Even now, no words prompt so much anguish, so much grief, so much disbelief as these: John F. Kennedy is dead.
Those words flew around the country Saturday in frantic electronic pulses, though this time it was not news of the death of a president but of his son, missing and feared dead after a small-plane crash.This time, the fragmentary reports did not throw the government into convulsion. This time, the tragedy did not come at a time of Cold War peril. This time, the news will not freeze a nation in a frightful memory.
But the news that tragedy had apparently struck another Kennedy -- indeed, a young man bearing the very name of the slain president -- still had the power to shock a nation that has come to believe it is all but inured to shock.
Because the fearful phrase -- John F. Kennedy is dead -- has a special meaning and triggers, for many, a cascade of emotion and memory: The flag-draped casket. The widow's unfailing courage. The funeral Mass in St. Matthew's Cathedral. The foghorn voice of the late Cardinal Richard Cushing. The skirling of the bagpipers from the Irish Black Watch. The gathering of world leaders, from France's DeGaulle to Canada's Pearson.
And the salute, unbearably brave, of the president's son on the day he also turned 3 years old.
This is a different time, of course, the assassination of President Kennedy having heralded an era of violence and senseless death that dulled the senses. But in corners of America -- in New England, in pockets of Washington and, it is not to be denied, in the supermarket checkout lines where the tabloids blare their headlines -- the Kennedy family still holds a special place.
The weekend after the assassination, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told Boston journalist Theodore H. White that the president used to like to fall asleep to the strains of "Camelot." Of the immediate family that, for one brief shining moment, symbolized idealism and inspiration, only one person remains: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.
The son, like the father, was given the name of a storied Boston mayor, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. The son, like the father, gained fame, in part, because of his unimaginable good looks. The son, like the father, has lived dangerously and defied conventions.
Known first as John-John, then as John Kennedy Jr. and finally simply as John Kennedy, he was the president's son -- but he was reared by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
She battled to keep him out of the public eye. She fought to nurture in him grace and etiquette. She taught him how to have a private life and that it was possible to satisfy only the most formal obligations of public duty.
So when Jacqueline died in 1994, the son knew -- he was trained to know -- how to bear grief, how to show dignity, how to express loss and love. It was apparent that steamy afternoon on the Virginia hillside as he stood with his sister and uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the president's brother, and bid farewell to his mother in a relentlessly public moment that should, if there were justice in death, have been intensely private.
Kenneth P. O'Donnell, one of the president's closest aides, wrote a memoir remembered chiefly for its evocative title, taken from an old ballad: "Johnny, we hardly knew ye."
O'Donnell's title was ironic. We knew much about the president -- his distaste for the ballet his wife loved, for example; his ability to rally bosses like John Bailey and Richard Daley, his skill at disarming his foes, like the time he told Richard Nixon, proud of his triumph in the 1959 "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita S. Khruschev, that he knew a lot of men who won debates in the kitchen.
And now we know even more about President Kennedy, or think we do, much of it sordid.
But it remains true that, of the son, we've hardly known him.
We know, of course, that he was a storied bachelor, that he teased the women and seduced the camera, that he plotted a romantic getaway wedding with a breathlessly beautiful woman on a remote island, that he started a magazine called "George."
But we know little else.
David M. Shribman is chief of The Boston Globe Washington Bureau.