The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Read online

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  People keep telling me I can be a great man. I’d rather be a good one.

  —JOHN

  My John is such a happy little boy, you know. I think sometimes I worry about him too much.

  —JACKIE

  FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER,

  CHARLOTTE BEATRICE BROWER,

  AKA “CHARLIE”

  Contents

  * * *

  Preface: “A Certain Gallantry”

  Part One: HIS MOTHER’S SON

  1. “Please Don’t Do It”

  2. The Son He Had Longed For

  3. “John, You Can Salute Daddy Now”

  4. “A Kennedy Never Gives Up”

  5. “I Want to Help Him Go Back and Find His Father”

  6. A Shoe Box Full of Diamonds

  7. The Crown Prince

  Part Two: JOHN ON HIS OWN

  8. Just One of the Guys

  9. “My Mother Will Be Frantic”

  10. “I’m Not My Father”

  11. “The Luckiest Man Alive”

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Christopher Andersen

  Sources and Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  The whole world knew his name before he did. John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family.

  —TED KENNEDY

  Preface

  “A Certain Gallantry”

  * * *

  He was the most brilliant star in the Kennedy firmament—the only son of two figures who captured the world’s attention more than a half century ago and have yet to relinquish it. John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. would spend his entire life trying to come to terms with the world’s obsessive interest in the people he knew simply as Mummy and Daddy—and its similarly obsessive interest in him.

  For the rest of us, it was no mystery at all. As a dynamic, attractive, and impossibly glamorous couple living with their young children in the White House, Jack and Jackie Kennedy embodied all the hopes and dreams of the postwar era. When a sniper’s bullet brought a bloody end to it all, Americans realized that, however shocked and saddened they may have been for the nation’s loss, it paled in comparison to the burden his wife and children would bear.

  In the days and weeks following Dallas, Jackie’s natural dignity and quiet strength were the glue that held a stunned and grieving nation together. Yet it fell to the little boy known throughout the world as John-John, whose mother well understood the enduring power of symbolism, to provide the most memorably heart-melting moment of all. With her eye undoubtedly on John’s future, Jackie bent down and instructed the three-year-old to deliver history’s most famous salute as his father’s horse-drawn casket passed before him—in that moment securing his place forever in the national consciousness.

  At the time, young John was merely a supporting character in the larger narrative being spun by his mother. Terrified that her husband’s time in the White House was too short for him to be remembered as a great president, Jackie concocted the myth of an American Camelot. Then she spent the rest of her life cultivating a personal mystique that, in the end, made her the most talked-about, written-about, speculated-about personality of her generation—arguably the most celebrated American woman of the twentieth century.

  “It’s hard to talk about a legacy or a mystique,” John once observed. “It’s my family. It’s my mother. It’s my sister. It’s my father. We’re a family like any other. We look out for one another. The fact that there have been difficulties and hardships, or obstacles, makes us closer.”

  Caroline’s big-sisterly affection for John was certainly never in doubt. Nor was her role in the Kennedy family saga any less significant. Like her brother, high-spirited Caroline was one of the few remaining links to a more innocent and hopeful period in American history—the time before Vietnam, Watergate, AIDS, and the specter of terrorism. At dedications and graduations and weddings and funerals too numerous to mention, Caroline stood alongside her brother, sharing equally in the joys and the heartaches.

  In the patriarchal world of the Kennedys, however, the heavy burden of expectation was John’s to bear alone. Starting with his wildly ambitious grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the men of each generation were expected to carry the dynastic torch forward. When Joe Jr. was killed on a bombing run during World War II, the torch was passed to Jack, then from Jack to Bobby, from Bobby to Teddy—and on to the next generation.

  For John, the pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps was an inescapable part of daily life. In JFK’s absence, it seemed as if the entire world had stepped up to remind John more or less continuously that he was destined for political greatness.

  John came to understand why so much was expected of him, but he also often wondered what, if Dallas had never happened, his larger-than-life dad would have wanted for him. In one grainy black-and-white television interview, JFK cautiously admitted that he wanted his son to enter politics because he had found public service to be both challenging and personally fulfilling. At the same time, the young president was quick to add, “I want him to do whatever makes him happy—whatever that is.”

  John’s mother was another matter entirely. No less a force of nature than her husband, Jackie also wanted her son to do whatever made him happy—as long as he fulfilled what she firmly believed to be his destiny. Along the way, she urged him to take risks, to forge his own path, and to cherish his legacy without letting it overwhelm him.

  “I think the most interesting thing about him,” John once said of his father, “is that you realize he was just a man, that he lived a life, like anybody else.” John did precisely that—living his life to the fullest and on his own terms, with a kind of easy, unadorned grace born of a life spent entirely in the public eye. In the end, he eagerly embraced all that was expected of him—and, in a move that might well have altered the course of U.S. political history, prepared to challenge one of the most formidable public personages of our time.

  When she died of lymphoma in May 1994, Jackie took comfort in the fact that, unlike so many other members of their famous family, her children had escaped the famous “Kennedy Curse.” John believed it, too. During the five years that followed, it became clear that he, like his mother before him, shared in what Arthur Schlesinger called “a certain gallantry.”

  In the end, John could no more escape his fate than his parents could escape theirs. His is a bittersweet boy-to-man saga of family, fate, love, loss, and promise unfulfilled.

  It is the story of The Good Son.

  * * *

  PART ONE

  His Mother’s Son

  * * *

  1.

  “Please Don’t Do It”

  * * *

  July 16, 1999

  It was nearly 8:30 on this torrid Friday evening, and the sun was already sinking into the strange, yellowish haze that consumed the horizon. If he had left two hours earlier as originally planned, John F. Kennedy Jr. would have arrived at Martha’s Vineyard in time to see Gay Head’s majestic gray, white, and crimson clay cliffs standing in sharp relief against the darkening sky. Gliding over the cliffs, John and his two passengers in the Piper Saratoga—his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren—would all have been treated to a gull’s-eye
view of Red Gate Farm, the 474-acre estate that had been his mother Jacqueline’s true refuge—a Shangri-la of dunes, marshes, Scotch pines, and scrub oaks, bordered on one side by square-shaped Squibnocket Pond and on the other by 4,620 sandy white feet of private oceanfront.

  Kennedy family friend George Plimpton called it “a dream place, a sunlit place. It’s hard to explain the effect it all had on you—all the variations in color, water sparkling like diamonds everywhere you looked.”

  That had been the original plan—to leave Manhattan at 6:30 p.m. and be in the air by 7:15 so that John, who had yet to learn how to rely solely on his instruments, could fly under visual flight rules. John was accustomed to cutting things close, and given the Piper’s cruising speed of 180 miles per hour, leaving at 7:15 would put them safely on the ground at Martha’s Vineyard Airport well before nightfall. They would drop Lauren off with friends, and then make the quick hop over to Hyannis Port for the wedding of John’s cousin Rory—all before Cape Cod, the islands, and the ocean that separated them were engulfed in darkness.

  Even if they had managed to leave on time and make it the Vineyard before sunset, Carolyn was far from enthusiastic about boarding a small plane with her husband alone at the controls. She was well aware of just how much her husband enjoyed pushing the envelope—like the time just a few years earlier when a group of John’s friends watched as he swam out to sea off the coast of Baja California and simply vanished. John’s terrified pals began to run for help when, as one recalled, “all of a sudden he just reappeared.” Then there were the kayaking trips in which John would take off alone for long stretches at a time and simply materialize at base camp, filthy, wrung out, and deliriously happy. John simply showed no sign of outgrowing his daredevil streak: Just that spring South Dakota authorities denied his request to rappel down the face of Mount Rushmore, the sort of stunt that prompted his closest friends to call him “Master of Disaster.”

  It was a part of John’s personality that Carolyn’s celebrated mother-in-law took great pride in. Jackie made a point of indulging, even encouraging her son’s instinctive adventurous streak. Whether he was mountain climbing, scuba diving, playing football, skiing, or simply zipping in and out of midtown Manhattan traffic, Jackie was proud of her son’s unfettered athleticism. She did not even protest when he disappeared into the wilderness for as much as a week at a time.

  John’s obsession with taking to the skies at the controls of his own plane was an entirely different matter.

  “Please don’t do it,” she pleaded with John when she discovered he was pursuing his pilot’s license. “There have been too many deaths in the family already.” Given the Kennedys’ track record when it came to flying, Jackie clearly had a point. Joe Kennedy Jr., the eldest of John’s uncles, died when his plane exploded over the English Channel during World War II. Four years later, in 1948, John’s aunt, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, perished with her lover, Earl Fitzwilliam, when their plane crashed into France’s Cévennes Mountains.

  John’s aunt Ethel lost both her parents in a 1955 plane crash, and her brother when his plane crashed eleven years later. In 1964, John’s uncle Ted was flying to Springfield, Massachusetts, in a storm to accept the Democratic nomination for a second U.S. Senate term when his small campaign plane crashed into an apple orchard. Both his aide and pilot were killed, but Ted managed to survive—albeit with a broken back. In 1973, John’s twenty-four-year-old stepbrother—Aristotle Onassis’s only son, Alexander—died when his plane crashed immediately after takeoff.

  Jackie confided to Maurice Tempelsman, the wealthy diamond merchant who shared the last fifteen years of her life, that there was another reason for her concern. In recent years, she was experiencing a series of premonitions regarding both her children, and the strongest and most persistent of these involved John perishing at the controls of his own plane. She had made John swear that he would not pursue his pilot’s license, and on her deathbed in 1994 made Tempelsman and her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy swear that they would do whatever was necessary to keep him from becoming a licensed aviator.

  John abided by his mother’s wishes during her lifetime, but by late 1997 he was enrolled in a Florida flight school. Although John took Tempelsman’s financial advice—Maurice had managed to parlay Jackie’s $26 million settlement from the estate of her late husband Aristotle Onassis into a $200 million fortune—John turned a deaf ear to Tempelsman’s pleas and warnings when it came to flying. The open sky, he tried to explain, was the only place where he felt truly liberated. “You know,” explained his college pal Richard Wiese, “it was just him up there, away from everybody and it made him feel free.”

  Neither Tempelsman nor Uncle Teddy would fly with John alone at the controls, and while she told friends she would have loved to oblige her husband, Carolyn was equally reticent. In addition to John’s well-documented penchant for risk taking, Carolyn also worried about his lack of focus (John suffered from attention deficit disorder) and his chronic absentmindedness. John routinely misplaced things—his gloves, his credit cards, his wallet. It didn’t help that he kept his keys on a chain fastened to his belt loop; they still disappeared with frustrating regularity—so often that he kept a spare set of keys to their TriBeCa apartment tucked under the front stoop. This inability to concentrate for extended periods of time—something a pilot would obviously be required to do—was of particular concern to the meticulously organized Carolyn. “We spend hours every day just looking for his stuff,” she complained. “It drives me so crazy.”

  More to the point, it had been only six weeks since John took to the skies over Red Gate Farm in a $14,300 Buckeye ultralight powered parachute—a flimsy contraption that resembled a go-cart with an engine-drive propeller at the back—and crashed, snapping his right ankle. Undaunted, and with his foot still in a cast, John flew back up to the Vineyard for the Fourth of July. This time, Carolyn agreed to go as John’s passenger—but only because there was a licensed instructor sitting next to him in the cockpit. Otherwise, she would buy a seat on one of the scheduled airline flights or drive the five hours to Hyannis and then take a ferry to the island. Once while she waited to meet John at the Martha’s Vineyard airport café, Carolyn told her waitress, Joan Ford, why she was reluctant to fly with John. “I don’t,” she said without hesitation, “trust him.”

  On today’s trip up from New Jersey, Jay Biederman, the flight instructor who had recently helped John pass his written instrument test and was preparing him for his instrument flight test, was scheduled to go along as he had several times before. But when Biederman canceled to join his parents on a hiking trip in Switzerland, John made the fateful decision not to find a replacement.

  Carolyn’s thirty-four-year-old investment banker sister harbored no reservations about John’s piloting skills. Lauren Bessette was a Wharton School graduate with a command of Mandarin Chinese, and a rising star at Morgan Stanley. She could be most persuasive. Over lunch at the Stanhope Hotel’s Café M that Wednesday, July 14, John was overheard enlisting Lauren’s help in talking his wife into going. “Oh, come on now,” Lauren urged Carolyn, “we’ll have fun.”

  Kyle Bailey was also planning to fly to Martha’s Vineyard that night, but when he arrived at New Jersey’s Essex County Airport he could see that “something was not quite right.”

  Instead of the clear five-to-ten-mile visibility being reported by the Federal Aviation Administration, an odd haze was blanketing the region. He picked out a fixed point on the horizon—a ridge he would normally be able to make out in the distance. “But I couldn’t see it at all,” Kyle said. “There was this really strange, thick haze. Heavy but sort of shimmering at the same time. It was already getting dark, and the wind was picking up. So I decided it wasn’t worth the risk.”

  John made a different decision. Since the cast had been removed from his injured foot just twenty-four hours earlier, he hobbled to the plane on crutches, tossed them into the baggage compartment, then gingerly pulled himself up into the
cockpit—all the while wincing in pain. Behind him, Carolyn and Lauren belted themselves into the Piper’s tan leather seats. They faced forward, with two empty rear-facing seats opposite them.

  Now, as he walked to his car, something made Bailey turn around. “It was so spooky,” he said, “but I watched as they taxied into position and waited to be cleared for takeoff.” The aircraft’s registration number, N92539A, was emblazoned on its fuselage. Bailey noticed that this was different from the number on John’s older, less powerful Cessna. John was actually having that number, N529JK, transferred to the new plane. N529JK was a reference to his father’s May 29 birthday.

  Bailey found himself standing, unable to move—“as if something was telling me it was important to keep watching.” Since Lauren was seated on the opposite side of the plane, Bailey could not see her. But as the Piper idled on the runway, John and Carolyn—she seated directly behind him and facing forward—were plainly visible in profile. “It was hazy but their silhouettes were so clear. I was struck at the time by how ethereal it looked, how eerie.”

  There was no obligation to file an official flight plan that night, but John did inform the control tower at Essex County Airport that he intended to fly due north and then east to Martha’s Vineyard. Just twelve minutes after sundown, at 8:38 p.m., the tower cleared John for takeoff. He advanced the throttle, and the Piper Saratoga rolled down Runway 22. In a matter of seconds, the plane carrying JFK Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette lifted off the tarmac and sailed smoothly into the twilight sky—heading due south at first, over a golf course, then banking right before making a gentle turn toward the northeast. “North of Teterboro,” he told the control tower in his only radio communication that night.