Bold, Spirited Lives

The report swept the nation Saturday at the start of a summer weekend: The plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. was missing and presumed down in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The son of the president who brought a new generation to political power in America, the famous son of a famous family who himself had chosen to work on the edges of the political world, publishing the magazine George, was reported to be piloting the plane, which also carried his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette. As night fell Saturday, with physical evidence of a crash accumulating, yet another tragedy confronted the family dubbed by many, properly so, as America’s political royalty.

The star-crossed Kennedys have been players in the highest leagues of power and fame for more than half a century, and despite the naysayers it was far more than money that brought them to this station. Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder, made millions in the stock market and parlayed his influence in the late 1930s into the U.S. ambassadorship at London’s Court of St. James’s, where his children began developing the worldview that burnished their later political efforts.

Almost all eventually turned away from their father’s highly conservative tendencies. But he gave them a legacy of going all out in their lives, whether in the sports at Hyannis Port, Mass., or what became the family trade--politics. The anointed son was Joseph Kennedy Jr., but he was killed in a World War II bombing mission over Europe. Later, the second son, John F. Kennedy, a celebrated war hero, picked up the flag and won the presidency in 1960. Three years later John Kennedy was assassinated, and the child that the president and his wife, Jacqueline, called John John stood bravely at the funeral procession and saluted.

The shadow over the Kennedys persisted: Edward M. Kennedy and Chappaquiddick in 1969; the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, here in Los Angeles in 1968; more recently, the deaths of two sons of Robert Kennedy.

How much sorrow can a family take? How much is self-inflicted? Joseph Kennedy taught his sons and daughters to live their lives boldly, and they did. He encouraged them in their many endeavors, and the achievements reached by John, Robert and Edward Kennedy were and are remarkable. We should not look at the Kennedys with pity; the family will persevere. Better to celebrate the energy they brought to politics and other arenas of public life. A lesson for us all can be found in their spirit.