Monitor: US comment as the wreckage of JFK Jnr's plane and his two passengers are found

All the News of the World

TO THOSE of the Baby Boom generation and their elders, JFK Jnr will always be John-John, the precocious child playing under his father's White House desk, and saluting the casket of the [assasinated] president. But as television networks devoted almost nonstop coverage to the tragedy and newspapers spared no ink with their coverage, many younger Americans were asking what all the fuss was about.

After all, they said, what had John Jnr really accomplished during his 39 years? John F. Kennedy Jnr didn't discover a cure for cancer. He didn't walk on the moon, or win the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn't have to. It was enough for most of us that, with his life's combination of tragedy, wealth, privilege and media scrutiny, he didn't wind up being a jerk.

Daily Star

THE DISCOVERY of the plane is important for the public because it eliminates the possibility, remote but grotesque, that bounty hunters or other greedy and unscrupulous people would have sought to find and salvage the aircraft for commercial profit. It also will reduce the proliferation of far-out rumours and speculation concerning the flight, and fate of the plane's three occupants. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

HAS A nation ever placed so much of its hopes in one family, only to see them so repeatedly dashed by tragedy? These Kennedy men, even outside of public office, have seemed always in the wings, the embodiment of power and purpose, of mystique and mission, as ready heirs to the mantle of leadership when the nation would need them most. In three decades we had come to expect, even demand it of them.

Daytona Beach News

JFK JNR deserves better from the media than the Princess Di treatment. Taking only sensible risks, he might have become an important publisher or a genuine leader. But he did not fall victim to any "Kennedy curse".

The icon-busting Book of Job teaches that God does not micro-manage the universe, and that free-willed human beings are responsible for actions and injustices.

That's why life is unfair.

North West Arkansas News