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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

It is fitting that John F. Kennedy Jr. should be mourned in this way. His father's assassination in November 1963 demonstrated television's capacity to involve millions so intimately in such a public event. Little John-John's final salute was only one in a series of incredibly private moments beamed publicly that touched people deeply in the days of wall-to-wall coverage after the Kennedy assassination. John Jr. claimed that he did not remember that moment; nevertheless, that unforgettable image bound millions of strangers to him.

It is easy to dismiss these public paroxysms of grief as ersatz mourn-a-thons that boost ratings and puff reputations, as people indulge their emotions for some person they never met. But such a caricature ignores the venerable need for myths and heroes. Human beings need stories, ideas and individuals to offer inspiration and to unite us. That need seems even more intense in our mechanized and anonymous world, a world where, without unifying legends, ideals and, yes, celebrities, life would seem more meaningless and lonely.

For Americans, the Kennedy family is uniquely suited to serve as a building-block for national identity. Back in the 1930s, headed by Ambassador Joe the patriarch and Rose the matriarch, they were branded "America's best known large family," a spirited brood of Irish Catholics living out - and redefining - the American dream. By the 1940s, tragedy began to give their success story a poignant patina. In 1944, Joe Jr.'s plane disappeared in combat; four years later a plane carrying his sister Kathleen crashed.

By the 1960s, the Kennedys were America's First Family, epitomizing the high hopes with which that decade began. But the assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy made the Kennedys embody the great traumas of the 1960s. By the 1970s, after a young woman in Ted Kennedy's car drowned at Chappaquiddick, and with mounting revelations of President Kennedy's peccadilloes, the Kennedy family was deemed dysfunctional - like so many other American families.

Still, the Kennedy mystique has survived. The Kennedys remain blessed with a unique combination of political power, fabulous wealth, movie-star glamour and intellectual cachet. Earnest liberals who cannot tell an Arnold Schwarzenegger from an Adam Sandler go wobbly in the presence of a Kennedy. Joe's children strove for greatness - and achieved it. As a result, Joe's grandchildren have struggled to be normal amid the celebrity culture that their parents' successes unintentionally imposed on them.

John-John's quest for normalcy became part of the legend. Yet to those of us too young to be baby-boomers, too old to be Generation Xers, his mundane travails - getting mugged in Central Park, succumbing to his mother's wishes to eschew an acting career, trying to pass the bar - somehow glamorized our own prosaic attempts to mature. Still, the contrast between the generations holds. The three Kennedy uncles died in the service of their country; the three Kennedy cousins who have died thus far - Bobby's son David of a drug overdose, Bobby's son Michael in a skiing accident and now John Jr. while piloting his private plane - have been casualties of more private pursuits in the leisure society.

Increasingly, the world of celebrity knows no boundaries, which is why these quintessentially American icons have become world- famous. Especially in a democracy peopled by immigrants, theirs is an inspiring model. Besides, few of us can resist the glamour of the Kennedys, and all of us are humbled by the epidemic of tragedy that has afflicted this celebrated clan.

As Americans mourned this weekend, they praised John Jr.'s down- to-earth qualities despite his fame; his generosity amid great wealth; his public-spirited idealism even in our cynical and selfish culture. In so doing, the mourners articulated central tenets of American ideology and rehearsed the American story, an epic that goes from rags to riches and that emphasizes great power and great idealism.

Thus, in turning on their TVs, Americans joined together as citizens in an act as fundamental to modern electronic culture as voting is to modern democracy.

As the world mourned this weekend, we all pondered the mysteries of fate, the evanescence of life, the randomness of death. We turned on the TV all wanting to understand how three lives so filled with promise could end so abruptly. In so doing, we reaffirmed our humanity, together, via that maddening and magical box that remains the main switchboard of modern life.

- Gil Troy is a professor of American history at McGill University.