c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

NAPLES, Italy _ Watching CNN’s coverage of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s missing airplane took me back 36 years to a parking lot outside a Dallas hospital, where another generation of broadcasters led us in waiting for medical news about JFK Sr.

We knew the news was bad then. We knew it was bad now. Yet we watched, hoping for something better. We watched also in fascination at this latest tragedy to befall the family that Britain’s Sky News network insisted on calling”the Americans’ royal family.” I don’t think of the Kennedys in such shallow terms _ as our version of the tiresome bunch who currently occupy England’s throne and fill its tabloids with their infidelities. But they do generate a similar interest.

So much has changed in those 36 years from father to son. The assassination in Dallas meant the loss of innocence for many of us, an end not only to Washington’s”Camelot”phase but to the 1950s, to neighborhoods where boys”played guns”but only to emulate TV cowboys, to a peaceful time when schoolrooms seemed friendly, romance seemed magical and wars were movies.

We know now that 1963 wasn’t such a peaceful time. We know now that persons of color were suffering grave indignities, that a horrible war was starting, that race-driven suburban sprawl was decimating cities, that drugs were arriving, marriages were ending, many women were suffocating in the subservient homemaker myth, and maybe it was only the music that was magical. Still, the assassin’s bullet and the sudden elevation of the mournful and menacing Lyndon Johnson opened our eyes to an ugliness we simply hadn’t seen.

We are no strangers to ugliness nowadays. In our national life, it sometimes seems as if we have seen little else. We have seen another Kennedy gunned down, the full flowering of the Indochina seeds that President Kennedy sowed, riots in major cities, the collapse of the black community under drugs,”urban renewal”and despair. We have seen crime, the arrogant and self-indulgent 1980s, the music turning angry and hateful, corruption of the political process, the collapse of American religious life into self-serving feuds. Not to mention disco, Latrell Sprewell and Donald Trump.

In some ways, JFK Jr. represented a charming victory over such ugliness. He was bright, young and wealthy, and yet not arrogant, not wrapped up in strutting and spending. He had grace in an era that hasn’t seen much grace in public life.

Television has changed, too. In 1963, the three networks didn’t have much to offer beyond stationing cameras outside a hospital and letting us watch Roger Mudd wait and then Walter Cronkite tearfully announce. CNN’s vigil last weekend, by contrast, featured informative briefings; you-are-there shots of helicopters, small craft and dune buggies searching a vast sea and a small island; surprisingly tasteful recaps of JFK Jr.’s life, marriage and publishing career; and a rotating cast of commentators who seemed to have nibbled at the Kennedy banquet.

In some ways, the Dallas vigil was more realistic, because it was exactly like waiting for news inside a hospital. This latest vigil had more variety and entertainment value. It seemed to put us at a safe distance from the tragedy.

From the beginning, the Kennedys have seemed larger than life, certainly larger than most of our lives. Some people enjoy the reflected light of the famous. How else could People magazine stay alive? Some people take private comfort when the mighty fall, because it proves fame doesn’t protect the glitterati from being frail like the rest of us.

I am moved by the younger Kennedy’s demise mostly because it reminds me of a more poignant moment 36 years ago. I never saw the son as an icon for this age. But by all accounts he was a decent person who managed to wear his mantle of fame gracefully.

Maybe he was more of an icon than I realized, in that he lived a useful life despite immense pressures to cash in and to cast klieg-created shadows. He chose not to become what many consider the ultimate prize of success, namely, justifiably arrogant.

DEA END EHRICH