BRUSSELS — On the day last week that hope died of finding any survivors from the small aircraft carrying John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law, the heir to the throne of Italy filed suit in the European Court of Human Rights.
The son of King Umberto II, who gave up his throne in 1946 as punishment for his family's support of Italian fascism, is seeking the right to return home. After his father's abdication, the new republican government of Italy barred the former king, his heirs and consorts from Italian soil forever.
They did so for a reason, which explains why the modern government of Italy is even now arguing in court to uphold that decree of exile passed in a more heated time. Kings are more than just people with quaint titles and old palaces. They are political symbols whose influence spreads far beyond their own persons to embrace a whole social order and a specific concept of the state. Italy's republican governments understand this, which helps illuminate, if not explain, the apparently churlish decision to enforce the continued exile of the former royal house of Savoy.
We use the metaphor of royalty often and perhaps too lightly these days, and seldom more so than in the tragic context of recent days, when the rather tired concept of the Kennedy family as the nearest America has to royalty has been exhaustively deployed.
At first glance, the family does embody some of the characteristics of royalty. They are extremely wealthy, and their most prominent members are instantly recognizable. They have glamour and a degree of political power and enduring influence. They have, like a royal family, undergone private dramas and intimate tragedies in the most public of settings. Their fates and names are as familiar to us as those of our own kin.
They are a dynasty, with a patriarch in Joseph, father of the president, and a matriarch in Rose. Since the patriarch was the former ambassador to the Court of St. James, they even mingled with real royalty: the future president of the United States taking tea with the future queen of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Like in a royal family, the duties passed from one brother to the next. The death in World War II of the eldest son, Joseph Jr., already groomed for a political career, meant that mantle was inherited by the second son, John F. Kennedy. With his assassination in 1963, the sense of obligation was transferred to Robert F. Kennedy, who ran for the presidency in 1968, to be assassinated, in turn, after winning the California primary, at what seemed like the moment of success.
