July 19, 1999
One question has been asked many times this weekend.
How can so many bad things happen to a single family?
Charles Sherrill spoke with a native Utahn who knows the Kennedys, about how
they cope with a seemingly endless series of tragedies.
While searchers continue to scour the sea for airplane wreckage and
victims'remains, tributes to them pile up outside the Kennedy apartment in New
York and at the Kennedy family gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery.
And old family friends, like former Utah Congressman Wayne Owens, share their
their sorrow.
"How any family could be subjected to so much glory and fame and yet so much
tragedy, it's unbelievable," he says.
Owens says Sunday night's state dinner for the new Israeli Prime Minister was
tinged with sadness.
"Both the President and the Prime Minister spoke of the tragedy and everybody
that you met remarked on it."
President Clinton mentioned it again today when he welcomed the women's world
champion soccer team to the White House.
The Senate started the day with a prayer for one of its own.
Lloyd Ogilvie, U.S. Senate chaplain, said, "No American family has given more,
or served this nation more faithfully."
Owens says faith is part of the glue that holds the Kennedys together.
"There's a fundamental belief in themselves and in the country and in God. And
it is a resort to which they go when these kinds of things happen," Owens says.
The parents of the young women killed in the crash must be at least as grief
stricken as the Kennedys. They've lost two of their three daughters as well as
their son-in-law.
