From a New York Times story by Vanessa Friedman headlined “Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Ghost Influencer”:

When John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crashed on July 16, 1999, killing both Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (as well as Carolyn’s older sister), at the peak of their glamour and celebrity, the couple became not just another tragic story, but a symbol.

Think pieces proliferated about what it all meant: about the Kennedy curse and promises unfulfilled; about another chapter in, as The New York Times wrote in an editorial, the story of “unfinished journeys, of magnetic personalities cut down far too early.”