Those who remember the day President Kennedy was shot will have been struck this weekend by a terrible sense of deja vu as people, everywhere in the US, gather in small groups shaking their heads, watching yet another Kennedy tragedy unfolding.
But this tragedy belongs to a younger generation, for whom John F. Kennedy Jnr represents great glamour and grace: handsome, stylish, hard-working, he has managed to restore grace to the Kennedy legacy in the wake of so much sorrow and scandal.
The image of John Kennedy saluting his father's coffin on his third birthday is an enduring one, imprinted on the American imagination. And new generations have watched him grow up, as privately and discreetly as he possibly could under the circumstances, surviving a relatively short period of apparent failure to edit his own magazine, marry a beautiful bride and develop a reputation as a New Yorker who reigned supreme on the social scene but who also used his position to advance important philanthropic causes.
More Bouvier than Kennedy, more New York than Boston, John F. Kennedy jnr is indeed his mother's son - a successful melding of his father's handsome vigour and his mother's intelligence and command. He did not choose the gilded path that might have been expected of a Kennedy heir, avoiding the classic WASP school for the more progressive, cosmopolitan and diverse life at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. And when he finally did pass the Bar exams at NYUU, he did not fall into a fancy law firm but chose the District Attorney's Office.
He and his wife chose to live in TriBeCa not Park Avenue. New Yorkers think of him as a neighbourhood guy, their own royal prince, their heartthrob. He was never a natural in the political arena, too sophisticated to be a backslapper, though an important mover and shaker through his magazine George.
As coastguard authorities announced that the search has officially become an investigation, the country is immersed in this tragedy. Hyannisport, a town with one post office and one sweetshop, has been besieged by press. One local friend of the Kennedys says she has never seen such an invasion in good times or in bad.
"It's a like a waiting and gawking game," she said. One dreads the moment when Senator Ted Kennedy may have to make yet another brave statement about his proud but unlucky clan.