Reply #28: Don't know. Accident is highly probable, but please read this:

[Bridget Burke]

"She was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. . . . By her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not."

No passage of "Moby-Dick" is more moving than the one in which the whaling ship Rachel searches hopelessly the empty sea for the lost whaleboat carrying the captain's son. Few television images are as affecting as the sight of those planes and ships vainly crisscrossing the waters off Martha's Vineyard in heartbreaking search of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the Bessette sisters.

Most of us no more knew John Kennedy Jr. than we knew the fictional son of Captain Gardiner. But we are nonetheless moved. There is nothing inauthentic about feeling pain at a young life cut short, at the sorrow of the bereaved. But the loss the country felt at John Kennedy Jr.'s death was more than that. It was a feeling of national loss, the kind one feels at the death not just of youth but of royalty.

If his death could persuade Charles Krauthammer to compose such an elegy it's very clear why some would consider JFK Jr a dangerous man.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfkjr/s...