I dismissed this first as habit, formed from seeing him at all those other Kennedy funerals across the years. But that's the brain talking. The brain didn't know this man. The brain was never going to know him. I couldn't avoid seeing when I picked up People in a doctor's waiting room.
Death has a remarkable power to clear the vision of the living.
That's not what you want in your romantic fantasies, nor in your cliches about people who live full and fast and die young. And short, fat and ugly certainly is not what you want in the standard bearer for a nation's hopes. That's what JFK Jr. was. I dismissed him in People not because he was a pretty face but because he was letting me down. It took three tries for him to pass the bar exam passed by thousands every year.