Word: jr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...might he have gone? There has always been a tendency to see John F. Kennedy Jr. as John-John, the sobriquet the press bestowed on him when he was a little boy in the White House. Those bewitched by the John-John idea saw the grown man as a frivolous young fellow floating carelessly on the pleasures of life. In fact, J.F.K. Jr. detested the nickname and was not a man fulfilled by pleasure-floating. But he cherished his privacy and disdained defensive self-publicity...
...seemed to be edging into politics. His father had begun as a journalist; it is not a bad introduction to the American political labyrinth. J.F.K. Jr. cared too much about the state of the nation, especially about the increasing disparities of wealth and opportunity in American life, to live out his life as a spectator. He was a cautious man, methodically feeling his way, but I think he sensed an evident opportunity and acknowledged a dynastic responsibility. He was destined, I came to feel, for political leadership...
...more stab at the heart of America. There is an echo of Greek tragedy about the succession of blows striking a single American family. So many Kennedys have been cruelly cut off before they had fulfilled themselves--Joe Jr., my Harvard classmate, killed in the war; John and Robert, cherished friends, assassinated; two of Robert's sons dead; now John's son, the golden...
...there no sense, no purpose, to the universe? Later R.F.K. scrawled on a yellow sheet, "The innocent suffer--how can that be possible and God be just?" He found solace in Aeschylus, memorizing the lines from the Agamemnon that he would use when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed: "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace...
...first time John Kennedy Jr. registered in the national imagination, he was at the side of a coffin. On his third birthday, holding a flag and saluting his murdered father, he was already mastering the Kennedy protocol of premature farewells, the leave-takings that are nearly as much a family tradition as touch football and big weddings. The assassination of J.F.K. seemed to many people the terrible culmination of a Kennedy-family saga that began in the ambitions of father Joe. It turned out instead to be just the most spectacular episode in a family history littered with misfortunes: plane...