BOOK II
PART I
Daughter of Camelot
Prologue: Pinkie Swear
SPRING 1973
“I don’t know about this,” twelve-year-old John Kennedy was telling his sister, Caroline. “When Mummy finds out, we’re gonna be in big trouble.” The siblings were standing out on a runway at Hanscom Field in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. A flight instructor named Matthew Johnston was standing before them, along with Lem Billings, the family friend who’d taken many of the next generation under his wing, particularly Bobby Jr.
Lately, fifteen-year-old Caroline Kennedy had become fascinated by the idea of flying. She loved looking at pictures of airplanes in magazines and had become fixated by the idea of soaring into the sky. It was one of those crazy ideas that would never amount to anything in the lives of most children. When she would mention it to her mother, Jackie would always say, “Absolutely not.” John had been talking about planes since he was three, and she wasn’t discouraging of it. However, Caroline was old enough to know better.
Undaunted by her mother’s disapproval, Caroline somehow coaxed Lem Billings into signing the permission forms that would allow her to just go up in an aircraft for a quick trial run experience. Why Lem would do this is anyone’s guess. He had to know Jackie would not approve. Some in the family would later say Lem probably felt that his best friend—Caroline’s late father, Jack—would have wanted his daughter to have the experience, even if just to get it out of her system. Instructor Johnston was ambivalent, though. Many years later, he recalled, “When I said I needed to get Jackie’s permission before I could take the kid up, Billings got aggressive with me. He said he was sure it was fine and for me to just let the papers he’d signed be sufficient. Against my better judgment, I said okay. I would just take her up for a quick flight, I told him, not an introductory lesson. In a formal intro, I would let the student actually fly the plane.”
“You guys wait here,” the instructor told John and Lem as he handed the boy a pair of binoculars. Johnston then helped Caroline into the passenger seat of the cockpit of a blue-and-white Cessna 172. He got into the pilot’s and, five minutes later, the plane was slowly pulling out onto the main runway. Caroline, beaming and waving at her brother through the window, was obviously excited. He waved back. Minutes later, the Cessna sped off and then was up … up … and away.
About a half hour later, Johnston finally brought the plane down. By this time, his young passenger’s eyes were as wide as saucers. Yes, Caroline said, she definitely wanted to take further instruction. “Me too,” John piped in. “Me too.” The flight instructor explained that John was too young; fifteen was the cutoff age. “I told him to wait a couple years and come back,” Johnston recalled. “He frowned at me. Then Caroline wondered how they would convince Jackie. Lem said, ‘Oh, just leave that to me.’ He was confident, but John wasn’t having it. He said that their mother would never let Caroline fly. ‘She’s going to be very cross with us for even coming here,’ he said. I remember thinking, That’s an odd thing for a kid to say—‘very cross.’ It sounded like something maybe he’d picked up from his mother.”
According to what the instructor recalled, Caroline knelt down to John’s level. Holding him by his slim shoulders and looking him straight in the eye, she said, “John, you can’t let people tell you what you can and cannot do,” she said.
“Even Mummy?” he asked, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Yes. Even Mummy.”
Matthew Johnston recalled, “As I watched, Caroline made them do a pinkie swear. She told her brother, ‘I promise to help you make all your dreams come true, and you have to promise to help me make all of mine come true—and that includes going up in this plane.’ They then locked their little fingers. ‘Okay, I promise,’ John said seriously.
“Lem didn’t like it at all,” said Johnston, “the part about them not allowing people to tell them what to do. ‘That is not right, you two,’ he said, glaring down at them. ‘It’s precisely because you are Kennedys that you have an obligation to your family and even to your country. This isn’t about your dreams, it’s about your obligations. You are old enough to know better. I never should have brought you here,’ he said angrily. He was all bent out of shape. ‘Now, let’s go,’ he demanded. Chastised, the two kids didn’t say a word. Lem then began walking quickly, and the siblings followed, holding hands, John tripping over his feet trying to keep up. Caroline turned and looked at me with a sad face and waved. I waved back.”
The next day, Matthew Johnston got a call from Rose and Joe Kennedy’s attorney Benedict F. Fitzgerald Jr. “From my understanding, Jackie called Rose, agitated about Caroline being taken up in a plane,” remembered Fitzgerald. “She didn’t know how to handle the situation because Mr. Billings, a trusted friend of the family’s, had been involved. She asked Rose what could be done about it. Rose called me to ask what I thought. I happened to be a licensed pilot. I had bought my first plane when I was a teenager. I also served as a pilot and flight instructor in the Navy. I taught [baseball stars] Ted Williams and Jimmy Piersall how to fly. Therefore, I understood flight instruction and was astonished that any licensed instructor would have taken Caroline up without parental authorization. I told Rose I would handle it.
“I then called the gentleman and had a reasonable if also firm conversation with him, telling him that the Kennedys were agitated because of what he’d done with Caroline. He was extremely apologetic. He asked if he should call Jackie to express regret. I told him I felt that would just make things worse, to just bow out at this point and never do such a thing again, not only with Caroline but with any adolescent without parental approval. I then reported back to Rose that I had taken care of it.
“The next day, Jackie called me and thanked me. ‘We cannot tempt fate in this family,’ she told me. ‘We’ve had enough tragedy. I will never let my children fly. Never.’”
“Just the Three”
WINTER 2000
How do you manage to go on after such a tragedy?” a reporter was asking Caroline Kennedy.
“Oh, you just do,” she answered wearily. “You do it for the children. You have no choice, really. You have to soldier on.” Her answer sounded much like one her mother might have given back in 1963 after her father was assassinated. Like Jackie, Caroline always made it sound so easy, as if it was all just the natural order of things: “One pulls it together because one must” is how Jackie put it. In truth, though, as most people might imagine, it wasn’t quite that simple.
By the beginning of 2000 it had been more than six years since Jackie died and barely six months since John’s passing. Caroline, now forty-two, was petite at five foot three, four inches shorter than her mother. Her brown hair was most often cut to her shoulders and simply parted in the middle. She usually wore little makeup. “Unlike Jackie, I guess you could say that from the time she was a young woman Caroline would never be thought of as necessarily glamorous,” observed Letitia Baldrige, Jackie’s former White House social secretary, in a 2005 interview. “She was utilitarian in appearance. In other words, she wasn’t one to pore over fashion magazines in search of the latest styles. I think she preferred casual wear for an easy-to-manage appearance. As long as she looked put-together and represented herself and her family with good taste, and she always did, she was fine.”
Maybe not in style, but certainly in character, Caroline was much like Jackie—powerful, determined, and with a will of iron. She and her husband of fourteen years, Ed Schlossberg, lived comfortably in an eleventh-floor co-op on Park Avenue. Their home, with its modernist decor, was magnificent with its picture gallery (a large ornate room in which the Schlossbergs displayed their expensive works of art), dining room, kitchen and pantry, library, study, four bedrooms, and four and a half baths, all with high ceilings and city views. The Schlossbergs also owned a country home in the Berkshires and a summer home in the Hamptons, the previously mentioned Sagaponack house. Their marriage was strong an
d steady, in no small part due to Caroline’s insistence that she retain her own identity; if she had learned anything from her mother, it was to never lose herself in her marriage. She never officially changed her name to “Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg,” for instance. It would always be “Caroline Kennedy.”
For Caroline, the woman recently referred to in one newspaper editorial as “the only remaining child of Camelot,” the grief she felt over John’s sudden passing remained mind-numbing, despite what she suggested in press interviews at this time. “After John’s death, she was in bad shape,” said her housekeeper and longtime friend, Marta Sgubin. “She was shattered. She cried all the time, constantly. I saw her many times with her uncle [Ted], her head on his shoulder as she cried and he comforted her.” Marta started working for Jackie as a nanny in 1969 when John was eight and Caroline eleven. After the children no longer needed a nanny, she stayed on as the family’s chef. Now, all these years later, Marta still worked for Caroline; she still does.
People in her life say that Caroline has always felt misunderstood where John was concerned. Her detractors charge she was hell-bent on having her way with him, no matter the dispute. As his older sister, yes, she could be bossy and even she would have to admit to it. “But there was no one in her life Caroline cared about more than her brother,” said one of her longtime friends. “She loved him so much that I think she would agree that sometimes she became overbearing, almost as if she was his mother. But after their father died and their mother went into a tailspin, it was up to Caroline to look after John, and she did, and she always would. He knew it, too, and I think that’s why he never came out too strongly against her. ‘We always had this sort of unspoken communication,’ she once told me, ‘and even when he was mad as hell at me, I know he got it that what I really wanted was the best for him.’”
People also accused Caroline of being deliberately contentious where Carolyn Bessette was concerned simply because she didn’t like her. She knew she’d been hard on Carolyn. However, people who know Caroline best say that besides the fact that she had little in common with Carolyn, she also had a gut instinct about her. Early on, she intuited that she wasn’t strong enough to survive life as a Kennedy. She feared that she’d buckle under the pressure and that, in doing so, she would bring John down with her. After Carolyn was gone, though, Caroline would have some tough moments wondering if she should have done more to help her, especially given that the two did have similar views when it came to privacy and the stalking media. “In the end, if she was going to beat herself up over anything,” said Caroline’s friend, “it wasn’t about John. It was about Carolyn. I think she wished she’d been just a little bit more generous with her, that’s all.”
Making things all the more complicated for Caroline was the fact that her cousin Anthony was now also gone. “When John passed, Anthony was the first person I thought of,” recalled Gustavo Paredes. “I wondered, ‘How in the world is he ever going to deal with this?’ The last time I saw him was at John’s funeral; he was a pallbearer. I could see then that his life was already over.” Less than three weeks later, Anthony would follow his best friend in death, passing from this world to the next in a New York hospital in his wife, Carole’s, loving arms. “Loss upon loss,” is how his grieving mother, Lee Radziwill, put it; she had used the same phrase after Bobby Kennedy followed his brother Jack in death. “This was hard on Caroline, too,” said Gustavo. “She grew up with Anthony. She loved him, too.”
For the rest of the summer of 1999 the Kennedy family tried to get Caroline and Ed to the compound to commune with the family there, but to no avail. When the season turned, Ethel invited them to Hickory Hill several times and, again, was turned down. Caroline and Ed chose to spend less time, not more, with the Kennedys. Caroline found it uncomfortable to be around so many of them, just as her mother had at times; extended family was best in small doses. One wonders if she knew that she and her late sister-in-law, Carolyn, shared this feeling.
“When Jackie was alive, it was just the three of them—Jackie, Caroline, and John,” said Christopher Lawford. “So many times, I would hear the question posed to Aunt Jackie, ‘So, who’s coming?’ whether it was an invitation for a dinner or a clambake or something else. Jackie would always answer the same way: ‘Just the three.’ John loved being with the cousins, always did. You had a sense, though, that Caroline was just getting through it. She and Maria were close and she had a rapport with Kara. But for the most part, Caroline didn’t really fit in. When both Jackie and John were gone, a lot of people felt that maybe the connection to Caroline would be broken, too.”
The Jacqueline Kennedy Yardstick
Because of the way she captivated most of the country while being raised with her little brother, John, in the White House, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy would always be viewed by a generation of people as “America’s daughter.” Today she has a wealth of happy memories of those Camelot days—the trips overseas with her mother, the glamorous First Lady, Jacqueline; the fun moments of dancing in the Oval Office with her father, the handsome President Kennedy; the friends she made in the private school her mother organized in the White House, not to mention her pony Macaroni, whom she would ride on the grounds. Born on November 27, 1957, Caroline actually began learning vocabulary during the 1960 campaign, her first words being “plane,” “goodbye,” and “New Hampshire.” Jackie once said, “I’m just sorry more states don’t have primaries, because if they did we’d have a little daughter with the greatest vocabulary in history.”
Everything changed when Caroline was five. That’s when, on November 22, 1963, her father was assassinated. Unfortunately, she also has vivid memories of that dark time. Today, she can still recall details of the funeral, for instance, and even remember with clarity that historic moment when John, on his third birthday, saluted their father’s coffin. John didn’t really remember it. “If only I could remember,” he would say with longing. However, Caroline could call up all the details, including the unspeakable grief, and it would take years of therapy for her to even begin to reconcile it.
“In 1969, Jackie told me that when Caroline was about eight, she started taking her to the noted therapist Erik Erikson,” Joan Braden recalled in a 1998 interview. Joan, the former personal secretary and economic assistant to Nelson A. Rockefeller, was also a campaign worker for the Kennedys and a close friend of the family’s. “He said that Caroline was suffering from an identity crisis. I laughed and told her that she should stop with the headshrinkers; they didn’t know what they were talking about. ‘But she’s just so unhappy,’ Jackie said. ‘She walks around all the time with her little hands clenched in fists; she seems angry at the world.’”
Jackie explained to Joan that—at least according to Erikson—Caroline had lost her father at a time in her life when she was just beginning to understand her identity and her place in the world. The sudden loss of her father made her question everything, including her own mortality. In an effort to protect her innocence, it had been Jackie’s well-intentioned decision to at least try not to allow Caroline to see her grief. Yet the youngster still understood that her mother was all but broken. “My mommy cries all the time,” she told one of the nuns at school when she was little. The inadvertent message to Caroline, again according to Erikson, was that turning away from sadness and not addressing it was acceptable behavior. This belief, he told Jackie, could only lead to trouble for Caroline as an adult.
Caroline would see a number of psychologists until she was about twelve. At that time, Jackie feared that therapy was only keeping her daughter tethered to her grief and stopped sending her.
A year after Jack’s death, an anguished Jackie moved herself and her two children to Manhattan to start life anew. As a child, Caroline attended the Brearley School and the Convent of the Sacred Heart, both in New York City and within walking distance of Jackie’s apartment.
“I think by about the age of eighteen, Caroline came to the conclusion that she would probably
never get over Jack’s death, but that she needed to find a way to get past it long enough to get on with her life,” said Joan Braden. “While she never wanted to disgrace him or her family name, Caroline also viewed the royal and heroic ‘Camelot business,’ as she called it, as not really being rooted in much reality. She became bored hearing from her mother and [maternal] grandmother, Janet [Auchincloss], how Kennedys were supposed to act. After all, it could be said that she saw a bit of bad behavior in a few of her relatives. ‘Can we please stop acting like we’re one big happy family?’ I once heard her ask Jackie. ‘Why are we always trying to make our story so perfect when it’s not perfect at all, and shouldn’t have to be perfect.’ Jackie actually agreed with her. ‘Of course, dear,’ she told her. ‘When we’re at home, we can act any way we please within reason. But out in the world? Out there, we are Kennedys and we must be Kennedys. That’s what’s expected of us.’”
Caroline graduated from Concord Academy in Massachusetts in 1975. She then received her bachelor of arts degree from Radcliffe in 1980, and by 1985 was attending Columbia University Law School. She then toyed with becoming a photojournalist, just as her mother had once been, and even interned at the New York Daily News in 1977 for $156 a week.
A year later, in 1978, Caroline ended up in a brief romance with Rolling Stone’s cofounder and editor, Jann Wenner, ten years her senior and recently separated from his wife. Jackie wasn’t happy about it. She liked Wenner well enough, but she didn’t want him around her daughter. First of all, he was still married; she was adamantly against extramarital affairs. Also, she sensed an ambiguity about his sexual orientation; he wouldn’t officially come out until after her death. Her biggest concern, though, was about his drug use.
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 32