Word: jr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...John Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister Lauren, a New York City investment banker, arrived in separate cars at New Jersey's Essex County Airport. John had told friends the day before that he was flying straight to Hyannis; the decision to stop in Martha's Vineyard to drop Lauren off may have come at the last minute. But the weather was clear, and the FAA does not require pilots to file a flight plan when visual flight rules are in place...
...this seemed possible because John F. Kennedy Jr. had such a complex relationship with his own fame--sometimes amused, often appalled, always highly ironic toward the weirdness in which he lived. He had to get away from it sometimes--to Baja, to Alaska, up in the Piper Saratoga--because his celebrity had never not been there. He couldn't tell you where the media images of his childhood ended and his own memories began, and learning to live with its effects hadn't been easy. People were always approaching him, always wanting something from him, but he stood...