Mass., was upset that JFK Jr. called his cousins “poster boys for bad behavior” and listed such scandals as the controversy around Joseph Kennedy’s decision to seek an annulment of his first marriage, and Michael Kennedy’s alleged affair with his family’s teenage baby sitter.