The Kennedys' Bill of The Century, JFK Jr., Oliver Stone and Brecht's influence on NBK

John F. Kennedy: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Howie Carr’s column, which was printed on July 4th in The Boston Herald, is a nutty litany of the conservative and politically motivated vendetta that is trotted out every time the reactionaries think: “Hey, things have gotten so bad that the public might be reminded of how much progress was made during the Kennedy presidency.” No president before Kennedy ever confronted the civil rights issue as he did. No one was even close. It was the preceding century of near inertia that created the immense problem that President Kennedy faced in 1961. But to his credit, Kennedy pressed the issue from the outset. Finally, the inspiration and support he gave the civil rights movement, provided the opportunity to pass what Clay Risen has called the “bill of the century”. What JFK achieved in three years is quite remarkable, especially when compared to his White House predecessors (Dwight Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt) in thirty years prior. 

In the wake of the sensation caused by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, scores of books were either released or republished in order to capitalize on that publicity wave. Many of these were utterly worthless, but that did not matter to the MSM. Since Chuck Giancana had a famous last name, he got exposure. Chuck was the half-brother of “Momo” Giancana, the Chicago don. Sam Giancana was his half-nephew and they co-authored the book. Therefore, these two collaborators (Sam and Chuck Giancana) were taken at their word, without any due diligence done by the media or any consultation with experts in the field who could give them such analysis. I had little regard for it when I first read it; I have less for it now. In fact, today, not only do I think it is mythological, I think it is scatological. It has the historical value of a Harold Robbins novel. Double Cross also stated that the Outfit owned the contract of Marilyn Monroe. As the esteemed Don McGovern notes in his book on the subject, this is more bunk. McGovern goes on to demonstrate how Double Cross libels Joe Schenck and Marilyn Monroe about both their personal reputations and professional careers. If that is not goofy enough, the book claims that Giancana had Monroe killed on orders of the CIA and they killed her with a rectal suppository. As McGovern notes, Momo Giancana must have had some great chemist working for him, because the type of suppository described in the book was not invented at the time of Marilyn’s death in 1962. (McGovern, pp. 511-514)

I won’t even go into the issues of why the CIA would want Monroe killed or why, of all people, they would contract that assignment out to Giancana. I will say, though, that when Double Cross came out in 1992, there were multi-segment specials about it on the programs ET and Hard Copy. They accepted the book at virtually face value. Thus is the culture we inhabit. Influenced by the work of his sister Eunice Shriver, one of the first things Robert Kennedy did as attorney general was to take a dual interest in the rights of the poor to have attorneys and also the problems and causes of juvenile delinquency. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) Other times, David Hackett would show RFK the shabby conditions of schools or recreation areas. The attorney general was moved by these and so he invited celebrities—Cary Grant, Edward R. Murrow—to come into those blighted neighborhoods to give talks to the kids who lived there. (Schmitt, pp. 69-70) The attorney general would also attain appropriations to repair some of these facilities. America was sitting on a ticking time-bomb. While everyone was concentrating on the South, Hackett and Bobby Kennedy were examining sociological predicaments elsewhere that could not be solved by an accommodations bill or a voting rights act. In these places, the problems were not simple and the remedy was not as direct. In fact, RFK predicted that riots would erupt soon if nothing was done. (Schmitt, p. 86) He told a Senate committee in February of 1963 that America was “racing the clock against disaster… We must give the members of this new lost generation some real hope in order to prevent a shattering explosion of social problems in the years to come.” 

Needless to say, no other administration had ever gone this far in this specific field. Richard Russell was so worried that he told his colleague Senator Harry Byrd that what he feared if Kennedy got elected was that he would go beyond even the Democratic platform. (Brauer, p. 53) The insight may have originated from Russell’s personal exposure to Kennedy while they were in the Senate. And indeed, that is what the president was doing at the time of his death, before his civil rights bill passed. As the president told Heller at their last meeting on the topic, “Yes, Walter, I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty.” (Schmitt, p. 93) To show how interested he was, at his final meeting with his cabinet, President Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. After his death, Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general had them framed and put up on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96) As Hackett told RFK, the situation America faced in 1962 it was much more complicated than the FDR's New-Deal era. Kennedy was going to face the poverty problem in 1964 in order to transform it into a national issue. He did not plan on starting his program until after the 1964 election. (Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, p. 71) What happened after his death shows how important one man can be in determining the currents of history. Walter Heller met with Johnson the day after Kennedy’s murder. The economist told the new president about the ideas he and JFK had reviewed for relieving poverty. When Heller got back to him with the demonstration projects that were running under Hackett, Johnson almost eliminated the entire program. The new president understood that the civil rights act making its slow way through Congress was really Kennedy’s.

As I have noted, Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century proves that point. But Kennedy’s poverty program had not been formally announced or written up. Therefore, Johnson could present it as his own. A bit over four months later, Johnson would announce the Great Society. Most analysts have differentiated the Great Society from the War on Poverty. The main agency for the latter was called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). In five years, from 1965-70, OEO was granted 1.5% of the budget for all of its programs. Needless to say, all this hubbub necessitated that the cautious Hackett be retired to the sidelines. Which he was. While Johnson was putting together his package, David Hackett—the man who ran the program for three years, who knew more about it than anyone—was now working on Bobby Kennedy’s senatorial campaign in New York. RFK tried to intervene to no avail. Hackett wanted what he called his “community action experiments” to resemble something like a socialist democratic laboratory. It didn’t end up that way. With unwise alacrity, Johnson sent his program to Congress in March of 1964. As Harris Wofford notes in his book, the choice Johnson made to replace Hackett with as supervisor of his War on Poverty surprised many people. But Johnson couldn’t wholly kill it, since Robert Kennedy was still attorney general. Instead, he added other elements to it: a job training program, a summer jobs program, a work-study program, assistance to small farms and small business, and the aforementioned VISTA program. This brought in other parts of the administration, like the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Office of Education.

Bobby Kennedy had targeted help for pre-school children that would bypass the regular school system. Later, RFK continued in this vein by saying: "The institutions which affect the poor—education, welfare, recreation, business, labor—are huge, complex structures, operating outside their control. They plan programs for the poor, not with them." (Matusow, p. 126) What Kennedy and Hackett were saying was rather simple: How can we trust the same people who allowed these inequities in the first place with the millions meant to cure them? (Schulman, p. 94) Author Schulman then listed a few examples that proved the Hackett/Kennedy warning. By 1967, Johnson had folded his cards on community action. He allowed them to be taken over by the local entities Hackett & Kennedy feared. In the end, LBJ had lost all faith in it and said it was being run by “kooks and sociologists”. (Matusow, p. 270) The beginning of Johnson losing faith started in Watts in the late summer of 1965. To his credit, I have never read anything that states that Bobby Kennedy had his “I told you so” moment at this time, even though, as we have seen, he did predict it. RFK visited Watts in November of 1965. When he returned, he told a couple of his staffers, Ed Edelman and Adam Walinsky, to continue with Hackett’s research, but to take it a step further. He wanted ideas on how to address the entire phenomenon of the urban ghetto and how to structurally transform it. They did so, and in January of 1966, the senator gave three speeches on the subject of race and poverty. (John Bohrer,The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 255-61) Those speeches marked the birth of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration project.

It was RFK’s answer to Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal. As Michael Harrington said of RFK, “As I look back on the sixties, he was the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.” (Wofford, p. 420) Journalist Pete Hammill wrote RFK before the presidential race of 1968: "I wanted to remind you that in Watts, I didn’t see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls. I saw pictures of JFK." One is left to imagine what America would be like today if President Kennedy had lived, and Bobby Kennedy and Dave Hackett had run the War on Poverty. Without Vietnam, and those men in charge, it is even possible that America would not have burned. 

Oliver Stone - Tom Fordy and The Telegraph: With a new documentary and a new autobiography  Chasing the Light coming out, Oliver Stone is once again being met, in advance, by trolls intent on burying the truth of JFK’s foreign policy and his assassination. Fordy is a Warren Commission shill who might as well be writing in 1967. Yet in some cases, he is even worse than that. As everyone knows, the 1991 film JFK was based largely on Jim Garrison’s 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins. That book was essentially Garrison’s memoir of his investigation into the murder of President Kennedy which he conducted through his position as DA of New Orleans Parish. Stone’s film was so cinematically powerful and its intellectual effect so shocking that it provoked the creation of a new agency of government: The Assassination Records Review Board. That board was in session from 1994–98 and declassified 2 million pages of previously redacted papers; 60,000 documents in all. It then declassified, on a timed-release schedule, thousands more. Fordy's  foot in mouth moment is when he says that Kennedy signed off on an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. Again, this shows that neither Fordy nor Drinkwater ever read the declassified documents of the ARRB, because, in 1995, the Board issued an unredacted version of the CIA’s Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Fidel Castro. On several pages of that report, one will see the issue of presidential authorization of the Agency plots addressed. In every instance, the reply comes back in the negative. In other words, the CIA had no such presidential authorization from Kennedy or any other president, i. e. Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon B. Johnson. Source: kennedysandking.com

In the years since John F. Kennedy Jr's passing, the fascination doesn’t seem to be on the level of Marilyn Monroe/James Dean-like cult, and there are not nearly as many death theories and myths that haunt his father’s legacy. With the exception of Steven Gillon's The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr: America's Reluctant Prince, the rest of published memoirs about him or his wife Carolyn Bessette were sketchy or trashy. However, there is a brief yet good memoir that explains the political icon as a flesh-and-blood man, written by someone who really knew well, his best friend, The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert T. Littell first met John Kennedy Jr. while they were both freshmen at Brown University in 1979. Their instant bond grew into a life-long friendship, until Kennedy died at the age of 38. “I felt obligated to stand up for him, frankly,” Littell says. “He bent over backwards just to be a great guy.” JFK talking about his children: "I hope my children live as good people, that they understand that though they have what many don’t, that does not make them better—but that they can do better, they can help make a difference in this land of freedom in which freedom has not been given to all. My hope is that they’re gracious and sensible in their actions. And if politics is their passion, well, I can’t very well argue with that now can I?”

Robert Littell, who was born in Milwaukee and brought up in Connecticut, had a rough go of it himself. Though he was upper-middle-class and attended prep school, his father, a writer, had committed suicide at 40. His mother had remarried but more for worse than for better. He thinks of his family as “dysfunctional,” and describes himself as a “street-smart Republican.” Although the friendship would seem unlikely, he says this was a good basis for his relationship with Kennedy. “We were both brought up by women,” he says, “and we both lacked a strong father figure. We sort of linked arms from that. We had the exact same experience there. There was a shared trauma between us for not having a dad. I watched his mind develop and mature. He learned how to master his negotiating skills. He already had the focus and the intellect inside of him and he learned how to bring it out and master it over the years.” Littell witnessed this first-hand, during their years together at Brown, and then during their student trips to Europe on the cheap (because of John’s love of being just an average guy). They also shared an apartment together after college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

“John was a bad drinker,” Littell recalls. “He was a two or three-beers guy. He couldn’t have six beers. He was the kind of guy who just wanted to be in control all the time. He really valued his sense of control. He needed to, because he was always ‘on stage.’ He was a modern Renaissance man.” It seemed inevitable that John would go into some sort of public service, like most of his family. However he wanted to do it on his terms. “He was offered to run for office in New Jersey and Rhode Island,” Littell says, “but he wanted to do it in New York. Everyone had expectations but he didn't want to lead as a young man. He wanted to have his youth first. He wanted to give back. He wanted to serve the people–not for recognition. He didn’t need it. He already had it.” Littell married soon after college, and had two children and settled into a life of domestic bliss in Manhattan. “John respected and admired my getting married and having kids,” he says. 

“John was naturally monogamous. When Christina Haag broke up with her boyfriend, he said to me, ‘My future wife is free!’ He wanted to have a nice, stable life. He admired his sister Caroline’s life, and wanted to have that and as soon as possible. After his mother Jackie died, it was a heavy burden, because he was now an orphan. He wanted to have a family of his own.” Of course, his future wife turned out not to be Christina Haag or Daryl Hannah but Carolyn Bessette, who, according to Littell, was “the most empathetic, sensitive person that I’ve ever met. She was my children’s favorite friend. And she wanted to be sensitive. She didn’t want to develop a thick skin. I think her sensitivity sometimes hurt her, but they were soul mates. They loved each other tremendously. When they were together, sparks flew.” John Perry Barlow, another good friend of John Jr. recalled of the Cumberland ceremony: "I remember many odd moments at John's wedding. I was having a languid conversation with Christiane Amanpour and Jackie's old boyfriend Maurice Tempelsman. I had many vivid experiences of that wedding, including John sternly telling me that now she was married, I could no longer leer at his wife Carolyn."

“John made me a much better person by his loyalty, his sense of honor, how polite and graceful he was to everybody,” Littell says. “He related to the underdog. He couldn’t stand the idea of elitism. He was actually a very simple man. He was a camper sort of guy. He liked to ground himself. He was not cynical. He was a really kind guy. He was stubborn and told me again and again: ‘I will never be a cynic.’ He was an innovator for starting George magazine and he had a lot of courage. His magazine began to hemorrhage money and was expected to lose $10 million in 1999. To John’s frustration, George never earned the respect of the journalistic community, which considered it an amateur venture. The fact that he made that decision that he was not going to be cynical, that he was going to rinse himself of that, was really inspirational.” Source: www.popentertainment.com

Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the stage. He wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable. One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "estrangement effect", or "alienation effect"). "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argued. Brecht used his poetry to criticize European culture, including Nazis, and the German bourgeoisie. Brecht's collaborations with Kurt Weill have influence in rock music. The "Alabama Song", originally published as a poem in Brecht's Hauspostille (1927) and set to music by Weill in Mahagonny, was recorded by The Doors, and various other bands and performers since the 1960s.

There's that classic quote from Quentin Tarantino about how "Violence is one of the most fun things to watch" and never before have I seen a movie more thoroughly challenge, and ultimately tear itself to pieces over that statement than Oliver Stone's film, 'Natural Born Killers' (1994). Based on an original screenplay by none-other than Quentin Tarantino, who eventually relented into conceding Stone's unique vision, 'Natural Born Killers' is still one of the most controversial Hollywood movies ever made. Owing to its very graphic violence and frenzied, near subliminal, visual and editing style it is genuinely one of the most unnerving and unconventional films of the 1990's. 

We cut back to the day of the interview, where Mickey gives Wayne plenty of well-composed quotable remarks to fill his program - explaining his motives plainly as being a ‘natural born killer’, thus giving the movie a title - and then a riot goes down in the laundry room which forces the deputies to concentrate their efforts on pacifying the other inmates; giving Mickey an opportunity to take the camera crew hostage and force the release of Mallory from her holding cell - the two having been separated for a year and romantically longing for each other since. The idea Stone wants to present is clear - that media enterprises like those ‘American Maniacs’ is inspired by and represent are deeply immoral and often help aid or indeed validate the actions of those they’re so eager to depict. Meanwhile, Wayne is eager to get this one final interview, primarily because he stands to gain massive ratings and therefore financial compensation for his work. It's the fact that Wayne Gail and the network he represents stands to gain a lot of money by continually making content about people like Mickey and Mallory. There’s a *capitalist* incentive there, rather than one of mere perverse intellectual curiosity. 

There’s a real meaningful interesting point being made here about how the media is a participant in the events it depicts, and it demonstrates this literally by having Wayne Gail and his camera be part of the climax and its action. Wayne is directly responsible for Mickey and Mallory’s escape, by naively playing into their hands, by assuming control because he’s a big media boy with a TV network backing him, and without fully grasping exactly who he’s dealing with. Because of course, the big punchline here is that Mickey and Mallory Knox are both actively, knowingly exploiting their own infamy as a means to escape prison - and just Wayne is the naive conduit for that. In a way, the script aims to comment on exactly that kind of media irresponsibility, and it does it with surprising deftness.

Oliver Stone decided he wanted almost every single shot in the film to use a different lens, a different stock, and a different angle so therefore no single shot can be seen as objective. Not even standard shot reverse has a 1:1 equivalency. We transition to scenes with TV static and brief shots of Coca-Cola commercials as if we’re thumbing through a cable box, occasionally interrupted by subliminal flashes. The scenes themselves are littered with fake rear-projection backgrounds, overlays, and coloured lighting, designed to deliberately highlight the artificiality and unreality of the production, to a positively Brechtian degree. Not a single frame in Oliver Stone’s production goes by without reminding you that you’re taking part in viewing a piece of media and not real people inhabiting a real world. What they’ve done here is an attempt to turn it into a kind of metafilm - what Stone is attempting here is a kind of Bretchian ‘Epic Theatre’, i.e. a production that emphasises the unreality of the production itself.

With the goal being to make the audience confront what their reality actually is - because according to Brecht, once you know how all of this works, or is made to work, you can speculate on what it could be. So this gharishness is essentially a type of ‘deliberate estrangement.’ NBK is a quintessential Generation X movie. The critical response was negative in general, seeing his satire as 'too blunt.' However, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote, "Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Oliver Stone's vision in Natural Born Killers is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering." Sticking with the Brechtian influence on Stone's filming tecniques in NBK, you could even argue that this film reframes the story as "Two B-movie action heroes are constructed for public consumption, they become aware they are a part of a media construct, and manipulate their media construct in order to destroy it, and thus attain freedom". -"The Social Construction of Nature and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers" (2012) by Jeremy Withers

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