A View from the Shore

A clatter of emergency: a Coast Guard helicopter flutters low from Tashmoo to Gay Head, scanning the water for something that may have fallen. We watch from the beach in the summer morning. We stand among dark boulders, taller than we, that came to rest here 20,000 years ago when the glacier melted and retreated north. The waves in Vineyard Sound have a lazy heave, sweet whitecaps in the distance.

A friend has summered here all her long life. She remarks (the memory coming alive in her eyes as fresh as yesterday) that in the spring of 1932, after the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, a tipster told the family that the child would be found, alive, on a boat off Gay Head. Our friend watched from this shore as Charles Lindbergh flew relentlessly back and forth in his small plane over exactly these waters, searching for that boat. Our friend mimes Lindbergh’s fierce, focused anguish, peering at the waves: “Where’s that baby? Where’s that baby?”

Where’s the famous child? the helicopters want to know. Where’s John-John, who became, in time, the Kennedys’ hunk Telemachus, next in the family’s line of dreamboats and (in the tabloid version) satyrs and–can it be?–latest to fall before some mystery of bad karma on a dynastic scale?

We shake our heads, our faces almost embarrassed in the presence of this violent blank: What is the text trying to teach us? This merciless–almost preposterous–pounding, these ingenious yet repetitive variations on the theme: they mean something, don’t they? They’ve got to. Some cruelly overwritten sermon on Old Joe’s hubris? There must be a secret beneath the surface, down there, full-fathom five, beneath the choppers and clatter of media.

Or is it vulgar to demand meaning in what may be, after all, just the piling on of bad luck arriving in bizarrely unusual clusters? We want Sophocles or Shakespeare–or, rather, in our day, tear-drenched mass-media renderings of equivalent tragedies–to broadcast inflated significances, messages from God. (We have before us the ghastly example of Diana’s death and the mawkish excesses that followed.) But maybe we are merely in the presence of outrageous fortune. To my mind, standing on this beach, the Kennedys’ accumulation of dooms seems as inarticulate as the boulders that the glacier left.

No family played such a sustained, gaudily heartbreaking role in America’s fantasy life–the longest-running political soap. Eventually–after the LIFE magazine spreads that spun Old Joe’s golden children into myth in the ’40s and ’50s, after Dallas and the keening over Camelot and after Bobby–at last there set in the disillusioned revisionism: all the dark-side stories about Jack’s satyriasis and the loathsome way the brothers treated Marilyn. And the myth developed a twin, an antimyth of cheap fraud, of a tribe of photogenic hustlers.

I don’t know. I attended the magic show at an early moment. Once, in the ’50s, when I was a 12-year-old Senate page boy for the summer and Jack was the junior Senator from Massachusetts, he entered the Senate chamber one late-June morning, walking on crutches because of his recent back operation. The chamber was one-third full, the atmosphere somnolent, idly buzzing. When Kennedy walked in from the Democratic cloakroom, a jolt of electricity fired the air. The chamber fell silent. Even heavy-hammed saurians like Herman Welker of Idaho and Homer Capehart of Indiana and Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin swiveled and peered for a long moment at Kennedy with a curiosity and awe that impressed me, even as a child, as unusual: they had seen something.

His son John Jr. possessed not that magic but a sweetness and an intelligence that the tabloids, with their headlines about “the hunk,” always missed. The celebrity media came at him with an ambivalence of adoration and envious jeering, sneering superciliously at the mere Adonis. That was stupid journalism. When my wife and I first had dinner with him some years ago, he talked to her about Egypt, and he recommended a book by a writer named Michael Ondaatje. The book was called The English Patient, but no one had heard of it in those days. John did generous and time-consuming charity work on, among other things, a program to help improve the prospects of health-care workers who earned next to nothing in their jobs. No one wrote about that side of him. I think he might have done much more in our public affairs if the more ravenous branches of our culture had not condemned him to life as a cartoon.

I am told that a wheel from the plane has been found. I am going down to the beach now, to sit on one of the smaller boulders and see if I can find something in the Book of Job.