Edward Klein, author and editor, wrote for the current issue of Vanity Fair a story that challenged the faith in the matter of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his storybook wife, dead somewhere off Martha's Vineyard after crashing into the water on his private airplane four years ago. The event arrested the attention of the entire world. How could such a thing happen, given the sophisticated technology of the age in which young John was flying?
I was in the company of a lifelong pilot when the news came in. He explained that John need only have done one thing to avoid the blindness of the fog that night: turn on the autopilot, and do whatever he was told to do by the air-traffic controller, who would have directed him, that particular night, either to Boston or to Halifax, and a safe landing.
But Klein has a thesis that overwhelms such niceties of precaution. Yes, JFK senior might have authorized the bubble top on his limo in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and thus deflected the bullets of sharpshooter Lee Harvey Oswald. And Teddy could have stopped in at the house next door and reported that there was a girl in a car underwater and please do something about it. And young Joe Kennedy might have complied with the recommendation that the electric circuitry in his heavy bomber should be checked out, to avoid exploding in midair a few minutes later.
Klein runs the whole thing under the rubric of "The Kennedy Curse," as he titles his forthcoming book. And he takes the reader back to Joseph Kennedy, the founding father, who chiseled his way to the Court of St. James as ambassador in 1937. On a trip back to the United States, aboard an ocean liner that was also carrying Israel Jacobson, a poor Lubavitcher rabbi, and six of his yeshiva students, who were fleeing the Nazis, Kennedy complained to the ship's captain about the distracting noises caused by the Jewish passengers praying on the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah. He demanded that they be forbidden to continue exercises so distracting to fellow passengers. "Rabbi Jacobson put a curse on Kennedy, damning him and all his male offspring to tragic fates."