It happens to Douglas Kennedy all the time: Strangers come up to the youngest son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy while he is reporting for the FOX News Channel to tell him how impressed they are. Not that he's a Kennedy, but that he works for the network that airs The X-Files. "Most of the time, people don't know who I am, and I don't tell them," says Kennedy, 31. "I value being part of my family, but I have a clear sense of who I am and what my job is."

The obliviousness of a few sci-fi fans notwithstanding, Kennedy is making quite a name for himself as a hard-nosed-yet-caring TV reporter. It's a reputation he has earned while working for media outlets that could hardly be considered Kennedy-friendly: the New York Post and FOX's 24-hour News Channel, both owned by conservative Rupert Murdoch. "Douglas has a healthy contrarian streak," chuckles John F. Kennedy Jr., who followed his cousin into journalism by launching George, for which Douglas often writes. "The downside to the last name is that you don't always get the credit you are entitled to," he continues. "But Douglas has certainly proven himself."

Kennedy's tenacious reporting has landed him his own FOX News series, Douglas Kennedy's American Stories, which runs every two weeks and features human-interest tales. A recent piece on the closing of a shoe factory in rural-Maine examined the issue of labor strife in small-town America. "He's very emotional when it comes to the stories he likes, and wants to tell them correctly," says FOX senior producer Thorn Bird, who suggests Kennedy's journalistic doggedness may spring from feelings that his family has, as Bird puts it, "been burned a few times" by the media. Or maybe it's just innate competitiveness. Kennedy is known for lacing up his all-terrain hiking sneakers and racing through FOX's New York City newsroom when news breaks. "I value getting a story," he says, "better and more quickly than the people I'm competing against."

Only a year old when his father was assassinated in 1968, young Douglas learned to be scrappy at the Kennedys' Hickory Hill compound in McLean, Va., where he grew up with 10 brothers and sisters. When he was 5, he disrupted a formal luncheon at his home by jumping down a flight of stairs. "It made this huge noise that shook the house," recalls his brother Bobby, an environmental lawyer. "Then Douglas stuck his head into the dining room with a raised fist and said, 'Power to the little people.' "

By high school he had taken up the fight for the downtrodden, spending vacations sleeping on the streets to raise awareness about the homeless. A gifted athlete who shone at the family's fabled touch-football games, Kennedy graduated from Brown University in 1990 and went to work as a freelance reporter for the Boston Herald. Three years later, he landed a job at the Post, where he broke several front-page stories during his two-year stint. "He's one of the most conscientious journalists I ever worked with," says his former editor Maralyn Matlick. "He genuinely cared about the people he reported on."

In 1996 he moved to the start-up FOX News Channel, where, he says, "I enjoy being part of a team." An avid skier and windsurfer who shares his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with a 90-lb. sheepdog named Maya, Kennedy just broke some news of his own: In August he will marry Vermont native Molly Stark, a 28-year-old teacher of autistic children whom he met while working on Nantucket in 1991.

The question must be asked: Does Bobby Kennedy's handsome, civic-minded son—who in 1993 founded a group to lobby Congress on behalf of generation X—plan to enter the family business by running for office? Douglas won't rule out the possibility. "I take challenges as they come," he says. "What is important to me is that I live life to the fullest."

Alex Tresniowski
Mark Dagostino in New York City