On July 16, 1999, Kennedy's nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed when his Piper Saratoga light aircraft crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. John Jr.'s wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and his sister-in-law were also killed in the accident. Ted was the family patriarch, and he and President Clinton consoled his extended family at the public memorial service. He paraphrased William Butler Yeats by saying of his nephew: "We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years." Ted now served as a role model for Maria Shriver, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, and other family members. "The Boston Globe" wrote of the changed role: "It underscored the evolution that surprised so many people who knew the Kennedys: Teddy, the baby of the family, who had grown into a man who could sometimes be dissolute and reckless, had become the steady, indispensable patriarch, the one the family turned to in good times and bad."