JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette, Breakfast at Tiffany's

John Kennedy Jr. often spoke about the stresses endured by any woman photographed with him. These pressures were embodied by his wife; photos of Bessette, looking haunted and hunted, clutching her Calvin Klein coat protectively around her while the press pack chased behind, became as much a staple of the 90s New York tabloids as gossip about who Jerry Seinfeld was dating. Kennedy had found, somehow, a woman as beautiful as he was, who managed to make even the dreariest of clothes – beige skirts, small sunglasses – look absurdly elegant. Yet she hated the attention that came with being a Kennedy, and who could blame her? On 16 July 1999, they lived out the most Kennedy destiny of all, dying young when he crashed the plane they were flying in, with Bessette’s sister Lauren, en route to a cousin’s wedding. I watched the news coverage the next day, and the only positive thing anyone could say was, “Thank God his mother didn’t live to see this.” John Kennedy told USA Today in 1998: "The only person I've been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife. The second it was legal, she came up with me. Whenever we want to get away, we can just get in a plane and fly off."

Two years ago, Q Anon types were adamant that John Kennedy Jr. would emerge from hiding and be Donald Trump’s VP pick for the 2020 election. Spoiler: didn’t happen. But – and I swear this is the only time you’ll hear this phrase from me – Q Anon were on to something here. Kennedy and Trump are each other’s yin and yang, two sides to a very New York coin, blessed with absurd opportunities because of their families. The 2016 election will never make any sense to me, but maybe, I now think, my brain softened from a year of lockdown, it was always meant to be that a telegenic quasi-celebrity with a famous name would win the presidency that year. It’s just that we got the wrong one. I have a weakness for alternative histories that play on the idea of fixing a past wrong: Quentin Tarantino’s fantasy about saving Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; or Doctor Who showing Vincent van Gogh how beloved he would one day be. Preventing the Kennedy Sr assassination is the ultimate alt-history fantasy, because his murder has long been seen by many as a downward turning point in American history, a theory mined by Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63. The Kennedy family will, to Americans, always represent a golden promise that was never realised. And what else is there to do, when the present feels so much bleaker than the bright future you were promised in the past, but to sit on the sofa and think: what if, what if, what if? Source: www.theguardian.com

John F. Kennedy Jr., unlike PEOPLE’S previous selections as Sexiest Man of the Year—Mel Gibson, Mark Harmon and Harry Hamlin—isn’t a professional actor. He doesn’t make his living by being on public display. The folks around him argue that he is a private citizen, and his mother, Jacqueline Onassis, has gone to some lengths to keep the press away from her family. The nation has followed his life through his studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and on through Brown University, from which he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in history. When did we first notice his social conscience? You really don’t care about his work for his aunt Jean Kennedy Smith’s Very Special Arts program for people with learning disabilities, or that he’s considered a friendly, decent, remarkably down-to-earth guy who once followed a stranger down the street to return the five bucks the man had dropped? There were some “obnoxious types” in the Phi Psi fraternity house, an old frat brother says, “but John wasn’t one of them. At Brown he was very undercover, and he didn’t have any attitude.” He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a messy, book-filled apartment. He prefers to get around, even in winter, on his bike. He’s been an amateur actor since college, and when he goes for a hamburger at his favorite spot, Jackson Hole on Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, he sprawls at an outside table. 

It is not merely his looks—his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s striking body. (He’s 6’1″ 187 lbs.) It is that he has something that no film star, no athlete, can duplicate—the aura, the excitement that charges a room when he enters it, simply by virtue of being Kennedy. The energy, however, hasn’t inflated his ego. “I used to pay my rent to the 42nd Street Development Corporation, which was co-founded by Jackie Onassis,” says Manhattan restaurateur Jean-Claude Baker. “JFK Jr. was in the office once, wearing big Texas boots with his feet up on the desk. When he saw me, he stood up and said very politely, ‘Yes, can I help you?’ There is no arrogance in the guy.” Although privately he was nervous, his introduction of Senator Kennedy at the Democratic convention got a two-minute standing ovation. “I can’t remember a word of the speech,” says conservative Republican consultant Richard Viguerie, “but I do remember a good delivery. I think it was a plus for the Democrats and the boy. He is strikingly handsome.” During his summer job at the law firm (one of its founding partners was Ted Kennedy’s law school roommate), JFK Jr. did not, like some summer associates, turn down assignments. He worked, according to one attorney, on “anything he was given.”

As yet unlike his father and grandfather, who were legendary ladies’ men, JFK Jr. has long relationships with his girlfriends. His steady for the last two years has been another Brown alumna, Christina Haag, 27, daughter of a marketing executive. A graduate of the upper-crusty Brearley School in Manhattan, Christina has known Kennedy since they were both 15. She too is Catholic; like Kennedy, she loves to keep in shape. They’ve acted together, playing the young lovers in Brian Friel’s Winners at Manhattan’s Irish Arts Center in 1985. This summer, when Haag appeared in a one-act comedy, Sleeping with the Past, at Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater, she and JFK Jr. shared a house in Venice. “They bring out the best in each other,” says Robin Saex, the play’s director and one of Christina’s closest friends. He was also spotted a few times with Click model Audra Avizienis, 22. “We’ve been on a few dates, but I’m not seeing him,” says Avizienis. “I’m not a girlfriend. He has a girlfriend. Or have they broken up?” Did she find young Kennedy sexy? “Oh, yes,” she says. “He has this quiet sadness. There’s something pensive and sad about him.”  —Victoria Balfour for People magazine, first published on September 12, 1988.

John Kennedy Jr’s work with the underprivileged and disabled, his experience bridging the public and private sectors, his inquisitive mind, sense of obligation, and determination to avoid the obvious, a quick run for elective office, reveal a commendable sense of purpose. “He makes good decisions, not facile ones,” says a New York University School of Law pal named Stevelman. Friends say that now, though John rarely brings up his father, he is gracious when others do. Nevertheless, awkward moments do occur. “One time he was hanging out in somebody’s room,” recalls a fraternity brother, “and they were playing the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (which contains the lyric, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ / When after all / it was you and me”). Everyone realized, ‘Uh-oh.’ But at some point, he’d just walked out and then he walked back in again. He just avoided the situation.” Friends are careful with him. “It’s never come up and I wouldn’t bring it up,” says Stevelman. It’s not that he won’t want our votes eventually. He just doesn’t want them now, when all he would be is JFK II. But John F. Kennedy Jr. will always be America’s son, and that’s a hurdle he’ll face for the rest of his life. “I honestly think,” says one friend, “in 100 years, they’ll say that whatever he did, he succeeded not because he was John F. Kennedy Jr. but in spite of it.” —Michael Gross for New York Magazine, originally published in March 20, 1989 

A federal judge refused to send a legal battle over a “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” remake back to state court, despite pleas by attorneys for writer Truman Capote’s trust that they mistakenly alleged copyright infringement. Paramount Pictures has designs on producing a feature film or television series remake of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” the 1961 classic starring Audrey Hepburn, and has a screenplay ready for the reboot. The film was based on the novella of the same name, which Truman Capote wrote in 1958. After his death, domestic property rights to the novella transferred from Paramount to the Truman Capote Literary Trust, a charity Capote established before his death. In 1991, the charitable trust entered into a settlement with Paramount granting certain rights for an eventual remake of the classic film. The controversy in the current legal battle arises from the parties’ differing interpretations of the 1991 agreement. Paramount claims the agreement granted it full rights to the novella and allows the studio to produce a “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” remake at any time. The trust has received seven-figure offers for a television series remake of the novella, the lawsuit said, adding that Paramount executives are allegedly also hip to the idea and hope to pitch a series to a streaming platform. Source: www.courthousenews.com

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the tale of the romantic misadventures of two gold-diggers, Holly Golightly and her upstairs neighbor, Paul Varjak, both of whom are skating through their 20s by having sex with and taking money from older and richer people. Of course, they both maintain their self-respect by keeping a discreet distance between the sex-giving and money-taking, so that the quid pro quo is not too brazenly obvious. Capote said that Holly was an “American geisha.” Both Holly and Paul rationalize their choices by reference to a mission. Holly wants to buy land and horses and Paul is a writer who needs a patron to give him time to work on his great novel. But it is not working. Both show symptoms of social isolation. He’s got writer’s block. As Holly notes, he doesn’t even have a ribbon in his typewriter. Paul is the prouder and more serious of the two. Holly is top banana in the flake department. Which, of course, means that Paul suffers greatly at Holly’s hands when he falls in love with her. 

The basic plot of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is quite simple. Paul Varjak—played by George Peppard at the peak of his Nordic-preppy good looks—moves into an apartment on Manhattan’s upper east side and meets his ditzy downstairs neighbor. Holly Golightly is rootless, a drifter, a flake. She has an orange cat, but she hasn’t given him a name. Her favorite place in the world is Tiffany’s, the jewelers on Fifth Avenue. She declares to Paul that if she ever finds a place that makes her feel like Tiffany’s, she’ll put down roots and give the cat a name. Paul’s apartment isn’t exactly “him” either. It looks like an expensive European hotel room. It was decorated before his arrival by his patron, Mrs. Failenson, nicknamed “2E,” played by a radiant Patricia Neal. The movie creates the character of Paul from the novel’s unnamed narrator. 2E and her relationship with Paul are inventions of the screenwriter, which considerably deepens the character and his relationship with Holly, creating dramatic conflict through “irreconcilable similarities.” For Paul, gold-digging is a short-term strategy, to get his start in life, at which time he will settle down with a nice girl and take care of her. For Holly, however, gold-digging is a long-term strategy to find a husband, who will take care of her forever.

Holly is just not Lula Mae anymore. She has constructed a whole new identity for herself. She got rid of her Okie accent with French lessons, courtesy of a Hollywood producer, Berman, and she has a fabulous circle of rich male friends—whom she rates as “rats” and “super-rats”—competing for her attention. When she sees a heartbroken Doc off at the Greyhound Bus station, she tells him that she’s a “wild thing” and that one should never fall in love with wild things, because they will just break your heart. In truth, Holly is just a flake who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants and is afraid of real relationships and real commitments. Berman thinks Holly is a phony, but he debates whether she is a real phony or not—a real phony being someone who believes his own nonsense. The whole sequence moves from creepy, to comical, to corny, to deeply moving. That’s the magic of this film. Paul now knows her story but loves her all the more. He hopes that she will get a little more serious about life, and maybe about him. 

Paul enjoys taking care of Holly. It makes him feel strong and manly. Being taken care of by 2E is convenient but emasculating. Unsurprisingly, Holly proves to be the better muse than 2E. Awakening Paul’s manliness also awakens his creativity. Thus Paul is appalled when Holly declares that she is no longer going to play the field. She is going to set her sights on marrying Rusty Trawler, the ninth richest man in America under fifty, despite the fact that he is a tittering pig-faced manlet. Paul gives Holly a powerful talking to. He tells her that people really do belong to one another and that it is the only real chance we have of happiness. In today’s rabidly individualistic society, these are unfashionable sentiments, but deeply romantic and stirring ones. Paul actually reaches Holly. He actually changes her heart. She runs into the rain, searching for the cat, whom she finds, then Paul and Holly embrace, the prototype of a human family that may come to be. The end—a happy one, we hope. Unsurprisingly, modern arbiters of virtue don’t like Breakfast at Tiffany’s very much. It is obviously heteronormative, anti-feminist, and otherwise “problematic.” I highly recommend Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But what is most enchanting about this film can’t be captured in prose. It simply must be seen—for the beautiful people, the iconic fashions, and its portrayal of a glamorous, safe, overwhelmingly white New York City. It's a character study that even manages to have a “message”—and a wholesome one at that. It communicates the joys and follies of youth in America at its peak—an age of seemingly infinite potential—and the necessity of finally growing up and actually taking a stand. Source: unz.com

JFK: pillar of sanity, Jackie & Lee, Tipping Point

"JFK had a capacity for backing off and watching himself perform, and later commenting on what he’d seen and heard with a quick, half-sublimated sense of humor that often made him seem like a pillar of sanity in the thieving, swinish chaos of American politics. He seemed like the only man who knew what was happening, and although there was rarely any way to guess what he might decide to do about it, there was always the chance that he might find an opening to do something right. His killing has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at this time for the death of hope, but here it is. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time. From now until the 1964 elections every man with balls should be on the firing line. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. Fiction is dead. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag. My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done, if indeed, any publishing houses survive the Nazis scramble that is sure to come. How could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to that point. We now enter the era of President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. No more of that. -"Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967" (1997) by Hunter S. Thompson

Richard Nixon suffered a cerebrovascular accident on April 18, 1994, at his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, and was taken to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. After an initial favorable prognosis, Nixon slipped into a deep coma and died four days later. Jackie Kennedy was admitted twice at the New York Hospital-Cornell during the last months of her life. She was at the Stavros-Niarchos suite. The nurses remembered that Jackie, despite her deteriorated state, had a good laugh when they wheeled her up to the suite and she saw the big Stavros plaque on the door (The Stavros-Niarchos Greek family, the shipping clan who had been the greatest rivals of Aristotle Onassis, had made an important donation to the hospital and the Suite was named in their honor.) Jackie by then was suffering from gastric bleeds. One evening, the nurses wheeled her down to visit Richard Nixon, who had fallen into a coma. She mumbled then some words to Mr. Nixon, which he seemed to appreciate slightly. Jackie was released the next morning and—knowing she had just left a couple of weeks to live—she chose to stay at her apartment by arranging her assisted-death by a physician at home. When the President Kennedy had been killed, Richard Nixon had sent Jackie a telegram, assuring her: "I really admired your husband, Ms Kennedy. Despite the destiny lead us to become political enemies, I always admired him. I send your family my prayers." 

At the White House, Richard Nixon had reached out to Jackie Kennedy several times. "Can you imagine the gift you gave me?" Jackie wrote in a thank-you note to Richard and Pat Nixon, dated the day after the family visited the White House (February 3, 1971). Jackie wrote: "To return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood—with you both as guides—and with your daughters, such extraordinary young women." She added that the president and first lady had spoiled her kids Caroline and John Jr. "beyond belief" with a "superb dinner" that included a "precious bottle of Bordeaux." Source: www.nyp.org

As both sisters, Jackie and Lee Bouvier, came to define the parameters of modern celebrity culture, so they would experience its dark side in the ’70s. Jackie, widowed for a second time after Onassis’ death in 1975, moved back to New York and became a book editor at Doubleday. She was now dating Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born industrialist and diamond merchant, but she remained a subject of endless speculation and gossip fodder; the proto-paparazzi photographer Ron Galella became her unofficial stalker, snatching hundreds of off-duty pictures of her, before she won a restraining order against him. Lee had become embroiled in a libel case that Gore Vidal had brought against Capote, after the latter had accused Vidal of being thrown out of a 1961 White House function after putting his arm around Jackie and insulting her mother, adding that Lee herself was the source of the story. Her response was imperious —“They're just a couple of fags fighting; it’s just the most disgusting thing”—goading Capote to turn attack-dog, accusing Lee of jealousy towards her sister (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”), and eviscerating her break-up with photographer Peter Beard, and on-again-off-again engagement to San Francisco hotelier Newton Cope (“She said he was a nobody who was riding on her coattails”). 

In their latter years, the sisters maintained their lifelong commitment to discretion. Jackie died in 1994, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; her son, the ill-fated JFK Jr., announced that “she died surrounded by family and friends and the things she loved. She did it her own way, on her own terms.” Once Capote said of Gore Vidal: “I’m always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.” Vidal retorted: “Truman Capote made lying an art form—a minor art form.” The spat, legal and otherwise, springs from a 1975 Playgirl interview in which Capote charged that Vidal had been bounced from a 1961 White House party because of drunken and obnoxious behavior. Should it ever come to trial, the case could feature cameo court appearances by such eminent eyewitnesses as John Kenneth Galbraith, George Plimpton, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—and even Jackie Kennedy herself. Guests at the party deny that Vidal was forcibly ejected, though they confirm that he squabbled with Bobby Kennedy. Capote kept attacking Lee Radziwill: "Lee really thought she had Onassis nailed down. Lee pretended to have great contempt for Onassis and the marriage. She wasn't in love with him. But she liked all those tankers. I'm not sure that Lee's ever been in love with anybody. Of course, Lee had a crush on Jack Kennedy. Why wouldn't she? Lee was always saying, 'Why do they always write about the Kennedys? They're so dull.'" Capote also added, "Men to both Lee and Jackie are to be totally controlled, nothing but foot slaves. Lee and Jackie really do think they are royalty.'" And neither of them was going to suffer for money, according to Capote. 

"Lee owned a very valuable piece of land in Greece. I think she got it from Onassis. And she owns a lot of real estate in Long Island. She's the most extravagant girl I have ever met. No more than Jackie, though. They have the sense of the right to luxury." This whole experience with Radziwill made him think about friendship and what it meant. "Her conniving against me with Gore when I was the single most loyal friend she ever had, it's very hurtful to put it mildly," he said. When he heard that Radziwill had given a deposition to Vidal's lawyer saying she never told Capote the story that Vidal got thrown out of the White House, "She just said I was a liar, that's all. I called her to get an explanation. I talked to her secretary. She never called back." Capote says that he was Radziwill's No. 1 confidant until he went through "that long period when I was in and out of the hospital, I wasn't communicating with anybody. But of all my friends she never wrote me once to say she hoped I was getting well, or wished me luck with my problems. So far as I know there has never been any reason for this unbelievable conduct." Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Larry Hancock’s new book Tipping Point: The Conspiracy that Murdered President John Kennedy  (2021) is a concise summary of his many decades long investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. Those who want a taste of  Tipping Point before purchasing it, you can read excerpts at the Mary Ferrell website here: www.maryferrell.org/pages/Tipping_Point.html 

Hancock lays out a very believable alternative scenario, one that connects all of the main subjects to Cuba, and defines the essence of a covert intelligence operation, the means by which the conspirators achieved their goal, and got away with it. Tipping Point picks up where Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas leaves off, with the President’s head shattered by two almost simultaneous shots, one from the front and one from behind. While Thompson gives a micro analysis of the eyewitness reports, ballistics, medical evidence, and acoustics, fitting them all together without speculating who was behind the triggers, Hancock puts things in their Cuban context, lays out a chronology and gives names to those who are the most likely candidates for pulling off such an audacious triangulation of firepower. As with the subjects in his previous book Someone Would Have Talked, and as CIA official Rolf Mowatt-Larsen explained in his 2019 CAPA presentation in Dallas, the suspects are limited to those who had the capability to conduct such complex covert intelligence operations. James Angleton ran the CIA counter-intelligence office that kept particularly keen tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, counter-insurgency expert General Ed Lansdale, William Harvey director of the anti-Castro Cuban Task Force W, along with Rip Robertson, all of whom are associated with the CIA’s Miami station JMWAVE, where most of the intrigue stems from. Besides documenting most of the references to records released under the JFK Act, Hancock refers to the CIA crypt files that translates the codes into English. Besides the usual suspects, Larry brings some relatively new names into the fold – Carl Jenkins and John I.F. Harper, CIA trainers who prepared the Cuban Pathfinders for the Bay of Pigs and later Mongoose commando attacks against Cuba. And Gene Wheaton, Jenkins’ former housemate and proprietor of a CIA airline propriety company. Wheaton tried to blow the whistle on what he knew about renegade CIA operations but  then CIA director William Casey was in on it, and the Assassination Records Review Board didn’t pay him any attention. Narrowing down the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro to the few that resemble the Dealey Plaza operation, Larry focuses on one particular plot – the Pathfinder Plan. From CIA technicians at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) we learn that Pathfinder was a plan to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban commando snipers into Cuba and shoot Castro with high powered rifles as he rode by in an open jeep. Source: JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com

The Will to Believe, Dismantling "The Other Man" (JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette)

As the American philosopher William James argues in The Will to Believe (1897), there’s a human weakness to letting belief ride on emotional factors such as ‘lively conception’ and ‘instinctive liking.’ As the American philosopher Robert Pippin wrote in 1991: "To be modern is to ‘demand independence, a freedom from historical tradition and the power to rule one’s own beliefs’. In this way, modernity took up the energy of religious belief and produced substitutes such as Marxism-Leninism, social justice and celebrity worship. A study published in Computers in Human Behavior (Volume 116, March 2021) suggests that brief exposure to online misinformation can unknowingly alter a person’s behavior. The experiment found that reading a fake news article slightly altered participants’ unconscious behavior. Study author Zach Bastick says that these filtered environments risk creating a “distorted reality” whereby users are exposed to content that reinforces distorted views at the expense of alternate viewpoints. “These findings raise deep concerns for the future of society and politics,” Bastick warns. “Disinformation risks skewing individuals’ worldviews and deleteriously informing their behavior. Deliberately produced and targeted disinformation aimed at behavior modification amplifies these risks.” Belief is an option, a choice between a set of theories or construals of reality. Source: aeon.co

Carolyn Bessette was known by John Kennedy Jr's circle of friends as fond of cutting off people she didn't approve of. One of those people was Barbara Vaughn. She met John in 1989, and was friends with him until Carolyn banned her from entering her and John's apartment. Before that she got along fine with Carolyn, and even accompanied her and John on a trip to Honduras in November 1994. Barbara wouldn't tell exactly what she did to make Carolyn feel so negatively about her, but from what Steve Gillon knew, basically Barbara and John had an intimate relationship after the Daryl Hannah breakup in 1994, and John never mentioned it to Carolyn. “'John described receiving messages from distant contacts in his father’s administration and members of far-flung aristocratic families proposing introductions, which he gracefully sidestepped,'” John’s friend Barbara Vaughn told Steve Gillon. “John would be monogamous for long periods of time, but once he felt the relationship fizzling out he would search for a replacement before breaking up,” Gillon explained. Somehow, John had managed to juggle Daryl Hannah, Carolyn Bessette, Julie Baker and Barbara Vaughn together for some time. No small feat!

Barbara Vaughn took this photo of John at George's office. Barbara commented about his friendship with John: "Everyone has their own angle, perspective, and agenda in this arena. Mine is just to keep to myself and only share what I’m comfortable with. Steve Gillon said it well: “I protected John’s privacy during his lifetime, and now I want to preserve his legacy”. Carolyn knew me, knew John liked me and respected me, and I was one of John’s “Ivy League” pals. This is difficult for me to say, but I think I was a threat in her eyes. For my two cents, Carolyn was very warm and generous with me until the point where she felt uncomfortable, and I know exactly when, where, and why that happened, and I don’t fault her for her feelings." John had visited Mike Tyson in jail in March, 1999. Later Tyson mentioned in his biography "Undisputed Truth" (2013): "John was talking about other women and I got a sense he was going through a lot of shit with his wife. He told me 'When you get out of jail, give me a little time to handle some stuff with my wife. Then you and I have got to hang out'."

According to a friend of a roommate of Julie Baker, she and John were hanging out together in the last days before the plane crash: "When John died my good friend had to go stay with Julie, apparently JFK Jr was still dating her when he died, she was a wreck apparently." Julie revealed to Gillon that she regretted taking part in the ABC 2020 documentary "The Last Days of JFK Jr", because people were poking into her past, and questioning her. Also Gillon explained that Julie got Lyme disease in 2009, and lost her memory and had a hard time remembering her time with John at the Stanhope hotel. However, Julie was able to remember her first date with John in 1989 when she spoke to Town & Country magazine in 2019, but couldn't remember the last time she spent with John in 1999. Every time John got back from his monthly lunch with Julie, Carolyn would tell Rosemarie Terenzio to call her. John was also helping Julie pay her rent, since her modeling contract was over. In the late 90s she was a sales clerk at a Menswear store, Seize Sur Vingt. John used to support her buying from her over the other clerks, and would recommend her to his friends, but the suits she sold John didn't fit right. What most people don't know is that Julie Baker was engaged to volleyball player Patrick Boyle from 1993-1994. 

She broke off her engagement just one week before the wedding, and she was seen soon after kissing John in NYC, on September 4, 1994. Carolyn wasn't fond of John's ex-girlfriend Julie Baker. According to Rosemarie Terenzio: "In November 1997, Carolyn decided to invite Julie Baker over to the apartment for John's birthday. Julie of course accepted that invitation. At one point during the party, Julie went over and sat in John's lap, and 'got cozy'. Carolyn got angry and told her that was inappropriate. I don't know what happened after that, but Julie wasn't invited to John's birthday again." This didn't stop John from making sure that Rosemarie Terenzio scheduled monthly lunches with Julie Baker, who would also hang out at his George office. 

Julie visited John at his hotel room at the Stanhope on the Wednesday before he died. There is some information that hasn't been printed about this visit. The following day on Thursday, July 15, John and Gary Ginsburg went to see a Yankees game at around 7:30 pm, the game didn't finish until 10:30-11:00 pm. Anyway, John and Gary drove to the Stanhope hotel together after the game and when they arrived, Gary helped John grab his stuff up to his room. Gary said that Julie Baker was waiting for John in the hotel lobby. Gillon didn't think this information was important, and when he asked Baker, she said she had no recollection. She did however remember John hanging out at her apartment a week before the crash. It seems something was going on between them. They were still in contact regardless of Carolyn's feelings towards her. Here's an excerpt from Sons of Camelot, "Gary was a good and trusted friend. Yet he saw only veiled hints of the personal difficulties his friend was going through. They started talking about Julie Baker, though John did not let on that he had just seen her twice at the Stanhope hotel. Julie was a temptation to him, as he had admitted a few months before; she was a voluptuous, passionate woman who may still have been in love with him."

Sasha Chermayeff said John would often speak about Julie Baker but he never brought Julie around his mother Jackie Kennedy. Sasha also told: "My own feelings are that it isn’t any of my business about John and Julie. I know his friendship (with “benefits” as they say) with Julie was real, and was on and off for years. She wasn’t a family intimate who was invited to dinner with his mother and such, but her claims to intimacy with John are founded, from my perspective, more so in fact than other women who claim to have been close with him. She was not a great love of his life, but their closeness at times throughout his life I believe was genuine, for what it’s worth." William D. Cohan, author of "Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short" (2019) writes: "Sasha Chermayeff said she spoke with John about the fact that his wife wouldn’t sleep with him. He was upset about it. He was in therapy. He may have, eventually, had casual sexual interludes with Julie Baker, a former girlfriend, but he was, Chermayeff said, “very serious, and very seriously committed to the fact that he had fallen madly in love with Carolyn. They had this really passionate beginning, which Herb Ritts photographed incredibly. I mean when they were madly in love. He took these incredibly super sexy pictures of John and Carolyn where they were like on fire. She even said to me, ‘We were like on fire during this session,’ and you can tell.” (The photographs have never been made public.) But she [Carolyn] was fickle, Chermayeff continued."

Also Daryl Hannah didn't like Julie Baker as it was proven in an article about the TV movie "Rear Window" that came out in 1998: "The former star of “Splash” is co-starring opposite Christopher Reeve in the ABC remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Daryl Hannah has the role originally played by Grace Kelly (the Princess of Monaco), but a source close to the production says according to a source on the set, not all has been smooth. When Daryl Hannah looked out the window and saw actress Julie Baker, once a rival for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s affections, “She really wigged out,” says a source. “She said, ‘What’s she doing here?’ Julie was cast as the 'luscious woman'."

Isabel Jones wrote in InStyle magazine (July 19, 2019): "While John and Carolyn’s relationship no doubt had its complications, Kennedy is thought to have remained faithful to his wife throughout their marriage. Steve Gillon writes that John had told friends, “I wish I could cheat on her,” but couldn’t bear to “humiliate Carolyn the way his father had done his mother.” However, it seems the same could not be said for Carolyn Bessette, who appears to have had an affair with Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin." Sadly, Ms Jones is not the only journalist who has contributed to spread this colossal lie about a false romantic relationship between ex-model Michael Bergin and Carolyn Bessette post-marriage with John Kennedy Jr. (1996). There is a myriad of examples that undermine and ultimately discredit The Other Man (Bergin's atrocious biography first published by Harper in 2004). For example, Bergin talks about a date as part of his clandestine affair that took place in late June/early July 1997. But Michael Bergin was lying about the affair, since JFK Jr didn't go to Iceland in July, he went in mid-August. So absolutely no, Carolyn Bessette didn't have sex with Michael Bergin post-marriage. More proof that specific affair didn't happen in the summer of 1997 is the fact that Carolyn was staying in New York, not in Los Angeles during John's trip to Iceland.

An acquaintance of Bergin confessed: "I know Michael Bergin very well. He wrote the book because he was broke. Carolyn used Michael to get John's attention. Do you really think she would have chosen an underwear model over the most eligible guy on the planet? She was many things, but stupid was not one of them. Carolyn helped Michael get the CK job. They met at a bar randomly. Judith Regan helped Bergin with the book. Michael Bergin's book was full of lies." Another egregious glitch in Bergin's prefabricated timeline: "Michael Bergin claims he once called Carolyn at her job at Calvin Klein after her engagement," notes one friend. "Trouble is, she'd already quit Calvin by then." Among several defamatory accusations, Bergin claimed that Bessette had two abortions and a miscarriage while she was dating both Kennedy and Bergin. But, sorry again, Michael: "Carolyn was using birth control as long as I knew her," argued a longtime friend. 

The photo that proves Gordon Henderson attended the wedding ceremony of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. Now let's compare the truth with another of the false stories of Bergin—Another extract from The Other Man: "Gordon Henderson called me while I was reading an account of the ceremony in The New York Times. He was practically in tears. Carolyn had told him he would design her wedding dress, but instead she had gone to Narciso Rodriguez, an up-and-coming designer. Even worse, Gordon hadn't been invited to the wedding. 'I will never forgive her,' he said it without conviction."

In an interview with Greta Van Susteren for Fox, on March 30, 2004, Michael Bergin stated: "They're making Carolyn look like a coke addict. I'm coming forward to tell the world that she didn't dabble in drugs. She didn't like it. She got mad at me when I did it. But, all of a sudden, like she's a coke addict. You know, Ed Klein interviewed me, and he said all of this nasty stuff. He got me on the phone. He said I'm printing this, I know this and whatever, and it scared me. It scared me to death. So I spoke to him. And he asked me about an affair. I -- in about 20 different ways, I told him it wasn't true, as far as I know she's happily married. I didn't want this stuff to come out." So basically Michael Bergin was pressured by Ed Klein (a long time antagonist of the Kennedy clan) to release a book after Klein first made the false allegations about Carolyn of drug abuse and infidelity in his salacious and defamatory book The Kennedy Curse (2003).

Matt Berman (editor of George magazine): I was eating potato chips in my dismal gray-carpeted office, glad to have a moment to myself. I took a sip of Snapple and turned to see a beautiful woman leaning into my doorway. “Are you Matt?” she asked. I looked up, squinting in the harsh fluorescent light. Great, she had caught me smeared with potato chip grease. She came into the office and offered her hand and a huge smile. “Hi, I’m Carolyn.” [Carolyn Bessette meeting Matt Berman] She was gorgeous in a flowered summer dress and high heels. Wavy dirty-blonde hair framed her face. She crouched close behind me, her face almost resting on my shoulder as we looked at the logos together. She smelled incredibly good. Thrusting her hand into my bag of chips, she said, “I’m starving, can I have some?” Later, she told John, “The logos are young, cool, they look exactly right.” I was in love. And I got the job.

Carolyn was exciting to me because she looked so exotic, with her full lips, white hair, and azure eyes, yet she came from a normal suburban family like I did. I can picture her sitting on a bar stool at Odeon, rumbling with laughter, then stopping me mid-sentence to carefully remove an eyelash from my cheek with her pinky. She was glamorous, and protected and empowered me. Just as my office had become Carolyn’s refuge, my hideout was in the office of the publisher, Elinore Carmody. I found a photocopy of a poster of the blonde actress Carroll Baker in the film Baby Doll—a grown woman lying in a crib, sucking her thumb. John had us fax it to Carolyn at home, a joke making fun of her for not working and being a lady of leisure. John never looked at my scars, he never once asked what happened. The thing that I thought alienated me he didn’t even notice—he concentrated on my essence. 

John saw past flaws and had the ability to see people regardless of how they presented themselves or were seen by others. He taught me that my flaws allowed me to develop gifts that helped me to live in a world that was far from perfect. Of course, John’s face was perfect. Jean-Louis once brought a famous Indian plastic surgeon named Rajan to the George offices to meet him. I stood to the side and watched as this guy marveled at John’s face to the point of making John so uncomfortable that he started scratching his nose to break the man’s trance. John was flawless. But Jean-Louis said John wasn’t perfect: “He has very short teeth.” Being scarred myself made me hypersensitive to physical flaws in others. John had the ability to see inner flaws in people, and always responded with empathy. He’d be polite and make a beeline for the shyest person in the room and talk to them. He’d engage someone he could tell was nervous about meeting him by asking them a question that was easy to answer. —"JFK Jr, George and Me: A Memoir" (2014) by Matt Berman  

JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy video

John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy video.

A Common Good: JFK, RFK, JFK Jr.

Scholar Guillaume Budé, the first royal librarian and advisor to King François, wrote a handbook printed posthumously in 1547, which contained the observation that political laws need to be tempered by ‘mixed, ambidextrous men’. Budé was referring to the delicate mixing of different types of law (including civil and ecumenical), in a context of factional divisions and mass conversion to the reformed faith. The idea of a fundamentally mixed person enacting politics–an ‘ambidextrous’ character, balancing ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ centuries before these were political categories–came under intense pressure as religious and social change intensified. Politics was the art of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. Then as now, this was considered horrifying as well as hopeful. After thousands of French Protestants were massacred in 1572, poems celebrating the killings dismissed politiques who preferred peaceful coexistence to violent purges. A female member of the UK parliament, Jo Cox–who argued at the Parliament ‘we have far more in common than that which divides us’–was assassinated. Britain had voted to leave the EU. Populations across the world started to elect nationalist ‘strong’ men who exploited anti-politician sentiment. The battle between political monster and ‘holy’ union continues today. “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams (the 2nd President of USA) wrote in a letter to philosopher John Taylor in 1814: “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Source: psyche.co

Bobby Kennedy: "There is no greater need than to educate men and women to point their careers toward public service as the finest and most rewarding type of life. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change."

“The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty, and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.” —H.L. Mencken (Baltimore Evening Sun, February 12, 1923)

Helen O’Donnell, author of A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell (1998) also worked with Chris Matthews of MSNBC on his 2012 book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. The experience served to further pique her interest in the topic of the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, and the Rat Pack. She published more recently The Irish Brotherhood: John F. Kennedy, His Inner Circle, and the Improbable Rise to the Presidency (2015) and Launching Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency (2018).

After the death of his brother Joe in the war, Bobby Kennedy was again reminded that fortune did not guarantee anyone a future. He would always be hesitant thereafter about plans beyond his control. ”Kathleen’s death, and Joe’s before it, were tastes of tragedy that helped make Bobby particularly understanding of those to whom fortune had been unkind. This characteristic would mark him throughout his life—leading those who knew Bobby to find it difficult to understand the often mentioned charge that he was 'ruthless.' I think that when he came upon people’s deep problems later on,” says Dave Hackett, “it was a natural thing for him to have compassion and some understanding for them. I think what he never had any understanding or compassion for was arrogance, or wealth that was not used properly by the privileged, he had very little compassion for that!” “When Bobby first came into the campaign headquarters, he was very polite, nice, and what I would call very shy,” says William Sutton. “ What struck me was the first thing he said to me: ‘Give me the toughest part of the district. I’ll take it.’ Then I realized that underneath, Bobby wanted East Cambridge because he knew that was Neville’s area and it was going to be a really tough race,” Sutton remembers. Just as he had done with football at Milton and Harvard and with the debates at the Varsity Club, Bobby was naturally drawn to the toughest front in the battle. Rather than being intimidated, he saw it as a natural opportunity to prove himself. His wife Ethel was more forthrightly engaged with people than her husband, balancing his inner shyness. Bobby received from her the kind of love and acceptance he needed, which would revitalize him in times of trouble and difficulty. He trusted her judgment, admired her as a mother, and loved her fiercely. “Bobby was a really terribly shy person, even in 1960,” W. Arthur Garrity, (a federal district court judge in Boston) remembers. “I had known him from the 1952 campaign and my days as a Kennedy assistant in Wellesley, but I was struck by how he was so reserved and a very shy person,” Garrity would recall. Garrity also remembers thinking about Jimmy Hoffa that day, “a very terrible and dangerous man, and yet Bobby who remained so quiet and unassuming had actually whacked him.” 

Jimmy Hoffa had not finished with Bobby and Jack Kennedy yet. Since Bobby had investigated him in 1957 and 1958, he would make things as difficult as he could for both Kennedy brothers. One of Bobby's big victories was in May 1963, when Hoffa was charged with the attempted bribery of a grand juror during his 1962 conspiracy trial in Nashville. Hoffa was convicted on March 4, 1964, and sentenced to eight years in prison. While on bail during his appeal, Hoffa was convicted in a second trial held in Chicago, on July 26, 1964, on one count of conspiracy and three counts for improper use of the Teamsters' pension fund, and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite his shiny charisma, Jack Kennedy also had a certain shyness. As Nixon described in his memoirs, “We both shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen. Neither of us was comfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. John Kennedy was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.” 

On the evening of January 21, 1946, Jack Kennedy had climbed the three flights of stairs to the top floor of a three-decker house at 88 Ferrin Street in Charlestown. Completing his speech, Jack struggled through the throng of Gold Star Mothers, all of whom were reminded of their own deceased or lost sons. He responded uncertainly to their grasps and smiles. This was new territory to him, and he was determined to overcome his shyness and reserve. Jack had forged what Dave Powers would later come to call a “magical link” with the people in that room, knowing this young Navy vet was a different kind of politician. Dave Powers would remain associated with Jack Kennedy in a variety of roles until November 22, 1963. I think we have to grow up regards JFK's extra-marital affairs. Besides that one addictive and admittedly wrong marriage vow dishonoring flaw, no President has ever inspired and energized not just America, but the entire free world in the most important areas of democracy based societies like JFK did. 

Bobby knew his brother had a compulsion towards sexual conquest, but he was adamant Jack didn't ever want to hurt Jackie's feelings. John Kennedy was truly moral in his stances on racial injustice and equality, opposing of long time abusive colonial rule, standing up to hard line military leaders who would actually consider nuclear war as an option, economic disparity, unchecked growth and influence of the massive MIC as Eisenhower had warned; and yet he would not back down if North America and our allies were truly threatened by any outside aggressors. How come LBJ's extra marital dalliances (as numerous as JFK's and which produced at least an illegitimate child) are hardly ever mentioned in any mainstream media? Johnson was a crude and sexist Texan bigot with propensity to take corrupt deals. JFK was one of the first true gender-equalitarian statemen, who despite his Catholic upbringing, did not blink an eye when he alluded on-record to the desirable possibility of a female president in the United States. JFK put his life on the line in WWII and always honored his country. Sadly, we cannot say the same of most of his political successors in the White House. —A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell (1998) by Helen O'Donnell

JFK talking about his children Caroline and John in July, 1963: "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?”

Jason Beghe, a character actor who starred in the 1988 George A. Romero film Monkey Shines, had attended the Collegiate School, a private preparatory school located in New York City. While there, he became good friends with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and future X-Files star David Duchovny. Kennedy Jr. and Beghe often spent time together outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in Central Park, and were often monitored by Kennedy's Secret Service. Beghe would later persuade Duchovny to pursue work in acting. Beghe decided to apply at Pomona College, graduating in Dramatic Arts in 1982. Beghe told a funny anecdote about John Jr. being shy with girls: "He was so aloof with girls. I felt he was different, maybe because his father's exploits had been public domain for a long time, and his mother had such high expectations for his son. I remember this pretty girl who wanted to date John, she constantly called me and asked me to talk with John, and he invariably blushed. She wound up being my first girlfriend. [laughs]"

By the time Jackie died in 1994, John had already been planning to ditch Daryl Hannah for good. He started dating Julie Baker, a fashion model with a slight resemblance to Jackie whom he had dated briefly during one of his separations from Daryl. John had dated Julie from November 1991 until March 1992. Baker also worked in the late 90s as a sales clerk at a Menswear store: Seize Sur Vingt, being John one of the regular customers. But Carolyn Bessette still lingered in his mind. 

And now Carolyn played hard to get. If John did something to upset her—like canceling dinner at the last minute—she would scream at him, “Fuck you! I’m going off with Michael!” Carolyn was considered a difficult woman by some of John's friends. As Laurence Leamer wrote in Sons of Camelot: "John liked difficult women. If they were too nice, he thought they were boring." The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Laurie C. Merrill identified JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette together on two occasions in New York: July 18, 1993 and November 14, 1993.

After John had broken up with Daryl Hannah, John and Julie Baker were seen together locked in a kiss on September 4, 1994. A month later, in October 1994, Carolyn Bessette was John's official date at Michael Berman's wedding. Unlike with other girlfriends who faded out of his life, John remained close to Julie Baker long after their romantic relationship ended. Their relationship now rested on mutual trust and respect. “John and I had an easy, uncomplicated friendship,” Baker told Gillon in 2019. “We had a very special bond that throughout the years became stronger. I believe we knew we would always be there for each other.” Their close friendship was no secret to Carolyn. “John and Julie remained friends and were in touch about once a month,” recalled RoseMarie Terenzio. “Their friendship was completely transparent, and Carolyn even invited Julie to one of John’s birthday celebrations at their apartment.” 

Billy Way, a friend of John’s from Andover, had introduced Julie Baker (a catalog model) to John in the late 80s. According to Billy Noonan, Billy Way also had introduced John to Carolyn in November 1992 at the Rex nightclub, although it's more likely both introduced to each other since they didn't share mutual friends by then. Billy Way was friends with Bobby Potter, whose sister Linda Potter happened to be Timmy Shriver’s wife. Timmy Shriver was Eunice Kennedy Shriver's son.  

Both Way and Noonan thought John wasn't really in love with Julie but there was clearly an intimate connection. John also helped Julie to establish her jewelry design catalogue among his social and business contacts. According to Billy Way, Daryl didn't like Julie Baker because she had just a high school diploma, but the Splash star thought of Carolyn Bessette as graceful and charismatic, and conceded that John and Carolyn made a striking couple. For her part, Julie Baker appreciated Carolyn's company but some friends thought she was jealous of her sophistication, and suspected Julie kept on chasing John. Julie Baker showed her ambivalence about Carolyn one night after a drink too many, confessing to Sasha Chermayeff: "For Carolyn, to win over John was just a fantasy in her mind. She's always complaining and John needs a grown-up woman beside him." 

Baker was not the first who believed Carolyn Bessette was stubborn and it was hard for her to face the realities of the press and John's lifestyle. In fact, Carolyn's art teacher Linda Bemis at Juniper Hill Elementary School described her as "rather shy, and prone to daydreaming." On July 15, 1999, John returned to Lenox Hill Hospital, where his surgeon removed the cast that had been molded to his ankle for the previous six weeks and gave him the go-ahead to fly. According to a nurse at Lenox Hill, Carolyn accompanied him, and the two were very affectionate, kissing passionately while seated in a small reception area. This scene revealed again the volatility of their relationship. 

They could be fighting one minute and then unable to keep their hands off each other the next. John emerged from the hospital on crutches and went straight to the George's office on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. He had an important meeting later that afternoon with his new boss at Hachette, Jack Kliger. In May, David Pecker had left Hachette and purchased American Media Company, which owned the National Enquirer and other tabloids—the very ones that bought pictures from the same paparazzi who tortured Carolyn. Hachette replaced him with Kliger, who lacked Pecker’s dramatic flair and had no emotional attachment to George magazine. Kliger was informed that the magazine was losing money and that Hachette did not see a viable way forward for the partnership. Hachette’s priority was figuring out how to make the company operate more efficiently. Kliger met with John over the next few weeks and told him that the current business plan was not working. “My point to John was if we might find a graceful way for us to part,” he shared in 2017. He made clear to John that parting ways did not mean shuttering the magazine. 

If they chose to end their association, Hachette would stick with him for a reasonable amount of time until John could find another partner. John took Kliger’s recommendations to heart and submitted a revised business proposal in June. “I thought it was a viable plan,” Kliger admitted. It called for cutting the number of pages in the magazine, producing fewer copies, and raising the newsstand price. However, Kliger never presented John’s modified business plan to the French executives because he still concluded that the partnership could not be rescued. There was not, he recalled, “much faith at Hachette in George.” Hachette, he pointed out, was a “bottom-line-driven company that didn’t really have as big a franchise in either news or lifestyle.” While John was picking up hints that Hachette was going to pull out of their partnership, he still retained a glimmer of hope.

Carolyn Bessette had not been said yes when John F. Kennedy Jr. first proposed to her. She didn't say no, either, but remarkably the 29-year-old Calvin Klein publicist wasn't yet sure that she was ready for what marrying a Kennedy would entail. That change of life would come with a host of perks but also a daunting amount of self-sacrifice, and the ruthless assault on her privacy. Carolyn had spent enough time at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port to know the tensions behind the legend. And she wasn't bowled over by the Kennedys bond. Rather, the clannishness turned her off. Carolyn loved John, but in what would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives, she didn't particularly enjoy going to spend holidays and weekends with his sprawling family on the Cape, where their comings and goings were rather formally presided over by Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow. John Kennedy Jr. was the godfather of Robert Kennedy Jr's son William Finbar. Michael Bergin (Carolyn's ex-boyfriend) didn't help matters, almost coming to blows with John when he was seen stalking outside their Tribeca apartment. Allergic to the exposure and publicity, she became a reluctant fashion icon.

Carolyn was playing it cool, but she had fallen in love for the first time in her life. "I kept having to say, 'Snap out of it, John's just a guy," she confided the future Carole Radziwill (née DiFalco), who was about to marry John's cousin and best friend Anthony Radziwill in August 1994. "Carolyn was also worried her marriage to John would change everything," Terenzio wrote in Fairy Tale Interrupted. Carolyn had already moved into John's spacious loft at 20 North Moore St. in TriBeCa, and "Carolyn understood that the formality meant something to John. He was pretty old-fashioned, and given his place in the world, he couldn't be single forever." The prince of the fallen kingdom of Camelot did want a true partner by his side. He was worth approximately over 30 million when he married Carolyn in 1996. "When you were with them," Richard Bradley (author of the New York Times bestseller American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.) said, "you felt John had really put forth a new power couple in the family, like Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice Shriver. John had always had a thing about the Kennedy power couples of the past, and this was how he viewed himself and Carolyn. I guess one could say that Carolyn was becoming the woman behind the man, and John was happy and proud. I think Jackie would have been as well."

And importantly for Carolyn, unlike so many of the men in his family, including his iconic father, John F. Kennedy Jr. aspired to take their marital vows seriously. According to historian Steven M. Gillon, Ann Freeman (Carolyn's mother) had openly questioned during her wedding toast whether John was the right man for her daughter. Anthony Radziwill tempered the awkwardness with his best man toast. "We all know why John would marry Carolyn," he said. "She is smart, beautiful and charming... What does she see in John? Well, some of the things that I guess might have attracted Carolyn to John are his caring, his charm, and his very big heart of gold." "Carolyn, more than anyone who John had been with, would stand up to him, and confront him, and I think that John to an extent needed that," Steven Gillon—a classmate of John's at Brown University who was later a contributing editor at George magazine—told InStyle in 2019. However, the rumor that John had roughed Carolyn in Washington Park on February 25, 1996, spread like wildfire, even ending up the topic of one of David Spade's "Hollywood Minute" segments on Saturday Night Live. 

"Why don't you stop hitting your girlfriend and pretending to run a magazine?" Spade quipped, deadpan. Gillon wrote in his 2019 book America's Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., "The cause of this infamous fight, and the many that followed, stemmed from Carolyn's ongoing complaint that John let people walk all over him." In the summer of 1996, shock host Howard Stern also used the fight in the park to ignite ratings in his show The Howard Stern Show. As many a Kennedy has noted over the years, not a single person has been born into the family—especially not the men—without eventually feeling the crushing weight of expectations and history upon them. 

"People keep telling me I can be a great man. I'd rather be a good one," John said, determined to forge his own path. According to Randy Taraborrelli, Ethel Kennedy told Carolyn, "I think you're more powerful than any of the other women John has dated. You know why? Because you're smart, and because you have heart. So don't let those reporters or photographers or anyone else change who you are in here." Also, before they got married, Carolyn had become increasingly involved with George, much to the consternation of John's partner, Michael Berman, who ended up selling his half of the magazine in 1997. On July 14, 1999, Richard Bradley remembered to Vanity Fair that he overheard John screaming at Carolyn on the phone through his office door. "In startling, staccato bursts of rage, John was yelling," Bradley said. "His yells would be followed by silences, then John's fury would resume. At first I could not make out the words. Then after a particularly long pause, I heard John shout, 'Well, goddamnit, Carolyn. You're the reason I was up at three o'clock last night!' The shouting lasted maybe five minutes, but John's office door stayed shut for some time." Christopher Andersen, author of The Day John Died (2007) 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 Carolyn Bessette abused cocaine. "I've talked to people who knew that Carolyn was taking antidepressants, but there was no indication of drug abuse." 

Andersen adds: "John Kennedy Jr had a tremendous wit and native intelligence, and above all, he was a really nice guy. He was a gentleman, very considerate with the women of his life. Half of the romances concocted by the press were a bluff." "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." Anderson is also the author of Barbra Streisand: The Way She Is, The Wild Life of Mick Jagger and American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power. There was dissension within the Kennedy family how best to honor John and his wife in the wake of the latest sick twist of fate to befall their cursed dynasty. Among conspiracy rumors, their ashes were placed in blue boxes and scattered off the coast of the Vineyard on July 22, 1999. Ted Kennedy, whose Chappaquidick scandal almost eclipsed his gigantic accomplishment as "the Lion of the Senate", had to grieve for four of their dead siblings, Mary Jo Kopechne, his family tragedies, and now the loss of his nephew John Jr. While working for The Cape Cod News in July 1969 covering Chappaquidick, journalist Leo Damore said to Ted: "Bobby Kennedy probably would have died trying to save Ms Kopechne." Ted Kennedy understood perfectly what must have felt to John Jr. to be compared with his father. So Ted delivered a beautiful eulogy at a memorial service held on July 23 at the Church of St. Thomas More on New York City's Upper East Side. "John was a devoted son and brother, and he was a husband who adored the wife who became his perfect soul mate," the senator, who died in 2009, said. "John's father taught us all to reach for the moon and the stars. John did that in all he did—and he found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette." Source: vanityfair.com

Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) characterizes individuals who engage in vivid, fanciful daydreaming for hours on end, neglecting real-life relationships, resulting in clinical distress and functional impairment. Existing knowledge on MD suggests the involvement of dissociative and obsessive-compulsive symptoms, as well as comparable to processes in addiction disorders. Once mind-wandering is initiated, executive control is needed to ensure the continuity of a self-generated internal “train of thought”. Interestingly, mind-wandering without awareness is associated with a greater degree of  psychopathology. Singer and Rowe demonstrated decades ago that the frequency of daydreaming is associated with anxiety and depression. Constructs related to daydreaming are “absorption and imaginative involvement,” a dissociative tendency and involvement in fantasy. A 20 year-old diagnosed female student from the United States, described her daydreaming behavior: "Some daydreams involve people I know. Others don’t include me at all. These daydreams tend to be stories–for which I feel real emotion, usually happiness or sadness. They’re as important a part of my life; I can spend hours alone with my daydreams. I often feel as if I just cannot turn off my mind, whether because I need to concentrate in class, go to sleep, or just find some peace in the world outside my head. I'm careful to turn off my daydreams in public, so it's not evident that my mind is spinning these stories and I get lost in them. I can sustain normal relationships with friends, coworkers, and family, although I often neglect those relationships in favor of replaying or elaborating on my daydreams. I am torn between the love of my daydreams and the desire to be normal.” As opposed to normal daydreaming, which is usually neither immersive nor fanciful, the quality of daydreaming in MD represents an innate talent for vivid fantasy, defined as “a fictional tale created by a subject for his own pleasure and for no other purpose.”

Symptoms that are pathognomonic to MD and different than the characteristics of existing dissociative disorders, MD does indeed seem to contain several dissociative elements. Specifically: (a) detachment from external reality in favor of internal experience; (b) absorption—a state of total attention; and (c) via their daydreams, individuals may temporarily adopt alternative (non-self) identities (while acting out characters’ behaviors or dialogues in their minds). Additionally, some individuals have described the initiation of excessive daydreaming during childhood to avoid an intimidating or traumatic social environment. Possibly, engaging in daydreaming for several hours compromises the sense of presence in reality and brings about experiences of depersonalization and derealization. Moreover, in MD, not only is attention focused inwards, but it is focused on fantasized (thus, derealized) “characters,” performing activities and engaging in their own dialogues. Possibly, attending to mental imagery which is attributed to a non-self entity (i.e., a “character”), produces impairment in one’s normal sense of embodiment. Indeed, increased bodily sensations may be characteristic of intensified daydreams. In other words, MD may be instigated from an absorptive dissociative tendency to lose oneself in one’s imagination, while depersonalization-derealization may be merely a consequence of MD. It is also possible that MD does not stem from dissociation but is a type of dissociative symptom in itself. Source: www.frontiersin.org