Many of the notes, as you would expect, were heartbreaking; some of them were mawkish. To be honest, a few were frankly weird, written, I thought, by the sort of people who pen letters to the newspapers in purple ink. The modernist touch came in the number of notes that had been written on computers; people sure do love playing with their fonts. In the week since Kennedy’s plane disappeared, there’d been a lot of chat that his death had particularly affected the middle-aged and elderly–those who could remember the president who shared his name, and the little salute that John gave his father’s funeral cortege. Admittedly, I was in TriBeCa late at night; but there were plenty of young people lining up to lay flowers on North Moore Street. (You don’t have to have been alive at the time to know something of the Camelot mystique; since she was 6, my younger daughter has firmly said that John Kennedy was her favorite president.) Above all, though–and I make this point for those overseas puzzled by America’s behavior last week–there was absolutely no sign of hysteria. The crowd was respectful and sad; that’s all.

There’s been much written, in the United States and elsewhere, on the reaction to JFK Jr.’s death. It’s quite true that the modern media latch on to the death of a celebrity with a zeal that can appear unseemly–especially, to be honest, in a summer that has been devoid of breaking news stories. In a brilliant article later in this magazine, Ellis Cose nicely dissects the distinctions between today’s “virtual” grief and the “real” kind. It’s also true that John Kennedy was a man unformed: a magazine editor with a highly developed social conscience, to be sure; a genuinely nice guy (I can attest to that myself), and yet someone whose potential and promise may have remained unfulfilled. Those who claim that we in the media have overdone our reaction to Kennedy’s death can say, with some reason, that he was as yet all symbol and no substance.

Yet all those for whom great crowds mourned were symbols of something or other. That was as true of the crowds who lined the streets of Paris to bid farewell to Victor Hugo in 1885 as it was of the Roman working class who gave their hero Enrico Berlinguer a people’s funeral in 1984. And it was abundantly true of the Londoners who turned their city into a giant floral display after Princess Diana died two years ago. Rather than scorning the celebration of a symbol, we would be better advised to ask what it was that those who died symbolized.

In the case of Kennedy, I think the answer is plain: it is lost innocence. By that I don’t mean any particular characteristic of Kennedy himself, but more the memories that his death unwillingly brought of that awful day in November 1963 when his father was cut down. You can make a powerful case, I believe, that the United States has still not recovered from Kennedy’s assassination. For the death of the president brought to an end an unparalleled period of American peace, prosperity and political stability. To that marvelous dispensation the young president added the final touches–glamour, grace and energy. His death was followed by a decade and a half of horror–a lost war, two failed presidents, riots and social dislocation, political murder. You need to be something other than human not to feel a sadness, still, at President Kennedy’s untimely death; last week, it was all to easy to hear an echo of that sadness when his son died.

The picture on the cover of this week’s magazine epitomizes, for me, this sense of loss. It is a shot taken on one of those wonderful New England days when the sky is an impossible shade of blue, high clouds scud about in the ocean breeze and wild roses ramble over white picket fences. But the photo flatters to deceive; the New England summer is just a few weeks long. I’ve shivered on Cape Cod in June, and by the beginning of August, the first nip of autumn is touching the leaves. And so we remember; sunshine, grace and promise are but temporary gifts.