I for one am glad that fate intervened as it did. Just look at the 20th-anniversary crapola, which will emphasize the tragedy and assess none of the responsibility (he killed two other people with his recklessness) and imagine if he had entered politics. Yuck. HRC was pretty bad in her interlude as NY Senator, but the media would have had him running for the Presidency in the middle of his first Senate term. Their tongues planted in his posterior.
My favorite memory of the search and rescue phase of the story was a prankster of Howard Stern's following who managed to call into ABC news and convince the morons there that he was a Coast Guard Commander directing the search. He gets patched in to speak with Peter Jennings live and runs on for a while with a sufficiently jargon-laden spiel that even had me thinking he might have been real. Then he indicates that "Capt. Baba Booey is on the scene." and I laughed out loud. Peter Jennings did not catch it and went on talking to the guy for several minutes, then cut to commercials. When he came back he had been clued into the scam. His attitude was so dismissive - of course here we are burying our Prince and this vulgarians dare to make fun....
The best was the O.J. chase. Al Michaels could barely hold back his laughter until he finally clued Peter Jennings in. I remember Al telling Howard Stern that story.
I have a favorite memory of another event except that it was also a plane crash in the NYC area.
This was a few months after the JFK Jr. crash, and a small plane ran out of fuel and crashed on its landing approach a few miles west of Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey. I was driving in the area with a friend of mine and saw a bunch of helicopters hovering nearby in the night sky, so we figured it was a breaking news story. I turned on the radio and got the details of what happened, and we took a small detour to make my way to the scene. We parked a couple of blocks away and walked over to the crash scene.
It was in a residential area, and the place was crawling with dozens of emergency vehicles and probably 100+ firefighters, EMTs, etc. There must have been about 25 news crews there that night from New York and New Jersey newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, etc. It was really interesting to watch the radio guys do their live reports on the air, because the reporters all had familiar names from the big news stations in NYC -- 1010 WINS, WCBS 880, WABC, etc. -- and this was the first time I actually saw what they looked like.
The radio guys were consummate professionals. The TV crews were a whole different story. It was disgraceful to see how rude and obnoxious the TV camera crews were acting. They were all pushing and shoving against each other and getting into loud arguments over who "owned" the space where they wanted to get their live TV camera shots.
They treated the spectators with complete disdain, ordering us around and telling us to get out of their way while they did our jobs. My friend and I told them to go 'eff themselves, and we damn near got into several fights with different TV network crews over the course of an hour. I don't think I've ever dealt with a worse bunch of @ssholes in my life.
Anyway ... After a while there was a flurry of activity and then-Governor Christie Whitman arrived on the scene. She was briefed by the senior police and fire personnel, then her aide came over to the knot of reporters -- actually reporters plus news crews plus two obstinate spectators who refused to move out of their way (LOL) -- and told the group that she would be making a public statement and taking questions in five minutes.
They set up a bank of microphones right there in the street, and all the bright lights went on just as she stepped up to give her update on the situation. Then she said she would take questions from the reporters on the scene.
I don't know where he got the inspiration to do this, but my friend was so pissed off about the behavior of the press on the scene that he was determined to make a mockery of the whole press conference. If you can find an original, unedited copy of a news tape from that event, you can hear his loud voice in the background as he shouted out his question:
"Hey, Governor! Which Kennedy was flying THIS one?!"
LMAO.