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THE KENNEDY CURSE

"That family is cursed!" the doctor's assistant exclaimed Saturday morning after the news broke that JFK Jr.'s plane was missing. I thoughtlessly blurted out my true reaction: "The men in that family are not cursed; they are reckless."

My second thought was, "I'm glad Jackie's not alive."

In public, John F. Kennedy Jr. was much more her son: improbably graceful, polite, tasteful, charming, never self-assertive or boastful, strong, but sensitive.

In private, he had all the Kennedy men's restless macho: moving from motorcycles to flying, paragliding, even flying ultralights, anything for a thrill. His wife, he joked back in 1998, was the only person who would fly with him. Even she had her doubts.

But it was Carolyn, according to the New York Post, who insisted they drop Lauren off at Martha's Vineyard, provoking the hazy flight over the water. You can see the pieces of the puzzle: the doting husband, unwilling to worry his already anxious wife. No flight plan filed. The borderline flying conditions. The urgent desire to get to the wedding. Taking off without an instrument-trained pilot on board. No contact with air traffic control. Pointing the plane over water, instead of island hopping. Small risk added to small risk that added up that night to disaster: a dark, sudden death when (most likely) the plane smashed into a wall of water they never even saw.

If the older Kennedy men, steeled in tough, swaggering Irish masculinity of a kind most of us now associate only with movies or novels, were reckless, they were at least reckless with a cause: Joe Kennedy Jr. died volunteering for one extra WWII fighter pilot run; Bobby Kennedy, in that season of assassination, launched a moral crusade for president.

By contrast, the younger generation of Kennedys (I include Ted here) take on risk for its own sake: fast cars, women, substances and sometimes, fatefully, all three.

Of course, John Kennedy's twilight flight can't be classed with that kind of disreputable behavior. But still, risk-taking contributed to his own, his wife's and his sister-in-law's death. Better dead than weak. Call me middle-aged, or a woman -- or maybe it's because I'm the mother of a son about to get his driver's license that I get so censorious: Life is precious. Don't risk it if you don't have to, certainly not for anything less than a great cause.

But then again, one can't help but be swept up by the magnificence of this Kennedy fearlessness. Two hundred years ago, such a man might have been an explorer going where no (white) man had gone before. Thirty years ago to the very day, he might have joined the elite contingent of men who, risking slow, lonely death, lifted off to touch the face of the moon.

But now, until the next great spurt of human daring, men with an unquenchable yen for adventure are reduced to rappelling monuments, driving too fast, climbing well-traversed mountain peaks. Masculinity of this sort looks silly, and small, and pointless.

Maybe the problem lies in the age, not the men. The words of William Butler Yeats, writing about a woman, captured the clash between the large spirit and mundane reality: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days/ With misery ...? What could have made her peaceful with a mind/ That nobleness made simple as a fire/ With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind/ That is not natural in an age like this,/ ... Why, what could she have done, being what she is?/ Was there another Troy for her to burn?"

John Kennedy, rest in peace.

COPYRIGHT 1999 MAGGIE GALLAGHER