[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 106 (Monday, July 26, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9211-S9212]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  A REFLECTION ON JOHN F. KENNEDY JR.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, of the half-dozen great journalists who 
wrote of the Kennedy era, as we think of that Presidency, none was 
closer to those involved, where they had come from, who they were, who 
they wished to be than Martin F. Nolan of the Boston Globe. He has done 
so once again, in a moving reflection of the deaths of John F. Kennedy, 
Jr., his wife and her sister, entitled ``Life Goes on, but it'll Never 
be the Same.''
  I ask unanimous consent that his reflections be printed in the 
Congressional Record
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                        [From the Boston Globe]

               Life Goes on, but it'll Never be the Same

                          (By Martin F. Nolan)

       When Sander Vanocur, the former NBC correspondent, first 
     heard the news, he recalled what John O'Hara, the Irish-
     American novelist, said on a hot July day in 1937. ``They 
     tell me that George Gershwin is suddenly dead at 38. That's 
     what they tell me, but I don't have to believe it if I don't 
     want to.''
       The composer and songwriter died of a brain tumor, a 
     celebrity death which, like many, caused shock, disbelief, 
     and grief among thousands, even millions, who had never met 
     him.
       The death of John F. Kennedy Jr. is different because of 
     Americans' attitude about history. However imperfectly, they 
     knew that the young man who perished with his wife and 
     sister-in-law while approaching Martha's Vineyard was ``a 
     part of history.''
       The prayers, the sadness, the flowers in TriBeCa all flow 
     to a clan whose rise to glory began on the margins of 
     American society, an underdog dynasty. John F. Kennedy Jr. 
     was born 17 days after his father became the first Roman 
     Catholic president amid the

[[Page S9212]]

     fears of millions that the White House would be an outpost of 
     the Vatican. Friday, as his life is celebrated at a Mass at 
     St. Thomas More Church is New York City, anti-Catholicism has 
     almost vanished in America.
       The Kennedy saga covers most of the century. John F. 
     ``Honey Fitz'' Fitzgerald was elected to the US House of 
     Representatives in 1894. One of his grandsons, John, became 
     president; two more, Edward and Robert, became senators; and 
     two of his great-grandsons, Joseph and Patrick, also have 
     served in the House. A half-dozen Frelinghuysens from New 
     Jersey have served in Congress, but only four from another 
     Dutch dynasty, the Roosevelts. The grandchildren of Franklin 
     Delano Roosevelt have known little political fame.
       The future has always been Kennedy country and the greatest 
     Kennedy success could lie among its women. Caroline Kennedy 
     Schloseberg has been a key decision maker on many matters, 
     including her father's library. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, 
     the lieutenant governor of Maryland, may possess as much 
     charm and savvy as her father, Robert, her uncles and 
     cousins, and even her grandfather.
       The much-photographed Kennedys have been reviled and 
     revered. In a society anxious about ``family values,'' theirs 
     has been on exuberant display for four decades, along with 
     those of the Bouviers, Shakels, Bennetts, Smiths, Lawfords, 
     and Shrivers. (A large family means many in-laws.)
       In a nation of small families, size matters. When Edward 
     Kennedy barely escaped death in the crash of a small plane in 
     1964, his brother Robert visited him and remarked in that 
     ruefully wry Kennedyesque way, ``I guess the reason my mother 
     and father had so many children was that some of them would 
     survive.''
       Edward Kennedy, the ninth of nine, is, at 67, the sole 
     surviving son, the patriarch, and an all-too-accomplished 
     eulogist. The Kennedys' famous fatalism was once expressed by 
     President Kennedy's citation of a French fisherman's prayer: 
     ``Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.'' 
     Thursday's burial was private and at sea off Cape Cod, that 
     slip of land of which Henry David Thoreau said in 1865: ``A 
     man may stand there and put all America behind him.''
       The America John F. Kennedy Jr. leaves behind is one in 
     which the median age is younger than his at his death. The 
     vast majority of his fellow citizens have no contemporary 
     memory of his father's violent death in 1963 nor that of his 
     uncle in 1968. The grief of the Kennedys has been vivid in 
     the nation's tribal memory as only a photograph or a video 
     image, but no less vivid for being so.
       Stanley Tretick, who died last week at 77, was a 
     photographer for Look magazine. One of his most famous 
     pictures was of the President Kennedy's young son climbing 
     through a desk in the Oval Office. ``The Kennedys are great, 
     but you have to do things their way,'' Tretick once said.
       The Kennedys stage-managed their own public image in the 
     days before 24-hour cable channels and the vast hordes of 
     paparazzi that their fame and glamour enticed. The Hyannis 
     Port family compound this week has been a logo for media 
     fascination with one family's grief.
       The old Latin liturgy once included an Augustinian 
     admonition, ``Vita mutatur non tollitur''--``Life is changed 
     not taken away.'' That belief sustains those of faith, in 
     addition, there's always the Irish wake tradition of stories 
     and memories, happy and sad.
       Arthur N. Schlessinger Jr. wrote in ``A Thousand Days'' of 
     how a young assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick 
     Moynihan, reacted to President Kennedy's death. ``I don't 
     think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that 
     the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess 
     that we thought we had a little more time,'' Moynihan said. 
     ``Mary McGrory said to me that we'll never laugh again. And I 
     said, `Heavens, Mary. We'll laugh again. It's just that we'll 
     never be young again.' ''
       Across America and the world, many people feel a lot less 
     young than they did a week ago.

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