John Kennedy Jr…What Might Have Been

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. on this day, will be gone 23 years.

  Hard to believe.

  Most of us remember where we were when we heard the news his plane was missing, the same as when his dad was shot in 1963.

   I decided to test my theory asking a few people.

  A woman seated in a wheelchair while her attendant ran into a store said, she was babysitting her grandson sitting in her garden in East Hampton when her housekeeper came out to tell her.

  My next door neighbor was home watching a movie when…JFK JR’S PLANE BELIEVED MISSING flashed across the screen.

 What film? I asked, but that she didn’t remember.

 The writer John Howell was in Sonoma, California drinking coffee on his patio when he first heard the plane was lost.

 Anthony the grocer was at his cabin upstate and thought he heard wrong.

 Marc from sorryless.com said…

  ‘I was out to eat with some friends. I remember sitting outside  after our meal to grab a smoke. I remember that moment as if it was last night.’

  As for me, I was canoodling with an actor who mistakenly left the TV on, cooling my passion like a bucket of cold water.

 The Kennedys, like the Royals, despite scandal and controversy still stop us in our tracks; Diana in the tunnel; Jackie’s bloody pink suit.

  As young as I was still remember that little boy saluting his father’s casket, an image so etched in my mind not needing a yellowing newspaper as a reminder.

 He seemed to have the best of everyone; his mother’s dignity, his dad’s eloquence.

 His Uncle Bobby’s tenacity, along with Uncle Teddy’s quick wit.

 He was likable and charming even with the press carrying his inherited mantle like a Knight of the Round Table.

 The way politics are now, would he have made the difference we so desperately need tossing his hat in the ring, an expression coined by Theodore Roosevelt considered one of our greatest Presidents?

 The way some pair him with Donald Trump as I see it, is like mixing lemon and milk.

 It curdles.

 But they got along so well, did you say?

 John Kennedy got along with everybody.

 On this day I think of him standing on the steps of Manhattan’s Federal Hall on the site George Washington in 1789 took his oath of office, launching his premier magazine, George, some say was a steppingstone to the day he’d succeed his father as President of the United States, but fate, alas, had other plans.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was 38 years-old. 

  (1960-1999)

This was taken from a 1600 word piece I submitted to the New York Daily News they rejected, so I’m humbled by those who have read it.

Thank you.

SB