He Was America's Prince...

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If you believe his friends, the most famous son in the world wanted nothing more than to be a normal guy, to put people at ease. Born to a father who understood politics as a performance art, he hoped at one time to become an actor, but wound up as an editor of a magazine that promised to treat politics as entertainment, which could be seen as a strange gesture toward the arena in which his father and uncle had died.

In their shadow he lived life in full; he kayaked and parasailed and Rollerbladed through Central Park, traveled to India to study health care and dated Madonna and Daryl Hannah, flunked the bar exam twice and couldn't go for pizza without the tabs coming along. If he was less reckless than his cousins, it was not saying much; there were friends who turned down the invitation to take to the skies with him. Pilot Kyle Bailey watched the plane take off Friday night. "I didn't lose any sleep over it," he says. "I figured he must know what he was doing." But Bailey didn't like the weather. He decided to wait and fly in the morning.

Saturday was supposed to be Rory's day. Ethel's youngest daughter had earned the perfect weather, a bright breeze and feathery clouds and sunshine splashed across the water. Ethel Kennedy was pregnant with Rory when her husband was murdered in 1968; Rory's uncle Ted attended her delivery and played surrogate father to her and her brothers and sisters. It was Rory who cradled her brother Michael as he lay dying on a mountain after skiing into a fir tree, his three children praying at his side. Rory, a documentary filmmaker, had seen suffering in her family, and she had shared in their successes, and so last weekend they were gathering to share in hers as she prepared to marry New York City writer Mark Bailey.

Friday night was the bridal dinner, for family and members of the wedding party. Rory and her mom had gone sailing the day before; the weather was lovely, the dinner was perfect.

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.

John was apparently not rated for instrument flying, which meant that the night had better stay very clear. Flying a small plane over water at night can be a scary business; the horizon bleeds into the water, so you can be in a shallow turn and not even know it, not be able to get your bearings from the lights on the shore.

The sun set in New York around 8:25; the plane took off at 8:38, a Piper Saratoga large enough for six people but carrying only three. It turned north, then east, as the temperature began to dip and the haze thickened around the islands and fingers of Massachusetts. The flight was supposed to take a little more than an hour.