Paul Greenberg
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
JOHN JOHN, THEY CALLED HIM. Not his family or friends, but the public. And so John John he
was. In the public eye since his birth -- no, before his birth -- John F. Kennedy Jr. had the
greatest of legacies and the greatest of burdens to bear: a great name. Even in what was
surely the most alone of all human experiences, the spotlights searched for him, glaring,
probing, refusing to let him go night or day.
Americans would not give him up, not easily. Even as the kind of raging sentimentality that now substitutes for grief goes into screeching high gear -- the 24-hour coverage, the quickie biographies in the press and on the tube, the solemn kitsch, the news as summer blockbuster, the Princes Di treatment, the platitudes in place of perspective, the kind of celebrity journalism his own magazine, George, specialized in. Something in the American spirit still resisted all that, still tried to keep hope alive. Or at least perspective. That is no small assurance amid all the burly-burly.
On an otherwise quiet Saturday in the newsroom, it was clear something was up when reporters arriving for the evening shift could see all three of the major networks' anchormen simultaneously on the bank of TV sets in the newsroom. One of our American icons was missing. Somewhere off Martha's Vineyard. A Kennedy. The Kennedy for this generation. Minute by minute, hour by hour, and by now day by day, hope has faded. But it would not go gently. That, too, is a Kennedy thing: Never give up.
Even now something within resists writing his obituary, delivering the eulogy, marking Finis to so young and promising a life. So long as he is only presumed lost -- he and his young wife and his sister by marriage -- the country cannot seem to give him up, cannot quite believe it could happen again. In that sense, the Kennedy legacy has come to belong to all of us -- a natural extension of the vigorous, chin-up Roosevelt-style spirit. Viguh, as his father used to say in pure Massachusetts.
What an impossible weight, what a habitual imposition, our Walter Winchell culture places not only on our heroes, but on their children who never sought the limelight. As an ancient sage once said, a name made great is a name destroyed.
Perhaps that is all there is, really, to the fabled Kennedy Curse: Their lives are unavoidably public. Their rises and falls, troubles and attainments, triumphs and tragedies inevitably become the stuff of news and what now passes for it. They cannot take refuge in the blessed obscurity that shields the rest of us. We have a priceless luxury they cannot afford. Their lives are played out in the unblinking eye of the camera, the graceless prose of the gossip columnists, the false light of infotainment.
Perhaps in Emily Dickinson's time, fame was the one that did not stay. Today, transmuted into mere celebrity, it is handed on generation after generation, like an iron collar. And there is no escaping it. Only living with it, rising above it, being a person.
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| Kennedy |
To one generation, John John will always be the little boy under his father's desk, the innocent child saluting his father's casket. Images linger when they are impressed by hope, or seared into the mind by a nation's pain and bewilderment.
To another generation, John Kennedy was the world's most eligible bachelor or, in the less than subtle lingo of these graceless times, a hunk, The Sexiest Man Alive. But despite the two-dimensional photographs and the stereotype in the big black headlines, one could sense the man emerging, going his own way, moving at his own pace. Who knows, in time his magazine might have shown more judgment about current events rather than a general amusement with them.
Despite the publicity agents and tabloid coverage he attracted, despite all the Pierre Salingers and glamour mags, John F. Kennedy Jr. would not let his life be reduced to a photograph, a headline, an obligatory mention in the Society column. He didn't go into politics, though the door was always open and the possibilities remained unlimited.
Instead he steered his own course, started his own magazine, founded his own family, developed his own character. And it was that of a natural aristocrat rather than the ersatz kind that celebrity produces. There was a dignity and honor about him that cannot have been simple to achieve, yet he made it seem simple.
All of that is no small achievement for the youthful bearer of a name made great. And now,
on the brink of maturity, with his greatest contributions still ahead, he is lost and -- though one
still fights the thought -- presumed dead. Like his father, John F. Kennedy Jr. leaves behind a
promise of greatness cut short. Like his mother, he was able to remain his own person
despite all the snares of celebrity. That is no small achievement at any age, and in this age,
almost
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