While members of the Dartmouth community were riveted by the drama that unfolded Saturday with the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane over Martha's Vineyard, many appreciated that what they were witnessing was a great deal different from the death 35 years ago of his father, President Kennedy.
Dartmouth students found out the news from parents' phone calls and watched television and checked news sites on the Internet to monitor the hunt for Kennedy's single-engine plane.
Sophomore Pam Lombardi was in Collis watching TV and mistook a news report for a documentary on Kennedy's life until the news bulletin flashed across the screen.
Lombardi said she Blitzed her friends to notify them about Saturday's events.
Rachel Milstein '01 also used BlitzMail to let people know about Kennedy, through an automatic reply with a quote taken from his father's book Profiles in Courage.
She said she found out about the crash when she randomly turned on the television after she woke up, and then continued to watch throughout the morning.
Both Milstein and Lombardi said they talked to their parents about the crash, and that their reactions were tempered by those of their parents.
"For my mom, the reaction is different," Lombardi said. "My mom said that there's a sense of knowing the whole Kennedy family as it's gone on through the years, that she's watched [John] Kennedy [Jr.] grow up."
"It's almost like America knows the Kennedy family" personally, Lombardi said.
Milstein said members of the Kennedy family were people her parents looked up to, while JFK Jr. was the member of the family she looked up to.
Kennedy is the first member of his family, Milstein "can remember being attached to and who's life ended in tragedy."
Lombardi stressed, however, that she realized it is more the promise of Kennedy, rather than his accomplishments, that makes people mourn this weekend.
"It's because he is the son of the ex-president who meant a lot to them," Lombardi said. "He wouldn't have been recognized if he wasn't the son, but it would have been interesting to see what happened."
This promise of a political career was also discussed by government Professor Lynn Vavreck. Kennedy, a magazine publisher, had not entered the political arena formally, but "there was the hope that he could have had a promising political career," she said.
"With his death dies that hope and that's one of the things making people sad about this," Vavreck said.
Vavreck does not think Kennedy's death will affect the prospects of Democratic candidates in 2000 races nor will it mean the end of his political magazine, George.
Vavreck said she thinks George will continue in Kennedy's spirit and that the staff of the magazine "will step up to the plate and keep it going."
History professor Jere Daniell said the level of attention focused on Kennedy's death differs critically from the level of attention focused on the death of his father since the elder Kennedy was president of the United States at the time of his assasination.
At the College, the Nov. 22, 1963 death of President Kennedy was marked by a great deal of grief and out-of-the-ordinary events. Then-College President John Kemeny cancelled classes - the first of only two times in the College's history this has happened- so that students could watch the Nov. 25 funeral.
The Dartmouth marked the occasion with a house editorial that said "few will deny that the blow struck equally hard everywhere: we have all lost most grieviously."
Daniell said that prior to President Kennedy's assassination, the public was aware of the Kennedy family mainly because of their enormous wealth. Now, in the years since the president's death, they have achieved celebrity status.
"They have become THE royal family in the U.S. over the last 40 years," Daniell said.
Daniell said Kennedy's death now is sad, and that it follows in a sad list of deaths, many the result of the family members' inclinations toward risky activities.
