Fortune And Misfortune

The first time John Kennedy Jr. registered in the national imagination, he was at the side of a coffin. On his third birthday, holding a flag and saluting his murdered father, he was already mastering the Kennedy protocol of premature farewells, the leave-takings that are nearly as much a family tradition as touch football and big weddings. The assassination of J.F.K. seemed to many people the terrible culmination of a Kennedy-family saga that began in the ambitions of father Joe. It turned out instead to be just the most spectacular episode in a family history littered with misfortunes: plane crashes and...