Personal Baggage

By TAD BARTIMUS

John F. Kennedy Jr., stood at the confluence of true history, the culture of celebrity and his own active life. That might explain the nonstop news coverage of his disappearance and death, but it doesn't -- not quite.

Add to it the personal baggage of a select group of highly-paid superstar journalists and you have the engine driving the media train.

In the telling of their terrible tale the familiar faces who light up our living rooms every night looked old. Hushed tones and stricken sentences revealed as much about the journalists as they did about the boy/man at the heart of The Big Story.

"He was a son who belonged to all of us," CBS News' Dan Rather said. Not really. He was Jackie and Jack's son. But Rather, like millions of Americans old enough to remember a little boy's salute to his father's coffin, viewed JFK Jr., through his own lens. Events in Rather's life, like those of millions of us, are overlaid onto the growing up of our national child.

No matter whether we knew him – as Rather, ABC News' Peter Jennings, NBC's Tom Brokaw and many prominent journalists did -- or whether we seldom thought about him except when we saw his photo on a magazine or caught him on TV, he was always out there somewhere, being a golden boy while we struggled onward.

"My family photo album in my head is shared by a lot of other people," Kennedy Jr., once said. "It's an unusual connection with a lot of folks." Baby Boomers, particularly, presumed to know the Kennedys because cameras intrusively recorded their every blessing and blight.

Many reporters built careers covering JFK's and RFK's political quests and assassinations, as well as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and other Kennedys over the past four decades. JFK Jr.'s milestones became growth marks on their own door casings, a way to measure whether they were accomplishing their goals, abandoning personal dreams, making a difference ("Some people see things as they are and ask why. We dream things that never were and ask, why not?" challenged Bobby).

Brokaw, Rather, Jennings and the rest of us who grew up in a more idealistic time knew, as the 90s rolled along, that we'd better hurry up if we were going to get it all done because -- My, how time flies! -- John-John was growing up. That must mean we're getting on, too.

Still, given the natural order of things, we thought we had a few good years left. Heck, he wasn't even a father yet. Then the natural order stopped. In the middle. Just like that.

In the telling of their terrible tale the familiar faces who light up our living rooms every night looked old. Hushed tones and stricken sentences revealed as much about the journalists as they did about the boy/man at the heart of The Big Story.

ABC's Barbara Walters, a mother herself, said thank goodness Jackie wasn't alive to suffer the loss. NBC's Katie Couric, a young widow, spoke with solemnity of the love between JFK Jr., and Carolyn. Charles Gibson, co-host of Good Morning, America, spoke with nostalgia about growing up just two doors away from the Georgetown home of John Kennedy when he was elected president. GMA co-host Diane Sawyer reportedly was too distraught to work the Monday after the crash.

The old saying that journalists like to have their noses under the tent is true. For millionaire reporters who themselves become celebrities, it's a perk of the job to hobnob with the rich and hang out with the famous. Which explains some of their fixation on the John F. Kennedy Jr., story. They were passionate, emotional and arguably too close to it to be objective.

"I wish," said Roman Catholic priest and prominent author Father Andrew Greeley, being interviewed by Ms. Sawyer on Good Morning, America, "that the media would leave the Kennedy family alone in their grieving. I think this harassing of them by the media is terrible. If the Archangel Michael should appear at the end of this program and say 'ENOUGH ALREADY!" nobody would probably pay any attention."

Diane Sawyer agreed with him. Then she left the TV studio to attend the invitation-only memorial service.

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