On 16th July, 1999, John Kennedy Jr crashed his Piper Sartoga aircraft into the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard. He died instantly along with his wife, Carolyn and her sister Lauren. John was just 38. John shared some of these characteristics – his ADHD did not help – but was conscious of this cycle of destruction and disaster. If anybody looked capable of outrunning the family’s dark history it was him. As the world had watched, that little boy had grown into a gentle, beautiful man. And he had gradually come to terms with the Kennedy Legacy and his role within it. Politics, he had begun to realize, would suit his temperament and his talents. The return of a Kennedy to the White House was a narrative it was hard to resist. All that ended with John Jr’s fatal flight in the summer of 1999. The world had wept at his father’s funeral in 1963 and they wept again as John’s ashes were scattered from a US Navy destroyer off the coast of Massachusetts. They were burying a modest, kind man whom Americans had taken to their hearts. And they were burying a dream. This truly was the end of Camelot.
