Word: john
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sense of loss for John Kennedy, too, like Milton's sense of loss, is more abstract than personal, and yet is personally felt because it connects with our private hopes for bright young futures. Nothing is as attractive as the sight of young people flinging boisterously into life (see the American women's soccer team), and the thrill comes as much from wishing them well as from anything of their own doing. Admirable young people speak for life itself, and when they stop suddenly, everything stops...
Even as tears were being shed and tributes read following the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, a troubling question became hard to ignore: Should he have taken off that night? In a family famous for its appetite for risk, Kennedy was far from the most reckless. Yet he didn't shrink from pushing the edge of his personal envelope. Last Friday he may have pushed too far, as a deadly combination of too much airplane and too green a pilot apparently proved disastrous...
...John Kennedy Jr. loved to fly. After he got his pilot's license last year he would ask people if they wanted to come along, could he give them a lift somewhere. But most of us don't need to go where he did--to a place where he could get away, off camera, out of the bubble, on his own. Most often he headed up to the house his mother had left him on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., a place so special, so private, the houses far back from the road, the beaches so peaceful. Until last Saturday afternoon...
...those pictures again all weekend, but now the dark shadow has lengthened with the passing of 35 years to claim the son as well. A boy born on Thanksgiving Day to a man just elected President lost his father three days before his third birthday. John Jr. and his sister Caroline grew up in our hearts instead, protected by a mother who feared that death still stalked the family. After Bobby was killed, Jackie said, "If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets...
...John Kennedy Jr. was swaddled in headlines, the first baby ever born to a President-elect. It was news when he came out of the incubator, when he first went on formula, when he got a haircut or lost a tooth. The family never called him John-John; a reporter heard his father chasing after the fleeing toddler, shouting "John, John," and thought it was a pet name. And so it became our name for him, not theirs, which was fitting, since like the rest of the family, he has always been partly a myth of our own making...