They are concentrated among those in poor or minority districts who see little prospect of escape.But it is also expressed by young meritocrats, who see the Kennedy clan as irrelevant, and see JFK Jnr as a young man of privilege who would not have got where he got without his name and fortune. Such sentiments are concentrated among those who are too young to have any recollection of the JFK years and no reason to identify themselves in any way with his children. Already, in the views of the 10 per cent or so of Americans who look askance at the shock and grief attending JFK Jnr’s death can be divined the end of the Kennedy mystique.If the suspicion based in the religion and immigrant origins of the Kennedys is no more, there is a new wariness of their prominence and continuing influence as America’s self-styled “royal family”. For this generation, the Kennedys are Americans; they are people of “strong faith”, but the nature of that faith is now almost immaterial.As with the mourning for the Princess of Wales, the moment when all the propitious currents converge is short and unlikely to be repeated.

The recklessly fast living of his father behind the scenes of the White House has been at least partly neutralised by the Oval Office exploits of Bill Clinton.More significant, perhaps, is the passing – with the older Kennedys, perhaps – of the pervasive suspicion of the family’s Catholicism and its Irish immigrant origins that attended John Kennedy’s presidential campaign and supplied fuel for his political enemies.That JFK Jnr is the scion of a Catholic family or of Irish descent has almost not been mentioned in the outpouring of sorrow and reminiscence. He and his glamorous wife, Carolyn Bessette, reflected – as the pile of flowers and tributes outside his home testifies – a fellow feeling among younger Manhattanites that here was someone like them, just richer, more successful, and “better”.Like his late father, John Jnr was able to bear the glitz that attended social success without giving the impression that he had lost his concern for the less fortunate.John Kennedy Jnr’s death also comes at a time when much of the negative baggage that the family name carried has been dissipated. “You have to understand, I grew up with John-John”, or with Carolyn, were sentiments heard frequently from their contemporaries as the news of his death sunk in yesterday.The youth of Bill Clinton when he was elected to the White House, and the revival of racial and healthcare equality as political concerns at the start of his presidency all reinforced – with however little justification – the feeling that the hopes of the Kennedy administration, with its civil- rights priorities, could be revived.And, while the actual course of the Clinton presidency looks likely to leave Americans less equal economically than when Bill Clinton came to the White House, Mr Clinton has reached out to black and poor Americans in a way that no other president since JFK has done.With the emergence of JFK Jnr to prominence in Manhattan, a financial – but above all, a social – success, the Kennedy myth gained a new foothold with a different social group and a new generation. And their audience is anyone in their late 30s or older, who remembers the heartrending pictures of the fatherless Kennedy children as they grew up, or who grew up with parents comparing their good fortune and progress with that of their Kennedy contemporaries.The personal reminiscences of John Kennedy Jnr’s college contemporaries – like the international reporter Christiane Ammanpour – who have paid their personal tributes to him over the weekend as an unaffected friend and engaging character are among them.But so, too, are less privileged members of their generation. They are the generation that remembers the shock of his assassination, and recall their hopes, dashed again, five years later, with the killing of the heir apparent, his brother, Robert.The luminaries of the media are those who cut their teeth as junior reporters at those events. Those in the prime of their power and influence, driving the Kennedy nostalgia, are the JFK generation.The politicians are those, like Bill Clinton, who remember the exhilaration of John Kennedy’s election and the promise it held. IT WAS a benevolent fate that decreed John Kennedy Jnr’s demise in the time of Bill Clinton.

Under another president, under Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Jimmy Carter, even under George Bush Jnr or Al Gore, the death of JFK Jnr would hardly have had the resonance it has in America today, and certainly not the capacity to generate such a mood of national mourning and regret for what might have been. When President Clinton spoke, as he did yesterday morning at a reception for the victorious US women’s soccer team, of this being a moment when “we really stop to recognise that, as big and diverse as our country is, we can come together as a national family”, he was reflecting a sentiment that nearly all Americans seemed to share.
As with the untimely death of the Princess of Wales almost two years ago for Britain, the death of 38-year-old JFK Jnr and his 33-year-old wife caught a moment when currents of generations and social and political trends all came together as neither before nor since.For Britain, the public outpouring of grief marked the passing of a certain idea of the Royal Family; it sealed the decline of the stiff upper lip as the defining feature of Englishness, and it seemed to sanction a change in the role of women, who saw in Diana’s unhappy marriage and fulfilled motherhood a mirror of their own experience.There is a similarly unique criss-crossing of strands in the United States now. Detectives believe it had not been left long because security staff at the airport check the area every couple of hours.. Three women had noticed the suitcase on Saturday evening and alerted staff. Up to 6,000 cars a day use the car park but officers have been concentrating their efforts on tracing those who used it between 5pm and midnight on Saturday.Police are convinced that the suitcase was brought to the car park in a vehicle rather than by the Underground because of its weight Ms Kama, who was 5ft, weighed about 10 stone. “One of the theories we are working on at the moment is that whoever murdered this woman left the suitcase at the car park, then caught a flight out.”Detectives have been studying closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage taken of all cars entering and leaving the car park.

“It is appalling that anyone should be stabbed and murdered but to have your loved one bundled ignominiously into a suitcase and callously abandoned in a car park, I think, is awful,” he said. “A family member saw the coverage in the media and put two and two together to make four,” said Detective Chief Inspector Richard Taber, who is heading the inquiry. Officers had stressed that until they could identify the victim it was virtually impossible to try to discover a possible motive. She had been living in the Marble Arch area of central London since the start of the summer. She had also visited Lebanon, returning to London 10 days ago.Police said Ms Kama had last been seen alive at 2pm on Saturday, about nine hours before her body was discovered inside a suitcase in the terminal three short-stay car park at the airport west of London She had been stabbed more than 10 times. Police said Ms Kama was last seen with friends but they had been unable to trace her movements since then.Obtaining a positive identification – which came yesterday afternoon by one of her relatives – was a big breakthrough for police. They in turn contacted the Metropolitan Police.Ms Kama is understood to have been Lebanese although she may have held a Canadian passport.