If people can remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was dead, this is for the good reason that the news came as a shock. News that his son is now also presumed dead, on the other hand, has been greeted more as though it were a foregone conclusion. Like the requirements of a soap opera script's formula, JFK jnr's disappearance is being treated, not only in the US but all over the world, as the inevitable next chapter in what they like to call the Curse of the Kennedys.
John F. Kennedy didn't die from a plane crash, apparently. He died of a curse. "The curse of the Kennedys strikes again" was how one British Sunday newspaper's front page broke the news, and there was not a single paper which could resist lingering over the phrase. In Italy, the headlines were "The curse kills another Kennedy", "The royal and cursed dynasty", and "The beautiful and the damned". In Belgium, it was "The curse hounds the Kennedy clan", while the Sunday Mirror made do with the one-word headline: "Cursed".
As evidence of the deadly curse, we have the following litany of tragedy. On the A-list are the assassinations of President JFK and presidential candidate Bobby, and Ted's infamous Chappaquiddick car crash, which prompted the senator to first ask: "Does some evil curse hang over us?"
The B-list is longer and less easy to remember, starting with JFK snr's older brother's death in a second World War bombing mission, and his sister's death in a plane crash four years later. After that you need a family tree to help keep track of the death by drug overdose, the fatal skiing accident, and a muddle of misdemeanours involving rape charges, cocaine treatment and drink problems.
On the face of it, that looks like quite a lot of tragedy. To infer that it amounts to a well-organised curse, on the other hand, is a very bold conclusion. It should be noted that there are 87 perfectly alive and well Kennedys descended from Joseph and Rose, and if you have a family that size, the odds of tragedy are naturally shorter than the average family will face.
More importantly, the specific causes of Kennedy deaths are hardly so mysterious as to require a magic curse by way of an explanation. An American president in an open-top motorcade in a country full of guns is not a freak target for assassination. If you travel by private aeroplane, your chances of crashing are considerably greater than they would be if you boarded a scheduled Boeing 747; if you have only just learned to fly it yourself, the risk is even greater. The skiing fatality of Michael Kennedy was described as a "freak" accident, but there is nothing terribly freakish about having an accident if you are careering down icy slopes on a small pair of skis.
Nor was it uniquely unlucky to die in a second World War bombing raid, or in a plane crash in the 1940s. If assassinations are an occupational hazard of the politically famous, then private plane crashes and skiing accidents are an occupational hazard of being very rich.
Cocaine, drink and a certain sexual recklessness are, likewise, entirely familiar dramas of modern living, and few moderately well-off families manage to escape one or more of them these days.
Why is it, then, that we have this powerful attachment to the notion of a dynastic curse? Henry Kissinger believes: "It almost seems as if the gods wanted to punish the Kennedys for taking risks"; and Richard Reeves, the Kennedy historian, says that while he used to doubt that the gods punished those to whom they had first given everything, he now believes it to be true.
People not known for their superstition are subscribing to the medieval fancy of a family curse, and do not even seem the slightest bit self-conscious about saying so.
The curse is an ancient concept, and is always applied to a rich and powerful family; in the popular imagination, the British aristocracy is riddled with all sorts of colourful and sinister curses, and these are usually referred to with a deliciously thrilled air of awe.
It is a fairly safe bet that, should any further tragedy hit Princess Diana's family, the Spencer name will acquire a deathly reputation for being cursed. If Prince Harry were to die in a fishing accident, it would not take many minutes for a consensus to emerge that this was eerily linked to the car crash in a Paris underpass.
The superficial explanation for this is that we, not being blessed with wealth and privilege from birth, take satisfaction in seeing those who are get their comeuppance, and infer from it a kind of justice. This appears to be borne out by our attitude to the Kennedy tragedy.
There is a popular suspicion that, having become more like gods than men, the Camelot dynasty flew too close to the sun, and the gods are now taking their revenge; this is underpinned by another suspicion that the Kennedys are destined to eternal tragedy because their fortune was built on bootlegging money, and so the sins of the father will be forever visited on the sons.
It is even said that the Kennedys are being punished for their princely fearlessness of danger - and so, like archaeologists who meddle with Tutankhamun's tomb, they will forever pay the price for upsetting the gods.
IT is nothing short of extraordinary that, at the close of the 20th century, intelligent people still believe in superstitious rubbish. Preordained destiny is a thoroughly irrational invention, and it does us no credit to be caught still secretly subscribing to it.
This is not merely because it is such a nonsensical theory. To believe in a dynastic curse may seem to suggest a reassuringly robust, if cruel, expression of commoners' defiance; a faith that privileged families are no better than us, and must pay for their good fortune. But it can also be read as something quite different.
A dynastic curse represents proof that nothing is random. If the Kennedys' tragedy is part of the natural order, then so too their entitlement to power and money is a supernatural given. Every word that is uttered or written about the "curse" of the dynasty confirms the belief that the family is divinely ordained to be different from the rest of us, just as blighted aristocrats were thought to be divinely different from the peasants.
Of course, when gang violence takes the life of every man in a family, that's just Los Angeles for you. That an impoverished black American has a lower life expectancy than a Kennedy is merely a demographic fact of life. When poor people suffer multiple tragedy, we don't call it a curse, we just call it bad luck.
