For People magazine he may have been the "sexiest man alive" but John F. Kennedy Jnr was showing America that he was much more than just a "hunk" as he carved out a career as a publisher in political journalism. Whether this would lead him into activist politics was becoming an intriguing, and probably now unanswerable, question.
After four years, his magazine George is still financially weak and there was increasing speculation that the French investor was considering pulling out at the end of this year. But without the charismatic presence of Kennedy to guide the magazine and attract publicity its future looks even more sombre.
Kennedy came to publishing relatively late after a stab at acting, then a stint as a public prosecutor while also doing discreet charitable work to help the underprivileged.
Alongside the effort to find a role as one of the most famous Kennedys was a love of adventure sports such as ocean kayaking, mountaineering and parachuting. The decision to become an amateur pilot flying his own plane seems now to have led to his premature death.
Thanks to his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy, no effort was spared to have him grow up as normally as was possible for the son of an assassinated president. He grew up in New York with his mother and sister, Caroline, while attending a Catholic primary school and later a boarding school, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts but without showing great intellectual promise.
Instead of following his father and uncles to Harvard, he chose Brown University, a distinguished private college in Rhode Island. After graduating in 1982, he floated for a while, working in the day as a planning assistant in New York while studying acting. He made his stage debut in a Brian Friel play called Winners where he played an Irish Catholic youth engaged to marry his pregnant girlfriend, played by his real life girlfriend, Christina Haag. At the end of the play they are found drowned.
While the media speculated that Kennedy was preparing for a professional career on the stage, he insisted "It's just a hobby."
In 1986, Kennedy enrolled at New York University Law School and was quickly dubbed the "most eligible bachelor in the world" as the media took a close interest in his love life. Actresses Madonna, Sharon Stone and Daryl Hannah were just three attractive women to whom he was romantically linked, as the gossip columnists put it.
His legal career proved an embarrassment in its early stages as Kennedy failed his Bar exam twice in seven months and drew the headline "The Hunk Flunks". He took the publicity with good humour and commented that he would keep trying "until I'm ninety-five."
He later passed the exam and went to work for the District Attorney's office in New York where he was responsible for six successful prosecutions. But he resigned in 1993, finding the work too restrictive.
The death of his mother from cancer in May 1994, was obviously a great blow but it may have made it easier for him to turn to journalism and then to publishing. He saw the monthly George magazine as a way "to make politics entertaining". He did long interviews, including one in Northern Ireland in 1997 with Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.
He also found a new girlfriend, Carolyn Bessette, whom he married in 1996, and who is missing with him and her sister from last Saturday's flight.
A year earlier, Kennedy told an interviewer he did not fear for his life. "It's sort of like walking around wondering if you are going to be struck by lightning. It's not something you really keep in the forefront of your mind."