One question has crossed my mind more than a few times: How much of John’s personality was shaped by the trauma of his father’s death?
For answers to that question, I turned to Dr. Susan Coates, clinical professor of medical psychiatry at Columbia University and a leading expert in childhood trauma. Coates was careful to make clear that it is impossible to know for sure how any individual deals with trauma, but she pointed out that a large body of literature has identified general characteristics exhibited by children who experience trauma.
As I listened to Coates describe some of the typical ways that children process trauma, much of the information sounded all too familiar. She explained that three-year-olds do not understand the finality of death, but they “take their cues in understanding a traumatic loss from their primary attachment figure, who is most often their mother. In John’s case, he would have known that something very terrible had happened from observing his mother’s reaction.” For John, his father’s violent death marked the first in a series of traumatic events that would shape his personality. “In one fell swoop, he loses his father. He loses his mother in the sense that he has likely lost her emotional accessibility because she is in mourning. He also loses his home, the White House. It is an overwhelming trauma for the child.”
For John, the trauma was not limited to a single event. Even the ongoing presence of Secret Servicemen could have reinforced and worsened his distress by serving as a daily reminder of his father’s death. Psychiatrists refer to this repetition as “strain trauma.” As Coates explained, “Although single traumatic events can have a big impact on a person, what most often shapes character are experiences, particularly interpersonal experiences, that happen over and over again.”
Were John’s risk taking and restlessness as an adult possibly outgrowths of the trauma he suffered as a child?
Quite possibly, according to Coates. The way that children deal with trauma can vary widely based on their emotional makeup. What’s more, given his family history, John was likely genetically predisposed to take risks. But the events of his childhood probably fostered even further a sense of rebellion and thrill-seeking behavior. “Some children react to traumatic loss by becoming withdrawn. Others become more outwardly dysregulated and act out in impulsive and aggressive ways,” she noted. Many children, especially boys, develop a “counterphobic defense” against the anxiety produced by traumatic events. Society teaches them that feeling anxious is unacceptable, so rather than acknowledging their anxiety, they deny it and move in the opposite direction by exposing themselves to risk.
Children undergoing trauma must also confront the realization that life is both fragile and precious. “When a catastrophic loss occurs, you lose the sense of living with a mantle of safety around you,” Coates continued. “You now know that something catastrophic can happen out of the blue.” Since life can be stolen at any moment, it is important to live it to the fullest—but traumatized children may come to interpret fullest in extreme, potentially dangerous ways.
While all of this discussion remains highly speculative, it does raise a tantalizing question: Did the trauma surrounding his father’s death produce personality traits that led John to accept unusual, even foolhardy risks? If so, this theory may help explain why on a hazy night in July 1999, he would choose to fly a plane without proper instrument training.
CHAPTER 3
“JOHN, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?”
In September 1964, after spending a few weeks at the Carlyle hotel waiting for renovations to be completed, Mrs. Kennedy took possession of her fifteen-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue. It would be John’s fourth home in less than a year. While not as spacious as the White House, the new apartment occupied the entire fifteenth floor of a sixteen-story building and sat across the street from Central Park. Ironically, there were already two other John F. Kennedys in the building. One of the men who operated the elevator was also named John, and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was a doorman. The only difference was that they shared the middle name Francis, not Fitzgerald.
According to Maud Shaw, who accompanied the family to New York, the move lifted everyone’s spirits. It was an improvement over living in Washington, where they were hunted by intrusive tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the grieving widow and her now-famous son. While reporters still followed Mrs. Kennedy, New York provided her and the children with a degree of anonymity. “In New York,” Shaw noted, “people seem to accept the presence of the Kennedy children without staring at them or doing anything so ridiculous as asking for their autographs.”
Understandably, Jackie remained haunted by her husband’s tragic death and held herself responsible for not reacting quickly enough to prevent the third, fatal bullet from lodging in his head. She now decided to channel her grief into shaping how the public viewed JFK and his presidency. After sitting for long interviews with journalist Theodore White and historian Arthur Schlesinger, she sought to counter the official explanation that his death was the result of a random and senseless act of violence. In hopes of breathing some meaning into JFK’s death, she initially approached two established authors—White and Walter Lord—to write an authorized account of November 22. Both declined, however, mostly because she demanded final review rights of the book. William Manchester, a former correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and editor at Wesleyan University Press, was her third choice.
Once she had settled on Manchester, Jackie rebuffed other efforts to detail the story of that tragic day. Just four days after Kennedy’s burial, veteran reporter Jim Bishop wrote White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger to inform him that he was writing a book called The Day Kennedy Was Shot. He had already published similar books about the deaths of Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln, and now he planned to adapt the formula to Kennedy. “I am sure that this will be attempted by several writers,” he said, but he was hoping that Mrs. Kennedy would designate him as the authorized writer. She rejected the request, but the undeterred Bishop later announced plans to write his own book. Mrs. Kennedy again begged him “to please not go ahead with your intended book.” The family, she wrote, had hired Manchester “to protect President Kennedy and the truth.” She told him bluntly that “none of the people connected with November 22 will speak to anyone but Mr. Manchester—that is my wish, and it is theirs also.”
Her relationship with Manchester quickly soured, however. The Kennedy family gave Manchester unfettered access, and Jackie sat down for long interviews with him. But as the book neared publication, Mrs. Kennedy expressed reservations about the project. She complained that Manchester had violated her privacy by exposing too many private details about her actions and thoughts in the hours following the assassination. She insisted that he make significant changes to the manuscript. When he produced only minor revisions, she filed suit to block publication. Eventually the two sides reached a settlement that required Manchester to remove all references to his interviews with Mrs. Kennedy. Despite the back-and-forth, the book became an instant bestseller once it was published in early 1967.
In addition to controlling the narrative of events, Mrs. Kennedy lobbied to have monuments named after her slain husband. She urged President Johnson to modify the name of Cape Canaveral, the launch site of the US Space Program, to Cape Kennedy. A month after the assassination, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. changed Idlewild Airport in Queens to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Mrs. Kennedy also took an active role in the building of a new presidential library, and she spearheaded the drive to name a national center for the performing arts after her husband.
Yet in her efforts to preserve and define JFK’s legacy, Mrs. Kennedy inadvertently increased the burden on John to live up to an impossible ideal. By perpetuating the myth of Camelot, she fed the perception that her husband’s death marked a critical turning point in our history, that if only he had lived, the future would have been brighter. Many Americans responded to the shoc
k by transferring their unrealistic hopes to the president’s namesake. Mrs. Kennedy saw the public pressure building on John even as her actions encouraged it. At one point, she confessed to friends that she regretted having named John after his father.
Despite these looming pressures, however, John appeared to adjust well to his new environment. While he missed the helicopter trips to Andrews Air Force Base, he enjoyed living across from Central Park, where he spent hours playing on the swings and going for boat rides on the lake. Maud Shaw would take him and Caroline to the zoo cafeteria for lunch. John, always the animal lover, enjoyed seeing the creatures behind fences, though he preferred the Bronx Zoo because there they could go for camel rides and watch the lions being fed. While Caroline was in school, John’s nanny would guide him through museums and exhibitions, always ready to respond to his rapid-fire questions.
John’s playtime was also occupied because so many of his cousins lived nearby. Pat Kennedy, her husband, British actor Peter Lawford, and their four children (Christopher, born in 1955; Sydney, 1956; Victoria, 1958; and Robin, 1961) lived only a few blocks away, as did Jean Kennedy Smith, her husband, Stephen, and their two kids, Stephen Jr. (1957) and William (1960). (They would later adopt two more children, Amanda in 1967 and Kym in 1972.) Caroline spent most of her free time playing with Sydney Lawford, who was about fifteen months older. According to Shaw, the two felt “like sisters.” Before he started school, John played the role of a typically annoying little brother. He occasionally tried to play checkers with Caroline and Sydney, but most of the time, he would end the game by tossing the pieces on the floor.
In February 1965 John started classes at St. David’s School, an independent Catholic boys’ school founded in 1951. John’s class had twenty-one boys, and the tuition cost $825 a year (today’s equivalent of $6,518). Jackie walked her son to school, accompanied by a small group of reporters and the ever-present Secret Service. His cousin William Kennedy Smith attended the same school, and the two spent plenty of time together, forming a strong friendship. More important, John finally left his sister alone. The day began with morning prayers in the school chapel, followed by classes. When school ended, John and his new friends rushed to Central Park to play sports.
Members of his Secret Service detail taught John how to box, and he put those skills to use within the first few weeks of school. “The new boy punched me in the nose,” a classmate told his mother. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know there was a new boy. Who is he?” The youngster replied that he did not know him but that “he says his name is John Kennedy.” Jackie, already concerned about John’s rowdy behavior, spoke with RFK about the incident, but he seemed unconcerned. The only question that Robert Kennedy asked was whether John had won the fight.
Shortly after her move to New York, Mrs. Kennedy hired Kathy McKeon, a nineteen-year-old Irish transplant, to assume the role of her personal assistant. John inadvertently helped her land the job. While she was sitting in the living room, John came bounding in with a black-and-white cocker spaniel. “Hello,” he greeted her. “I’m John. Do you want to see my dog do a trick?” Kathy smiled back and nodded.
“Shannon! Roll over!”
On cue, the dog flopped down on his side and rolled over. “Roll over again!” John declared, and once again Shannon did as told. “Shanny, get the bone!” The dog went searching between the cushions and found the bone. What Kathy did not know was that Mrs. Kennedy was watching the whole episode and liked the way the young woman interacted with John so much that she offered her the job on the spot. Thereafter, Kathy lived in the residence, was paid $75 a week, and was required to refer to Mrs. Kennedy as “Madam.”
Over time Kathy also assumed many of Maud Shaw’s responsibilities of caring for the children. Mrs. Kennedy felt that Shaw, who was now in her sixties, lacked the energy to watch over John. She’d been an ideal nanny for John and Caroline as infants, but now Caroline could sit for hours occupying herself, while John was in perpetual motion. In the White House, John would eventually give in to Shaw’s insistence that he take an afternoon nap; now he would stay in his room until Shaw disappeared into her room and then roam around the apartment in search of a playmate. One day he exploded an old firecracker that he had found in a drawer. The blast aroused the Secret Service agents on duty, and they came running into the room with their guns drawn. John was shaken but unhurt. The problem was that Shaw’s patience was beginning to wear thin. She devised a way to keep John in his room by having maintenance install a chain lock on the outside of his bedroom door to prevent him from leaving. Mrs. Kennedy was not pleased when she learned what Shaw had done, and it likely expedited the nanny’s departure the following year.
While John had always been an active child, it appears that his behavior grew unrulier following the assassination, a change that no doubt resulted from the trauma he experienced compounded by moving so frequently. McKeon described John as “hyperactive” and noted that a doctor had prescribed medication to treat the condition. The staff was also careful to limit his sugar intake; otherwise, she noted, “he’d really start bouncing off the walls.” Though John was not “destructive or bratty,” McKeon stated, “both his energy and curiosity were endless.” John was always the first one to rise in the morning, so he would “proceed to make a racket, rolling his favorite wooden truck up and down the hallway until someone—me, generally—came out to shush him.”
When John was home, there was never a dull moment. If cousin William was there, they would be running around playing cops and robbers. John also loved animals, but he was often too forgetful to care for them properly. One of his favorite toys was a semitruck with a back door and an empty compartment in the rear. Occasionally he would put his guinea pig inside the truck to give it a ride. But one morning, when he went looking for the guinea pig in its cage, he could not find it. They eventually discovered the animal still sitting in the back of the truck. John also had a two-foot pet snake that lived in a terrarium in his room. Often he would walk around the apartment with the snake draped around his neck. But one day the snake escaped, most likely because John had forgotten to properly seal the top of the terrarium. A few days later, the building super called to let them know that a snake had appeared in the toilet of a downstairs neighbor. The Secret Service retrieved the snake, and Mrs. Kennedy wrote a letter of apology.
John was a clown and a natural mimic, skills that he would fine-tune over the years. In 1964 the Beatles captured the hearts of countless teenage Americans after TV appearances on the popular Ed Sullivan Show. In the first of three consecutive Sunday-night appearances, the Beatles attracted an audience of seventy million viewers—the largest for any television show up to that point. The following year, John was one of fifty-five thousand fans at New York’s Shea Stadium when the Beatles toured the United States. Afterward, he entertained Jackie with his imitation of the Beatles. He would stand, hips swaying, pretending to play guitar and singing, “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!”
While living in the White House, John’s parents often clashed over how he should wear his hair, with Mrs. Kennedy willing to let it grow long and JFK insisting on keeping it short. Now in New York, Jackie allowed John’s hair length to reflect the trend toward longer hair inspired by the Beatles. John quickly became a trendsetter in young boys’ fashion, usurping the spot formerly held by Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. Mothers across the country took their young boys to barbers and insisted on the “John-John.” (While the public continued to call him by that name, John made his displeasure known, and the family reverted to calling him simply John.) The instructions were clear: lengthen the sides, shorten the bangs over the eyebrows so the width of an adult finger is visible, and let the hair touch the collar in the back.
John’s influence extended beyond just haircuts and into the world of fashion. My friend Sam Stoia, who grew up during the 1960s in an Italian Catholic family in Newark, New Jersey, recalls his mother instructing
his barber to give him a “John-John.” She would also buy outfits for Sam and his brother, who was ten months older, that imitated what she saw John wearing as a child. Although too young to understand the significance of his trendsetting power, John clearly “set the bar for American families and particularly young boys” in the years immediately after the assassination.
The move to New York did nothing to diminish John’s fascination with the military. He remained largely oblivious to the debates raging over the wisdom of America’s involvement in Vietnam—a conflict that his father had escalated and President Johnson expanded with the introduction of ground troops in 1965. At least for the first few years, the war remained popular, primarily because the administration assured the public that America was winning. As a six-year-old, John’s favorite song was the patriotic song “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the number one hit in the country throughout March and part of April 1966. He’d likely seen it performed on The Ed Sullivan Show by Sergeant Barry Sadler, himself a Green Beret who’d seen action in Vietnam. John still loved to salute, as well as to teach others how to imitate him. McKeon recalled John ordering her to march around in circles and also instructing her on proper saluting. Like John before November 22, 1963, McKeon mistakenly used her left hand until John corrected her. “No, Kat, like this!” he would say before demonstrating the correct right-handed salute.
Most people remember John as he was later in life: a strapping young man who loved to play touch football in the park and was allergic to wearing a shirt. However, as a young child, John was small and sickly, suffering from asthma and other respiratory problems. Although he enjoyed casually tossing a Frisbee or playing touch football with his friends in Central Park, he avoided the rough-and-tumble of Kennedy-style family sports. He found his cousins to be too aggressive and too competitive. According to McKeon, during their fiercely played touch football games in Hyannis, the other Kennedy boys “homed in on John as the runt of the litter and liked to pick on him the way big brothers do, seeing if they could make him cry.” John would make up excuses for not participating, but no one believed him. “The only part of dear, sweet John that was Irish,” she joked, “was his pitiful lack of imagination and commitment when it came to lying.”
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