Twenty Years On

Twenty years ago today the news flashed. JFK Jr. was gone. Lost in a tumult of salt waves on a short flight that would have gone unnoticed except for his high birth. No one would have blinked an eye if John had not overstepped his own limits.

It was the hubris of the Greeks, hidden in John’s elegant kindness.

Overweening pride. Just enough to kill himself and two others. The pride that goes before the fall. Even for those whose charm and beauty make the fault seem like lovely grace itself. Or at least the kind of grace beloved of cameras, captivating all eyes.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., died this day twenty years ago while piloting a plane he was not yet skilled enough to fly at night. Fame, money, charm, pride all conspired to his end. No one would even think to stop him. Because it all was so captivating, his highborn boyish strut.

It was the blessing and the curse of his bloodline.

His earlier image saluting his father’s cortege seared into memory in 1963. I was not much older than he was. But old enough to see how history had broken in two. His little salute with chubby hands lit the fracture in an unignorable way.

And so without ever wishing it, he became much more than a boy. He became a symbol of the point when history jumped its rails. The sweet little boy standing in the wreckage giving a smart salute to the goodness and the greatness that somehow joined inside his father, despite his father’s many faults.

It was the point when all the 1950s cheer started its fall into 1960s dread. A dread that rose and shaped itself into denial.

Denial of all that was wrong. — The racism, the greed for status at the expense of others, the poverty, the dangerous swagger of chip-on-the-shoulder diplomacy.

It was a different denial than before. Not the easy blithe denial of the 1950s, but a grasping denial just starting to fall apart. Denial whose center could not hold. Denial that was flailing in the sea, drowning in the failure of what once seemed innocent ceremonies. How could innocence become horror so quickly?

Yet through all of this, JFK Jr. somehow kept all the goodness of his father’s time and set aside its bad. Or perhaps he simply had the grace to keep private furies out of public life, as his father had done so well. There is grace even in such faultiness. Perhaps that was the source of his family’s charm.

John’s death in 1999 stunned us all. It was a fist to the gut. The loss of a public symbol. A visceral, wordless punch that sucks out air. Hard to explain at the time. After all, he had not steered history as his father had done. What he had done was more subtle.

There was a handsome terror to it all. None of us could stop looking as he strutted his glad hours on the stage till he smacked into the sea. It felt as if the larger furies of our public pride had chased his father to the grave, yet coveted him too. Furies still not satisfied. Not satisfied that history’s ledger was in balance.

No, not satisfied. Furies chased down the saluting boy and took him, too. Dragged him below the rough rude sea. Washed the balm from a king not yet anointed. A king who hesitated at the sight of crowns, at the horrors of power. And then died before any crown could touch his head.

Now we stand twenty years on. Twenty wrenching years.

From this new vantage, I still see that ledger columns make no sum. There is no equation yet. The inequity is worse. The iniquity still thumps its chest. The pride is more prideful than in his father’s day. Bitter salt waves await.

No one can fault John for pausing at the threshold between good and great. How could he not see a bullet waiting outside the jambs? How could he not know that power tries to weave a warp upon even the strongest?

I never wish the curse of greatness on anyone. Yet I also long for public people who can be both good and great. People who do not fan furies into frenzy. Those who know. Who know how to coax furies back in the box that also restrains their own Pandora faults.

Public people who understand what must become the ledger’s final equation: Furies loosed equal ruin.

I yearn that no more oceans drink down hands saluting what is both great and good. Hands saluting the sober understanding that great people are great because they restrain the furious demons everyone has. And most especially their own.