Blessed with a handsome face and a famous name, ample wealth and five-star celebrity, JFK Jr. was the golden boy of his generation, a darling of magazine covers (the sexiest man alive, cooed People) and a sort of American royal. He was our closest equivalent to Princess Diana, a comparison that his sudden loss will now make inescapable. He had carved his own path in life, launching the magazine George that explored the star-spangled intersection of politics, celebrity and pop culture. He helped sponsor an innovative program to assist kids at risk. He was, by all accounts, thoroughly unpretentious.
But he was, indelibly, a Kennedy, bearer of the most famous Kennedy name of them all. And the accident that apparently claimed his life–he was only 38–was just the most recent of a remarkable string of tragedies, the Kennedy curse, that have struck the family for more than half a century. Most Americans caught their first sight of JFK Jr. on another day of tears, when as a boy of 3 he raised his arm in salute to the casket of his fallen father. His uncle Robert was cut down by another assassin in 1968. Joseph Kennedy Jr., Jack and Bobby’s older brother, had been killed in World War II when he volunteered to fly a dangerous mission and his plane exploded over the English Channel. Their sister Kathleen died in a private plane crash in France in 1948. Another uncle, Ted Kennedy, survived a crash in a small plane in 1964, then wrecked his presidential chances when he drove off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard exactly 30 years ago last weekend, drowning a young campaign worker who was with him. Of Bobby’s 11 children, two died young, David of a drug overdose and Michael in a reckless skiing accident. John Jr.’s infant brother, born prematurely, died of a lung disorder two days after his birth. Their mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, succumbed to cancer in 1994, at the age of 64. Of the immediate family, only John’s sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, survives.
It is a terrible toll for a single family, any family, and the tragedy is etched in even sharper relief by the Kennedys’ prominence in American life. The patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr., was a self-made millionaire, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under FDR and ambassador to Britain from 1937 to 1940. Jack was president, Bobby and Ted ran for president. In the next generation, there is one congressman and one lieutenant governor. Although the Kennedy influence on American politics is perhaps more symbolic than real, the shock of the two Kennedy assassinations invested Jack and Bobby with an almost mythic stature. In posterity’s eye they–and the family–stand for ideals that Americans still cherish: grace under pressure (the Cuban missile crisis), a tradition of service (the Peace Corps), high aspiration (going to the moon) and physical vigor (lots of touch football).
There is, too, a carnal side to the Kennedy reputation that has only fed the public fascination with the clan. Joe Kennedy Sr. had a not-very-well-concealed affair with the actress Gloria Swanson. Jack Kennedy’s sexual snacking was publicly revealed only after his death. And John Kennedy Jr., before his marriage to Carolyn Bessette, in 1996, had a succession of stunning girlfriends, including the actress Daryl Hannah.
Another Kennedy quality has been less remarked upon in the great heaps of journalism that pile up around them wherever they go. They are, in the best sense, a family. Joe and his wife, Rose, taught their children to stick together, to support each other in good times and bad–and they have. The bad times, sadly, have been frequent, and the Kennedys have been there to help the others through. There is something endearingly old-fashioned about this, at least from the perspective of the late ’90s when so many families have broken into fragments, and large families are, in some quarters, frowned upon. The Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port still swarms with a jumble of relatives; that’s where Rory Kennedy’s wedding was going to be last weekend. She is Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s youngest child.
It can’t have been easy growing up as JFK Jr. Yes, he had a loving mother and sister, and the privileges that money can buy. But he also had to live his life in the glare of flashbulbs and, what must be equally annoying, in the heat of expectation. Will he live up to the name? Will he carry on the tradition? It’s to his enormous credit that he made his own life rather than trying somehow to echo his father’s. He was his own man. Not the least of the sad ironies of this tragedy is that now, in the public reaction, he will be gathered back into the clan. His life will be seen as part of the Kennedy melodrama, and his loss part of the Kennedy curse.
