Most of the 49,087 people in Yankee Stadium that Thursday night were too busy watching pitcher Roger Clemens get shelled by the Atlanta Braves to notice the man in the box seat near the Yankee dugout. Eating a Lemon Chill, sipping a Deer Park water and looking casual in a white polo shirt, he might have been easy to overlook, except, as usual, at least a few people quickly noticed. There was the television crew that spotted him and flashed his face to New Yorkers watching the game at home. As always, he looked striking on camera. After the game, two securities traders from Staten Island summoned up the nerve to approach him. "I went down and said, 'John, if I don't get this autograph, my sister will kill me,'" one of them recalls. Without a handy piece of paper, Anthony Hahn offered Kennedy one of the pink printed menus distributed in the box-seat area; with an easy smile, he signed. It was an ordinary evening for John F. Kennedy Jr., and an equally ordinary one for the people who liked to watch him.
Yet Kennedy no doubt had a few things on his mind that night. He had gone straight to the stadium from his office at George magazine and was due back there the next day for another in a series of meetings with his publishing partners about the future of the young publication. And there was a big weekend ahead: after work on Friday, he planned to fly to Hyannis Port to attend the Saturday wedding of his cousin Rory. It was, of course, a wedding he would never make. About 9:40 the next night, J.F.K. Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren would lose their life in the waters off the southwest coast of Martha's Vineyard.
It has long been a credo of pilots that death in any airplane accident is rarely caused by a single, catastrophic failure. Rather, it's usually the result of a succession of small failures, each essentially harmless, but building a sort of disastrous momentum until the weight of the accumulated errors brings the plane down. Similarly, there was nothing especially portentous on the final day of Kennedy's life that led, ineluctably, to tragedy. It's only in hindsight that it becomes apparent how the random eddies of those last 24 hours carried Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law to disaster. The awful thing about eddies, of course, is that if only one of them had flowed another way, that disaster might just as easily have been averted.
By any measure, John Kennedy's weekend was starting out to be a good one. Six weeks before, he'd broken his ankle in a paragliding accident, and on Thursday morning, before his trip to the Yankees game, he'd at last had the cast removed. On Thursday night he was still limping as he negotiated the steps at the stadium, but by Friday he was getting around the George offices with the help of nothing but a cane.