Jackie's Girl: Memoirs of Jackie Kennedy

“Kathy McKeon's delightful memories have been tucked away for fifty years, and thankfully, she has brought them out to share the enchanting magic of Camelot with us all.” —Kirkus Reviews

"An endearing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who spent thirteen years as Jackie Kennedy’s personal assistant and occasional nanny—and the lessons about life and love she learned from the glamorous first lady. In 1964, Kathy McKeon was just nineteen and newly arrived from Ireland when she was hired as the personal assistant to former first lady Jackie Kennedy. Kathy not only played a crucial role in raising young Caroline and John Jr., but also had a front-row seat to some of the twentieth century’s most significant events. Because Kathy was always at Jackie’s side, Rose Kennedy deemed her “Jackie’s girl.” And although Kathy called Jackie “Madam,” she considered her employer more like a big sister who was also her mentor. Kathy witnessed Jackie and Aristotle Onassis’s courtship and marriage and Robert Kennedy’s assassination, dutifully supporting Jackie and the children during these tumultuous times in history. A rare and engrossing look at the private life of one of the most famous women of the twentieth century, Jackie’s Girl is also a moving personal story of a young woman finding her identity in a new country, along with the help of the most elegant woman in America." amazon.com

Shoes were actually the very first thing Jackie Kennedy and I bonded over. I somehow convinced myself that the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought were as stylish as they were practical. Off to the kitchen I picked up Jackie’s tray of tea, toast, a soft-boiled egg, and the daily newspapers. Her corner bedroom faced the broad sweep of Fifth Avenue and Central Park along the front, and the narrower, quieter Eighty-fifth Street to the side. But as I walked from window to window I became aware of a persistent little squeaking sound. The realization that it was coming from my feet, which were perspiring against the rubber of my new shoes made me more nervous. I hurried into the bathroom, hoping Jackie would think I was merely arranging towels, and frantically rummaged through her cupboards until I found the talcum powder. I sat down on the closed toilet lid and thoroughly dusted the inside of each shoe. I hurried back into the master bedroom, my shoes blissfully quiet. All that powder felt silky on my feet, too. No cheap drugstore stuff in that bathroom. My relief was short-lived when I noticed something floating around my feet at ground level, like a little white cloud. Jackie was busy with her breakfast by then and hadn’t noticed what I now spotted—powder marks all over her carpet. I took a few tentative steps and saw white puffs shooting out of my shoes. I darted back into the bathroom, shutting the door this time, and sat on the toilet lid again, trying to figure out what to do, now that my shoes were emitting what looked like smoke. Now I was trapped in Jacqueline Kennedy’s bathroom. I put my head in my hands and started laughing uncontrollably. “Kathy, is everything all right?” I heard the door open, and the worry in Jackie’s voice as she took in the sight of me with my face still buried in my hands, shoulders shaking. “What’s wrong?” she asked kindly. I was too embarrassed to answer, and in the midst of my giggling fit I wouldn’t have been able to get an intelligible sentence out anyway, so I jumped up and ran past her, shooting puffs of powder from my shoes as I fled. I was losing too much powder, though, and the squeaking noises were back, sounding louder and more urgent as I sprinted to my room. I collapsed on the bed, burying my face in the pillow to muffle my laughter. “Kathy?” Jackie tapped on the closed door. She stepped in, her perfectly arched brows furrowed with concern. The look on her face quickly turned to bewilderment when she realized that I was laughing, not sobbing. Unless I wanted a Secret Service escort to the loony bin, it was time to come clean. As I started to explain the whole story, Jackie burst into laughter, which sent me into another spasm of hysterics, and by the time I led her into the hallway to point out my telltale trail of powdered footprints, both of us had tears running down our cheeks.The rest of the staff took turns peeking around the corner, trying to see what was so amusing. We finally composed ourselves, and Jackie was still chuckling when she ventured into the kitchen, where the rest of the staff were clamoring to know what had just happened with the new girl. “Oh, that Kath is just too funny,” I overheard Jackie say.

While we were on holiday in Ireland, I would take John and Caroline on long walks through the green countryside, and they would delight in the sheep ranging free in the hills around us. I explained how the different-colored x’s painted on their backs helped identify which farmer they belonged to. John and Caroline had a deep compassion for all living things. One of John’s favorite toys was that big semi-truck he used to roll noisily down the hallway at the crack of dawn in hopes of rousing Maud Shaw, or me to come keep him company. It opened and closed like a garage in the back, and John often shut his hamster inside to give it joy rides, the joy being likely more John’s than the hamster's. One day he took a break from playing to wander into the kitchen for a midafternoon snack. He parked his truck by the back elevator and forgot about it. The next morning, when he went to get his hamster out of its cage and discovered it empty, he raced to me in tears. We went and found the truck. The guinea pig was alive, but wobbly. Caroline pounced on her forgetful brother. “How could you do such a horrible thing, John? she wailed. “I didn’t mean to!” John cried. The guinea pig was revived with food and water, and he lived to ride again.

Despite his intense gaze and coarse exterior, Mr. Onassis quickly proved to be a true gentleman; I had expected such a rich, important man to be cold and demanding, but he was friendly to the help, which always says something promising about a person’s character. He was also extremely generous. I knocked gently on Caroline’s door and went to sit on her bed, where she was curled up with her face in the pillow, her small shoulders heaving with her sobs. I couldn’t begin to imagine how she felt. A framed picture of JFK was always on her nightstand. I knew that however great a hero he was considered as president, he would always be ten times that hero to Caroline and John as a father. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’ll all work out good. He’s a nice man.” Hollow as the words must have sounded to a despairing ten-year-old, I meant every one. From what little I had seen of Aristotle Onassis, he seemed to genuinely want the children to like him. “We’re going to Greece,” Caroline said desperately. Caroline, always the good girl who minded her mother, composed herself and got up to pack for whatever new life was awaiting her now. “She told me I would need a couple of nice dresses.” We pulled out some shorts and bathing suits, too, and I went to see about John, who was hanging close to his mother but didn’t seem visibly upset by the prospect of getting a stepfather. 

It took some doing for John to dislike anyone, and Onassis had shown him only kindness. By the time she returned from her honeymoon cruising the Greek isles, Jackie Kennedy had become Jackie O. I was touched when Jackie went out of her way to make me feel special, surprising me with a strawberry and whipped cream cake and some lovely gifts—two turtleneck sweaters, a suede purse and a silver cigarette holder—for my twenty-first birthday.

“I envy you two starting out, doing it all your way,” Jackie said wistfully one day. She was hungry to hear all about my plans for setting up house with Seamus. I realized for the first time that she must have felt the same way I had, though on a much grander level, about the magnetic force of the Kennedy family pulling you close. She had famously redecorated and restored the White House, but here she was wondering what it was like to pick out tea towels at Gimbels. “Kathy, why don’t you and Seamus come down to my storage unit and see what you could use?” Jackie offered. She didn’t have to ask twice. The unit, it turned out, was more like a warehouse, packed with art, furniture, and all kinds of crates and boxes. She led us through the maze of things she’d even forgotten she had, making a list of what we were getting as she went. It was like winning a TV game show starring our very own host, Jacqueline Onassis. She arranged for everything to be loaded onto a truck and delivered to our apartment. Her thoughtfulness touched me more deeply than she could have known. My mother wasn’t going to make it for the wedding, and it felt nice to have Jackie’s attention and interest in my big new beginning. Her generosity didn’t stop there. “Where are you two going on your honeymoon?” she asked. “Someplace warm,” Seamus said. I wondered what lottery he’d won and not told me about. At the rate we were burning through our budget, he could scratch tropical paradise off his list unless Coney Island had palm trees and hula girls. “You should go to Barbados!” Jackie exclaimed. “I have a friend there who runs a resort. Let me book it for you as my wedding gift.” We were floored. Nancy Tuckerman swiftly followed through on the offer, making all the arrangements. 

Everything was being taken care of, from our flights and the gorgeous villa to our meals and even a rented cabana around the island. Mr. Onassis was wishing me well, and said he looked forward to meeting the gentleman lucky enough to marry me, and how lucky I was to have a carpenter as a husband, because I would always have a nice home and someone who was handy at fixing things. Did I know Saint Joseph was a carpenter? he went on. “Do you know what my first job was?” he asked. “I was a busboy cleaning tables. You always have to start from the bottom up to make something of yourself.” There was a check inside the cornflower envelope, too. It was one thousand dollars. His generosity blew me away. This was ten times the annual bonus I had always received from Jackie at Christmastime! John and Caroline had each written me little notes, too, wishing me a happy wedding. I was at home opening RSVPs when several names fluttered out of one envelope. “Seamus, they’re coming to our wedding.” I was in shock. “Oh my God, what do we do now?” He knew exactly who “they” were. I fanned out the response cards: Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis, John Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy. We decided not to tell anybody. If we did and they didn’t show, we’d look like foolish braggarts. And if they were coming, we didn’t want word to leak out ahead of time, or the Astoria Manor would get overrun with paparazzi and crowds of looky-loos. Jackie had lost her Secret Service protection when she remarried. John and Caroline would keep their Secret Service until they were sixteen. 

“Why don’t you bring your family for the summer and stay in the Cape house?” Jackie suggested. We would be the caretakers for the season, and that way the house would always be ready whenever John or Caroline wanted to come. Seamus, she also knew, would ensure that the historic home was well maintained. It was a win-win proposition all around, and every June thereafter, we’d pile the kids, the dog, and all our gear for the summer into our van, bicycles strapped to the roof, and drive up to the Cape. John came back more frequently than Caroline, but the Cape was where she chose to have her wedding in the summer of 1986. I was touched to receive an invitation. John was staying over at the Cape house and immediately offered to babysit our kids Clare, Heather, and Shane; the kids were crazy about John. He was practically a superhero in his eyes. One very funny anecdote was when John admitted that he’d been making hamburgers and left the pan on the burner when he went to take a shower. John had a checkered history of combining showering and cooking; his attention disorder tended to sabotage that kind of multitasking. Seamus and me still remembered that time he had been fresh out of the shower with a towel around his waist when he fired up the grill to make us hamburgers. He’d turned around and lost his towel, causing Seamus to drily remark, “I thought you were making us hamburgers, John, but it looks like we’re getting wieners instead.” John laughed it off, a bit embarassed.

I still saw Jackie every so often, and we were in regular contact by phone, but it had probably been a year since I’d last seen her when I picked up the newspaper and read that she had cancer. There was a paparazzi shot of her in the park. She looked terribly thin and frail. I immediately dialed 1040. John came on the line. “Hi, Kathy,” he said. “It’s so nice of you to think of my mom.” I asked how she was doing, and he told me it didn’t look good. “She’s very, very ill.” We talked for a while, and I hung up, heartsick. I bought a get-well card and mailed it to her with my prayers. One of Jackie’s blue note cards arrived in the mail. On it was a typewritten message thanking me for my lovely card. “I think of you and Seamus and your children often,” it said, “and I hope we can all get together before long.” The last two words, handwritten, were her last to me: Much love. She died just two weeks later. I called Nancy Tuckerman, who told me I could come at two-thirty the next afternoon for the pre-funeral viewing. Jackie’s coffin was in the living room, draped with her favourite floral bedspread. I felt a deep pain in my heart. I had lost a great lady who had been so kind and made me feel like a friend so many times. John came out to greet us warmly. Caroline was at home with her children; the oldest of the three the same age she had been when I first met her. Caroline had sent gifts for my children over the years as well, and her graciousness reminded me so much of her mother.

John and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, were spending more time at Martha's Vineyard, and the place desperately needed some updating to suit a modern young couple. The big burn mark a hot pan had left on the Formica countertop in the kitchen had been hidden by a cutting board for decades, and that was just for starters. John had called Seamus to ask if Seamus could come give him some advice about renovations on the house. The stereo was blasting “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” when Seamus and I walked up the familiar path to the house at the Cape. John had been playing that same Rolling Stones record for a good quarter century—the song was his all-time favorite. How was it even possible that John was now thirty-eight years old? I hadn’t met Carolyn Bessette before, though of course I’d seen pictures of her all over the magazines. She was imposing and very pretty, but different from the other girls John had romanced over the years. Carolyn was harder to read, more distant and mysterious in a way. Her skin was almost as white and translucent as fine porcelain. She wore beige shorts and a black cashmere sweater. She was holding a fluffy tuxedo cat as he shed all over her sweater and cardigan. Seamus later told me John had confided how hurt he was by Carolyn’s apparent disinterest in the house remodeling, which John had tackled with enthusiasm. Carolyn never came up to offer her input. “Isn’t that strange?” John asked. I found it odd, too. You could tell with one glance that Carolyn had flawless taste and a great sense of style. Provi’s Dominican roots made her the absolute queen of daiquiri-making. She insisted on buying the best rum, dozens of fresh limes she squeezed by hand, plus bags of brown sugar. We sat down to dinner, with John insisting I take the seat at the head of the table, the one that had always been Jackie's, back when I was Jackie’s girl.

Carolyn opened up about feeling besieged by the paparazzis. John was clearly worried about his high-strung wife. “Kath, tell Carolyn how Mom used to handle them,” he prompted me. Provi jumped in to answer first, but John cut her off. “No, wait, I want to hear from Kathy,” he said. “When she was up here, she’d leave the gate smiling, give them one good picture, and they’d let her go,” I remembered. “No!” Carolyn nearly shouted. “I hate those bastards! I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” “That’s exactly what they want you to do,” I argued. “They’ll get great pictures.” She described how she had gotten chased down the sidewalk by a wolf pack of photographers, and ducked into a building to escape them. They cornered her by the elevator as she frantically pushed the button. “I can’t take it!,” she said exasperated. John interjected: “You gotta just take it easy,” he insisted. “Relax.” I told Carolyn how Jackie perfected the art of not responding to Ron Galella when he stalked her. “She knew if she kept the same blank expression on her face, he wouldn’t have a picture to sell,” I explained. “They all need something different. That’s why they yell things and try to scare you. They want a reaction. They want to get a picture showing you angry or scared.” We finished up dinner, and John soothed Provi’s ruffled feathers by complimenting her cooking. “This fish is delicious, Provi,” he told her. “The flavors are fantastic.” The gin and all that lime had made it more delectable. The Stones were still playing in the background, the volume lower, but the song was the same. It would finish then start again. I knew it was because John had done what he used to do as a boy with that very record player, adjusting a little pin on the arm so the needle set down in the same groove each time. With John and Carolyn making it their second home, we no longer moved up to the Cape with our family for the summer, but Seamus gave John fatherly advice about the work he was having done and John would ask for estimates and contractor’s bids on his behalf. “If they see my name, they think they’ve hit the lottery and the price gets jacked up four times what it should be,” John said. When they last spoke in the summer of 1999, John was eager to get the place in shape, a few weeks before he and Carolyn went for his cousin Rory’s impending wedding.

Seamus turned on the TV and the screen instantly filled with the image of John’s face with the words BREAKING NEWS beneath it. The reporter was saying the single-engine plane John was piloting had vanished the night before on a flight from the airport in New Jersey up to the Cape for Rory’s wedding. John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, were aboard. I called Provi, who was summering at the compound with her son Gustavo. Provi told me she had dinner ready for John and Carolyn the night before, that Gustavo had left John’s Jeep for him at the airport earlier so it would be there when he landed. On Saturday afternoon, the news reported some piece of luggage bearing Lauren’s ID had washed up on a beach at Martha’s Vineyard. A coast guard admiral delivered a press briefing at the Pentagon, describing all the search efforts under way. Seamus and I had moved out from Queens when the children were growing up, buying a house a block from the shore in Rocky Point, Long Island. Seamus was sure the flight path John had taken would have had him flying right past our house. The night would have still been clear and beautiful then. He would have been safe with us. At Mass on Sunday, we prayed with our congregation for the Kennedy family, and for the Bessettes. The priest left prayer cards and red roses at the back of the church to take on our way out. Later that night, the coast guard admiral was back on TV, announcing that they were shifting their focus from search and rescue to search and recovery, official words to say they had given up hope. On the fifth day, the bodies of John, Carolyn, and Lauren were recovered and cremated. Their ashes were scattered at sea the next morning. Attending the funeral service at St. Thomas More, we ran into Ethel Kennedy. “We lost a good man today,” Seamus told her. “Seamus, we don’t know what we lost today,” she replied urgently. “We have no idea.” “That’s the end of Camelot,” I said, sobbing. I woke up convinced I had dreamed it all, or maybe blacked out. It didn’t happen, none of it. It couldn’t happen again. —"Jackie's Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family" (2017) by Kathy McKeon

Vincent Salandria discussing the Kennedy case, JFK Jr (Fairytale Interrupted)

Vincent Salandria was a history teacher at Bartram in the 1960s; he was also a Penn-trained lawyer who spent decades independently investigating the JFK assassination and believes the CIA assassinated Kennedy with the military’s approval because he was moving toward ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the war in Vietnam. Vince began to feel his safety was at risk—he had received threats and he'd doubled his life insurance before taking his mid-’60s trips to Dallas. He would eventually learn the FBI created a file on him. The most daunting warning came, as Vince would tell a writer chronicling conspiracy theorists, after a panel discussion with Yale professor Jacob Cohen, in Boston in 1966. Late that night, there was a knock on Vince’s hotel door. It was Cohen. “I feel horrible,” he told Vince. “I feel like a crumb. Debating the assassination is horrible.” “We need to become more American,” Vince said. “We need to stop trying to act like a police state and go back to some of our original virtues, like skepticism of government and power. I can’t live in a police state—not Russian, Cuban or American.” “It’s not a question of whether you want to live in a police state,” Cohen said. “You’ll have to be killed.” This idea didn’t sound, to Vince, like an intellectual exercise. It sounded like Cohen was warning him of a potential threat.

Vince Salandria: The job for the American media was, to make this case look so complex, so prolix, so difficult to comprehend, so subject to debate, that the public would weary of trying to know. When in fact, the public did believe, always did believe that there was a conspiracy. And the public was permitted to believe, but it was not permitted to know the obvious. Only the center of the American power structure could have effectuated this conspiracy and expected that the American press would play along with it. Only the CIA could manipulate us internally and seek to provide hegemony over the whole world in terms of American military power. We would become more militarized. We would become more aggressive, more imperial. And at home we would become just a façade of a democratic structure.

David Starks: Why is this case still so important three decades later?

Vincent Salandria: I think it’s most relevant to our society. I think that what happened in Dealey Plaza was that a duly elected President was fired. Because this affects not only this country, but around the world. Perhaps a million South Vietnamese died as a consequence of what happened in Dealey Plaza. The world, hanging always, between peace and war. And it’s the interests of the people who killed Kennedy of maintaining war. That the constitutional process was relegated to a paper-thin façade. That what was left at that time, to American democracy, was relegated to theatrics; to the theatre of the absurd. And that what is happening now is a continuation of what was set forth then and that is, that we became more a militarized society. Under the guise of Cold War we were told that the increase of governmental expenditures to the military sector of the economy was necessary. So we began to spend on the order of 300 billion dollars of national wealth per year on the military industrial complex which caused us to neglect the private sector, neglect education, neglect health service delivery to the poor, neglect increasing poverty, neglect an effort to make the society fair, and to make the wealth of the country more equally and equitably distributed so that we’d have a state which we could be proud of, where the needs of our people would be met. Whether it be upward social mobility, which I enjoyed, and the future of the society could enjoy. Instead, we became militarized. Instead, rather than being competitive economically and maintaining our competitive edge and being able to maintain the highest standard of living in the world, we have been slipping. And now we have slipped to eleventh or twelfth in our standard of living. The number of poor increases. The injustice of this unequal distribution of wealth escalates. Public education is neglected. And we see that although the Cold War has dissipated, the military expenditures remain pretty much flat, hanging close to a 300 billion dollar a year point. That’s why it’s so significant. The people who seized power, November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza, are still in power and are still distorting the quality of the American constitutional structure and are still destroying the quality of life in this society. That’s why it’s so important. Additionally, some FBI files on Oswald from 1959-1960 remain classified, and could give us a better understanding of what the CIA didn’t want to relay to its Mexico station.

Democracy means you can believe anything. But if you purport to know this government is illegitimate because it is really controlled by the military industrial intelligence complex, and you act accordingly then the media will deal with you and then you’ll feel the weight of American governmental power. Allen Dulles was involved in a clear crime and covering it up. When Harold Feldman wrote that article, “Oswald and the FBI,” that prompted a secret executive session of the Warren Commission, during the course of this executive session, someone makes mention that Marina Oswald was going to testify before the Commission that Oswald was a double agent. Allen Dulles said, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ Issac Don Levine, who was an old Czarist right-winger, came to the United States and had solid US intelligence connections. Dulles said, ‘Isaac Don Levine has been assigned by LIFE magazine to write an article about Marina.’ Incidentally he never wrote such an article. He was assigned—I’m sure by American Intelligence, not LIFE magazine—to Marina Oswald to keep her quiet. Dulles said of Levine: ‘I have known him. I will talk to him. She will not so testify.’ That’s suborning perjury. That’s a crime. So Allen Dulles was clearly a criminal. The leading candidate for the killing of Kennedy always was the CIA. None other. Preserving democracy by destroying democracy was important. Preserving Vietnam by destroying My Lai and its people. This is the reasoning of the Military-Industrial Complex. This is the reasoning of these people of enormous power, enormous arrogance and murderous in their instincts.

The power of intelligence agencies increases in direct proportion to the degree of sickness of a nation. A healthy and united people can localize the cancer of a power-usurping intelligence agency and eventually extirpate its malignant cells from the nation’s political life. Therefore, the intelligence apparatus which killed Kennedy has a need to keep our society in turmoil. It has — in order to maintain its power — to generate a high degree of chaos. Chaos is required to make a people willing to accept such strong medicine as is administered by the secret police in order to restore order and to stabilize a disintegrating society. It takes an acutely sick society to be able to accept as palatable the terrible cure — totalitarianism. Source: ratical.org

"Ah come on, you know I don't deserve it." That was John F. Kennedy Jr.'s answer for why he refused an honorary degree from Maryland's Washington College just two months before his untimely death. That took grace, humility and a sense of perspective, three qualities that exist in short supply. Even Paul Bloustein, JFK Jr's plumber down the street, said that the man wanted to live his life simply. After his untimely death, John Jr went from being the affable son of a fallen president, a hard working district attorney and the editor of a political magazine to a secular savior. JFK Jr. was looking for a new house in New Canaan, Connecticut. He wanted to make his wife Carolyn happy. Perhaps because a privileged brain, charm, a sense of humor and good looks are insufficient explanations, dozens of commentators attributed the source of John Kennedy Jr's appeal to his lack of cynicism. "In many ways, JFK Jr. was on the threshold of a new chapter in his life. George just had been a stepping stone to public office," Michael Beschloss wrote in The Wallstreet Journal: "I think there has been this sort of unspoken assumption that John Kennedy Jr. at one point in his life might have run for president. And if he won, it would be a restoration of the Kennedy era." It should be no surprise that the press has used this tragedy to make John F. Kennedy Jr. "the blank slate for other people's dreams," were the words of NBC's Keith Morrison. JFK Jr was unpretentious, decent, socially aware and a dozen other good qualities. JFK Jr. sought none of his fame yet managed to live gracefully in spite of what must have been an incredible burden. He possessed a quality of character that few could maintain under such a magnifying glass, including his own father. 

John Jr never got caught in any disgraceful scandals, despite being under a magnifying glass his whole life. He didn't take an easy route (Jackie had discouraged his actor career), he persevered and got a law degree and spent 6 years in public service. He was very philanthropic and volunteered with a number of non-profit organizations, along with sitting on the boards of numerous family foundations. Senator Ted Kennedy said in the funeral that John Jr. had "found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette. His beautiful young wife -- the new pride of the Kennedys -- would cheer for John's team and delight her nieces and nephews with her somersaults. We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years." John Jr had the charisma, the humility and a brilliant mind. But maybe politics, despite being his fate, would had been rough on him, because good men don't usually triumph or survive in a political arena. Source: www.nationalreview.com

RoseMarie Terenzio (John Jr's assistant at George magazine): Every morning, I found John Jr. going through the stack of mail that I had covered in notes with various questions. The whole of Central Park and the Upper West Side skyline was his backdrop as I sat across from him and the office’s wall of windows. I started in on his day: an editorial meeting at noon; lunch immediately after at Limoncello with Jeff Sachs, his friend and the executive director of Reaching Up, the charity they cofounded; then a 3:00 p.m. meeting with Biz Mitchell, executive editor of George. The office had new furniture, big ashtrays, Diet Coke, and a sofa—all the makings of a good lounge. That’s where Carolyn hung out whenever she visited John’s office. She’d flop down on the couch, a whirlwind of handbags and stories, and spent hours leafing through magazines and smoking, so that by the time she left, George’s office looked like a nightclub. The two of us had quickly developed a friendly rapport in the time I had been working for John. We talked almost every day, first brief conversations when she called for John, then longer gossip sessions when she called for me. “Did John apologize?” Carolyn asked. “He came home last night a nervous wreck and I said to him that I couldn’t believe he showed all those other losers the magazine first and left you sitting outside like the redheaded stepchild. I told him, ‘Oh no. You need to go in and apologize to her in the morning.’” Carolyn came to my defense by making John feel bad about what he’d done, which was so typical of her. 

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures, she looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit, with an aura of mystery like Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Carolyn held her black patent-leather Prada purse behind her back with one hand, while absentmindedly twisting a lock of hair with the other. She wasn’t trying too hard. In fact, she wasn’t trying at all. From my point of view, John was happier when Carolyn was around him. I hadn't seen him so happy with his previous girlfriends. And Carolyn, like any smart woman, had a way of making John pay attention to sensible matters. She got him to differentiate between the people taking advantage of his generosity and those who needed a little extra attention from him. Once Carolyn treated me to Barneys, and when we were headed to the cashier with thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, I realized I couldn’t afford any of it. “You know what, Carolyn? I’m just going to take the shirt,” I said, trying not to be obvious while picking the least expensive thing in the pile. “I don’t need the rest of it.” “No,” she said firmly, and handed her credit card to the salesperson. “We’re going to take all of it.” Carolyn understood how lucky she was to be able to afford beautiful clothes, and she wanted to share the wealth with those she cared about. I loved the clothes and her generosity, even if I was uncomfortable with the extravagance of the gesture. 

Sometimes things could get really heated between John & Carolyn; for example, he would go crazy when she was on the phone all day while he was trying to get through, getting busy signal after busy signal since they didn’t have call waiting; or it upset him when Carolyn, a big-sister type to her friends, would spend an entire weekend dealing with someone else’s problems, which took her attention away from John. But no matter the issue, John and Carolyn always defused the situation with a joke. They never took anything so seriously that they couldn’t laugh at themselves. That, combined with the respect Carolyn had for John (and viceversa), took their relationship from dating casually to seeing each other every week at night to living together within a year. Carolyn was also worried that marriage would change their dynamic. She understood that the formality meant something, especially to John and his lifestyle; he was pretty old-fashioned indeed. As John’s girlfriend, she could skip a benefit or advertiser dinner without her absence being considered an insult. Once she was his wife, everything would have to be more carefully considered and planned. —"Fairytale Interrupted" (2011) by RoseMarie Terenzio

RIP Vincent Salandria

Vincent J. Salandria (1928 – 2020) was one of the first Warren Commission critics, and a persistent researcher of President John F. Kennedy's causes of assassination. Vincent J. Salandria has died at his home in Philadelphia, PA. He was 92 years old. “Vince Salandria is the greatest teacher we have on JFK. His False Mystery is our classic foundation for understanding President Kennedy’s assassination by his national security state for choosing peace. Read it and learn.” —Jim Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable. A fierce and formidable critic of the U. S. government’s version of the events surrounding the president’s murder, Salandria is rightfully considered one of the first and most influential citizen activists who sought to challenge the official version of events. Salandria was born in Philadelphia in 1926. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1951 he became a lawyer. A pacifist, Salandria had a long record of campaigning for civil rights. Member of the American Civil Liberties Union, in 1964 Salandria published an article in the Legal Intelligencer where he argued that the wounds of President John Kennedy suggested he had not been killed by a lone gunman. Salandria argued that Kennedy had been assassinated by "the national security state" because he was trying to bring an end to the Cold War. Salandria also rejected the idea that the assassination was organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Mafia, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro or Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1975 Salandria told Gaeton Fonzi: "I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one - not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless." Source: spartacus-educational.com

In Retrospect: The Vietnam War, JFK

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing everything with logic." -Albert Camus

540,000 American combat troops arrived to Vietnam by 1968. There were no combat troops in Vietnam the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Vietnam was a Rubicon that Kennedy never showed any signs of crossing. As the advisors who were noted, LBJ’s tone and attitude were much more militaristic, compromising and controlling than John Kennedy’s. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect) LBJ said, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.” Kennedy had appointed his Defense Secretary to supervise the withdrawal plan until its completion in 1965. Johnson not only ignored NSAM 263, he actually increased the advisors there to over 20,000. There is another manipulative statement Johnson made to McNamara that is probably the most revealing of all. He said, “How the hell does McNamara think he can—when he’s losing a war—he can pull men out of there?” It shows that Johnson was reading the Pentagon’s back channel reports about the true state of the war: namely Saigon was losing. Secondly, it shows that Johnson thought that Vietnam figured among America’s vital interests and it had to be defended at all costs. Because if we lost there, it would embolden the international communist conspiracy. This illustrates the difference between JFK and LBJ. 

Johnson was a classic Cold Warrior who completely bought into the Domino Theory. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told his biographer, that was not the case with John Kennedy. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 230-32) By the end of 1965, Johnson had committed over 175,000 American ground troops into theater. Ken O’Donnell later wrote a book with Dave Powers where he specifically stated that Johnson had broken with Kennedy’s policy on Vietnam. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford took office. The Warren Commission cover-up veteran brought with him two young conservative firebrands: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Those two did not care for Kissinger’s foreign policy. They actually considered him too moderate. Thus began the neoconservative movement. Which eventually took over Washington, including the Public Broadcasting System. Source: kennedysandking.com

Jim DiEugenio: Robert Loomis was a former top editor at Random House who was known for sanctioning books that specialized in concealing true facts about the assassinations of the 60's: in 1993 he sponsored Gerald Posner's infamous Case Closed; in 1970 it was Robert Houghton's book on the RFK case, Special Unit Senator; and then again, he helped publish Posner's 1998 book Killing the Dream. Not only did Loomis help get these spurious books published, he got them out at timely moments in history. The Houghton book was published right after the trial of Sirhan Sirhan. The John F. Kennedy book was out at the 30th anniversary of his death. The King book was also published at the 30th anniversary, in the midst of a swirling controversy. Loomis was also the editor of James Phelan's 1982 book The casebook of an investigative reporter, which featured a derogatory chapter on Jim Garrison. Before Phelan ever got to New Orleans for Clay Shaw's preliminary hearing, he had already done work for government agencies." (p. 244,  Destiny Betrayed). Albert Rossi's 2013 review of Destiny Betrayed: "DiEugenio shows the deliberate theft of JFK's terms of US foreign policy and how the unravelling of five decades has "betrayed" the character of John Kennedy."

That journalistic duo, Phelan and Aynesworth, were both on the scene: Phelan as a witness for the defense and Aynesworth to help Shaw's attorneys. Phelan's job was to put the spin on each day's testimony for the residing press, thereby controlling the entire national media reportage on the Shaw trial. He would invite all the reporters over to his rented house. On the day the Zapruder film, depicting Kennedy's body being violently knocked back, Phelan really shook up the press. It appeared Jim Garrison was right, that it had been a conspiracy. But then Phelan pulled a proverbial rabbit out of his hat. He began to outline the dynamics of the socalled 'jet-effect' explanation for the action on the film. That is, if Oswald was firing from behind Kennedy, why does Kennedy's body recoil with tremendous force to the rear of the car? This is how determined Phelan was to keep a lid on what came out of the trial. One can only assume where the reporter got his quick course in physics to dream up such a theory in a matter of hours.

The Kennedys were different, and that's why they were killed. Those who conspired to do so recognized that assassinating their characters would be a crucial part of the ongoing cover-up. I think they were fighting evil forces, and I will always consider them heroes. I'm usually very cynical about politics, and there are very few politicians I have admired during my lifetime. In comparison to their contemporaries, the Kennedys were about as honest as political figures can be. They actually did try to work for the greater good, and they were murdered because of it. If there are such things as "good guys," then John and Robert Kennedy fall into that category. In 1978, according to John Malcolm Blair’s definitive study The Control of Oil, the Rockefeller family had controlling interest in four oil companies of the top eight in the world. They were also in control of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the biggest in the nation then and the largest today. 

They also owned the single most expensive piece of real estate in the country, Rockefeller Center in New York City. Among the list of private companies they own are IBM and Eastern Airlines. As Mort Sahl relates, before the 1960 election, he liked to say that Kennedy was the scion of a multimillionaire. Kennedy cornered him once on this topic and asked him point blank how much he thought his family was worth. Sahl replied, “Near two hundred million.” Kennedy then asked him how much he thought the Rockefellers were worth. Sahl said he had no idea. Kennedy replied sharply, “Try about four billion. Now that’s money, Mort.” The Rockefellers minions were John J. McCloy, Allen Dulles, with close ties to the Texas oil men who, along with the CIA, probably arranged the JFK assassination. If General Ed Lansdale was involved, then Allen Dulles very likely was (look at Dulles outrageous behavior on the Warren Commission farce), and if Allen Dulles was then Nelson Rockefeller very likely was. And if Nelson Rockefeller was involved in the JFK assassination, then I think it is very likely that Henry Kissinger knew exactly what was happening. Kissinger went to Harvard with McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's NSC advisor who acted extremely suspiciously in promoting the "lone nutter" fantasy within hours of JFK's murder, not a reasonable thing to do base on the overwhelming real time evidence of multiple shots and shooters (plural). McGeorge Bundy was the secretary of the CFR at the same time future CIA head Allen Dulles was the president of the CFR. The CFR was heavily influenced, almost controlled by the Rockefellers. It's possible the Rockefellers used the CIA/military to kill JFK. Then Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford and John McCloy covered it up on the Warren Commission farce.

About Mimi Alford's story, it is clear that Robert Dallek's conclusion that Alford had an affair with President Kennedy is not borne out by what Barbara Gamarekian actually said in her oral interview archived in the JFK Library.  Yet it is remarkable how many journalists cited Dallek in their articles as if this story was true. It speaks to the lazy state of journalism in today's internet world and it speaks poorly of Dallek that he would write what he did. What Gamarekian said in 1964? Here are a few statements she made in that interview: "It could have been one of the special assistants who was interested in Mimi and flew her down to Nassau. I don't know if JFK wasn‘t implicated in it. I like to think that as far as the President was concerned, he indulged in this all sort of vicariously and it was fun to have pretty girls around." Even someone like Edward Jay Epstein could figure it out. A couple of excerpts from his 1997 article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times: "The conclusions Hersh drew about a sexual relationship between JFK and Marilyn Monroe had no basis except for unsubstantiated celebrity rumors. Hersh's other discoveries all involve recovering snatches of lost memories from distant or defective witnesses, a questionable technique of reporting that he pushes to the limit of credibility. About Robert Kennedy and Marilyn, Hersh must have invented these facts. Such license may serve to expand the universe of creative journalism, but it unfortunately does not produce credible history. When his pretensions fade away on scrutiny, this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."  Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

John Kennedy Jr. signed his will on December 19, 1997, some 15 months after his marriage to Carolyn Bessette, who died with him in the tragic plane crash on July 16, 1999. JFK Jr's will had the heading: "I name my cousin Anthony Radziwill as executor of my will; and if for any reason, he fails to qualify in that capacity, I name my cousin Timothy Shriver as my executor in his place. I give all my tangible personal property, wherever it is located, to my wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy." In the event his wife didn't outlive him, his will provided that his belongings would go to their children, if they had any. If not, he directed that all the property go to Caroline Kennedy's children. Christopher Andersen, author of The Day John Died (2000) refuted reports of discord between John Kennedy Jr and his wife Carolyn Bessette. "All this talk about them headed for a divorce was baloney," he says. "John Jr was an astoundingly moral and ethical person and he wanted this marriage to work." Andersen found no evidence to support rumors that Bessette abused cocaine. "I've talked to people who knew that Carolyn was taking antidepressants, but there was no indication of drug abuse. It's awful that she continues to be defamed."

Andersen says another misconception about John Kennedy Jr, founding editor of George magazine, was his intellectual prowess: "John Jr had a tremendous wit and native intelligence, and above all, he was a really nice guy." "I'm a warts-and-all writer," Anderson reckons, "and I couldn't really find any warts in John's life. He was loved by everybody." JFK Jr's godmother, Martha Bartlett, called Carolyn's ex Michael Bergin's book The Other Man "Pure fiction and hogwash. In my day, we would call this Bergin character a cad, especially since John and Carolyn are no longer around to defend themselves." Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's cousin John H. Davis also weighed in: "I'm horrified by this book," Davis said. "It's really horrible these things are being said, and they're not true." Likewise, Painting Horses: A Memoir by Sybil Hill was discontinued (out of print) in 2016 due to its dubious veracity. Source: www.usatoday.com

The Devil All the Time, The Unmaking of America

Netflix has a new psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson that is set to hit the screen on September 16. The Devil All the Time features the Spider-Man: Homecoming actor in the role of Arvin Russell, a young man forced to fight the sinister characters that threaten him and his loved ones in a Midwestern Gothic tale that takes place over the course of two decades. The official premise alludes to the ominous tale that was adapted for the screen from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name. “In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters — an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — converge around young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. Spanning the time between World War II and the Vietnam war, director Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time renders a seductive and horrific landscape that pits the just against the corrupted,” the official Netflix description reads.  

Much like his previous credits would suggest, director Antonio Campos is not crafting something breezy, with the trailer alone filling you with a sense of dread as Arvin Russell's tortured soul battles for some sense of justice. "It was a hard book to adapt also because there was so much that we loved," Campos said of the project earlier this month whilst discussing adapting Pollock's novel with brother and co-writer Paulo Campos. "I'm a big fan of southern gothic and noir and this was a perfect marriage of the two. Sometimes you might be adapting a piece and you think like, Well, there is a seed of a good idea here and I'll just throw everything away and start from scratch. In this case it was like, we love everything!" The Devil All the Time is scheduled to be released onto Netflix on September 16. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

How the ‘Useful Idiots’ of Liberal New York Fueled Income Inequality: Kurt Andersen, founder of Spy magazine and the author of “Evil Geniuses,” on how affluent lefties slept through the escalating inequality crisis. In his new best-selling book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,’’ the author and cultural critic Kurt Andersen performs a deep excavation of the country’s inequality crisis. He finds the roots not only in the balance-tilting schemes of Wall Street and the champions of right-wing political economics but also in the obliviousness of the liberal professional class. Kurt Andersen cops to his own part in the profound social reordering that has taken place since the 1980s. Anderson: Wall Street is the problem here. You’ve got all this money sloshing around — backing restaurants, theater, everything. Among my cohort — Gen Xers in New York — there was a great premium placed on irony and detachment over earnest engagement with pretty much anything. As soon as we turn the clock back on economic inequality and insecurity and immobility and de-rig the system and reduce Wall Street power, as soon we go back and replace market values as the supreme values in America, I’ll stop. Until that happens I'll follow the critique of a system that disadvantages almost everyone. Source: www.nytimes.com

Limerence, JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette

Limerence is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to have one's feelings reciprocated. The concept of limerence "provides a particular carving up of the semantic domain of love", and represents an attempt at a scientific study of the nature of love. Limerence is considered as a cognitive and emotional state of being emotionally attached to or even obsessed with another person, and is characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings—a near-obsessive form of romantic love. For Dorothy Tennov, "sexual attraction is an essential component of limerence... the limerent is a potential sex partner". Willmott and Bentley define limerence as an acute, unexpected, obsessive attachment to one person. Limerence is characterised by internal experiences such as ruminative thinking, anxiety, fixation, and the disintegration of the self, and found in their case studies that these themes find relation to unresolved past life experiences and attempts at self-actualization. Limerence is sometimes also interpreted as infatuation, or what is colloquially known as a "crush". Tennov notes how "limerent bonds are characterized by 'entropy' crystallization as described by Stendhal in his treatise On Love, where a new love infatuation perceptually begins to transform and attractive characteristics are exaggerated and unattractive characteristics are given little or no attention". Limerence is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated. Limerence can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often dismissed as a construct of romantic fiction. Source: www.amazon.com

John F. Kennedy Jr.’s last days prior to his final flight were fraught with difficulty. His most pressing dilemma was the financial future of George, the political magazine he had cofounded with Michael Berman in September 1995. After a promising beginning, based primarily on JFK Jr.’s undeniable charisma, the periodical suffered considerable setbacks both in circulation and advertising revenues. Since its inception, it had gone some $30 million in the red and was losing more than $1 million per month in April-June 1999. Hachette Filipacchi, the French media consortium, had begun to lose faith in George’s ability to survive. Starting in early June 1999, Jack Kliger, Hachette’s newly appointed CEO, successor to David Pecker, had been conducting weekly meetings with John to determine George’s future.

John had collaborated with the Robin Hood Foundation since 1991, a fund-raising organization that sponsored projects in low-income New York neighborhoods. Before founding George, John Jr. had worked in the DA office in New York. One night, after winning a case, he went to dinner with Oleg Cassini, Jackie’s White House fashion designer. “I had a great deal of admiration for John,” said Cassini. “Even people who disliked the Kennedys liked John. He talked about his work in the DA’s office. What he enjoyed most about it was the marvelous assembly of characters he encountered—The interplay of conversations he heard reminded him of the theater. ‘Everyone in the office is overwhelmed,’ he complained. ‘A sense of humor is the only way you can survive.’”

Cassini asked John if he had ever wondered about his father’s assassination. “I asked him if he thought there had been a conspiracy. ‘Based on the books I’ve read,’ he responded, ‘I think it’s more than likely that Oswald was not the guilty party. But my family is extremely self-protective. There are certain details they probably don’t want to know. The same applies to my uncle Bobby’s assassination.’” In the early fall of 1990, while shooting in Belem (Brazil) At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Daryl Hannah fell ill with a mysterious virus. She was taken to a nearby medical clinic, where she spent the next week recuperating from a dangerously high fever. When he heard about her misfortune, John—a true romantic—ordered dozens and dozens of long-stemmed red roses to be delivered to her bedside at the clinic. Jack Donahue, a New York City cabdriver, never forgot the time he drove the couple from TriBeCa to Grand Central. “They were both dressed in grungy clothing topped by baseball caps,” he said. “They looked like they were on food stamps. They argued the entire trip. It had something to do with Daryl not wanting to accompany John to a political fund-raiser of some sort. By the time we reached Grand Central, he felt lousy about it and he gave me a big tip.”

“Jackie didn’t like Hollywood actresses,” said George Plimpton. “It may have had something to do with Jack Kennedy’s lifelong attraction to film stars. I remember Jackie calling me one day and saying, ‘Did you see that photograph of Daryl Hannah in The New York Times?’ They’d run an advertisement for some film she’d just made, and Daryl appeared in the ad attired in a rather suggestive outfit.' I tried to explain to Jackie that Daryl was simply playing a role—it had nothing to do with her true persona. ‘Oh, really?’ said Jackie. ‘Well, while she’s seeing John here in New York, she’s still living with that rocker in California.’” Richard Wiese (a friend from Brown University): “I introduced John to a Sports Illustrated model named Ashley Richardson. She looked a bit like Daryl Hannah: tall, pretty, and blonde. They dated for a while. It was clear by then that John and Daryl weren’t going to make it.” As early as the fall of 1989, it must have become clear to him that his relationship with Daryl, as much as he cared for her, would not evolve into a permanent situation. Although he still considered her his “full-time” girlfriend, he was spotted dating actress Molly Ringwald, John Hughes' muse. John Jr. had a crush on her after watching The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, although they seemed to connect mostly on a friendly level.  

“John and his mother had their differences, particularly in the summer of 1993 when he stepped down from his position with the DA’s office. She was disappointed,” George Plimpton remembers. “She’d just seen a picture of John and Daryl Hannah in one of the tabloids down the street together. He had on a baseball cap turned backward. ‘You look like an overgrown frat boy,’ she told him, ‘and Daryl looks like an unmade bed.’ John walked out on his mother and slammed the door in her face.” Richard Wiese, who happened to be with him at the time, recalled that they’d been talking about Marilyn Monroe. “John had just seen Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn, and he was extolling her beauty and sexiness. He said something like, ‘She’s some kind of babe,’ although he refused to admit his father had an affair with Marilyn."

 “John was a regular guy,” said Jason Sachs, a TriBeCa picture framer who first encountered John at the Square Diner on Leonard Street. “The first time we met he was eating breakfast and reading the New York Post. We began talking about the New York Yankees. He was an easy conversationalist. We remained friendly. It didn’t matter who you were—he was always cordial. He’d stop you on the street and ask how you were doing. I had a dog, a mixed breed, and he loved to play with it. I once bumped into him in a local hardware store. He’d bought a sponge mop and a broom, and he’d taken out his credit card to pay. The store clerk looked at the card and then looked at JFK Jr. ‘Aren’t you the son of President Kennedy?’ he inquired. John hesitated a moment, then smiled. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he retorted. It was a cute response, particularly as he’d worked in the DA’s office.”

During the late summer of 1993, JFK Jr. first met his future wife, Carolyn Bessette. She was working in the NY public relations department at Calvin Klein after having been recruited by Susan Sokol, a Calvin Klein executive. John phoned Carolyn to ask her for a date. They went out a few times before John invited her to spend a weekend at Sea Song, a Long Island beach house. “John and Carolyn were very much in love,” remarked George Plimpton. “Still, as with most marriages, they had their issues. Their fundamental point of difference involved children. Carolyn didn’t want to raise a family in New York, but she also didn’t want to move permanently to Red Gate Farm. Jackie’s house was too large and impersonal. Consequently, she and John spent nearly every weekend that summer on Cape Cod looking at prospective properties.” Chris Hudson, a friend of Boston University, remembered Carolyn regaling him with drawn-out tales of her “low-end, trailer trash Staten Island relatives. Concomitantly, Carolyn had this almost aristocratic quality to her. It was the combination of these contrasts that made her so special.” Playboy purportedly offered Carolyn (when she became Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr.) $1 million to pose semi-nude; unlike Daryl Hannah, she turned the proposal. 

Publicist R. Couri Hay: “Carolyn Bessette brought a sense of drama to their relationship,” said Hay. “John loved drama. He was like a Greek mythological hero whose life consisted of euphoric highs and tragic lows. John was headed for the public arena—the Senate and then the presidency. Carolyn had a near breakdown just living in TriBeCa. How could she have handled being a politician’s wife, or residing in the White House? She was attractive and chic, but also strange and erratic.” Chris Overbeck presented a balanced appraisal of John and Carolyn’s relationship. An investment banker, John’s friend from Brown had married and moved to Greenwich, Carolyn’s hometown. According to Overbeck, John “was engaged by intelligence and mystery in a woman, rather than pure good looks. Interesting and complex women intrigued him. Carolyn was both very complex and attractive. She had a fierce side, yet she was feminine. John was very masculine. He liked to take charge, although he was sweet and affectionate.”

“John told me: ‘Carolyn’s my absolute best friend in the world. I’ve never had a better relationship with anybody. That stuff in the press is total bullshit.’ I’ll never forget that he said ‘absolute best friend in the world.’ I asked him again, ‘So it’s all bullshit?’ And John replied, ‘I’d tell you if it weren’t. I trust you.’ He admitted that she was difficult. She was demanding. But that only kept him on his toes.” Richard Wiese frequently played quarterback with John. “After the games, we’d go to this low-key coffee shop on Madison Avenue, and we’d order burgers and milk shakes. We’d sit around and chat, usually about ten of us. It was like being back in college. One thing that struck me about John was that he never spoke ill of anyone, ever. In many respects, he was naive.” JFK Jr.’s acquaintance Richard duPont recalled bumping into John at a TriBeCa bistro called Walker’s. “John began questioning me about how I’d recovered from my alcohol and cocaine addiction,” said duPont. “He wanted to know about certain rehab clinics, such as Sierra Tucson and the Betty Ford Center. How did it work? What did they do? I didn’t attach much importance to the conversation at the time, but afterward it occurred to me he might have been making inquiries because of Carolyn, although he never mentioned her.”

Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio: “I knew Carolyn from when she worked for Calvin Klein, and I always liked her. She was a riot and John adored her. Did they bicker from time to time? Well, I’ve been bickering with my wife for forty years but I’d be finished without her. I know John felt the same way about his.” Once John led Florio into his library and took out a family photo album. “My God,” said Florio. “Every once in a while I have to remind myself that you’re the son of an American president. My grandfather came to this country with five bucks in his pocket and a bag of carpentry tools.” With a big smile, John Jr. said, “That’s why you’re the CEO of a major company now. It’s because your grandfather got on a boat and said, ‘I’m going to find a better place.'”

Sasha Chermayeff (John's friend from Phillips Academy in Andover, MA): "John was seriously committed to the fact that he had fallen madly in love with Carolyn." John Perry Barlow (mentor of Aaron Swartz and JFK Jr): "John loved Carolyn desperately. He really worshipped the ground she walked on." Suzanne Ruddick, a friend of Carolyn’s from Greenwich, visited the couple in New York in early October 1997. “Carolyn and I went shopping in the Prada department at Barneys, and she bought a black gabardine jacket,” remarked Ruddick. “She said John was very generous and supportive. He didn’t mind being written up in the gossip columns, but it irked him when they picked on her. ‘John’s nicer than I am,’ Carolyn said. I discerned absolutely no friction or tension between them. Quite the opposite, whenever I looked, they were either nuzzling or kissing. One evening he gave her a deep blue cashmere sweater as a present with a note that read, ‘To match those matchless eyes.’ —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone, JFK Jr

Sharon Stone has just received a hefty advance of at least $2 million for her book The Beauty of Living Twice and is due in bookstores next March, a literary agent familiar with the deal disclosed to DailyMail.com. New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf secured the deal, as the agent explained: ‘There was major interest from all the big publishers. This will be the blockbuster Hollywood tale of the decade if not the century. ‘Publishers for years have been pleading with Sharon to sit down and write her story, and now at the age of 62, she’s decided to go full steam ahead. It’ll definitely be a shocker.’ Another publishing source close to the project revealed Stone’s book will be a kiss and tell on steroids. Men and women in her star-studded life should already be ducking and covering!’ While the 62-year-old star is staying tight-lipped about the contents of the book, her alleged romantic affair with JFK Jr was a highly publicized episode of Stone's life in the early 1990s. Stone was engaged to producer William J. MacDonald in 1994 and she dated, amongst a long list of celebrities, Eric Clapton, Jack Nicholson, David Duchovny, Christian Slater and Dwight Yoakam. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Reports of Sharon Stone's affair with JFK Jr were so rampant in the media in fact, that it almost led to the breakup of the most eligible bachelor at the time and his then future-bride, Carolyn Bessette. A CNN article about JFK Jr and Bessette's private wedding, read, "The road to the altar was rocky. There were reports that Kennedy proposed after Bessette became enraged over tabloid stories saying he had had an affair with actress Sharon Stone. In February 1996, Kennedy and Bessette were videotaped in a very public lovers' quarrel in the middle of Central Park. At one point, Kennedy grabbed the engagement ring off her finger and sat down on a curb to cry." Nevertheless, JFK Jr did end up marrying Bessette, laying to rest all the gossip. In September 1996, he declared at his rehearsal dinner at Cumberland Island, "I am the happiest man alive." Since their affair was never confirmed, it is difficult to say for sure if their "relationship" was all a baseless rumor or there was some truth to it. An exchange between the two observed by a Washington Post reporter Art Buchwald in 1995 — around the time she was to start shooting for the movie 'Diabolique'. 

Buchwald was accompanying the actress on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, and they were strolling near the lighthouse when JFK Jr made an entrance on his bicycle. His recalled the meeting in an op-ed later on, which read: "He stopped to say hello, but despite what the papers said, he did not kiss Sharon's hand. Sharon gripped my arm tightly and said, 'Is he for real?' 'Of course, he is,' I told her. ' Then Sharon said: 'Why does he turn me on, and you don't?' 'Because,' I told her, 'My beauty is real. His is an invention of George magazine.'" Buchwald remembered having small talk with the duo, mostly talking about how their stay had been on the Island. Then came the journalist's all-important observation on the alleged couple: "I observed no chemistry between John and Sharon." The reporter also implied that apart from the complete lack of the flirting vibes, there was also the possibility that the so-called affair was all in Stone's head. "She whispered, 'If he offers to show me the lighthouse, think of a good excuse why I can't go.' I assured her that John was not that type of guy. Then John announced, 'Well, I've got miles to pedal and promises to keep. Goodbye, everybody, and may the wind always be at your back.' After he left, I asked Sharon, 'Did the earth move for you?' She said, 'It takes more than a man on a bicycle for the earth to move for me,'" Buchwald wrote. Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Chris Cuomo on JFK Jr: "One day, we were at Martha's Vineyard, and he decided that we would swim from the shore to someone's boat. We swam several hundred yards, which completely wrecked me, but he wasn't even winded. On the way out, he asked me who I was dating, and I started complaining how hard it was to find anyone special. It was right before John married Carolyn, and he told me not to worry. He said that he played the field for a long time and worried about never meeting anyone, and then one day he met Carolyn and from the first minute he knew that she'd be the one. He said it all comes down to keeping yourself open: that you meet all these people who don't work out for different reasons, and then one day, someone pops up and really grabs your heart, and suddenly what happens to them is as important as what happens to you."

Billy Noonan: Carolyn quit her job soon as she moved with John and got engaged. He then opened a bank account in her name and got her several credit cards. Her spending was legendary and John always picked up the tabs. When the bills from Tiffany's, Sachs, and Bergdorfs would come with huge amounts; John would laugh it off and say 'at least Carolyn found a hobby.' Carolyn remarked on how "normal" John's friends were compared to the druggie fashion crowd she hung around. I think Jackie came to meet Carolyn once, but she was very ill by then. It seems Carolyn's character left a good impression on Jackie, since she commented favorably towards Carolyn in contrast with Daryl Hannah. John didn't have a mean bone in his body, and conflict was something he did his best to avoid, which is why he sometimes tolerated Carolyn's rages. On the other hand, he was no picnic to live with, because he could be brooding, obsessive, and controlling.

John could get very angry in certain occasions when he felt misunderstood. I know there were two fistfights between John and Michael Berman (the editor of George) because Carolyn wanted to contribute to the magazine, whilst Michael said she needed to stay out of it. And John's last fight with Michael was so bad security had to break it up. John trusted Carolyn's opinions and I think she influenced him for the better. Once John told me: 'Some nights I stand by her bedside and stare at Carolyn as she sleeps. All I keep thinking is how much I want to lie beside her.'  —"After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family" (2012) by J. Randy Taraborrelli