THOSE PRYING EYES

By ELIZABETH GLEICK/NEW YORK

WHAT DO WE KNOW OF the Kennedys? Better to ask: What don't we know? We know, ad infinitum if not ad nauseam, about the blackguard patriarch, the philandering but beloved President and his glamorous wife, their handsome son risen from the ashes of an aimless, if active, life to become a magazine editor. We know of their loves, their losses, their lapses and their favorite dressmakers. Flip through new memoirs by Gore Vidal and Benjamin Bradlee, and there they are again, appearing in vignettes that will be eagerly processed by a curious public.

Surely it is not a coincidence, then, that Caroline Kennedy finds herself drawn to the subject of privacy. Following the law-for-the-layman formula of the bestselling In Our Defense, a book on the Bill of Rights that she and Ellen Alderman, a friend from Columbia Law School, wrote in 1991, Kennedy and Alderman have produced The Right to Privacy (Knopf; $25). The new book skillfully weaves together unfamiliar, dramatic case histories with a survey of the laws governing what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called "the right to be let alone." Looking at assaults on privacy by, among others, law-enforcement agencies, the press and new technologies, the authors show how vulnerable average people--not merely the Kennedys among us--have become. Says Kennedy: "We really wanted to get across the point of what happens when it's private people who are not involved in a public controversy. That's really where the law is developing."

As the authors point out, the word privacy appears nowhere in the Constitution. The things many Americans take for granted--the right to an abortion, for instance, or the assumption that their mail will not be read by others--stem in part from the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, in part from the 14th Amendment guarantee that no person will be denied "life, liberty or property, without due process of law," and in part from a constantly evolving patchwork of federal and state laws.

Kennedy and Alderman, both 37, took on this subject when they realized that readers of their first book frequently asked them about privacy. When they began their research they were skeptical about whether a serious assault on privacy was under way. Says Alderman, who lives in Maine with her lawyer husband William Harwood: "We thought, Can it really be that bad? But when you look at [the issues] all together, it's really disturbing what's happening." To make this clear, the authors open the book with perhaps the most sensational of their case studies: the story of several women who in the late 1970s were arrested for minor traffic violations, then subjected to humiliating, full body-cavity strip searches by the Chicago police. In the early 1980s the courts declared the searches unconstitutional. Still, the authors found that even years later, the women remained shaken. And that, says Alderman, "is part of the point of the book--that these kinds of invasions are really traumatic and lifelong."

The authors encountered that level of emotion again and again among their interview subjects--particularly those battling the press. Clarence Arrington, for instance, photographed without his knowledge, found himself on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, illustrating a story about the black middle class, even though he disagreed vehemently with the materialism described in the article. Brownie Miller had to see her husband's dying moments broadcast on television because they had been captured by a news crew doing a "ride along" with the paramedics. In general, the authors show how First Amendment protections trump privacy concerns.

This is a book with impressive breadth but modest goals. The authors touch on many troubling issues that arise from the modern age--the handling of frozen embryos, for instance, and the free flow of information in cyberspace--but offer no remedies or even strong opinions. Indeed, it is unlikely that Knopf would be risking a hefty first printing of 100,000 copies on a simple compendium of privacy case law without the Kennedy name attached to it.

Because Knopf is taking that gamble, however, Kennedy--who lives in New York City with her husband Edwin Schlossberg and their three children--must emerge, blinking, into the light to promote the book. She gamely grapples with a question about the ways in which the press may have invaded her privacy. "As far as me, personally, I think that, you know, certainly it's made me think about the issue more than I might otherwise have," she says with Diane Keaton-esque earnestness. "And it's just something that I've grown up with." She adds, "I know people don't always believe this, but my life is much more private than most people would think."