John F. Kennedy Jr.'s legacy

Had President John F. Kennedy's son lived, friend and historian Steven M. Gillon believes John would have made it to the White House just like his dad. "John would have been president of the United States and I think the tone of our politics would have been completely different," says Gillon, a professor of American history at the University of Oklahoma whose biography The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr: America's Reluctant Prince, is now out in paperback. "John would be a force for healing and bringing people together. John thought he could inspire people — so I think about it often, how much better off our country would have been had John not made the foolish decision to take his plane up on the hot humid July evening," Gillon says. He and John met when Gillon was John's teaching assistant at Brown University, and the two struck up a friendship lasting more than 20 years. “He said he was two people,” Gillon remembers John telling him once. “He said he played the role of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., the son of the president. But at his core, he was just John.”

"John spent his whole life trying to figure out who he was and what his relationship was going to be to his father's legacy and for most of his life, he ran away from it," Gillon says. "And he ran away from it, because he wanted to find out who he really was, separate from the unique burden of his family." Gillon continues: "The other layer to the tragedy is that, by 1999, he figured out who he is. And what he discovered is yes, he wants to go into politics. He wants to be his father's son. But he dies just at the moment when he discovers who he is. The one thing John will always share with his father is this sense of what might have been." From the moment in 1963 when young John saluted his father's casket, "all the unfulfilled hopes and expectations transferred to him," says Gillon. 

But John wrestled with those expectations for many years. "At first he needed to find himself," Gillon says. "At first, he ran from his father's legacy and he ended up running in circles. At the end of his life, he wanted to embrace his father's legacy." Gillon recalls that "John said, 'What people need is hope, realistic hope and they need to know that tomorrow is going to be better than today.' That's what his dad did as well since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John understood that." Gillon adds, "John had the best instincts of anyone I ever met. He could read a person, read a room — the instincts you have to have as a politician. You cannot discount his impact on people, what happened when he walked into a room," says Gillon. "John inspired memories. For an older generation, he represented the unfulfilled possibilities of his father. For a younger generation, he represented a new style of leadership. I don't think you can discount the emotional connection that John had with the American public. He understood that power. For most of his life, he tried to avoid it but if it came to the point where he was running for office, he knew how to use it."

In his biography of John, Gillon recounts a haunting comment John once made to one of his closest friends, Robert Littell: "They were watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton and he said 'I want to go home.' For him, going home was the White House. And by 1999, he's actively talking to people, finding the opening — what office he's going to run for and actively strategizing how he's going to make his next steps into politics." Indeed, friends say that before his death John had begun exploring the idea of running for New York governor. "The John who would have been elected president would have been different than the John that founded George magazine," says Gillon. "I'm perfectly aware of his limitations," Gillon adds. "John wasn't ready at the age of 38 to be president, and he wouldn't have been at 42, the age his father was elected. But he would have been, if he had continued the same process that he had shown over the past 15 years of his life." The world will never know what would have been. "With John's death came the end of Camelot," says Gillon, referring to the halo of his father's approximately 1,000 days in the White House, before the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

"A lot of the family mystique revolved around his father, the emotional connection that the public had to John's father," Gillon says. "John was his father's son. John was the only one who could have carried his family legacy into the future. All the expectations for that were placed on him. John's father is frozen in time," says Gillon, "and now John is too. We can't see how he would have evolved." Or what might have been, "John had the potential to unite a nation that has become so divided," his friend says. "It would have been a huge undertaking and a reasonable person would say no one person could have done that, even someone whose name was John F. Kennedy Jr. But those of us who knew him think that he could have made a big difference." Pollster Daniel Yankelovich noted that trust in government declined from 80 percent in the late 1950s to about 33 percent in 1976. More than 80 percent of the public expressed distrust in politicians, 61 percent believed something was morally wrong with the country, and nearly 75 percent felt that they had no impact on Washington. Source: people.com

John F. Kennedy Jr.'s marriage to Carolyn Bessette being in turmoil before his plane crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard was one of British journalist Annette Witheridge's scoops, which was loosely informed by mostly anonymous sources and published as a column in The New York Post in November 1999: The report is based on interviews with members of Kennedy's close-knit circle of friends and associates of Carolyn, including two people who have signed sworn affidavits — John F. Kennedy Jr.'s marriage to Carolyn Bessette suffered from cyclical arguments, reciprocal jealousy, and drugs. Even so, John Kennedy Jr. didn't seem to suspect that a distraught Carolyn had once called a divorce lawyer, and that private investigators were trailing him around the clock. "When Carolyn first moved into John's Tribeca apartment, he was convinced she would be able to cope with the pressures of his fame. And in the early days Carolyn seemed to be coping," said a friend close to the couple. "But after their marriage, she changed. Everything fell apart in the months following the honeymoon. Suddenly she was Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr. and not just the lively girlfriend, and she mostly reacted like a frightened deer caught in car headlights." No one will ever know exactly what happened on that fateful July flight, but insiders say their trip to Rory Kennedy's wedding was a clear indicator of a possible reconciliation.

One of John's (anonymous) friends reckons: "John was terribly upset about his marriage. He wasn't one to talk about his problems, but he was worried when Carolyn stormed out of a joint therapy session in July, 1999. He truly loved her, and when they married, he honestly believed it would be forever. But Carolyn was convinced he was sleeping with another woman." Carolyn initially had approached high-profile divorce lawyer Raoul Felder. Felder declined to comment. According to a friend of Carolyn, the former Calvin Klein publicist then had turned to lawyer Bob Cohen in February, 1999. The friend said Cohen hired private detectives to trail John Kennedy's steps. Cohen said the private eyes came up empty. "On one occasion - believe it or not, it was Valentine's Day, she even manufactured a row with John and stormed out of a restaurant. She knew the private detective was watching and, in her paranoid state, believed that if she left, John would go off with some other woman. He ended up eating his appetizer alone, trying to put on a brave face. He then went to another bar where he met a male friend. And at 1:45 a.m. he looked at his watch and went home alone in a taxi. Carolyn was befuddled when she discovered her ruse hadn't worked. In that regard, John Jr was the anti-JFK." 

Another friend, who had known the normally stoic Kennedy for more than a decade, said he was stunned by the admission of turmoil. "John sort of threw his head back and tried to discreetly wipe the tears from his eyes. He was terribly embarrassed." Kennedy then began to pour his heart out, relating how upset he was. "John broke down and in the course of many conversations over several weeks he told me Carolyn had moved out of the marital bed. At that point they weren't having sex, and it was taking a toll on him because he was so hooked," said the friend. "It's staggering to think that he put up with it. He could have had his pick of beautiful women but he chose to remain true to Carolyn. I was stunned when he told me, 'She says she wants children but she's moved into the spare room. I tried joking with her, saying you have to make babies, they aren't delivered by the stork." Kennedy finally persuaded Carolyn to join him in marriage counseling, but their weekly sessions often ended in screaming matches and sulking fits. Carolyn's sister Lauren called to John's office at George and asked to meet with him. They spent two hours closeted in his office at George magazine discussing the state of the marriage. "Lauren was acting as mediator. Carolyn had big psychological problems, as well as a cocaine habit and a dependency on anti-depressants, that made her paranoid."

At that point, both John and Carolyn were taking anti-depressants. Eventually Lauren offered to accompany them to Martha's Vineyard. She said she would stay there while John and Carolyn continued on to Rory's wedding at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. John, who was sick of making excuses about Carolyn's constant absences to his cousins, eventually agreed." Kennedy's friend said he decided to speak out because "John would have wanted me to." This friend claims he had known Kennedy through his high-profile romances with actresses Daryl Hannah and Molly Ringwald. "John almost married Daryl. But she was a very needy sort of person. She used baby talk to speak to John and constantly returned to Jackson Browne. Daryl refused to be exclusive with John even when he indicated his desire to be. He was faithful in his early relationships (Meg Azzoni in the late 1970s, Christina Haag and Sally Munroe in the 1980s). And, of course, John's mother, Jackie, didn't approve of Daryl because she was a Hollywood star." John and Carolyn dated exclusively shortly after his breakup with Hannah. Robert Littell, probably John's best friend, recounted: "John fell in love with Carolyn because she really was a very kind, sweet woman beneath her party girl façade and I think John developed a saviour complex with her. There's no doubt in my mind that Carolyn deeply loved John, too. They were a volatile couple, but after a row, they apologized to each other and enjoyed the making up." 

Carolyn's associates call it a story of an insecure woman who thought her Prince Charming would solve her emotional problems. On his part, John looked for an accomodating partner for his future political prospects. One friend of John says: John liked to relax over a beer in the evening. Carolyn was becoming too frightened to leave the apartment and he was hanging out in bars with his buddies until the early hours of the morning. Carolyn felt he was immature - I was there once when he begged her to be more supportive like other wives - and she screamed back at him: 'How can I support someone who acts like he is 15.' John looked hurt and dejected. But she just turned on her heels and stormed out. When John finally told me what was happening I was stunned. Carolyn gave up her job just before the marriage but afterwards she became paranoid and anxious. Before she met John she was known somehow as a party girl, climbing within the fashion set. But she continued with her cocaine habit and John didn't approve. John hated her doing cocaine and often complained she was high. Once, when we were alone, John told me: 'The only thing worse than her being high is her not being high. Carolyn in a downer phase is not a pretty picture. I'm worried about how she'd react if I tried to stop her.'

The sexual thing was the most puzzling. In her dreams Carolyn wanted John only to herself, she didn't want him going to work. She wanted them to live in Connecticut in a house with a brood of children. But then she refused to have sex with John. I was with him on many occasions when I saw he had the opportunity to stray. Many beautiful women would throw themselves at him but he simply wasn't interested. His days of playing the field were long over. John also wanted to address his political plans. John was seriously planning to run for the Senate in the year 2000. He had always secretly planned to follow in his father's footsteps, and he intended to begin as the senator for New York. His uncle Teddy Kennedy, whom he considered to be his surrogate dad, was delighted.

John had formed a committee in March to weigh the pros and cons. He also toyed with running later in 2004," the friend remarks. "Carolyn's attitude worried him a lot. She made it clear she didn't want him to run and John's political plans were the cause of some of his biggest arguments with Carolyn." Kennedy's friend admitted the whole drama caused much grief for the couple and they were in the process of healing their marriage. "It breaks my heart to think how much they suffered in their final months."

Daryl Hannah: "Well, one thing that I experienced while I was dating John Kennedy Jr. was getting to witness the family tradition in the Kennedy clan, of really instilling the responsibility to be of service, to choose something at an early age that they're interested in and engaged in, that they champion to that as a part of their life. That everybody in the family was expected to take on some form of social service. And I think that's something that our culture has sort of forgotten, that it's a big element of us feeling complete and whole. It's being a part of a community and feeling like you're giving back that actually brings you so much more joy and happiness than what you put out. It keeps a person healthy and happy, it keeps a person connected to the world. I really respect that's something that they instill in every member of their family. It was quite a beautiful thing to see."

"The world saw them as the American prince and princess," says Matt Berman, the creative director of George magazine, "but they were the most real and engaging people I've ever known. John's favorite band was The Rolling Stones. He would listen to You Can't Always Get What You Want on a loop. His favorite film was Fincher's The Game." "John and Carolyn were magic together," says their mutual friend Ariel Paredes. "She had an earthiness and a gentle fierceness. The same attributes as John." In 2000, Lynn Tesoro, a fashion assistant who had worked with Carolyn Bessette at Calvin Klein, recalled that she saw Carolyn the Wednesday within the week before her death and thought she looked quite happy and very much in love. John Perry Barlow, John Jr.'s close friend, slammed Edward Klein's sensationalist book "The Kennedy Curse" (2003) in the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine. John Perry Barlow: "I think Sybil Hill is a fraud and she was not John's type at all. No offense, but she is not an attractive woman and she made up a story to promote her husband's paintings. Steven Gillon disregarded Sybil's allegations of a romance with John as unreliable. I think John wouldn’t have ever married a famous woman as Daryl Hannah, since Daryl had her own name and fame, and John always wanted her wife had to rely on him, maybe a male ego thing.

Hence why he had some flings with famous women but pursued relationships with more regular women. If what Michael Bergin wrote about Carolyn miscarrying John's baby is true, he shouldn't have mentioned it in the first place. These are not manners of a gentleman to be talking about such a sensible subject. And it's telling all the sources in Ed Klein's book, all of them with scurrilous information attached to them -- are unnamed. I mean, I could write a book trying to prove that Richard Nixon had been a child molester with unnamed sources and it would be just as valid as Klein's. I think that probably the author's motivation is economic. But I think that there are other organizations, notably Fox or Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, who have a political motivation, which is to slime anybody who is on the leftist spectrum to bring them down. For example, a passage from The Kennedy Curse pulls a quote from John as though he had said it ominously. "I want to have children, but when I raise the subject, Carolyn refuses to have sex with me." Well, this is actually a quote of some unnamed friend who said this to someone else, supposedly. It's not a quote from John Kennedy. It may not even be a quote from the unnamed friend. And it's cited by a third party as though it were the real deal. The sourcing is thin, to say the least."

"True, John himself said he loved having drama in a relationship to keep things 'spicy,' but he was not an addict to drama to the degree that Ed Klein implies. John's sister Caroline was indifferent to Carolyn's personality, but once Carolyn got on Caroline's nerves when she went with John to the beach and Carolyn spent the entire time sitting under an umbrella to preserve her pale complexion. John enjoyed meeting regular people far more than he liked palling around with the rich and famous. However, his sister Caroline is a Democrat, but actually not a democrat. John lived in Tribeca when Tribeca was still counterculture; whereas Caroline lived on Park Avenue. John rode the subway frequently and happily. Instead, Caroline avoided it. John started a magazine whose intention was to popularize politics. Caroline was about the only one of John’s relatives who didn’t appear in his magazine at any point. I could see John having a beer with regular factory workers. Caroline would have looked for some hand sanitizer."

"Ed Klein criticizes Carolyn's shopping sprees, but unless John had married a wealthy woman, any wife of his was going to spend a good chunk of his money. Besides John liked when her wife was pampered on his dime, I think it probably made him feel like a big shot," Barlow concludes. Steven Gillon (author of The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr: America's Reluctant Prince): "Although John and I had an unspoken arrangement that we would not talk about our private lives, he confessed to me once in the spring of 1999, while we were sitting in the steam room at the New York Athletic Club, that he had “blue balls.” I honestly did not know what the expression meant and was afraid to ask a follow-up question that would sound stupid. Only later I realized that he had been denied sex from Carolyn that his balls were figuratively turning blue." Historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in The New York Times: “The news that John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Lauren Bessette are missing at sea and presumed dead has struck such a crippling blow to my generation. John F. Kennedy Jr. was the moral leader for the next generation of young Americans.” Source: www.vanityfair.com

"JFK: Destiny Betrayed" by Oliver Stone, Bobby Kennedy for President (Netflix miniseries)

AGC Television, the TV production-distribution division of Stuart Ford’s still fast expanding independent content studio AGC Studios, has landed worldwide rights to another high-profile doc-series which it describes as “probing” and “explosive”: Oliver Stone’s “JFK: Destiny Betrayed.” No one could deny that Oliver Stone’s work spoke directly to America’s dreams and nightmares. Films like “Wall Street” and “Natural Born Killers” had a particularly nuanced take on the rotten amorality at our society’s core, and the treatment of the country’s self-deceptions in “Born on the Fourth of July” and “J.F.K.” “I never wanted arguments,” Stone writes in his upcoming memoir, “Chasing the Light”: “I never wanted to provoke. I was just seeking the truth.” “JFK” proved to be the most controversial of his films. In the new doc-series, Stone and writer James DiEugenio, author of “Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case,” place now declassified files related to President Kennedy’s assassination in a far larger context, aiming to shine more light on what really happened in 1963. Coming in on the assassination from the angle of Kennedy’s far-reaching policy speeches that threatened the status-quo, Stone will “reveal that Kennedy’s foreign policy actions were revolutionary in many ways and were a conscious decision he had been contemplating for a decade before taking office,” said an AGC Television statement. It went on: “Stone will put Kennedy’s assassination in context politically, and present interviews, documents, and forensics reports that will change forever how Kennedy’s life, political career, and assassination will be considered.” Those interviewed in the series include John Tunheim, chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, criminologist Henry Lee, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., James Galbraith, and Salon founder David Talbot. “It’s not an exaggeration to state that this series features the most distinguished collection of talent and knowledge on the JFK case ever assembled,” said the AGC Television press release. Diaz added: “We have long admired Oliver Stone and his work, and the revelatory information his new documentary brings forward not only sheds a new light on JFK’s presidency and his assassination, it informs us about our contemporary world.” “This documentary film represents an important bookend to my 1991 film. It ties up many loose threads, and hopefully repudiates much of the ignorance around the case and the movie.” “JFK: Destiny Betrayed” reunites Stone with ace cinematographer Robert Richardson (“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” “Nixon,” “The Aviator”), who won the first of his three Academy Awards for “JFK.” Source: variety.com

Oliver Stone: There’s no chain of custody on the magic bullet, which is called CE-399. There’s also no chain of custody on this damn rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, which Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of shooting. I don’t want to go into the details, but we can’t account for who was in possession of the bullets and the rifle at various times. It’s a mess. Then we got more detail than ever showing that there was a huge back-of-the-head wound in Kennedy, which clearly indicates a shot from the front. It’s also clear that the autopsy from Bethesda, Md., was completely fraudulent. And there’s Vietnam. No historian can now honestly say that the Vietnam War was Kennedy’s child. That’s crucial. The last thing is the C.I.A. connection to Oswald. We have a stronger case, not only for post-Russia but also for pre-Russia. In other words, he was working with the C.I.A. before he went and when he came back. Those are the main points. I don’t want to criticize your paper, but if it was honest, it would be doing this work instead of just saying, “It’s all settled.” 

-But on some level you must know that we’ll never be able to tie up all the loose ends of the Kennedy assassination. So what do you want people to take away from your new work on this?

-Oliver Stone: Those who are interested will find it’s pretty clear that J.F.K. was murdered by forces that were powerful in our government. We point the finger at a couple of individuals. But I don’t want to get into that here. Now, why do I have to do this? I’m doing the documentary for the record so that you can see for yourself what the evidence is. That’s all. We’re just finishing it and beginning to show it. It will be out. Even if it’s on YouTube.

Jim DiEugenio: There are now 5 million pages of declassified documents about Kennedy's presidency and assassination. Why doesn't the press read what is in those pages? Why does The Telegraph and Yahoo let people like Tom Fordy distort the facts and keep the public in the dark about 11/22/63? The public wants to know the truth. They won't get it from shills like Fordy. The last thing the world needs right now is more hackery about the assassination of President Kennedy. John Newman had a hand in writing all the Vietnam scenes in the film JFK. They were all based upon his research. The reason they were so shocking is because the MSM, the Establishment and the public had all bought this lie that LBJ continued Kennedy's policy in Vietnam. That was not true at all. It was a huge and pernicious deception. I am proud of collaborating with this new JFK documentary by Oliver Stone, this has been going on for well over a year now. Many long days where we did not get out of the office until like 9 PM. And Rob Wilson, the producer, has been doing a remarkable job digging up archival footage which I did not even know existed. The material we have on Vietnam is striking, thanks to the research of Newman and James Galbraith. Galbraith talks about his father and JFK, what a story. Kennedy was really lucky to have James Kenneth Galbraith as a tutor because that is the way he communicated with him when he became president. I liked the line in the NYT interview where Stone wonders why he has to do the investigative reporting on JFK and Vietnam, instead of the "investigative reporters" in the MSM. Although David Marchese in The New York Times deliberately tried to misconstrue what Oliver said about CE 399. The SBT is not the same as the issue of CE 399. Stone has been prevented from making feature films about the My Lai Massacre, the MLK assassination, and other subjects (the film industry blames the commercial failure of NIXON, a great film), so he has turned to making insightful documentaries. Source: www.nytimes.com

The Kennedy Family and their controversial time in The White House and politics in general is arguably one of the most intriguing periods in history playing host to numerous conspiracy theories around the suspicious nature of their deaths. Bobby Kennedy For President is a four part Netflix documentary series that focuses on Bobby’s political rise to presidential candidacy before being assassinated. Exploring big political issues around Vietnam, worker’s rights and the Civil Rights movement, Bobby Kennedy For President is a fascinating look at the Kennedy brothers and the mood encapsulating America during this tumultuous time. The first episode begins in the early 60s with Robert F Kennedy directing his brother John F Kennedy’s presidential campaign. After briefly touching on JFK’s murder, the documentary continues through another 2 episodes that sees Bobby run for the U.S. Senate while committing to fighting for Civil Rights and campaigning against the war in Vietnam. The final episode takes a reflective stance following Bobby’s shocking murder, exploring various conspiracy theories and suspicion surrounding the handling of the investigation and if there ever will be a time we know for definite what really happened. Source: readysteadycut.com

"If Lincoln didn't get us there, and Dr. King didn't get us there, and Bobby Kennedy didn't get us there, what the hell is left to say, that's going to have a rude awakening, to make a nation alive, and to greet the better part of itself? But we have to keep trying. And that's what Bobby Kennedy was really about. He was trying to find a solution." -Harry Belafonte

After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedys

 In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation, as Nina Burleigh reveals in her widely praised book, the first to examine this haunting story. "Reads like a John Grisham thriller crossed with an Oliver Stone movie." —Boston Globe. "This is a must-read." —Jim Marrs, author of Rule by Secrecy. "A fascinating story." —Oliver Stone

The death of Mary Meyer left many Americans with questions. Who really killed her? Why did CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton rush to find and confiscate her diary? Had she discovered the plan to assassinate her lover, President Kennedy, with the trail of information ending at the steps of the CIA? Was it only coincidence that she was killed less than three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report? Fans of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2016), and JFK: A Vision for America (2018), will appreciate The Lost Diary of Mary Pinchot Meyer (2020) by Paul Wolfe. Building and relying on years of interviews and painstaking research, the author follows the key events and influences in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s life—her first meeting with Jack Kennedy; her support of President Kennedy, as he worked towards the pursuit of world peace and away from the Cold War; and her exploration of psychedelic drugs with JFK. Source: www.amazon.com

Did Robert Kennedy plan to reopen the investigation on his brother’s assassination? The question was positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert Kennedy had never believed in the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of his brother. When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but “privately he was dismissive of it,” as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers. To close friends who wondered why he wouldn’t voice his doubt, he said: “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.” In speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, ‘Kennedy assassinations’. Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassinations lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways. What JFK appreciated most in his brother Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks’ civil rights movement.  Shortly after JFK’s death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Timothy Naftali, Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy had been “the victim of a right-wing domestic conspiracy.” Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film, which shows that the fatal shot came from the “grassy knoll” well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from. Robert confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, “but I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.” In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother’s assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape the conspirators of JFK’s murder. They had no other option but to stop him. There is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA “Israel Office,” was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, “Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas came from the Mossad and he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.”

What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel. At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.

John F. Kennedy Jr. had long been portrayed as a spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young Hamlet’s in Shakespeare’s play. John Jr. had serious interest in mind, and, at age 38, he was just thinking about entering the political arena. In 1995 he had founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. might have become another target and eventually eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, having entered politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli Deep State. Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that. President John Kennedy and his brother Robert are almost sacred figures for many, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again. Source: www.unz.com

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.—the only son of the slain President Kennedy—broke the tradition of big family weddings with a more intimate affair when he married the lovely Carolyn Bessette in 1996. It was a surprise not only to the media but also to many of Kennedy’s friends and even family members. How he was ever able to pull it off remained a mystery to many, but John wed Carolyn privately on Cumberland Island, Georgia, with just a few close friends and relatives present. John Jr. had always been impulsive and unpredictable, but after the death of his mother in 1994, there seemed to be a great deal of pressure on John Kennedy Jr. to do something noteworthy with his life. Jackie’s passing caused some political pundits and Kennedy watchers to look to John Jr. as perhaps the next great Kennedy. It was as if Jackie’s death signified an end of the Camelot era. Adding to the pressure was that Jackie had also sometimes been critical of John’s lack of focus. A lot of others felt the same way, both in his private life as well as in the media. After all, he was JFK’s one and only son.

Few people knew that John Jr. contributed generously to several charities and spent a great deal of time working with inner-city children in Harlem and in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Moreover, he helped start Exodus House, a school for Harlem children. He also helped tutor students there. In 1995, he established Reaching Up, Inc., a nonprofit organization that trained caregivers for the mentally disabled, and a very personal undertaking for him in that it mirrored his aunt Eunice’s work. He also worked with the Robin Hood Foundation to help poor children and homeless people. These endeavors did not generate a lot of press for John—which was by design. He didn’t want the attention, he just wanted to make a difference. Thus most people weren’t aware of John’s personal philanthropy—even many of his cousins didn’t know about Exodus House, for example—while they insisted he should be doing something in the political arena. One of the greatest misconceptions about John Kennedy Jr. was that while he was a sincere and nice man, he wasn’t very bright. Doubtless, this was the result of the problems he had passing the law bar exam and all the bad publicity he had received.

Actually John Jr. was vastly intelligent in many areas. In fact, he lived and breathed politics, although the death of his father and uncle had left him psychologically scarred. Being of service to others was a code John Jr. had lived with all of his life. Back in 1988, when he met Al Gore for the first time at the Democratic convention in Atlanta (at which John was one of the speakers), Gore was annoyed by the demands of the pressing crowd and said to John, “Can you believe these people? What a pain in the ass! They are always wanting something from us.” John was stunned. From that moment on Al Gore was not a person for whom John had much respect. In fact, Gore’s sentiments were completely antithetical to everything John thought a public servant should aspire to be. “I was deeply offended by it,” he told Richard Bradley at George magazine when recounting the memory. “I thought, man, are you crazy? These people are why we’re in politics! They’re looking up at us. They believe in us. And your attitude is that they’re a pain in the ass?” In truth, the reality of John Kennedy Jr. was much more interesting than his public persona because—unlike what some thought of him—the real JFK Jr. was thoughtful and introspective. Richard Bradley said: “In fact, John was always fluid in his thinking and in his reactions. His thinking was never monolithic. He was also smart enough to know how simplistic his public persona was. He understood that JFK Jr., as a cultural figure, was completely disconnected from the reality of his true character and personality. In fact, he understood the culture and the mechanisms of culture better than most people because he had lived it all his life. He was attached to people’s memories, and that was okay with him, if a little frustrating.”

Carolyn Bessette was born in White Plains, New York, on January 7, 1966, the youngest child of William and Ann Marie Bessette. The couple also had twin daughters, Lauren and Lisa. When Carolyn was four, her parents separated and soon after divorced, her mother later marrying an orthopedic surgeon with three daughters of his own. The blended family then moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Carolyn went to elementary and high school. In 1983, she enrolled at her mother’s alma mater, Boston University, from which she graduated in January 1988 with a BA in elementary education. From all accounts, Carolyn was not only model beautiful with her long tresses and deep, penetrating eyes, but she was also funny and warm, the kind of young woman most men found irresistible. “Guys loved her,” said Stewart Price, who knew her after she graduated from college. “She was tall, flirty, fun, stunning. We’d laugh because I knew her motto with men was something like, ‘Get them. Train then. Drop them.’ She never made the first move. And she never reached for her wallet. She would always find guys to pay her way." Eventually, Carolyn ended up working in retail at a Calvin Klein boutique in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston. That job eventually led to another in the corporate headquarters of Calvin Klein in New York. John actually first met Carolyn a year before he began to get serious about her. At the time, he was still dating Daryl Hannah. His friend John Perry Barlow—the American poet, essayist, and political activist—recalled, “It was a difficult time in his life. John wanted to do the right thing. We were at Tramps, a nightclub [in the fall of 1993]. He was in a sad mood. He told me, ‘I have met a woman and I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t want to act on this now because I want to be true to Daryl.’ He said, ‘Daryl and I are having some difficulties.’ I asked, ‘Who is she?’ He said, ‘She’s an employee of Calvin Klein. Somebody ordinary.’ I responded by saying, ‘John, if you can’t stop thinking about her, she must not be that ordinary.’ ”

One thing led to another and Daryl decided that she wanted to “take a break” in her relationship with John. It seemed to not be going anywhere. One of John’s close friends recalled that Daryl Hanah possessed “these self-absorbed neurotic qualities that she couldn’t see beyond. She was a movie star, she was a bombshell, and she was all about her most of the time.” John quickly started to notice the insular, narcissistic nature of her world. “She was on a little hamster track of her own stuff that she may not ever face and grow out of,” remembered Robert Littell. Despite some allusions Hannah made of domestic violence by Jackson Browne (which Hannah later retracted), Jackson Browne denied having attacked her: "I never assaulted Daryl Hannah, and this fact was confirmed by the investigation conducted at the time by the Santa Monica Police Department."

So John took Carolyn away for a weekend, to the sleepy beach town of Emerald Isle on the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they stayed at a rental resort called Sea Song. They were accompanied on the trip by John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill and his wife, Carole, both of whom liked Carolyn a lot and in fact decided that she was much better for John than Daryl Hannah. However, as often happens in long, complicated relationships, John and Daryl reunited briefly when Daryl said she wanted to give it one more try, and John felt he owed it to her. Within days of his weekend getaway with Carolyn, John came clean with her, telling her that he was in an on-again/off-again relationship with Daryl, that it was troubled, that they had been “on a break” and now he was going to try finish it with her. Though Carolyn would say that she admired John’s honesty, he would one day live to regret ever having opened up to her about Daryl. Meanwhile, Calvin Klein’s wife at the time, Kelly Klein, invited John to a charity function and then to the showroom. It was Kelly Klein who reintroduced him to Carolyn. Upon meeting Carolyn again, John was, this time, conquered by her. He immediately ended whatever was left of his relationship with Daryl Hannah for good. “It was like one day we turned around and Carolyn Bessette was in the picture, and she stayed,” recalled Gayle Fee, who wrote for the Boston Herald. “The first time he was spotted with Carolyn was in Martha’s Vineyard. It was my scoop. They were out boating. A paparazzi got a photo of them and JFK Jr. was sort of helping her out of a black skirt, and she was quickly known as this mysterious girl. Since everyone thought he was still with Daryl, this was quite a big deal. If I recall, her hair was more brown at the time than it was blonde. Everyone wanted to know who this new girl was.” “The greatest power couple in our family has to be my aunt Eunice and uncle Sarge,” John told Jacques Lowe, the Kennedy family photographer. The two had met to go over photographs Lowe had taken in the 1960s, which he now wanted to donate to the JFK Library. “That’s what I’m looking for in my own life,” he said, holding a picture of Eunice and Sarge taken by Lowe. “A woman who will support me the way my aunt supports my uncle. That’s golden, what they have,” he said. “If I could find that kind of woman, I’d be a happy man.”

Publicist R. Couri Hay, a friend of the Kennedys, recalled, “Over time, a strange phenomenon began to occur where Carolyn’s image was concerned. John had his eye on the Senate one day, and, who knows? Maybe even the presidency. But if Carolyn couldn’t even handle Tribeca; how was she going to handle Washington?” Former classmate Stephen Styles recalled, “Friends would come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why is she so pissy? What does she have to be so unhappy about? She’s got JFK Jr. What’s wrong with her?’ And I would defend her, saying, ‘But you don’t know her, she’s nothing at all like those pictures you’ve seen, like those stories you’ve read.’ It didn’t matter. The perception was being engraved in stone that she was ungrateful and difficult.” There was a real cultural fascination about her, and a sense that if she was going to be the woman who landed the prince, the least she could do was be open about her life. This was expecting too much from her, because Carolyn Bessette was, at the end of the day, a very private person. Adding another layer to an already unhappy situation, some of the New York paparazzi began to dislike Carolyn because they felt she had poisoned John against them. He had always been very nice, but now, almost overnight, he was combative. Suddenly he was fighting the photographers, screaming at them to “get the hell out of the way,” and becoming confrontational. “He assumed the best about people and never became cynical about their motives,” his close friend Dave Eikenberry said, “and that’s amazing, given the amount of opportunists he had to deal with every day. It took enormous fortitude for him to stay well grounded in the face of his bizarre celebrity.”

Though obviously in love, John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were also two very passionate and expressive people who sometimes allowed their heated emotions to get the best of them. When they argued, it was as if they completely lost their minds, at least according to those who knew them best. “They definitely knew which buttons to push in each other, and they went nuts,” said one close friend. Carolyn was beautiful, charming, smart—the total package, if ever there was one. Yet the way some women reacted to being in John’s presence caused Carolyn's insecurity and made her second-guess his loyalty and fidelity to her. As far as John was concerned, he never gave her reason to be suspicious because he had never cheated on her. But Carolyn recriminated him that John had dated her for a weekend while he was still technically in a relationship with Daryl Hannah—and Carolyn would never let John forget it. “John was sorry he had ever told her about Daryl,” said Stephen Styles. “Carolyn had that on him and she was relentless with it. ‘If you cheated on Daryl with me, how do I know you’re not cheating on me with someone else?’ Of course, he and Daryl had been on a so-called break at the time, and it had been Daryl’s decision to call for the hiatus, but that didn’t matter to Carolyn. It became a part of the running narrative of their relationship that John had ‘cheated’ on Daryl with Carolyn. John could simply glance at a woman in a casual way and he would later be accused of becoming interested in her. From waitresses to celebrities, it didn’t matter—if she was an attractive female, a good fight with Carolyn was guaranteed.”

“Carolyn reminded me of Jackie,” John Perry Barlow said, “in the sense that her nature was complex, subtle. Carolyn was unconventional, charismatic, and she had so much compassion for others. Carolyn’s femininity was almost mystical. I never knew a woman who knew how to handle men so well. As for John, her love for him was tinged with ferocity.” July 4, 1998, John and Carolyn joined the Kennedys for a major family celebration of the Independence Day holiday at the Kennedy compound. The festivities started with a special Mass under a tent in Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy’s yard during which the sacrament of Communion was offered. Then there was a family cruise in Hyannis Harbor with at least thirty Kennedy relatives on board, including Rosemary Kennedy, who was visiting from St. Coletta’s. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy could roughhouse with them as if she’d been born into the family, chasing John’s cousins around the property, playing football with them, and dunking them. Meanwhile, Ethel Kennedy stood on the beach and admonished her, saying, “Carolyn, don’t do that. You’re going to hurt yourself!” John chuckled. “Don’t worry, Aunt Ethel,” John said, “she’s made of rubber. I think it’s all that yoga.” Ethel had to laugh. Later, John and Carolyn took a walk out onto the pier. A photographer appeared from nowhere. John walked over to a bucket, filled it with ocean water, walked over to the photographer—who was snapping pictures the whole time—and threw the bucket of water at him. “Just thought I’d cool you down,” John said, laughing. “It’s really hot out here!” It didn’t seem malicious, though. Rather, it was a light moment, so much so that the photographer started laughing too. At the buffet table, John and Carolyn joked about how John had only complex carbohydrates on his plate—macaroni and cheese, potatoes, and corn. “Now that’s what I call a meal, Kitty Cat,” he said, using his nickname for her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” Carolyn said, kissing him on the cheek. Ted Kennedy, witnessing the scene from his table, remarked: “God, those kids are so in love! It’s like watching Jack and Jackie again, all these years later.”

Most of John’s Kennedy family adored Carolyn. They knew that she fully supported John in everything he wanted to do, and she represented, in their view, a real anchor for him. She had quit her job at Calvin Klein and was now taking trips to Europe helping John on his George business. At this time, John was upset that circulation had begun to drop off and was even worried that Hachette might close it down. He was courting other possible investors and Carolyn was behind him all the way. “I think they were coming to grips with a lot of their problems by the summer of 1999,” said R. Couri Hay, “and were on their way to a serious rebuilding of their relationship. The fact that they were going to Rory Kennedy’s wedding was, I felt, a symbolic decision for them. I think they wanted to present themselves at the wedding as a united couple for the benefit of anyone who had lately heard otherwise of them. In the next year, I think they would have had a child.” “I know that they had been talking about having children,” confirmed John and Carolyn’s friend John Perry Barlow. Barlow says that John told him that he and Carolyn were trying to decide how to bring a child into the world knowing that the baby would be the subject of such intense scrutiny. “They were already in this unremitting klieg glare,” he said, “and they couldn’t imagine what it would be like with a child.” They searched for a new home as far north as Columbia County, where Sasha Chermayeff lived, near Albany. They also scouted out properties at historic Snedens Landing, a secluded town that sat along the Hudson River in the Palisades hamlet of Orangetown, New York. These were their main concerns, says Barlow.

Not long after John and Carolyn died, it was as if someone opened a floodgate to sensationalism and all sorts of stories began to be published alleging, among other things, that before their untimely deaths, Carolyn had been cheating on John with Michael Bergin (an unreliable ex-boyfriend) or John had been cheating on Carolyn with Julie Baker (Baker has denied the rumors), or that both of them were addicted to drugs. The list of unsavory allegations seemed to grow overnight. Who knows if any of these stories is true? That said, there’s no solid evidence to support any of those allegations. No credible sources have any real proof of any of these stories. As Jackie Kennedy once put it, “No one knows what goes on in a marriage except the two people in it.” “It was a difficult summer,” Carole Radziwill concedes, “I’m not going to say that it wasn’t. John’s magazine, George, was struggling and his cousin Anthony was dying, and we were not, any of us, really, in a good place. And there were reports that they were in marriage counseling, and that’s true. But I think what distorts everything in life is not understanding the difference between fact and truth. The fact was they were in marriage counseling. The truth is they loved each other. And I have no doubt that they would have been okay had they lived.” —"After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family" (2012) by J. Randy Taraborrelli 

John F. Kennedy Jr: America’s Reluctant Prince

Steve Gillon: When I met John F. Kennedy Jr in 1982, I stood firmly in the conspiracy camp. It was settled history, and I never raised the topic with him. It came up only once, around the time when director Oliver Stone’s conspiratorial film JFK hit theaters in 1991. Stone challenged all the major conclusions of the Warren Commission, established by Lyndon Johnson and chaired by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, by charting the path of the “magic bullet” as it meandered through Kennedy’s body and then Governor Connally’s. Clearly, they claimed, there must have been at least two shooters, maybe even more. It seemed by the end of their presentation that everyone in Dealey Plaza that day, with the possible exception of Mrs. Kennedy, had a motive to kill Kennedy. The military, the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, and the Mob apparently conspired with various outside forces—the Soviets and the Cubans—to murder JFK and then orchestrate a cover-up. I don’t recall the context of the conversation, but John stated cryptically, “Bobby knew everything.” By December 1995, Director Oliver Stone had just released a new movie about the late Richard Nixon, who died a month before Jackie in April 1994, and it was generating a lot of buzz. It seemed like an ideal fit for John's magazine George to produce a cover depicting a blockbuster Hollywood movie about a controversial American president. But it turned out to be a poor decision. A clueless Eric Etheridge suggested that John meet with Stone to discuss the content of JFK. John was shocked. Anyone who knew him understood that his father’s death was off-limits. John replied bluntly, “It’s not entertainment for me.” I spent many hours talking with John about his father and his presidency, but we rarely broached how he died. He made only two cryptic comments. On the thirtieth anniversary, in November 1993, considerable news coverage rehashed the assassination. And he said enigmatically, “Bobby knew everything about my father’s killers,” and he said it in a way that made me think perhaps Bobby knew things that the public, and maybe even the Warren Commission, did not know.

John Kennedy Jr had heard rumors that Carolyn Bessette liked to party, so he asked a friend who had connections in the Manhattan nightclub scene to investigate and report back to him. The friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, recalled that he did not deliver a “flattering” report. “She does a lot of blow, she stays out late, she knows how to play guys. Be careful.” John not only ignored this advice, he also told Carolyn everything he’d heard. She never forgave the friend. While preparing to launch his George magazine, John arrived at another important decision: to marry Carolyn. Their relationship had deepened in the year since Jackie’s death, and John had grown convinced that Carolyn was the one for him. He had fallen in love with her and considered her the first girlfriend who could see beyond the veneer of his fame and celebrity. Carolyn teased him and stood up to him because of her independent, passionate personality—qualities that John found attractive. Naturally, their relationship veered between extremes of emotion. Sometimes, they could not seem to take their hands off each other, while at other times, they fought with equal intensity. “They were fiery,” recalled Ariel Paredes, a mutual friend. “They would love hard and they would fight hard but they were very much a couple in love.” In November 1994, John officially introduced Carolyn to his only remaining immediate family members—his sister, Caroline, and her husband, Edwin Arthur Schlossberg. Carolyn moved into the 2,000-square-foot penthouse in Tribeca that John had purchased shortly after his mother died. 

After their wedding on September 21, 1996, which was kept secret from the press, on the remote Georgia island of Cumberland, Carolyn started to suggest changes in the George magazine staff, and John's partner Michael Berman didnt like her suggestions. He ripped into Carolyn, telling John, “Get her the hell out of the office.” John, caught off guard by Michael’s seemingly unrelated attack on his wife, rushed to her defense. “You have no idea!” John shouted back. “Don’t say that about her. She has legitimate friends in this office.” He told Berman that he was jealous because they liked her but did not like him. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Why would you try to ruin that? I can’t tell her what to do.” Berman snapped. “Her behavior is deplorable!” he shouted. As if to mark the end of their partnership, John bought out Michael’s 25 percent share, thus assuming half ownership of the magazine. Michael Berman never spoke with John again.

For the most part, John liked to play sports and engage in physical activities with his male friends. But he’d confide in his female friends, and none more so than old pal Sasha Chermayeff. By the late 1990s, she had married and was raising a kid. John called her the morning after she gave birth to her first son. “Sasha, did you have your baby?” he asked. John was ecstatic when Sasha said yes and told him her son’s name: Phineas Alexander Howie. John was Phineas's godfather. Sasha said about the rumors of turmoil in John & Carolyn's marriage: "It’s impossible to know the intimate details of John’s and Carolyn’s private lives, but from all the available evidence, it appears highly unlikely that John was having an affair." In fact, he had confessed to several friends, “I wish I could cheat on her but I can't.” Carolyn was not opposed to having children but found John’s timing mind-boggling. “We are in the middle of complete chaos here,” she told him. “You are flying around trying to find funding for your magazine, we are dealing with your cousin Anthony dying, and you want to start a family.” Still, John could not understand her reluctance. “What does she want? Like her life is so hard.” John once complained to RoseMarie Terenzio. Carole Radziwill, however, saw no evidence that John and Carolyn’s marriage was careening toward a divorce. “There was nothing, not one conversation, nothing to indicate that there was an impending divorce,” she recalled. 

“It’s certainly easy to sit around and talk about arguments and fights, but very few people knew what was going on.” The last six months of their lives were stressful: they were fighting over many different issues, and the shadow of Anthony Radziwill’s death hung over them. Carole Radziwill used the metaphor of a husband and wife having an argument in a fast-moving car when they crash into a wall and are killed. No one knows how that conversation would have ended. The same was true of John and Carolyn, she maintained. “He loved her, and she loved him,” she reflected. “But they also drove each other crazy.” John confided to Robert Littell that he worried the magazine would likely come to an end. His efforts to keep George afloat had clearly taken a toll on him. According to Littell, “he'd gained weight, he looked tired, his hair was noticeably grayer.” Steve Gillon was and old acquaintance of John and visited John & Carolyn's Tribeca apartment. Gillon recalls: We walked down a busy street, populated with countless bars and restaurants, onto a dark side street with only one dimly lit streetlamp. “Why would John live here?” I thought, as I scanned a neighborhood full of abandoned warehouses. His building looked like an outdated industrial factory. We entered a small, nondescript lobby with linoleum floors. No doorman. No security. He used another key to call the elevator. John’s apartment was on the top floor of a nine-story building. The apartment was dark, so I did not get to see much other than some mismatched furniture. Somehow I’d imagined John living in a fancy high-rise with a doorman and dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows. But John was always the rustic type. He would have been perfectly comfortable living in a tent in Central Park. As we walked in, John told Carolyn that he had brought a friend over to read “the Hachette letter.” I told him that this letter would almost definitely serve as Hachette’s defense for refusing to renew the contract with George magazine. It represented a clear warning shot, putting John on notice that if he protested, they would go after him personally.

At this point, Carolyn jumped into the discussion, enraged. I knew that she was fiercely protective of John, but I never expected what followed: a string of expletives like I had never heard before. “John, they are trying to fuck you!” she shouted loudly. “Everybody fucks you, John, and you just take it! You let everybody fuck you, John. When are you going to grow some balls and start fighting back? You need to start fucking people back, John.” John solemnly guided me out of their apartment. He said he needed to clear his head. When we got to the curb, I shook his hand and turned right toward the civilization. John turned left down the dark street. After taking a few steps, I turned around and saw his silhouette, head down and hands in his pockets. It was the last time I would ever see him. John’s relationship with his sister hit rock bottom in the summer of 1999. The visits to see her and her children—Rose, Tatiana, and Jack—whom he adored, had become less frequent. It was not the relationship that either wanted, but John could not stomach being in the same room with his brother in law. 

Despite being under enormous pressure, John was still capable of gestures of empathy and generosity. I learned that firsthand. In the spring of 1999, I had developed a tremor in my left arm, along with unexplained twitches throughout my body. By this point, I had left Oxford and accepted a position as the dean of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. Theoretically, the move made it easier for me to commute to New York to tape my History Channel show, but since there were no direct flights, it actually took longer. John noticed something was wrong one day while we played racquetball. During our last game, roughly a week before his Buckeye accident, I held out my left hand and showed him the tremor. I put on a brave face, telling him I was too afraid to visit a doctor. Without prompting, John started talking about Anthony and how courageous he was in dealing with his horrible disease. John never told me that Anthony was dying. All he talked about was how Anthony refused to complain. He used the word 'tough' a handful of times, as if prodding me to follow Anthony’s example. On Friday, July 9, I finally decided to make an appointment to see the chief of neurology at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. I had convinced myself that I suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but I decided to see a doctor who could confirm my self-diagnosis. At the end of the tests I sat on the table and asked the neurologist, “So do I have Parkinson’s?” He shook his head and said, “Well, I have good news and bad news.” The good news was that I did not have Parkinson’s; the bad news was that I could be in the early stages of ALS, popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

After listening to my detailed description, John started speaking. I can still hear his voice. “For better or worse,” he said, “my family is well connected in New York medical circles. If there’s anything you need, you let me know.” There was then a pause. “Stevie,” he said, “I’ll take care of you.” To make sure that I heard it right the first time, he repeated. “I’ll take care of you, Stevie.” He then added: “And don’t worry about all that insurance stuff.” Only later did I discover that he suffered from Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that required him to drink a disgusting concoction of iodine and seltzer. Apparently, anxiety only aggravated the problem. He was having trouble sleeping, often waking up at five o’clock, leaving him completely drained at work. John initially thought that Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, would at least offer constructive comments. “Politics doesn’t sell, it's not commercial,” Jann told him bluntly, suggesting that only 15 percent of any generation find government or public affairs interesting, but John dismissed the observation. He then proceeded to offer John a job at Rolling Stone. John suspected that Wenner simply did not want the competition. “John was hurt and felt betrayed by Jann,” a colleague recalled. Cousin Bobby Kennedy Jr., Robert and Ethel’s third oldest, praised John's ethics: “John has a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility. Whenever any of the cousins need help on one of their charity projects, John always participates.”

John F. Kennedy’s only son would grow into a remarkably well-adjusted adult, which no doubt owes a great deal to his attending psychological therapy continuously his entire life to alleviate his proclivity to depression. One question has crossed my mind more than a few times: How much of John’s personality was shaped by the trauma of his father’s death? For answers to that question, I turned to Dr. Susan Coates, clinical professor of medical psychiatry at Columbia University and a leading expert in childhood trauma. Coates pointed out that a large body of literature has identified general characteristics exhibited by children who experience trauma. She explained that three-year-olds do not understand the finality of death, but they “take their cues in understanding a traumatic loss from their primary attachment figure, who is most often their mother. In John’s case, he would have known that something very terrible had happened from observing his mother’s reaction.” For John, his father’s violent death marked the first in a series of traumatic events that would shape his personality. “In one fell swoop, he loses his father. He loses his mother in the sense that he has lost her emotional accessibility because she is in mourning. He also loses his home, the White House. It is an overwhelming trauma for the child.” Psychiatrists refer to this repetition as “strain trauma.” As Coates explained, “Although single traumatic events can have a big impact on a person, what most often shapes character are interpersonal experiences, that happen over and over again.” 

Robert T. Littell: John F. Kennedy Jr. met Carolyn Bessette in late 1994. Their attraction was instant and mutual. They began to date, secretly at first, I think because they both enjoyed the mystery. Carolyn was a blue-eyed public-school graduate from Greenwich, Connecticut, and was working for Calvin Klein at the time as a personal shopper. John first saw her while shopping for suits. He asked someone who she was, he got her phone number, and they went out on a first date in Tribeca. In one of his breaks during his long relationship with Daryl Hannah, John had enjoyed a fling with Madonna. Not a real fling, actually, more of a curiosity encounter. Madonna also alluded that sex with John had been “vanilla” for her standards and he called him “an innocent in bed.” John had dated over 50 women but he now knew he’d hooked with the one right away. By then I’d known John for twenty years. To his credit, John had a healthy libido but almost always resisted the sexual opportunities that came his way, preferring real relationships. And with people who completely lost their balance around him, he knew how to be polite but distant. It’s no coincidence that I met my future wife, Frannie, and my best friend, John, in my first week at Brown University. I met Carolyn Bessette for the first time at John’s apartment when they had just begun to get serious. He kept telling me that I should stay another minute because he had a surprise. The minute turned into an hour, but finally the buzzer rang. John became uncharacteristically jumpy. Bam! In walked the hottest girl I’d ever seen in my life. Tall, blonde, svelte, in loose-fitting jeans and a big blue shirt, she literally glowed.

Carolyn said hello to me and turned to John. From somewhere, he pulled out a cigarette—a sure sign he was a wreck because he rarely smoked. She was both shy and fierce, skilled in the acid-tongued banter that vulnerable people use to cover their soft spots. When Carolyn let down her guard, which wasn’t often, you could sense something wounded about her. I always chalked it up to the father who was so conspicuously absent from her life. Her vulnerability, while hidden beneath a tough, funny exterior, made her deeply empathetic to others. You had to meet Carolyn only for an instant to understand why she captivated John: She was almost preternaturally intense, with an electricity about her that nearly, though not quite, distracted you from her physical beauty. The qualities that John always liked in women—mystery, drama, irreverence and beauty—Carolyn had all in abundance. According to John, Carolyn resisted his proposal for an entire year. Playing hard to get? Maybe. I can’t imagine that too many women would have refused John's proposal, knowing he was madly in love. Which he was. Over July 4 in 1995, John and Carolyn went to Martha’s Vineyard to go fishing. “I wanted to go fishing like I wanted to cut off my right arm,” Carolyn confessed. John took her out on the boat, knelt down on one knee, and said, “Fishing is so much better with a partner,” as he pulled out a platinum band sparkling with diamonds and sapphires—a replica of his mother Jackie's wedding ring. Back at the Downtown Athletic Club, over an onion soup, John continued to assert that he didn’t have a doubt in his mind that he’d found the right woman. I know they were physically compatible because when I made the standard locker-room query about sex, John whispered blissfully, “Oh, my God,” and closed his eyes.

I gave him one piece of advice, which is that marriage is a decision. I said that once you make the decision to get married, you can’t spend your time longing for the greener grass over the fence. John replied, without any hesitation, “I know that.” By the time John got married, he was living in an apartment on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It was a beautiful place, though modest relative to his means. He was ready and eager to start a family when he met Carolyn. Though John might get momentarily angry when someone took advantage of him, he never held a grudge. But if Carolyn perceived that someone was using John, she went into battle mode. I’d hear about it when a banished friend would call me, trying to figure out why he’d been tossed aside from John's orbit. As 1998 progressed, John grew more frustrated with Carolyn’s troubled transition, but he also felt an enormous responsibility for her happiness. They lived out a complicated dynamic, resenting the demands each placed on the other while at the same time empathizing with the other’s frustrations. John felt hog-tied by not being able to solve Carolyn’s problems with the paparazzis. We talked a lot about this during the second year of their marriage. He hated the illogic of the whole thing: in his mind, they had so much.

There were so many reasons to be happy. But he also knew that Carolyn’s coping mechanisms had been overwhelmed. I listened and felt bad for both of them, but I told him it would get better. My wife Frannie had suffered a bout of depression in the early nineties, after quitting smoking, and she’d barely left the apartment for a year. I was confident that they’d come out the other side of this dark cloud, and John believed so, too, despite his frustration. John suffered from Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, for which he took iodine supplements and ginseng. He had constant emotional highs and lows, someone might even call it a bipolar disorder. After the plane crash, for reasons I don’t fully understand, John’s and Carolyn’s ashes were ceremoniously tossed into the Atlantic from a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Briscoe, off the Massachusetts coast near Martha’s Vineyard. Only close family attended the ceremony. John wasn’t in the Navy, he wasn’t a seaman, and he didn’t live in Massachusetts. Strange indeed there is no place to go and pay tribute to John.

John F. Kennedy Jr. had the potential to do great things. He embodied a unique convergence of factors: he was a good and smart person, endowed with the trust and goodwill—both inherited and earned—of most of the world. During his entire short life, he worked diligently to turn all that he’d been born with into something of value. I’d bet the ranch he would have become President, but there were other jobs and charity labor he could have done well, too. John mentioned that the United Nations had never had an American secretary-general. It’s a thought. I used to tell my wife that John would be there when his country needed him. John had a worldly and inclusive vision of America, a deep patriotism that was nonetheless open-hearted and sophisticated about the connectedness of the world’s nations. In this he was like his father, who in a speech not long after World War II spoke of the world’s need to “recognize how interdependent we are.” John had a marvelous pantheon of heroes, including Abraham Lincoln (John loved the quote “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”) When I think of John and his buddies, I see him in his favorite shirt, an old Racer X T-shirt. Racer X was the mysterious, long-lost brother of Speed Racer, the popular cartoon character of our youth. An orphan of sorts, Racer X wore a face mask to conceal his true identity. He was a top Formula One driver as well as a secret agent for the international police who would appear out of nowhere “to save his brother from dire circumstances,” according to the official Speed Racer history. Eventually Racer X stops racing to become a full-time secret agent. “No longer lured by fast cars, he turns his attention to the much more dangerous game of establishing world peace,” the story goes. Just before Racer X leaves racing for good, though, he vows to his unconscious brother (whom he’s just saved again) that he’ll “be near if you ever need help, no matter where you might go.” —John F. Kennedy Jr: America’s Reluctant Prince (2019) by Steven M. Gillon

John F. Kennedy Jr (George magazine, 1998): "Somehow I have been set up to be a great man. The thing is most of great men in history, my father included, could be shitheads as family men when they went home. I think it would be more interesting to be a good man than a great man. A bigger challenge for me would be to become a good man. And maybe not many people would know it, but I would have the satisfaction of knowing."