The Curse
For an American dynasty, tragedy tumbles on the heels of joy and triumph. Last week it happened again
The surprise is that it was not surprising. At a moment of family bliss--the wedding of Bobby's youngest daughter--the Kennedy family has been punished again, leaving a nation grown perversely accustomed to gawking at one family's unending melodrama to wonder if it was accidental, reckless, or simply inevitable.
Just miles from the place where his Uncle Ted drove off the Chappaquiddick bridge and into the rolls of political infamy almost exactly 30 years ago, John F. Kennedy Jr. disappeared. Seven members of the American political dynasty have died in tragic circumstances in the last half century. The aptly mysterious crash of the single-engine Piper Saratoga he was piloting to Martha's Vineyard became the latest of more than a dozen calamitous events that have scourged the family and those who associated with them. In addition to Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren were on board when the plane disappeared from radar screens late Friday night and fell into the Atlantic Ocean south of the Massachusetts resort island.
The pattern has repeated itself with startling regularity. Every happiness is overshadowed by tragedy. And every tragedy followed by another. John, elected president--then shot down in his prime. His brother, Bobby, on the verge of victory--assassinated as he celebrated. But it goes back further than that. The oldest brother--Joe Jr., a hero who they said had the most promise of all--killed on a mission during World War II. A beloved sister, dead in another plane crash.
So, it seemed almost ordained that a wedding--a celebration of new life together--would turn into a dark and somber deathwatch for this family, blessed and cursed all at once. The wedding was postponed. In its place--the expectation of a funeral for another of its young and promising members: John F. Kennedy Jr. It was almost too much to imagine that the small boy huddled under his father's desk in the White House and, later, bravely saluting at his funeral, was gone. That this time he would be the one mourned.
Beautiful people. As the Coast Guard scoured the waters and search planes crisscrossed the skies, the nation hoped against hope. But the time ticked agonizingly away, and there was less and less hope that the three beautiful people in the Piper would be found alive. Still, it seemed impossible to accept, and there persisted the same groundless rumors that people wanted to believe in 1963 after JFK was shot--and already dead. The reports, like the one that , perhaps, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane had landed on some remote farmland on Long Island. And the hope that perhaps he'd suddenly show up on the beach in all his sinewy splendor and wonder what the fuss was about. But that was not to be.
The latest tragedy struck one of the best and brightest members of the family just as life seemed most promising. The martyred president's only son was by all accounts content in his storybook marriage and pleased with his offbeat political magazine, George--although it was struggling with financial losses. He was, says longtime family adviser Bob Shrum, "very much his own person--who could have done almost anything he wanted in elective politics." Many friends assumed that one day, JFK Jr. would seek elective office--but at his own pace. "He wanted to define his own niche, and make his own way," says Shrum.
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