The Washington Post Style Section turns 50 this year. In a special edition celebrating the edgy, groundbreaking, award-winning features section where I worked for just over a decade, a piece of mine from 1995, an interview with John Kennedy Jr., was chosen to be reprinted. I wrote a lot of profiles for Style and I never thought this one was my very best. And it’s a bittersweet read now, remembering what a gentle and dashing and funny guy John Kennedy was. He died just a few years later.

Hank Stuever, the TV critic at WaPo, who has written his own motherlode of classics for Style, wrote a introduction to the special section — where you can also find links to a number of great stories, scenes, pr