Two MONTHS AGO, I was invited to participate with John Kennedy, his sister, Caroline, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and several other members of the family in the annual Profile in Courage Award events at the Kennedy Presidential Library. As it happened, the award ceremony occurred on the eleventh birthday of my youngest son, Jimmy. Ted Kennedy went to considerable lengths to make sure the birthday was publicly noted and celebrated. Jimmy reacted to the attention as most kids his age would, with a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment. All the Kennedys present were very kind to my son. But John and his lovely bride, Carolyn, were especially so. They talked with him in a quietly playful way that Jimmy appreciated as much as my wife Cindy and I appreciated John’s compliments for raising a nice boy and for choosing Arizona over Washington as our children’s home.
Cindy and I left Boston grateful for the experience and impressed by how gracious and considerate John and Caroline were; how seriously they took their responsibility to honor their father’s memory; and how well they reflected the loving care with which their mother had raised them.
John Kennedy was a splendid young man. Though we had only a passing acquaintance, I saw, as others did, that it was easy to like him. Given the temptations attending wealth, privilege, and beauty, it would have surprised no one if he had been arrogant and self-centered. But he was quite the opposite. In our encounters, he was friendly, well mannered, and thoughtful, not just to me but to everyone in the room. When, at his invitation, I appeared before his magazine’s editorial board, he encouraged the office interns to attend and ask questions, an unusually considerate gesture to them by their editor-in-chief (unless, of course, they were needed to fill seats because I had failed to draw much of a crowd, in which case it was an unusually considerate gesture to me).
Were that all I knew of him, I would grieve his loss. But, of course, he was more than that. He was a featured player in one of the more powerful legends in American political life, a legend that most Americans at one time or another have been enamored of, and that now seems inexpressibly sad. The nation grieves for him — an honor accorded relatively few people — and after my brief exposure to him, I understand why.
The personal loss of those who knew him well, of course, is immeasurably more painful. It’s a cold heart that has no sympathy for the Kennedy family; for Ted Kennedy, who must too often assume the duties of the head of a family on whom fortune and misfortune fall in great and equal measure; and especially for Caroline, who has suffered more loss than anyone of her young age should ever have to bear. The Bessettes, whose broken hearts mourn the staggering loss of two beautiful, accomplished sisters, must know a grief that in this moment is inconsolable. I pray for their comfort, as I pray for the repose of the souls of their loved ones.
The older we grow the more accustomed we become to death. And yet there are some whose loss seems impossible to accept. That is true of John Kennedy, who to many of us seemed only yesterday a fatherless 3-year-old.
A Yeats poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” laments the passing at a young age of a “dear friend’s dear son.” It is inconceivable that this son should now “share in that discourtesy of death” alongside friends of the poet’s who died in old age. Near the end of the poem, Yeats observes how good a life his young friend made of his too few days, and tries to reconcile himself to the loss with the wistful remark, “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”
Maybe that kind of sentiment is all we have to assuage the nation’s, perhaps even the families’, grief; that, and the comfort of knowing that John has been reunited with the father he lost long ago and the mother who loved him so well that he became a good man.
John McCain is the senior senator from Arizona.
