America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  Many of the departments held their ceremonies outside, but the history department broke with tradition and handed out degrees in the safe confines of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, a 119-year-old stone structure just a few steps away from the green. It offered a small, intimate setting free of reporters. No one seemed to notice that John, his sister, and mother, along with his cousin Anthony Radziwill and Jackie’s companion, Maurice Tempelsman, occupied the room. After all the diplomas had been awarded, families posed for pictures. At one point, John handed me a camera and asked me to take a picture of him with his family. Afterward, police and security officials escorted John and his family into two black limousines parked a few feet from the church entrance.

  Though John’s graduation marked his emergence as a mature young man, for many Americans he still remained that fragile young boy gesturing at his slain father. “The image of a small boy saluting his father’s flag-draped casket outside a Washington, DC, cathedral remains vivid in the minds of millions of Americans who were numbed in 1963 by a senseless tragedy,” wrote the UPI. But John, the news agency acknowledged, was “no longer the imp who played hide-and-seek beneath his father’s Oval Office desk.” The challenge for John would be to establish his own identity, freed from the haunting images of his past.

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  Two months after graduation, John decided to join a treasure hunting expedition with an old friend, Barry Clifford. Among his many other activities, John enjoyed scuba diving. In 1979 and 1980, Clifford and John dove together off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard exploring shipwrecks. On one occasion, they and another diver, John Beyer, descended deep into the bowels of a World War I freighter when Beyer’s regulator broke, leaving him unable to breathe. “Kennedy immediately gave Beyer his regulator, and they buddy breathed,” Clifford recalled. “But it wasn’t just a simple buddy breathing where you had to get to the surface. We had to go through these passageways that were falling—like going through a maze—to get out of the ship. But John didn’t even blink. There was no panic. It was just cool, calm, collected, business as usual.”

  During their dives, the two men decided to search for the remains of the Whydah Gally, originally a slave ship that had been captured by pirates led by Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy. In 1717 a violent storm sunk the ship off Cape Cod, killing all but two of the 146 men on board. The Whydah was loaded with the plunder of fifty ships, worth an estimated $400 million. “It’s like finding a department store on a shipwreck from the eighteenth century,” Clifford said. The captain of a research vessel called the Vast Explorer, which was leading the expedition, was a rough, old-school, six-foot-ten, 325-pound guy nicknamed Stretch. John wanted to go on the treasure hunt, but Stretch was not enthusiastic about having an inexperienced Ivy League preppie on his ship. Clifford pleaded John’s case. “Look,” he told the captain, “I’ve been diving with this guy for years, and he’s good. He’s a good diver and a helluva athlete, and you can depend on him, believe me.” Relenting, Stretch allowed John on his ship, but from the very first day, he did everything he could to force John to quit. He gave him the dirtiest jobs, ordering him to crawl into a little section of the ship to paint the rudder posts. “Kennedy,” Clifford recalled, “was breathing engine fumes and wearing lead paint,” but he never complained. His efforts eventually earned Stretch’s respect, and he welcomed him as part of the team.

  At one point, as John and Clifford were searching for what they hoped were the ruins of the Whydah, John found himself trapped under an avalanche of sand. “It was like being buried alive,” he told Clifford. Fortunately, John exercised his skills as a diver and managed to escape by holding his arms to his side, keeping his body rigid, and moving his fins with just his ankles. After this incident, John became convinced that he had found the ship’s cannons, drawing pictures of them as proof. But the archeologists dismissed his claims. The following year, however, Clifford went diving in the same spot and found the cannons. In 2007, when divers began the process of removing the cannons that John had identified, they found a plastic compass bearing the initials J.F.K. attached to one of them. Clifford speculated that the sharp metal had ripped the compass from John’s wetsuit as he tried to free himself.

  In October John traveled to India, where officially he planned to study food production, health, and education under the direction of a professor at Delhi University. It seems more likely, however, that John wanted to escape, immerse himself in a mysterious place, and spend time thinking about his future. According to his Brown roommate and future girlfriend Christina Haag, John believed that spending time in India represented “an invaluable opportunity to have distance from home, friends, family, and country, and he was excited to live in a place where everything from government to food to sex was considered in a completely different manner.” John grew up hearing stories about the exotic beauty of the nation from his mom, who traveled there as first lady, as well as from family friends, especially the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as US ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration.

  John recorded his travels in a diary, which the family controls, and much of his time there remains undocumented, but he did write letters and postcards that offer a glimpse into his six months abroad. I had the sense that John did not maintain a diary when he was in the United States. But India was different. It was the first time that John was free from the media circus for an extended period of time, living in a different culture and experiencing unique situations. It made him very contemplative. He told me later that he spent a lot of time sitting in a tree, smoking pot, and contemplating “the meaning of life.”

  The Indian government coordinated with the US embassy to protect John’s identity. Instead of staying at the embassy, he moved around New Delhi, sleeping on floors and occasionally staying at the embassies of other governments or in dingy hotels in the city center. At a wine and cheese party at the Irish embassy, John met the Indian journalist Narendra Taneja, who was surprised to learn that the famous son of a famous US president was spending nights in a sleeping bag on the floor of an embassy official’s home. Taneja had just moved to the Indian Institute of Technology, where he was staying in a four-room house, so he offered to share the space with John.

  The next morning, an official from the American embassy visited Taneja and warned him not to reveal John’s identity to anyone. A professor, however, discovered that John was on campus and invited them to his house for tea. “I hesitated but agreed, telling him no one else should know about him staying here,” Taneja told his son, who later wrote about his father’s experience. When they arrived, they found twenty people gathered in the living room waiting for them. “We decided to stay even though I had asked him specifically not to let anyone know,” Taneja said. After a few minutes, the professor asked John, “So, do you remember when your father was assassinated?” Taneja described John as “aghast” at the question, and the two immediately left the house. Taneja apologized to John as they headed home. “It’s okay,” he replied. “It’s just that no one ever asks me that.”

  While in Delhi, John wrote Sasha, telling her that he was studying under inspiring professors as well as interviewing locals about life in India. He confessed to being lonely but said the solitude was manageable. He was not impressed by New Delhi, which he described as “soulless and nonrepresentative.” Much of his time was spent dealing with more practical matters. He struggled with the Indian practice of eating with the right hand while “the left is saved for foreplay and wiping your ass.” Since he was left-handed, John wondered what “proper Indians” thought when he plowed “into the communal rice ball with my, as far as they are concerned, fetid, freshly soiled left hand.” Like many Westerners who travel in India, John often described the challenges of adjusting to Indian food. He told Sasha about having to submit stool samples to check for intestinal worms. Not only did he have to use the restroom every two minutes, he wrote, but he had to “drop
a little sample of one’s own in a Dixie cup and trundle it over to the laboratory, look the lady straight in the eye, and ask her to poke through it for you.”

  At one point, John joined Taneja on a trip to Tundla, a small, remote town in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Getting there required using third-class accommodations on crowded trains. “He not once complained throughout his stay about anything,” Taneja wrote. “In fact, he even took up some typical Indian traits, such as haggling with the tuk-tuk driver over the price of the journey.” Not only did John not complain, he told Sasha that it was impossible to understand what it was like to be poor in India without traveling third class. Spending twenty-four hours “in frantically crowded trains with families and all their belongings (from food to plows to chickens in boxes) is a great opportunity to indulge in a bit of in-depth study,” he wrote. He observed that many Indians who work hard to have the opportunity to travel first class could not understand “why this crazy Westerner is trying equally hard to be poor.”

  While in Tundla, John had his hands examined by a palm reader, who seemed startled by what he found. “This man is the son of a king,” he said. “You have to be the son of a king. Who are you?” Later that day, John insisted on returning to meet the palmist, but this time alone. He spent more than two hours with him.

  John stayed with Taneja for a week before moving on to Calcutta, later named Kolkata, where he roomed with another journalist at the request of the Indian government. “He stayed with us for a week,” his host recalled. “It was great fun having him. I remember that women used to line up around the staircase of the building as he ran up and down, bare bodied, for eight floors whenever there was no electricity and the lift would not work.” While in Kolkata, John visited Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity headquarters, where he met with the nun herself. He later said that Mother Teresa made him believe in the existence of God, a comment that would have shocked his devoutly Catholic paternal grandmother.

  John and I corresponded a few times during his travels through India. He was fascinated by the upcoming 1984 presidential election and frustrated by the dearth of information available to him. He said that his “soul was in America” and that he was desperate for news about the primaries that did not come from British papers. President Ronald Reagan was running unopposed for the Republican nomination. Meanwhile, former vice president Walter Mondale, who had secured the endorsements of most major Democratic Party leaders, found himself fighting for his political life when Gary Hart, a youthful senator from Colorado, defeated him in the crucial New Hampshire primary. Hart fashioned himself as a new JFK, calling for “new ideas and new leadership,” and “a new generation of leadership [for] a new generation of Americans.” Hart embraced Arthur M. Schlesinger’s “cycles of history” argument that every three decades, the nation experienced a burst of new ideas, beginning with FDR in 1932 and President Kennedy in 1960. John found the argument intriguing. “But Stevie, what about Gary Hart?” he asked. “Are we hitting another thirty-year peak, as he claims? What about JFK overtones? What the fuck is going on?”

  John had plenty of free time in India to ponder what he should do when he returned. Initially, he considered a graduate program in public affairs. I remember telling him that graduate education, which was tightly regimented, was not an ideal place to figure out what you wanted to do with your life. He wrote later that he received similar advice from his Brown advisor Edward Beiser, who cautioned, “It’s a basic mistake to go there [graduate school] and think it will somehow help you figure out what you want to do with yourself.”

  But John’s self-exploration went beyond debating practical steps about whether to attend graduate school or law school. John faced an existential crisis. He needed to discover his place in the world and establish an identity separate from his famous family. While still at Brown, John contacted John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist and essayist, whom he often turned to for advice. “You know, this is going to sound incredibly arrogant,” he said, “but it would be a cakewalk for me to be a great man. I’m completely set up. Everyone expects me to be a great man. I even have a lot of the skills and tools. The thing is, I’ve been reading the biographies of great men, and it seems like all of them, my father included, were shitheads when they got home. Even Gandhi beat his wife.” John confessed that the real challenge for him “would be to set out to become a good man.” But first he needed to define precisely what it meant to be “a good man.”

  John had hoped that by escaping the pressures of celebrity at home and throwing himself into a challenging new environment, he would get closer to grasping the substance of a good man. He likely anticipated that spending six months in India would help him discover his calling and guide him toward a career path. But that inspiration never materialized. As he prepared to return home, he told Sasha that he learned a great deal during his time abroad. But, he wrote, “The question is, where is this all taking me?”

  CHAPTER 6

  “I’M NOT MY FATHER”

  In 1984, after returning from India, John and former Brown roommate Rob Littell decided to live together again. John insisted that they find an apartment near Central Park, so they leased a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit on West Eighty-Sixth Street, a few blocks from the park. The only issue with the apartment was that it contained a master bedroom larger than the other. John proposed that they switch rooms every six months rather than pay different rents.

  In many ways, John could be regarded as the most visible metrosexual of his time: an urban, straight man who spent a great deal of time and money on grooming. Naturally handsome, he possessed his mother’s aquiline face and her dark hair and eyes. He enhanced his natural features by getting facials long before such luxuries were fashionable for men. I knew John from the time he was nineteen years old and rarely saw a skin blemish. He continued to work hard maintaining his toned physique. By his midtwenties, John stood six foot one and weighed 187 pounds of solid, sculpted muscle.

  John was a man constantly in motion. He simply had trouble sitting still for any length of time. When not lifting weights or playing racquetball, he headed to Central Park to toss a Frisbee or play touch football. The activities did not end there: he also enjoyed swimming, surfing, skiing, snorkeling, kayaking, hiking, and camping. He flew as a passenger in F-15 fighter jets and parachuted out of airplanes. The more danger, the better. John explained to his friend Billy Noonan why he was so committed to physical activity: “If I stop to think about it all, I would just sit down and fall apart.”

  The challenge for his friends was to look beyond his status as a national icon and accept him simply as “John”—a real human being with the same emotions and struggles as everyone else (and a few more). I realized this truth early on. One evening, as I was getting out of his car after spending a few hours together, I felt that I needed to say what I thought about him. “You know what, John? When I remove all that stuff that revolves around you because of your family and just look at the person sitting in front of me right now, I see a really good guy. Someone who is warm, kind, gentle, thoughtful. I just want you to know that.” He seemed genuinely touched. And I meant what I had said. John was simply a very likable guy: warm, funny, down-to-earth, and unfailingly polite. He could be careless and absentminded, but never intentionally rude. In fact, it was part of his charm and provided endless fodder for teasing. He exuded boundless energy and love of life that magnetized those around him. He had an ironic sense of humor and loved telling stories. He made fun of everyone, including himself, and was a great mimic. He used to imitate Barbra Streisand complaining about the paparazzi right before breaking into the chorus of “People,” from the musical Funny Girl. He could leave you rolling on the floor with his impersonations of family members, especially his uncle Ted Kennedy and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was married to his cousin Maria Shriver. But he was also the person from whom you would seek serious advice. In private he could be sad and pensive, but he would never a
llow the public to see that side of him.

  John loved New York, and the city loved him back. He could be seen cheering loudly for the Knicks at Madison Square Garden or rooting for the Mets at Shea Stadium. Rob Littell claimed that going out with John in the evening was “like having a key to the city. He was invited to everything. Doormen bowed and velvet ropes fell when he stepped out of the cab.” John knew the most popular clubs in the city and the best nights to visit them. He could waltz into the busiest restaurant in New York and be ushered quickly to a table.

  Unsurprisingly, John’s presence tended to generate overenthusiasm. “John was absolutely attacked by a crowd of mostly over-seventy-year-old women,” observed a bystander at a local market. “They were climbing over the lox counter to get to him.” Most often, people would stare, point, and whisper. Some would shout out his name. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen trip over curbs or walk into telephone poles while doing a double take. Oddly, it was usually men who embarrassed themselves. Women had no trouble stopping in their tracks to stare, but men who did not want to get caught checking out another guy tried with limited success to walk and glance simultaneously.

  Over the years, John had developed methods for dealing with this kind of adoration. He was always late, especially if meeting at a public place such as a restaurant. This unpunctuality was mostly strategic, as the last place he wanted to be trapped was standing in line in full view of other patrons or passersby while waiting for a table. When walking down the street, he kept his head down to avoid eye contact. On all but the hottest days, he would wear either a stocking or a wool hat over his head to disguise his easily identifiable curly hair. He would occasionally take the subway, but he preferred to get around town on his bike, which afforded him maximum freedom and enabled quick getaways if followed by the paparazzi.