Happy 60th Anniversary, John Kennedy Jr!

In a week where John F. Kennedy Jr. would have celebrated his 60th birthday (on 25th November), his friends are lamenting that the world never got to see what the dashing presidential son would have become. His death marked the latest big loss in a family that has experienced much of it over the generations. "His legacy was really about who he would've become," friend Brian Steel, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan with Kennedy, said to Today News. "But I just think America and also the world would have been a better place. Now you look back, and you think of what might have been." This past Sunday marked the 57th anniversary of his father's assassination. John Kennedy Jr. had been mulling over a foray into politics, the stock in trade of his famous family, but had not yet made the leap. He had become a New York City fixture as one of the most debonair bachelors before marrying Carolyn Bessette in a fairy tale wedding in 1996. A run for high-profile political office in New York was most likely in his future with an eye on one day returning the Kennedy family to the White House. "There's no doubt he was thinking about running for governor," Steel said. "We had that discussion a couple times in the months before he passed away. He also had given sort of fleeting thought for running for that Senate seat in 2000. The White House could have been his destiny." "I think anytime you go into politics, you have to make sure the rest of your life will accommodate that decision," John Kennedy Jr. told NBC's Tom Brokaw in 1995. "There is a whole generation that has now grown up without knowing Kennedy Jr. as a public figure, but his memory lives on. I mean, there was no one that compared in the world to John," Steel added. "Everything that he did with his power, his fame, it was all about some greater good," Rose Marie Terenzio (his former executive assistant at George magazine) said. "He's truly missed for the way that he gracefully took that mantle of responsibility and lived an honorable life full of integrity—and he's missed for what we all want, which is somebody to look up to and to be proud of." 

JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married for less than three years when they were killed in a plane crash on July 16, 1999, but their romance remains the stuff of legend. According to America's Reluctant Prince by historian Steve Gillon, Carolyn's mother, Ann Freeman, had openly questioned during her wedding toast whether John Kennedy Jr was the right man for her daughter. Anthony Radziwill tempered the awkwardness with his best man toast. "We all know why John would marry Carolyn," he said. "She is smart, beautiful and charming... What does she see in John? Well, some of the things that I guess might have attracted Carolyn to John are his caring, his charm, and his very big heart of gold." Carolyn had become increasingly involved with George magazine, much to the consternation of John's partner, Michael Berman, who ended up selling his half of the magazine in 1997 after exchanging some bitter arguments. Incidentally, Carolyn had left her own career, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do next. According to Stephen Styles, a friend of John and Carolyn, in April 1997, a female reporter attended a luncheon at the Robin Hood Foundation, and tried to pry into Bessette's plans: "As for the job prospects Carolyn might have considered, she shook her head and simply said 'I can`t comment on that.' John then interrupted this conversation to say with his peculiar brand of humor: 'I won't let her work!' Asked  by the reporter about his seemingly dominance, John shrugged it off, and Carolyn laughed while rolled her eyes in amusement." 

Carolyn loved John, but in what would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives, she didn't particularly enjoy going to spend holidays with his sprawling family on the Cape, formally presided over by matriarch Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow, and the Kennedy men, who with their touch football games and clambakes seemed lifted from a Ralph Lauren ad. John had officially met Carolyn in 1994 at a Calvin Klein-hosted event and was instantly smitten. "Early on, he would be frustrated with Carolyn," attorney Brian Steel, who met John when they both worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, recalled. "He would say, 'I called her and she hasn't called me back.' And John did not like that." Gustavo Paredes told People magazine that "Carolyn didn't think he was serious. And he couldn't believe she had turned him down. It had never happened to him before." "She was exactly the kind of girl I imagined would date someone like John Kennedy Jr.," Rose Marie Terenzio recalled in her 2012 memoir Fairy Tale Interrupted, "she actually intimidated the hell out of me." When she first met Carolyn, Terenzio realized Carolyn "was different from the typical trendy girls you see around Manhattan. She wasn't trying too hard to be cool. She wasn't trying at all." 

Although numerous issues would plague John and Carolyn's relationship in the years to come, by all accounts infidelity wasn't one of them—though, according to some rumors, Carolyn would hint John during their fights that she was thinking of seeing her ex-boyfriend. Her friends didn't think she would actually cheat on John, though. "Carolyn, more than anyone who John had been with, would stand up to him, and confront him, and I think that John to an extent needed that," historian Steven M. Gillon, a classmate of John's at Brown University who was later a contributing editor at George, told InStyle in 2019. That being said, John was still a headstrong Kennedy, and sometimes possessed an explosive temper that wasn't usually mentioned in the usual accounts—though his friends and ex-girlfriends knew better. "I knew that John had a temper and that Carolyn was no shrinking violet," Richard Blow recalled in American Son:A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. "But the violence and their rage of the video presented a harsh contrast to the tenderness I'd seen between them. John was a nice, compassionate and warm guy." Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy after the plane crash at a memorial service held on July 23 at the Church of St. Thomas More, New York City: "John was a devoted son and brother, and he was a husband who adored the wife who became his perfect soul mate," the senator, who later died in 2009, said. "John's father taught us all to reach for the moon and the stars. John did just that in all he did—and he found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette—the new pride of the Kennedys. We loved John and Carolyn. The Bessettes and Freeman families will always be part of ours." In Ted Kennedy's assessment, Carolyn had always fit right with the Kennedy clan. And that's certainly how John had wanted her to feel. Source: www.today.com