Remembering another generation

After about 12 hours of coverage of the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s airplane, my phone rang. It was my son, who was born on Nov. 22, six years to the day after JFK Sr. was assassinated.

"I don't get it," my son Jim said. "This is about your generation. Mine doesn't understand."

I flashed back to a conversation he and his brother, who is a year younger, had had when they were teenagers. After seeing a documentary on the '60s, they were strenuously debating whether John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were related. One of my sons was sure they were not; the other thought they might have been.

Time flies

People older than I am have vivid memories of FDR. To me, he is just a black-and-white image of a man with a cigarette holder. To them, he is the president who led them through the perils of the Depression and World War II.

"This is about your generation," my son said, even though he is closer in age to JFK Jr. than I am. The myth of Camelot, he was saying, depended on being there at the beginning. I was; he wasn't.

If you were there at the beginning, then you carry images of events that you witnessed as they happened: a boy saluting his father, a riderless horse with empty boots reversed in the stirrups, a second son killed in a hotel, a third son surviving while a woman did not, and on and on. For my generation, these are not pictures in a history textbook or on a newsreel. These are moments of our life.

Too many hours

With so much time to fill, out came the hooey about JFK Jr. being "an American prince," about how he might have become president someday and about how his magazine was making a significant contribution. In fact, it was little read and teetering on the edge of extinction.

What he seemed to have most of all was normality; he was a celebrity who was known for his positive qualities, not for abusing drugs or women.

Cursed?

The Kennedys have always been daredevils, and people who take risks sometimes pay the penalty. This is not a criticism; it is an observation of the lifestyle they chose, sometimes admirably and sometimes stupidly. The latter category includes these truisms: If you drive drunk, you might go off the road and into the bay; if you ski recklessly, you might hit an immovable tree; and if you fly at night with little experience, you might end up in the ocean. This is not a curse; it is how life works. It is how death arrives.

If the TV news departments had said that and signed off until something new was known, they would have contributed something more than the tedium they delivered for hours on end. Why they chose to stay on the air forever is easy to guess: The producers and anchors are middle-aged. As my son would say, "This was their generation," and the crash gave them one more chance to relive the old days.

(07-22-99) [[In-content Ad]]