
To one generation, the indelible image of John F. Kennedy Jr. was taken on his third birthday.
A little boy with a powder-blue coat and bare shins, standing in front of a wall of black-clad mourners. One hand raised to his forehead, saluting his slain father's coffin.
To the next, it was a photograph taken at a party after the 1999 White House Correspondents' dinner where he'd hosted a table as the Editor-in-Chief of George magazine. Jacket removed, he sits in a black bowtie and vest, his lips planted on the cheek of his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who's nestled in his lap.
Each carries tragedy. A little boy too young to grasp what he's lost; a 38-year-old man unaware what he's about to.
Just three months after the party photograph was taken, John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn and her sister, Lauren, were killed when Kennedy's light plane crashed off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
The accident raised countless what-ifs about the potential of "America's son", questions that are being pondered again today, on what would have been his 60th birthday.
From America's son, to its most eligible bachelor.
When President John F. Kennedy addressed the press after being called as the winner of the 1960 presidential election, his heavily pregnant wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, stood beside him
"Now my wife and I prepare for a new administration," he concluded, "and for a new baby."
That baby — John F. Kennedy Jr. — was born less than three weeks later, on November 25.
Cameras were trained on him from the very beginning, as he and his big sister, Caroline, toddled around the halls of the White House. As they mourned their father who was assassinated during a presidential visit to Dallas in 1963. As they mourned their uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was murdered four years later. And as their mother married and later buried shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
John F. Kennedy Jr. playing in the oval office with his father. Image: Getty.
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