COLUMN ONE : The Two Images of Kennedy : At 59, the senator is the patriarch of a legendary political family and a lawmaker with few peers. He is also a man, some say, whose private life risks all he has worked for.

WASHINGTON —  Flanked by family and surrounded by memories, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy took the floor at the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards presentation a month ago to salute his brother as a man who “saw more clearly than anyone the faces pressed against the window of our affluence.”

The words summoned old passions. The senator’s voice trembled and broke.

But spring has been unsparing for the Kennedys, and it seemed that barely had his voice died before others were rising to question him about the rape charge filed that day against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Where had he been, asked the TV interrogators at the fringe of the crowd. What did he know?

The senator answered politely and vaguely, then glided away to leave the day with two lingering images: The worthy heir of an American dynasty beckoning a celebrated past, and a flush-faced man explaining a disordered personal life to accusing TV lights.

These dissonant images have shadowed Edward Kennedy through much of his life, and are with him today.

At 59, Kennedy is the patriarch of a legendary political family, standard-bearer of American liberalism, conscientious family man and lawmaker with few peers. He is also, in some portraits, a man of flawed judgment with an appetite for women, liquor and ostentatious risks.

The incident in Palm Beach, where his nephew is charged with sexually assaulting a woman at the family mansion, is another curious element in a character made up of pieces that just don’t seem to fit. At the heart of the riddle is this: How can a man described by his Senate peers as sincere and hard-working pursue a private life that repeatedly threatens all he works for?

The question was raised after Chappaquiddick and often since, in thoughtful biographies as well as supermarket tabloids. Today it vexes admirers who still mourn how Chappaquiddick blighted Kennedy’s career, handicapping his presidential quest, and with it, their best hope for a new ascendancy of liberalism.

The Palm Beach episode has made many wonder about the judgment he used in taking his son Patrick and his nephew, William Smith, to a stylish saloon to drink and meet women. There are also questions--evoking memories of Chappaquiddick--of whether he tried to dodge a police investigation.

As more facts are uncovered, the mystery of Edward Kennedy deepens. Even his appearance confounds: Americans remember the clean-jawed, imperially slim freshman senator of 1962, and are shocked to see the great jowled head and mottled complexion of a man who through striving and enjoying has outlived the appearance the world expects of a Kennedy.

Edward Kennedy is charged with no crime in Palm Beach. Certainly, the senator’s political support in Massachusetts is anchored in a bedrock that has withstood the gale-force winds of Chappaquiddick and a later divorce, and now shows few signs of weakening.

His Capitol Hill colleagues, who did not hesitate to exploit the troubles of men like Gary Hart and John Tower, are voicing support or saying nothing about Kennedy. He is liked by many conservatives as well as liberals. So far, most seem to agree that, as Kennedy said in an interview: “In the Senate, we haven’t missed a step.”

The Palm Beach incident may soon be remembered as only one more link in the epic chain of Kennedy tragedies.

But it may, too, mark a turning-point for Kennedy, and perhaps even blot the prospects of the six or more Kennedys of the next generation who are believed to harbor political ambitions. Much depends on how the world now sorts and judges the fragmented pieces of his character.

“These questions have been around a long time, but people are still trying to figure them out,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” and the wife of former Kennedy speech writer Richard Goodwin.

What is this personal life about? The story stretches back at least 22 years to Chappaquiddick, where Kennedy drove a car off a narrow bridge, then waited 10 hours to tell police that a young woman had been trapped and died in the sunken vehicle. Years of fumbling explanations have left many convinced that the whole truth about Kennedy’s actions has not been told.

The stream of tales about his boozing and womanizing has been uninterrupted. According to various press accounts, he was reportedly caught in an amorous embrace with a lunch companion at Washington’s La Brasserie restaurant in 1987, involved in a barroom scuffle with a heckler in 1989 in Manhattan, and the same year photographed nude with a brunette in a boat off St. Tropez.

For many, the Palm Beach incident does not reflect well on a 59-year-old senator. Kennedy awakened his son and nephew--at 11:30 p.m., according to his version, at 2 a.m. according to son Patrick’s--for a trip to the restaurant called Au Bar.

Despite the risk of embarrassing publicity, he remained with them as they sought the company of young women, in what looked to some like the master roue instructing a pair of journeymen. Later, back at the estate, he wandered around apparently unclad except for a blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and looking “weird,” according to Patrick’s female guest.

In the Kennedy version, the garment was a nightshirt, and the trip was no more than an outing among adult male family members.

The stories may be exaggerated or untrue; police records from Palm Beach have spewed a fog of contradictory claims from witnesses of untested veracity. Many longtime aides, fellow senators and Washington figures insist they have never seen drink interfere with Kennedy’s work.

The senator won’t comment on his personal life, which he considers off limits to questioners and irrelevant to his Senate performance.

But the Palm Beach incident has flushed these questions into the open as never before. Now even fellow senators are discussing them publicly.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a friend and the ranking minority member of Kennedy’s Labor and Human Resources Committee, has had a series of conversations with Kennedy since Easter about his drinking and private life. In the privacy of Hatch’s office, Hatch told Kennedy half-jokingly: “I’m going to have to send the Mormon missionaries after you.” Kennedy responded, eyes averted: “I’m ready for them,” Hatch recalls.

On another occasion, Hatch told Kennedy bluntly that he would have to cut down on his drinking. “You’re a great senator now, but you’re going to have to grow up,” Hatch said.

“A sad Irish look came over him, and he said, ‘Yes, I know,’ ” recalled Hatch, who says Kennedy “enjoys alcoholic beverages” but is not an alcoholic.

Kennedy has been badly hurt by the incident, Hatch says, not only because of the public criticism, but because he knows that the late-night trip has created trouble for son Patrick, a Rhode Island legislator, and his nephew.

Asked on NBC’s “Today” show this week about his drinking, Kennedy seemed to acknowledge a desire to cut down: “All of us would like to improve ourselves, obviously,” he said.

The senator says his chief worry is not himself: “My greater concern is for my children, for the next generation.”

Because of the Palm Beach episode, the most powerful newspaper in Kennedy’s home state, the Boston Globe, has begun openly discussing his drinking in news stories. The headline of one article: “Kennedy’s drives: success and excess.”

Mike Barnicle of the Globe, a long-time Kennedy sympathizer who is the city’s best-read columnist, struck hard with a piece calling for Kennedy to clean up his act. Barnicle predicted Kennedy could be beaten in 1994 because “people have grown tired of a man who is out of control.”

“They are weary of paying attention to a man nearly 60 years of age who seems not to have the personal discipline to stay home and leave skirt-chasing to those young enough to participate,” Barnicle wrote.

Even setting aside the rape allegation, some women see in the tales of womanizing a disrespect toward women that they believe has often been evident among Kennedy men.

“There is a disease of sorts when you hear these kinds of stories,” says Ellen Convisser, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Particularly when the senator has such a good political record.”

Some political analysts, such as William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute, believe the incident could lead to an unraveling of Kennedy’s support among women, and voters too young to remember the days of the Kennedys’ greatest glory.

So far there is little evidence of such a shift. A poll taken in Massachusetts for the Globe after the incident--but before release of police documents suggesting inconsistencies in Kennedy’s account--found only the slightest weakening of support. In all, 69% of voters said the news had no impact on their view of Kennedy, while 27% said it made their opinion less favorable.

Kennedy says his own sense is “we’re in decent shape” in Massachusetts.

But if public attitudes have changed little, Palm Beach has again stirred wide speculation about what drives the man. There are not one but many explanations for the seeming inconsistency of the senator’s personal and private lives.

To sympathizers, Kennedy’s after-hours activities are another way of pursuing life to the fullest for a man who has seen, in his brothers’ deaths and son’s cancer, how fleeting life can be. They paint a picture of a man whose party-going is part of an exuberant, spontaneous, sociable nature.

“If public life were all that mattered, there’s no question Kennedy should stay at home, read a book, and lead the existence of a monk,” says biographer Goodwin.

But Kennedy conducts himself as he wishes in his private life because of a “great sense of vitality,” and because he wishes to show he’s as independent in his private life as he is in the Senate, she says.

To some less sympathetic eyes, Kennedy’s behavior follows a code of behavior set by his father Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who thought high office did not need to crimp party-going and pursuit of sexual conquests. Still others, such as Garry Wills, author of the “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” see the inconsistency growing from the conflict between a weak character, and the pressure created by the world’s high expectations of Kennedys.

“He’s always been a kind of wobbling, vacillating figure,” says Wills.

The Kennedy of Wills’ portrait seemed present May 10 when the senator, visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tried to explain to reporters why he did not contact police the day he heard they were investigating a rape allegation.

Kennedy said he believed sexual battery--the term used for rape in Florida law--meant sexual harassment.

As for rape, “I was never told that,” he said. “And the record when you see it, and when it comes out, will never, will not suggest that I was, and since from the time that, uh, I found out that was the allegation, I have been available, uh, to the police, and responded to all those questions, and I certainly would have if I knew that the charge had been rape, would have done it.”

But if this response evoked his fuddled handling of Chappaquiddick, the portrait of Kennedy that emerges from the Senate is different indeed. There, the talk is often of his hard work, subtle mastery of law-making, and the equable personality that enables him to cobble deals that unite wildly divergent interests.

“He is a very aggressive and effective senator, and I see no change in that at all,” says Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), the majority leader.

Even some conservatives who consider him champion of a bankrupt ideology admire the skill that has enabled him to put his stamp on a vast number of bills. While Kennedy’s influence on public opinion may have peaked in the late 1970s, his influence in the Senate has lately been near its zenith, many in Congress say.

Now chairman of the many-tentacled Labor and Human Resources Committee, and fifth most senior Senate member, Kennedy cranks a legislative paper mill: The Americans with Disabilities Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act, Freedom of Information Act, the Voting Rights Act and its extensions, and the 18-Year-Old Vote Law were all heavily influenced by his efforts. In the last session of Congress, more than half the Democrats’ top-priority legislative items came from his committee.

Kennedy himself feels this past term has been his most effective. Over time, “you learn when to hold them and when to fold them,” he says.

By quickly declaring his opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork, Kennedy crystallized opposition and brought Bork’s defeat. He prides himself on the independence of judgment that has showed up in his willingness to let the Defense Department close some military bases in his state, despite Massachusetts’ deep recession.

Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.), his nephew, half-jokingly complains that because of his conviction about ending the pork-barrel practices that have kept wasteful military bases open, Kennedy wouldn’t help him fight the shut-down of the Watertown Arsenal in Joseph Kennedy’s district. Kennedy’s consistent hold on 60-odd percent of Massachusetts voters makes it easier for him to take such stands, the nephew acknowledges, but “a hell of a lot of members of Congress have that kind of political base, and don’t use it.”

Conservatives accused Kennedy of defaming Bork, but many such as Hatch and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), respond to a personal charm and self-deprecating humor. Kennedy will joke about his girth, or about his frustrated presidential ambition.

A former aide recalls how after his failed 1980 presidential bid, Kennedy would survey a gathering of VIPs, and crack: “We’ve got the president of the university, the president of the Chamber of Commerce . . . Seems like everybody here is a president, except me.”

Part of Kennedy’s effectiveness is his 100-person staff--one of the best in Congress, made up of brilliant and independent minds whom he must occasionally force to compromise. “It’s to his credit that he’s willing to hire people smarter than he is,” boasts one former aide.

But Kennedy is also known for the hard work that gives him a grasp of the issues. Staff members communicate by means of memos they wedge into a commodious black satchel--”the bag”--that he lugs home each night to McLean, Va., for study.

To keep up, Kennedy often carries on meetings at his home at a feverish pace. An aide recalled going to the McLean residence to find a Democratic fund-raiser being carried on in the garden, while a group of Irish officials convened in the formal dining room, and cooks prepared yet another meal for aides who planned a working dinner a bit later.

But even in the Senate, there are occasional glimpses of the risk-taking that has so complicated Kennedy’s life. Each year he dons outrageous costumes for a slightly off-color staff party. In different years he’s played Batman, Elvis Presley, Milli Vanilli, and once even Fawn Hall, sheathed in panty hose that had been appropriately padded with documents.

“You really wonder why he risks this, considering what the News of the World would give for a picture like that,” says one Hill aide, referring to a rambunctious British tabloid.

Although tales of Kennedy’s private life still show no sign of affecting his pull in the Senate, they have caused awkward moments when private morality is at issue. In 1989, when John Tower’s nomination for secretary of defense raised questions in the Armed Services Committee of the Texan’s heavy drinking, the normally voluble Kennedy said little. He kept a low profile--literally--by slumping low in his chair through much of the proceeding, an aide remembers.

Sensing advantage in the morality issue, Massachusetts Republicans in recent days have begun using Kennedy’s problems in a telephone fund-raising campaign. Leon Lombardi, the state GOP chairman, compares Kennedy’s statements to the confused answers Kennedy gave TV newsman Roger Mudd in 1980, in a pivotal election-year interview about Chappaquiddick.

They show a Kennedy “who is more than just grazed, who is severely wounded,” Lombardi insists.

Massachusetts Republicans may be correct that the embarrassment of the Palm Beach incident will finally lead the voters to turn their back on him, and Washington’s powerful to feel they can no longer afford to be seen on his side. Over the years, Kennedy has suffered wounds that would have felled lesser politicians, but no one can survive such injuries indefinitely.

Yet it may be more likely that Kennedy will survive this dark moment, buoyed by a reservoir of sympathy that has resulted from the tragedies he has borne, his hard work, and, in the view of some, the class he has shown in adversity. Kennedy has been generous to political foes, and rarely complains about his treatment by opponents or--even now--the press.

“My life has had disappointments and sadness, and a share of successes,” Kennedy says. “I’m tempted just to try to live with it.”

As for his political future, Kennedy says he will continue to run “as long as the people of Massachusetts want me.”

Biographer Goodwin believes a time may come “when, finally, it’s all too much for the American people. But as long as he can show he’s making this contribution, that will offset the stories. So far, I think, he’s succeeding.”