DEBORAH CORRAO / L’Observateur / July 24, 1999

I don’t know quite how to explain the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach when I heard the news a week ago that John F. Kennedy Jr.’s planehad gone down off of Martha’s Vineyard.

I was 13 when his father, President John Kennedy, was assassinated, and like many of those who lived through the event I can recall the tremendous grief and loss I felt when I heard the news that fateful day in November.

At 13, I didn’t know what “Camelot” was, although I must have had some sense of it even then. All I know is I witnessed the execution of someone Iloved and admired as if he were a member of my own family.

It won’t do here to rehash the stab in the gut I felt when his brother Robert also became the target of an assassin’s bullet during his fateful run for the presidency five years later. To me and many of my generation,a feeling of hopelessness shrouded the political arena and life as we knew it would never be the same.

All those emotions come back to me now at the death of the man we assumed at that time would be heir to the Kennedy throne. Yes, the crownprince, if you will, despite the aversion some commentators have for their colleagues who have christened the Kennedy clan America’s royal family.

“John-John,” as we knew him, was the playful 3-year-old captured on tape walking with his father along the beach at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport or playing underneath Daddy’s desk in the Oval Office. Thelittle boy thrust into manhood, bravely saluting his father’s flag-draped casket.

Everything I say seems almost trite now after a week of television news, where all of the country’s brightest and best have, it seems, used up all my words in their reflections on the life of a young man who grew up to chart his own path in life, keeping his privacy in spite of his legacy as the only son of a fallen hero.

Politics seem almost irrelevant in the wake of this week’s tragedy. Nomatter what you think of Kennedy politics or various members of the high- profile family, the nation is experiencing a collective deja vu – a surrender to the inevitability of the tragedy.

But we can also hold fondly in our hearts, or perhaps bid a fond farewell to, a time that, for one brief shining moment in American history, was known as Camelot.

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