Is there something we should be doing about this?” “This” was the airplane accident that had claimed the lives of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and her sister, and as soon as the editors gathered in the office on that hot, disconsolate Monday after the crash, we started casting about for some thread that might lead to a story for us.

We always operate under the mandate to put current events in historical perspective, and this one had sent very powerful tremors through the national consciousness. The problem—or, rather, our problem—was that everyone else was busy doing just the same thing. From the moment that the Coast Guard started combing the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, the media were full of pictures and accounts of events long past: of a handsome young flier whose life was snuffed out in a risky, failed experiment in 1944; of that boy’s sister, killed in a plane wreck four years later; of the motorcade in Dallas, of course; and always of the child in the short coat.saluting the caisson.

We know these faces, and it seemed natural, somehow, to see them again when another son of the family went to join them in the shade. But in fact there is something of a mystery in this instinctive reaching to the past; it’s by no means the media’s first instinct. In this decade, for instance, we have gone through two major, hotly debated bombing campaigns overseas, yet I do not recall seeing a single article or television show that looked back to assess what the four earlier air wars Americans have fought in this century might have to tell us about the efficacy of bombing. We were shown no B-17s while Riyadh and Kosovo were under bombardment.

To take a more recent example, as I am writing this, Hillary Rodham Clinton is at the peak of a long and microscopically scrutinized flirtation with announcing her candidacy for the Senate, but nobody I’ve seen has taken a look at what happened the last time a New York Senate race was so vigorously challenged by an outlander. Our “In the News” columnist, Kevin Baker, does so here, and the canny audacity that Robert Kennedy brought to his campaign makes a terrific story.

Mind you, I’m not complaining about the media’s failure automatically to pursue the historical background of events; if they did, there’d be nothing unusual about American Heritage magazine. But why is everyone so quick to reach back when it comes to Kennedys? My friend and former boss Geoffrey Ward, who includes the Kennedy family among his areas of historical authority, told me, “I think it’s pretty simple. I think it’s the last time we really felt good about ourselves as a country.”

He meant more than that, of course, and it reminded me of seeing on television a couple of years back a five-second clip of Jack Kennedy. He’d been watching a missile take off, and he turned away