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Famous for being famous
From his salute to his father through his career at George, JFK Jr.'s triumphs were mostly style over substance.
By Bill Wyman
[07/18/99]

Can George survive without JFK Jr.?
The star-struck political magazine was losing money, ads and readers even before its founder's tragic disappearance.
By Anthony York
[07/18/99]

Boy wonder
It wasn't just JFK Jr.'s looks that made him a sex symbol.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[07/17/99]

The beautiful and the damned
Much has been given to the Kennedys, and much has been taken away
By Jake Tapper
[07/17/99]

The last Kennedy
From the moment he was photographed as a three-year old saluting the coffin of his father, he had a place in America's collective heart.
By David Horowitz
[07/17/99]

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For three days, Smith cruised in his car alone, a young white man in a light blue Taurus, two handguns at his side. After that first time, he didn't even get out of the car to shoot. He aimed out the window. He shot without saying a word. He sped away. He appeared an hour later, a day later, in another neighborhood, another city, finding new targets. No notes were left on the bodies, no racist pamphlets mailed to the police, no slogans shouted before pulling the trigger. He was a man with nothing left to say. A young white man. He killed all weekend, out there alone in his blue Taurus, and shot himself that Sunday night.

How many news reports have I read where "Man kills girlfriend and children, then self"? Hundreds, I suppose. I've always wondered if they turn the gun on themselves at the end to escape judgment. Or were they suicidal all along and just couldn't bear to leave her and the kids behind? Couldn't bear it because they knew that their families would survive fine without them; indeed, they would be happy to see them go.

Who did Benjamin Smith decide to take with him? Not his family, not his girlfriend -- she left him over a year ago. A black man walking with his children. A Korean man coming out of church with a group of fellow worshippers. He shot at Orthodox Jews returning from temple and a group of Asian students talking outside their college dormitory. Like the high school killers in Littleton, Colo., Smith went after anyone who believed -- in God, in family, in the rightness of their own existence. And anyone who belonged.

When I interviewed white-power skinheads a few years back, they were almost all the children of middle class, suburban families, like Benjamin Smith, like the Littleton boys, like the white supremacists in Sacramento, Calif. accused of murdering a gay couple. To the skinheads I met, being white meant being rootless, causeless, no flag to wave, no people to feel loyal to, no one feeling loyalty to them. "If the race war happened now, whites would lose," they complained. "Blacks are so close together. They'd be real easy to set off and they'd all stick together but whites wouldn't."

They were educated kids, articulate. For all their talk of racial pride, they didn't seem to like white people much. White meant weak. Greedy. Complacent. Most of all, lonely. They complained bitterly about how materialistic and bloodless white families had become.

Here's how one skinhead described his parents' middle-class life and their expectations for him: "It was go to high school, be on the football team, do all the things kids are supposed to do, then go to college, be a doctor, have a couple of kids when you're 30." His voice was filled with disgust.

He wanted to be working class. He wanted to be living in another era -- the 1930s or '40s, he thought, "when America was proud." At 16, he defied his parents and his class and dropped out of school to get married. He had three kids, worked a couple of jobs and he was happy. "I slept in the bed I made. I took care of business," is how he described it, proudly. Then his wife left him, and took the kids.

Next page | Beware the lonely white boy