Death of the Prince - John F. Kennedy Jr

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Christopher Buckley

And a nation's grief.

Mr. Buckley is editor of Forbes FYI. His new book is Little Green Men.

I never met him, but a few months before he died, I got a nanosecond's sense of what it must have been like for him. My wife and I were walking out of the Washington Hilton lobby following the White House Correspondents dinner, a big, black-tie, celebrity-rich target environment. Tourists and gawkers were lined up behind ropes on either side as we exited. Suddenly, the crowd began to make this . . . noise. I'd never heard anything like it. A collective groan of wonderment, pleasure, awe. Flashbulbs began to go off. Individual squeaks. I made out, "It's him!" . . . "There!" . . . "Oh, God, it's him!"

As it happened, it wasn't him-it was a near look-alike, Jamie Rubin, the State Department spokesman. But since he was walking out of the Hilton with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on his arm, that made him, for a brief, shining moment, a JFK Jr. simulacrum. It must have been a thrill, as much as it must have been a bore for the real thing, who had to live with it every-effing-public moment of his life. No wonder he liked flying. Up in the sky, there are no photographers, no passersby with turning heads. When I read last week that three top-secret KH-11 spy satellites were scanning the waters off Gay Head from 250 miles above, it seemed fitting-the ultimate paparazzi, in search of a few final pictures.

One other vignette: A few years ago, in the building in which I work in New York, I noticed a few extra amps of electricity humming through the corridors one morning. Secretaries were talking to one another in excited whispers. In fact, middle-aged managers were doing a bit of buzzing, too. What could be the cause of excited susurrus? Celebrities are regular droppers-in at the Forbes Building: Reagan, Gorbachev, Mrs. Thatcher, Bill Gates-they've all come to nosh. So what was the cause of this collective water-cooler tachycardia? John Kennedy was coming by to try to persuade Forbes to buy a chunk of his fledgling magazine, George.

The Forbes executive he was coming to visit, informed that Kennedy was in the lobby, asked his secretary to escort him up, knowing that it would give her something to tell her grandchildren. "I . . . couldn't," she said to him, not trusting herself not to faint in the elevator riding up with the prince. "You bring him up." Now, that's professionalism.

JFK Jr. handled this burden that life thrust on him with extraordinary grace, modesty, and humor. But his death, like that of his counterpart, Princess Diana-to whom he privately likened himself with some measure of amusement, according to Douglas Brinkley, his own private Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-is problematic, not only for its circumstances, but for its infantilizing impact on us all.

In the Forbes office the Monday After, my colleague Patrick Cooke announced wincingly that, while he had been showering that morning, the radio referred to "John F. Kennedy, American hero" not once but three times. The word hero has long since been drained by the media of all real meaning, but until that day, Patrick had not heard it applied to someone whose recklessness had resulted in the death of two young women, so near the 30th anniversary of the day another man in his family had caused the drowning death of another young woman, on the same island.

From there, our conversation turned toward a statement I had seen in the newspapers the day before: A Coast Guard spokesman had claimed that the search effort was no larger in scale than it would have been for anyone else. Patrick and I had a good honk and snort over that one. It does us good to know that when our ship goes down, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel Rude will be dispatched with side- scanning sonar to find our tub; that KH-11 satellites will be expensively retasked. The point, only, is: Why should the Coast Guard feel compelled to utter such carbonated gargle? No one-not I, not Patrick-would begrudge any effort to find survivors. But as the day went on, it became obvious that the haze over the Atlantic that had contributed to the plane's fatal plunge extended over the entire country, or least the Eastern Seaboard, home to the nattering classes of the media establishment.

Douglas Brinkley, in Newsweek, was writing, "My job as friend was to play the historian, and at a recent lunch I compared him to John Quincy Adams, the son of the second U.S. president, a fellow Massachusettsean whose entire political career was centered on escaping his father's shadow, on proving his own worth in the political arena."

Brinkley had to write his piece on Saturday, in the hours immediately following the first dreadful announcement, and even intellectual historians are not immune to the tug of the human heart. But-puhleeze. And it did no further service to his friend's memory that he went on to quote Kennedy as saying that boxer Mike Tyson, who had been re-jailed- having attacked some motorists, behavior apparently not encouraged within the probational curriculum-had been so because of "racism . . . pure and simple." Such statements serve only to remind us that, in the last year, Kennedy was capable of other lapses of judgment, such as his friendship with pornographer Larry Flynt, or his commissioning of an article for his magazine by conspiracy-monger Oliver Stone. In it, Stone referred to King Henry VIII's imprisonment of Thomas a Beckett for opposing his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Should I write a Letter to the Editor, I wondered at the time? Let it go, let it go. Why reveal oneself as a reader of a magazine no one else read?