The parties were just magnificent. The glow, the candlelight.
Handsome young men, pretty young women.
They were part of the scene and they've grown up. And I guess once a prince, all was a prince.
It was just those were golden years.
Humor, youth, adventure, spirit, all of that sort of thing.
Well, I think for a while, I mean, there were so many Kennedy's doing so many things that
there was almost an image in the United States of kind of a developing royalty.
That's not the fact, but I mean, I think that was the image that it created.
The Camelot thing came into play because Camelot was popular at the time.
The president had a young, attractive wife. He was very articulate, handsome,
a member of a very prominent Boston family.
Camelot, a mythical kingdom given life by a young widow who told a journalist
it was one of her husband's favorite songs.
A kingdom she later tried to escape, but even a new husband, a new name,
and eventually a career of her own, failed to satisfy the public's appetite
for news of the mysterious woman who once reigned in Camelot.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was more successful in shielding her two children from the hotlights of fame.
Contact with the Kennedy family was limited mostly to times of tragedy.
John Jr. and his older sister Caroline were allowed to grow up relatively out of sight.
The little girl who rode the pony in the nation's backyard was suddenly a bride,
and in recent years, a mother and a graduate of Columbia Law School.
Her younger brother seemed to grow into manhood overnight.
But John Jr. is not just another pretty face.
He has been an effective campaigner for his politically oriented cousins.
And should he so choose, there is a built-in constituency, willing and ready, for Camelot Revisited.
A quarter of a century has passed since President Kennedy was buried in Arlington Cemetery.
It is only through the family he left behind that 25 years seems more than a blink of an eye.
They are at once reminders of the past and promises of a future,
a generation grown up, another begun, and a third grown old since an assassin's bullet froze him in time.
Candy Crowley for CNN Washington.
We'll be back.