Immediately, Carolyn didn’t want to go. Besides the fact that if she never went to the compound again, she would have been fine, she had a real instinct about this particular occasion. She couldn’t really explain it; she simply didn’t want to go. It quickly became a real point of contention between her and John. Finally, John said that if Carolyn was insistent, she would have to call Aunt Ethel and tell her. He wasn’t going to do it for her. John suspected—and probably hoped—that she wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. Carolyn had a good relationship with Ethel, though, maybe better than John understood.
The next day, Carolyn made the call. She told Ethel that she realized some people might take issue with her for not being with John, but she simply didn’t have it in her. She hoped Ethel would understand.
Much to Carolyn’s relief, Ethel didn’t put up a fight. She said it was fine with her, and would also be okay with Rory and Mark, if Carolyn begged off. Things were changing in the family, Ethel explained. She used to always say, “Hyannis Port is where the Kennedys belong.” Lately, though, she knew that wasn’t always true. Many members of the younger generation had begun prioritizing their own pursuits over occasions at the compound with relatives. She had no choice but to get used to the idea. For instance, she said that Patrick—Ted Kennedy’s son—wasn’t going to be attending the wedding; he planned to be in California for a Democratic fund-raiser. In addition, Caroline—John’s own sister—would also be absent; she and her husband, Ed Schlossberg, and their children would be vacationing elsewhere. According to a source with knowledge of the conversation, Ethel told Carolyn, “Tell John his aunt Ethel wants him to stop being such a jerk about this thing.” After promising to see each other soon, the two women hung up.
When Carolyn, her spirits now lifted, reported to John everything Ethel had said, he still wasn’t happy. That’s when his personal assistant, RoseMarie Terenzio, decided to take up the cause. She stepped in and telephoned Carolyn and managed to convince her to change her mind.
Of course, John was delighted by Carolyn’s decision. In response, he made many promises about their future, among them that he would never force her to go to the compound with him again—this would be the last time. His joy was shadowed by concern, though. He knew she felt forced into doing something she’d been quite clear about not wanting to do. Now he just wanted to get the wedding behind them so that he could refocus his energy on saving his marriage. He still loved her very much.
Obviously, Carolyn wasn’t happy, either. She put John on “probation” and said she would know how she felt about him and about their marriage in three months. Of course, she still loved him and there was no denying it. But was that enough?
The Master of Disaster
“Where are you, man?” John wanted to know. “You’re gonna make us late.”
“I can’t get there in time,” Gustavo Paredes said on the other end of the phone line. “You guys go ahead without me. I’ll meet you there.”
“Typical, Gustavo,” John said. “Now we’re gonna be late.”
“Yeah, I know.”
It was July 16, 1999, and John Kennedy and Gustavo Paredes planned to fly, along with Carolyn, to the Cape for Rory’s wedding. John would fly his new Piper Saratoga, purchased a couple of months earlier, which was more luxurious, comfortable, and better in performance than his Cessna 182. On the way, they would drop off Carolyn’s thirty-four-year-old sister Lauren at Martha’s Vineyard. Lauren, a human rights activist, was just as striking as Carolyn, with her long dark hair and impossibly thin figure. She looked like a catwalk model and had dated Eunice’s son Bobby. She didn’t mind flying with John and had done so a number of times in the past. She and her sister would sit in the two seats behind John and try to catch up, straining to hear each other over the din.
Gustavo knew that his mother, Provi, was already at the compound, helping Ethel with wedding preparations. “Be careful up there, John,” he told his longtime friend.
“Don’t worry about me,” John said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” Gustavo said, laughing.
John loved to fly, and everyone in the family knew it. Ever since he was a small child, he had loved planes. Back when his father was President, he actually thought Air Force One belonged to him. Were his friends and family members worried about his flying? Some were, but for the most part there was a pervasive sense that John was somehow invincible. After all, he’d always been in one scrape or another, so much so that they’d lost count of the number of times one limb or the other was in a plaster cast. No matter the circumstance, he always seemed to emerge with a loopy grin and a great story. “You never imagined that anything could ever happen to him,” said John Perry Barlow, who first introduced John to flying in Wyoming in a Cessna. “He was the one who took care of everyone else. Plus, even if you were worried, there was nothing you could do about it. Ever since his mother died, he was determined to make every second count. If you loved him, you wanted him to live the kind of life he wanted for himself. You felt like he deserved to fly.
“When he bought the new plane, we chuckled about it among ourselves because John was the kind of guy who would lose his car keys or his wallet every day,” Barlow added. “He was that guy whose socks never matched, so it could be said that precision and accuracy wasn’t his forte. A lot of his klutziness had to do with his ADD. So the idea of John flying? Each time he went up in a new plane, it was a little scary. I mean, if you knew the guy. We didn’t call him the ‘Master of Disaster’ without good reason. Since I’d introduced him to flying, I always felt responsible for him and tried to keep an eye on him, but I admit there were times I was sorry I had endorsed the idea.”
Carolyn had originally been dead-set against John’s flying. However, during those times he convinced her to go up with him and it was just the two of them, she couldn’t help but note the advantage of being, at long last, alone with the man she loved with no interruptions. It was almost cosmic, she would have to admit. Therefore she actually began to look forward to those solitary moments with him. Still, though, she was usually on edge. Though she would try to relax and would sometimes be able to do so, for the most part she was nervous. “If John had ever decided to abandon his beloved hobby,” said Gustavo Paredes, “she definitely wouldn’t have fought him on it, put it that way.”
On the evening of Friday, July 16, 1999, at about eight-thirty, John took off in his Piper Saratoga from Essex County Airport in Caldwell, New Jersey, headed first to Martha’s Vineyard and then to Hyannis Port, with Carolyn and Lauren. As we all know, they didn’t make it. The plane ended up nosediving into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
John Perry Barlow had a conversation with John just two weeks before the tragedy during which he warned him of the danger of depending on his own perception while flying in hazardous conditions rather than on a plane’s instruments. “I told him I felt like he knew just enough about flying to be dangerous,” John would recall. “My exact words to him had been, ‘You’re always late because you are constantly enchanted by whatever is going on in the immediate present. This means you’re going to fly yourself into conditions that wouldn’t have existed had you left on time. Which means that you will find that you are flying on instruments whether you have an instrument rating or not.’” In fact, John didn’t have an instrument rating, meaning he was only certified to fly under visual flight rules. “I have just one thing to ask of you,” John Perry Barlow recalled telling John. “Which is if you lose sight of the horizon, don’t look for it. Just put your eyes on the instruments and believe them. Pay no attention to what may seem to be going on outside the aircraft. But when John flew into the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard about an hour later than he’d planned, he lost sight of the horizon due to a well-known ocean effect that I had encountered many times while flying back east. And he did exactly the wrong thing.”
Since that awful night, details of this great American trag
edy of July 16, 1999, have been dissected and analyzed so repeatedly by reporters, newscasters, historians, biographers, and, of course, close friends and family members, there seems little reason to explore any of it again. Suffice it to say, it was later speculated that John may have suffered from spatial disorientation, meaning that, due to foggy bad weather, his balance and depth perception were compromised, making it impossible for him to distinguish the plane’s position in the sky. “In other words,” said one investigator, “up became down. Down became up.”
The National Transportation Safety Board also hypothesized that tension could have played a part in John’s inability to control the plane. According to the Aeronautical Information Manual, “stress from everyday living can impair pilot performance, often in subtle ways. Distractions can so interfere with judgment that unwarranted risks are taken, such as flying into deteriorating weather conditions to keep on schedule.”
Whatever the case, much of America would wake up the next morning to ominous televised imagery of nothing but vast blue ocean and the sound of solemn newscasters fearing the worst about a man some lovingly called the “Prince of Camelot.”
It was Anthony who was tasked with tracking down Caroline Kennedy at Mountain Village Lodge in Idaho, where she and her family were vacationing, to give her the news. This was where the Schlossbergs had planned to celebrate their thirteenth wedding anniversary and also Ed’s fifty-fourth birthday (both on July 19). Anthony had trouble reaching her, but finally, with the help of the local police, managed to leave a message for her at about four-thirty in the morning on the seventeenth. She called him back immediately. “It’s John,” he said. “His plane was supposed to arrive here hours ago. He hasn’t shown up.”
From that moment on, it would be just one frantic call after another from Caroline to friends and family, including her uncle Ted, as she and Ed tried to figure out exactly what was happening. That evening, the Schlossbergs boarded a private plane, headed back home to New York. “I helped them with their luggage,” recalled Ken Nedeau. “Few words were exchanged, but you could see the panic in Caroline’s eyes.”
Once they got back to New York, the Schlossbergs would retreat to their home in Sagaponack, Long Island. Though everyone in her midst tried to be optimistic about John’s safety and that of his passengers, Carolyn and Lauren, Caroline seemed to know better. “I can’t feel him,” she told Ed. “Usually I can feel his presence. But I can’t now. I think he’s gone.”
“The Worst Day of Our Lives”
At first, Ethel Kennedy wasn’t going to accept any bad news about John, no matter what she was being told or how many times she was told it. When Ted called her at five in the morning that Saturday to inform her that John’s plane had gone missing, she said she was sure it would be found. She refused to accept any alternative. She then commenced with preparations for Rory’s wedding. She’d seen a lot of tragedy in her seventy-one years—she’d buried a son just a year and a half earlier. Not again, though, she decided, and not John. It was as if she felt that if she kept busy with wedding plans, maybe enough time would pass and John would just show up. “He always pops up at the last minute,” she said, echoing the thoughts of many others.
With the passing of more anxious hours, Ethel began to fear the worst for John. Of course, she had also grown fond of Carolyn. She often spoke of that first dinner at her home, the one for which “the newbie” seemed so ill-prepared. “Why was she on that plane?” Ethel kept asking. “I told her not to come. We talked about it. She said she wasn’t coming and I told her it was okay. I thought we agreed. So why was she even on that plane?” Very upset, she said she believed Carolyn must have had some sort of instinct about the trip, something that was warning her not to take it. “Oh, how I wish she had listened to it,” Ethel said.
When Gustavo Paredes walked into Ethel’s house without John, he was swarmed by Kennedys because they all knew he was supposed to have been on the flight with John. They figured that if he was safe, then maybe …
“Oh my God,” a tearful Provi Paredes said, rushing to her son. “I thought…”
“I’m okay, Mom,” he told her, holding her tight. He explained that he’d missed John’s flight and had found another way to get to the compound.
“But what about John?” Provi asked, her tone urgent.
“I don’t know,” Gustavo said helplessly. “I just don’t know.”
Provi then went to sit in the kitchen with Ena Bernard and her daughter, Fina, both of whom were distraught; the two had known John since the day he was born and had flown in for the wedding. “My mother tried to remain stoic,” said Fina, “as did Mrs. Kennedy. I was more emotional. It was a terrible time; we just didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but we feared the worst. I remember that the phone never stopped ringing. At one point, my mother picked it up, listened, and then slammed it back down. ‘It was a reporter who wanted to know what we ate at the rehearsal dinner,’ she said. ‘Can you believe it?’”
At midmorning, Holly Safford, the caterer hired for the wedding, called to ask Ethel if there had been any change in plans given the nature of what was being broadcast on the news. Holly had been catering Kennedy events for almost ten years, ever since Rose’s hundredth birthday back in 1990. She understood Ethel’s exacting nature. She liked to tell the story of the day she opened her mail to find a sheet of white paper upon which had been drawn a small pencil sketch of a three-dimensional square. She read the note. “Holly, this is exactly the size crouton I want in the Caesar salad. No bigger than this, please. [signed] Mrs. Kennedy.” That was Ethel’s way.
Ethel insisted to Holly that everything was still, as she put it, “a go.” Holly Safford recalled, “She told me, ‘We’re going to have a wedding today. I promise you.’ She would not give in to fear, she said, and no one else should, either. There were still calls to make, details to review. She had promised Rory it would be a special day, and she didn’t want to let her down. Rory had been on a sort of uneven emotional keel ever since Michael’s death. Eighteen months had passed, but of course she wasn’t over it. She deserved to be happy, Ethel told me, and this day had been planned with every intention of seeing her smile again.”
At about noon on Saturday, the catering trucks appeared at the compound and with them dozens of workers carrying trays of foods and placing them on long banquet tables that had been set up under large tents. “Keep that stuff covered,” Ethel ordered. “We get an awful lot of bugs around here.” She then watched as three florist trucks pulled onto the property. From them emerged six men, all in white and dressed for the occasion, each carrying large arrangements of mostly red roses. Ethel rushed over to them to tell them where to set up the flowers, “Definitely out of the sun at least until the ceremony,” she instructed, “or they won’t stand a chance.”
Ted Kennedy had been on the telephone for hours, trying to get information about John and then calling all his relatives to pass on what he knew. At one point, he decided he wanted to get out of the compound for an hour. He knew, though, that the perimeter was crawling with reporters. At that moment, he saw Provi and Ena getting into a car with Fina. “Where are you ladies headed?” he asked. They said they were going into town to pick up some things the caterers had forgotten. “Mind if I hitch a ride?” he asked. He then got into the backseat with Fina, and as the car pulled out of the compound, Ted ducked low so as not to be seen by paparazzi. “My God,” he said as the little coterie made its escape. “We Kennedys have had bad days, but I dare say this could be the worst day of our lives. I’m not sure how we’ll be able to handle it if John is gone. I actually don’t think we could do it.” He asked Ena to please be available to Ethel if necessary. “I think she’s going to need you,” he told her. He suggested she stay in town a little longer than she’d originally intended. Of course, Ena said she would do just that; “anything for Mrs. Kennedy.”
Meanwhile, out on the veranda of her home, Ethel sat in a rocking chair talking to Sister Pauline Joseph
. “She seemed older to me than ever,” said the nun. “I wondered if maybe this was one tragedy too many for her. We noticed Rory and Mark walking on the beach, arm in arm, seeming so sad. They were both thirty, their lives together just beginning, but on such a dreadful note. Above them was a helicopter, I assumed from the media, probably photographing them. ‘Not one second of peace, I guess,’ Mrs. Kennedy said, finally looking at me. ‘Do you think I should go out there, or should I just leave them be?’ she asked. ‘Go,’ I told her. ‘They need you, Mrs. Kennedy.’ She nodded, rose, and then began walking slowly down the pathway toward the beach. I noticed she was limping. I hadn’t noticed it earlier and wondered about it.”
Ted returned to the compound at about this same time. As he settled in at his home, he relayed to family members the story of his brief escape with the help of Provi, Ena, and Fina. “They know so much more about our pain than we do about theirs,” he said of them. “I’ve always marveled at their allegiance to us.” Moments later, the phone rang; it was the Coast Guard.
After talking to Rory and Mark, Ethel made her way back to the porch of her clapboard home. As she gazed out at the ice-blue cold sea, she noticed Ted walking across the expansive green lawn between their two homes. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped forward. Ethel didn’t make a move. Rather, she just stood as if frozen in place as she watched the senator with apprehension. As he got closer, she noticed Ted’s face lined with worry, his expression grave. Once he reached her, she listened as he said a few words. Then, as others looked on with heavy hearts—some of her children and grandchildren, members of her staff, as well as strangers who’d come to prepare for the festivities—Ethel Kennedy buried her face in both her hands. She then collapsed into Ted’s arms.
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 31