A Kennedy Apart

ONCE again the endless stream of images of the family—windswept, winsome, so extraordinary in appearance. Once more the summoning of all the old ghosts—Joe Jr., the doomed aviator; Kick, who also died by air; JFK in the motorcade in Dallas; RFK making the last speech in Los Angeles; and finally, in sad parodies of the tragic eloquence of these deaths, the silly recklessness of David and Michael and now the handsome young man with his mother’s air of mystery, who fell out of the sky on his way to a wedding.

In some ways, John Jr., born at the family’s high-water mark, was the most Kennedy of them all—America’s Child from the moment his father smuggled the photographer into the Oval Office, and America’s Orphan from the moment his mother got him to salute the coffin pulled by the riderless horse. Yet among his relatives, John Jr. was a stranger, an un-Kennedy with a threatening power he had not yet fully possessed to show what a soulless machine the Kennedys have become.

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Peter Collier

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ONCE again the endless stream of images of the family—windswept, winsome, so extraordinary in appearance. Once more the summoning of all the old ghosts—Joe Jr., the doomed aviator; Kick, who also died by air; JFK in the motorcade in Dallas; RFK making the last speech in Los Angeles; and finally, in sad parodies of the tragic eloquence of these deaths, the silly recklessness of David and Michael and now the handsome young man with his mother’s air of mystery, who fell out of the sky on his way to a wedding.

In some ways, John Jr., born at the family’s high-water mark, was the most Kennedy of them all—America’s Child from the moment his father smuggled the photographer into the Oval Office, and America’s Orphan from the moment his mother got him to salute the coffin pulled by the riderless horse. Yet among his relatives, John Jr. was a stranger, an un-Kennedy with a threatening power he had not yet fully possessed to show what a soulless machine the Kennedys have become.