“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” —Samuel Adams
“People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.” ―Political activist Richard M. Stallman
Gerald Celente (The Trends Research Institute, November 2019): By the time I met Governor John Connally, I had lost my naiveté and harbored deep doubts about government. And my disdain for most politicians was growing. It was not just what Connally said that moved me, but the authority and gravity of the way he said it. He was my epiphany. We all went up to his suite and had a couple of drinks, a few snacks and some small talk. Hooker was trying to sign Connally onto the Board of Directors for a chain of steak houses he wanted to develop. Caddell, a Washington pollster, and Connally traded tales of political days gone by. I half listened and said nothing. My brain was back in the hotel lobby replaying Connally’s statement: “If the American people knew what was going on in this government, there’d be a revolution.” That line reinforced my political atheism. —The JFK files: What Governor Connally told Gerald Celente (2019)
John F. Kennedy Jr rode his bike through the streets of Manhattan, played softball and Frisbee in Central Park, and sometimes made grand entrances at black-tie galas. But John F. Kennedy Jr. also worked hard--quietly but very intensively, his associates say--with several charity groups that have donated millions of dollars and helped thousands of people in the city to make their own. In 1988, Kennedy Jr. formed Reaching Up, an organization to improve care for the mentally handicapped. Three years later, he joined the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group that gives more than $1 million a month to programs to help the city's impoverished people, especially children. "This was no resume-builder for him," Peter Kiernan, Robin Hood's chairman, said: "This was not a subtle, slight involvement. He was completely engaged. He was a full partner. Quite often, he kept us focused on our mission when we started to drift away." For some of the group's causes, including a school in Harlem for the disfavored classes, Kennedy was the one who initiated the contact and encouraged the board to act. "He came to every board meeting, went to look at every place we invested in," Kiernan said. "When we went to a school, he'd talk with the strategic-planning people, and John was very good, very adept at that. But he'd also plunge right in there with the schoolchildren, visiting them frequently `Hey, kids, what's going on.' He'd get into conversations with them and play with them, sometimes bringing them all to ice skating at Rockefeller Center. So we certainly lost a great man here." Reaching Up grew out of the Kennedy family's longstanding charity work with the mentally disabled, which began as a tribute to his father's sister, Rosemary, who had been institutionalized for many years. "John spent about a year investigating how to get involved in this," said Bill Ebenstein, the executive director of Reaching Up. "And he realized the best way to support people with disabilities was to support the workers who provided services for them, by creating a program for them in higher education and helping them pay for it." Barbara Anselm, now the director of an adult day care program for United Cerebral Palsy in Brooklyn, was a caseworker and advocate for the handicapped and mentally ill in 1991, when Kennedy awarded her a funds grant, one of the first. "It helped me pay the tuition so I could go to classes at night," Anselm recalled. "I met John Kennedy. He told me he had selected my application himself. It was nice to know -- it encouraged me to know -- that people of that stature were supporting me." Before Reaching Up, Ebenstein said, people like Anselm had few professional prospects. "These were people with low-wage jobs, poverty jobs really," he said. "There was no career ladder."
Politicians were talking then about `quality health care,' but John realized you could never build a quality system of services unless you had quality jobs for the front-line workers." So, John Kennedy Jr. funded -- and persuaded professionals in a variety of fields to develop -- a series of courses on disabilities at the City University of New York, especially its East Side Manhattan branch at Hunter College. "He'd bring public and private entities together to work out how to do this: city and state agencies, the public universities, the hospital workers' unions," Ebenstein said. "He could hold a coalition like this together. He led these meetings, visited all the places, knew all the executive directors." Ebenstein was unsure whether the organization can continue without Kennedy. "Keeping these entities together -- you've got all this infighting and politics -- you need someone who can transcend that," he said. "I'm hoping we can keep doing it, but I don't know." Kennedy played down his involvement in these areas. David Saltzman, who is executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation and went to Brown University with Kennedy in the 1980s, declined to talk specifically about his role in the organization. "He was a friend of mine," Saltzman said. "He asked me to respect his privacy, and I'm going to continue doing that." Ebenstein made the same point: "He did not seek publicity. We'd win an award, and I'd say, `Can't we put out a news release?' He'd say, `No, stop that.' He feared people would just focus on him and miss the substance of what he was doing." Source: nadsp.org/jfkjr-award-2020/
In the past when someone had upset her, Caroline Kennedy simply cut them off of her life. The handwritten thank-you cards for which she was famous stopped, her phone was suddenly blocked, and she rarely forgave anyone who had crossed her. She fell out with her sister-in-law Carolyn Bessette during a party at her Park Avenue apartment when she discovered Carolyn had posed outside for the photographers while holding three-year-old Jack. And she was furious when her brother John sided with his wife. Although gossip was Caroline was not very fond of Carolyn Bessette, it was not comparable with the contempt John felt towards his brother-in-law Edwin Schlossberg. John's good friend Sasha Chermayeff recalled: "John thought Caroline's husband was a jerk. He mocked him and called him 'Edwina.' One day I heard fuming about him: 'I hate that jerk. I don't know what my sister saw in him.´" Their relationship became so strained that at one stage, when they were auctioning off their late mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s effects, John and Caroline only communicated through their lawyers. Chermayeff remarks: "When her brother wanted to run for the Senate, Caroline needled John saying his wife Carolyn's erratic behaviour would destroy any chances he had. Caroline even told him: "They'll shoot you, just like they shot our father and uncle." One of their most serious blow-ups occurred in the fall of 1998. RoseMarie Terenzio received a phone call from HBO, revealing that Edwin Schlossberg sought to be an executive producer of a documentary about the assassination of the President Kennedy and Schlossberg had suggested John as narrator.
John exploded, Terenzio recalls, "John could not believe that Ed was so dumb, or Caroline so clueless, as to get involved in such a controversial project. I had not never seen John so mad as that day." What infuriated John most was that Ed was crossing the line by thinking that because he had married a Kennedy, he was one of them. "Who the fuck is that guy to say me how to honor my father's legacy?" he shouted to Caroline on the phone: "You would never be doing this if Mom were alive," he bellowed before slamming the receiver. John stewed for weeks before he decided to tackle the problem head-on by summoning Caroline and Ed into his office. Although Schlossberg sat at the head of the conference table, John refused to even look at his brother-in-law or acknowledge his presence. According to his assistant RoseMarie Terenzio, John looked directly to his sister, admonishing her for entertaining such an idea: "Your husband will not interfere in my relationship with my father's legacy. Is that clear, is that understood?" John’s sudden death at the age of 38 hit Caroline Kennedy hard and left a massive void in her life.
From then on, Caroline distanced herself from the Kennedy clan – and refused to spend time at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod. Since the late 70's, Caroline Kennedy's husband, Edwin Schlossberg had been designing museum and game park exhibits. For a ''learning environment'' at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, he created exhibits as a playground based on the structure of a molecule. For the now-shuttered Macomber Farm, run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he developed games that simulated the gait, vision and social interactions of farm animals. In one, visitors pulled a Conestoga wagon to learn the meaning of horsepower. At the time, Mr. Schlossberg only thought up exhibits to be built by others. ''He had inspiration,'' Mr. Pockell recalled, ''but the execution and mechanics didn't interest him as much.'' Brent Saville, a designer now based in Los Angeles, made the exhibits at the Brooklyn Children's Museum. Mr. Schlossberg's plan was ''sort of wispy,'' he recalled. ''Nobody understood what it meant.'' —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen
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