America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  What John did not know was that weather conditions had deteriorated rapidly since he had checked the forecast a few hours earlier, and a thick fog had descended over the ocean. Munir Hussain, who had sold John his plane, had just landed at Essex after a short trip from Long Island. He went over to warn John, but John was still in the convenience store across the street. If he had not lingered for those extra minutes in the store, John might have received a warning that could have saved his life. “If only I’d seen him,” Hussain lamented. “I would have told him, ‘Don’t go up.’”

  After John and Lauren loaded their luggage into the cargo hold, John hobbled around the plane checking its wing flaps and fuel tanks. Just as he finished, Carolyn pulled up in a black car. John climbed into the pilot’s seat, while Lauren and Carolyn sat in the rear of the six-seat cabin directly behind him. Before they took off, Carolyn called Carole, notifying her they would be at the Vineyard in time for dinner on Saturday.

  According to recently released FBI files, there was a hiccup right before departure that foreshadowed worse to come. A woman told the FBI that she, her husband, and their three children ate at a Mexican restaurant near the airport that evening. After dinner, their kids wanted to watch the planes take off and land at Essex County Airport. It was quiet at the airport but after a brief period her husband heard an engine. They drove to the edge of the airport grounds where a red-and-white single-engine airplane was revving its engine. A white convertible car was parked near the plane, and the roar of the engine set off the car alarm. “A blonde woman then exited the plane and reset the car alarm,” she told the FBI. According to the witness, the woman “proceeded to walk around the left side of the aircraft and reentered the airplane from behind the pilot seat. The airplane then departed for the runway.” She noted that “the right-side door of the airplane was left ajar as they departed for the runway.” There is no evidence to suggest, however, that an open door played a role in the tragedy that was about to occur.

  According to the control tower, John’s plane departed at 8:38 P.M. on runway 22, climbed to 5,600 feet, which was a typical altitude for small planes, then headed east across the Hudson toward Long Island Sound. Eleven minutes into his flight, John ascended directly into the flight path of American Airlines Flight 1484, which was coming in for a landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Air traffic control scrambled to warn both John and the pilot of the American flight in order to avoid a collision. Apparently, John received the message and maneuvered out of danger.

  The flight was uneventful as they passed the southern Connecticut coast. The lights of homes and businesses that lined the coast served as beacons, helping John to navigate northward. At 9:26 P.M., just forty-eight minutes into the flight, John passed Westerly, Rhode Island, banked right over the ocean, and headed directly into a thick fog. He was now flying blind. He could have altered his plan and gone straight to Hyannis, but John continued to Martha’s Vineyard. An instrument-trained pilot could have guided the plane to its destination, but John had to use his own senses, which were now betraying him.

  It is impossible to know what was happening in the plane during the final minutes or what was going through John’s mind. Most experts believe that he suffered from spatial disorientation, often referred to as Spatial-D. Unable to see stars, lights, land, or even the ocean, John lost his bearings. The plane had an automatic pilot function, but John never deployed it. “It’s an excellent autopilot,” Al Pregler, a retired airline captain told the Los Angeles Times. “It probably could have gotten him down to the last one hundred feet.”

  Instead, John needed to reconcile what his body was telling him with what his instrument panel indicated. “If you are not able to fly by instruments, you are dependent on your body,” Pregler explained. “Your sense of balance is determined by your inner ear—and your inner ear can lie to you. You can lose awareness. You don’t know if you are turning or climbing or diving. What you may perceive is happening can be entirely different from what is really happening.”

  About thirty-four miles west of Martha’s Vineyard Airport, the plane began a descent that varied between four hundred and eight hundred feet per minute. At twenty seconds past 9:40 P.M., John made a left turn, but his wings were not even. John pulled frantically on the plane’s yoke, trying to lift the plane’s nose, but instead he was losing altitude. Clearly disoriented, John banked to the right, sending the plane into a downward spiral. While I hate to even think about it, John and his passengers experienced a horrifying final few seconds of life as the plane entered a violent, plunging spin that sent them smashing into the ocean at two hundred miles per hour. In the clinical language of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators, John failed “to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.”

  Fatal air crashes result from a series of mistakes. John’s first error was to choose to fly that evening without a flight instructor. In April, John had traded in his Cessna 182 Skylane for the faster and more complex Piper Saratoga. Although he had logged approximately 310 flying hours, including 55 at night, John had only flown 36 hours in the Saratoga, and only 10 of those were at night. Furthermore, he had not flown in two months because of his ankle injury. If he ever needed an instructor seated next to him, it was this night.

  Second, he was not experienced enough to fully understand how unpredictable the weather could be around Martha’s Vineyard, where fog could roll in and smother the island within minutes. The National Transportation Safety Board interviewed pilots who flew a similar route that evening. One pilot said that the visibility was well above VFR minimums. Before taking off, he asked if there were any adverse conditions along the route. He was told emphatically: “No adverse conditions. Have a great weekend.” Another pilot, also flying to Martha’s Vineyard, stated that his entire flight was conducted under VFR, with visibility of three to five miles in haze. He said that over land he could see lights, but over water there was no horizon to reference. But these were both seasoned pilots. John was not. Many experienced pilots chose not to fly that evening. Some who did take off traveling the same route radioed the FAA for permission to land at alternative airports farther inland, where the visibility was better.

  Even if he did not have an instructor, and he chose not to land at an alternative airport, John still could have used his radio to ask for help. But John never made radio contact. I think I know why. John enjoyed danger and risk, and he always found a way out. He no doubt realized that he was in trouble, but no more trouble than when he camped alone in the wilderness for a week, strapped himself into his Buckeye, or skied down steep cliffs. Whatever it was that attracted him to danger—a genetic predisposition or a psychological response to the trauma of childhood, or both—John had supreme confidence in his ability to get himself out of tight jams. If his own skill and determination were not enough, he could count on some other force to protect him, like the unpredictable wave that once lifted his kayak over a large boulder and past the jagged coral on a Jamaican beach. He assumed that this flight would be another challenge that he would conquer. He likely worried more about the embarrassment of a leaked recording of him asking for help than he did about crashing his plane.

  * * *

  —

  At midnight on Friday, July 16, the phone starting ringing at John and Carolyn’s Martha’s Vineyard home where Carole and Anthony were staying. Both were sleeping, but Anthony picked it up and handed Carole the receiver. She went into the bathroom and shut the door before putting the phone to her ear.

  “Hi,” she whispered, assuming it was John. “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, hi, Carole. I’m sorry to wake you,” the caller said. It was Dan Samson, nicknamed “Pinky,” who was supposed to pick him up at the airport in Hyannis.

  “I know it’s late. I’m really sorry. Maybe I’m confused, but I think I was supposed to pick John up at the airport at ten
o’clock, and he is not here yet.”

  “Pinky, what are you talking about?” Carole asked.

  He did not want to sound too alarmist, so he tried to lighten the mood. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You know John, he probably just changed his plans [and] didn’t call anyone.”

  “They’re in Hyannis, Pinky,” she told him. “Carolyn called me before they left. You must be mistaken.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re right. I thought maybe he changed his mind and stayed in the Vineyard after dropping Lauren off.”

  Carole hung up the phone and walked quietly out of the bathroom hoping not to alarm Anthony. But he was awake.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Oh. Well, you know John,” she said. “I’m just going to make a few calls to make sure everything is okay. Go back to sleep. Everything’s fine.”

  Carole, a talented producer for ABC News, used her investigative skills to immediately start tracking down sources of information. One of the first calls she made was to John and Carolyn’s apartment in New York, hoping that maybe they had decided at the last minute to postpone flying until morning.

  That Friday night, Rose was sitting on John and Carolyn’s sofa, sipping a huge glass of white wine and talking on the phone to Matt Berman, the magazine’s creative director, about an upcoming shoot with actor Rob Lowe, who was promoting a new TV show called The West Wing. Carole had been trying to get through for hours, but Carolyn had refused to buy call waiting because she thought it rude to interrupt one phone conversation for another. Finally, shortly after midnight, the fax machine started ringing. Rose knew that only a handful of people knew that fax number, so she hung up on Matt and picked up the fax line.

  “Hello?” Rose said.

  “Oh, Carolyn, thank God you’re home.”

  “Carole, it’s Rose. What’s going on?”

  “Where are they?” Carole asked.

  “What do you mean, where are they?”

  “Oh God!” Carole gasped.

  EPILOGUE

  “YEP, YOU REALLY WERE SPECIAL”

  I woke up at 7:15 A.M. CST on Saturday morning, July 17, 1999. Three days earlier I had moved into a new house in Norman, Oklahoma. I hadn’t found any time to go shopping for furniture, so I had only a bed, an old sofa, and a television. That morning I got out of bed, made coffee, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and strolled into my two-story study, which was the centerpiece of the house. I immediately began multitasking: sipping coffee; shoveling nondescript sugar-coated flakes into my mouth; turning on the computer to access my AOL account; checking for phone messages.

  I must have bypassed AOL’s news page and gone directly to my inbox, where I had a message from my research assistant that read, “I’m sorry to hear about your friend. I’m sure everything will turn out okay.” Having no idea what she was referring to, I wrote back saying that all my friends were doing fine. I hit the send key and then turned to access the voicemail on my landline. Since I had checked for messages late the previous evening, it was unlikely, I thought, that I had any new ones. Even if someone did call, I would not have heard the ring because the only working phone was in my study, which was far from the bedroom. But right when I realized I had eighteen new voice messages, I glanced at the computer screen and saw the headline: “JFK Jr.’s Plane Missing.”

  For a moment I froze. I looked at the clock above my desk and noticed that it was 7:24 A.M., almost the exact time that John had called me the previous Saturday to offer his help during my health crisis. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness. John had offered to take care of me in a moment of need, and now I was trapped in the middle of nowhere, unable to do anything to help him.

  During the night and into the early morning, both Carole Radziwill and RoseMarie Terenzio had frantically alerted the authorities and reached out to John’s friends in hopes that they might know his whereabouts. Carole contacted numerous airports along the Northeast corridor to see if John had decided to take a last-minute detour. RoseMarie called the New Jersey airport where John’s plane had taken off and insisted on speaking to the air traffic controller who had been on duty Friday evening so he could confirm that the plane had left. At 2:00 A.M., the controller reported that the flight had indeed taken off at 8:49 P.M. on Friday evening. “At that point, I panic,” RoseMarie reflected, “and I know that something is wrong.” She decided that it was time to inform Ted Kennedy, who was in Hyannis Port for the wedding.

  When RoseMarie called the senator’s home around 2:15 A.M., a housekeeper answered the phone and said that the senator was sleeping. “You need to wake him up,” Rose insisted. The housekeeper remained unconvinced. “Oh, John is just being John,” she said. “He probably went to a friend’s house, or he decided not to go and didn’t tell anybody. He’s going to come walking in the door, and it’s going to be no big deal.” Rose grew increasingly frustrated as the housekeeper brushed off the urgency of her request. Only when Rose specified that the flight departed at 8:49 P.M. and never arrived at the Vineyard did the housekeeper agree to wake up Ted Kennedy.

  The senator called about ten minutes later. RoseMarie told him everything she knew: the plane had left New Jersey and never landed at Martha’s Vineyard and no one had been able to reach either John or Carolyn. “Okay,” he responded, “just sit tight.” It’s unclear who he called next, but by the time I woke up, the search for John’s plane had already begun.

  * * *

  —

  To be honest, my memory of the next few days is a blur. I recall snapshots of what I felt and experienced, but I do not remember the connective tissue between these events. At one point, I flew to New York but have no recollection of being on a plane that week. I must have met people for lunch and dinner but cannot say for sure.

  Snapshot 1: I spent Saturday afternoon pacing back and forth across my living room while talking to friends and colleagues at George. Overnight, almost everyone hoped that John had simply landed at an alternative airport and somewhat characteristically decided not to tell anyone. By noon, however, that possibility was looking less likely. While John might have made a last-minute change without notifying anyone, Carolyn would have checked in with someone. But I remained upbeat and confident that John would be found alive.

  Snapshot 2: Later Saturday evening, reports emerged that a luggage tag from a garment bag that belonged to Lauren Bessette had washed up on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard. Even then, I remained in denial. John was such a vital force it felt inconceivable that he could be gone. As much as I’m embarrassed to admit it, I kept telling everyone that this occurrence would be John’s “yuppie” version of PT-109, when his father rescued his crew after their ship had been sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer during World War II. Rescuers, I assured, would find him with a rope clenched in his teeth, pulling the plane behind him with Carolyn and Lauren sitting on the wing doing their nails.

  Snapshot 3: I woke up Sunday morning and quickly realized that I needed a break from the constant news coverage. I turned off the television, disconnected my landline, and went shopping. Shortly after 10:00 A.M., I left my cell phone at home and went to Mathis Brothers, a giant furniture warehouse in Oklahoma City. I was clearly in shock and not able to think straight because I purchased enough furniture to fill three houses. When I returned home later that afternoon I walked in the house, picked up the remote, turned on the television, and there it was: a photo of John with the dates “1960–1999.” While I was out, the US Coast Guard had announced that it had given up hope of finding anyone alive. All the calls with George colleagues and other friends ceased. Everyone was now in mourning. Either that evening or early the next morning I must have flown to New York, but I don’t remember.

  Snapshot 4: Throughout the week, people kept calling and leaving messages to confirm a gathering point for that evening. I received a call on Tuesday afternoon that a group of close friends would meet at seven o’clo
ck at the home of Randy Poster, who’d met John at Brown. I was reluctant to go because I feared there would be security, no one would be able to vouch for me, and I would be turned away. I stood outside the building for a few minutes before mustering enough courage to approach the doorman. When I mentioned Randy’s name, the doorman simply waved me onto the elevator. I had passed the first test. Now the bigger test: would John’s other friends know me? Most of my time with John had been one-on-one, and while I occasionally ran into Randy and others who belonged to his inner circle, the interactions had been brief. When I knocked on the door, Randy answered. “Hi,” I said nervously, “I’m Steve Gillon.” His face lit up. “The professor!” he exclaimed, as he started flexing his right wrist as if going through the motions of playing racquetball. Now I knew how John had described me to his other friends. As I mingled with the other guests it became clear that many were aware of the role that I had played in John’s life.

  Snapshot 5: For most of the week I refused to watch television news, listen to radio, or read a newspaper. There was something liberating about living in a news vacuum. On Wednesday afternoon, as I walked near Forty-Second Street on my way to the gym, I passed a newsstand with a television. The novelty of the scene caught my attention, so I glanced over and saw a CNN headline declaring that the coast guard had found the bodies submerged in about 116 feet of water. Although I knew that John was dead, there was something jarring about learning that his body, along with those of Lauren and Carolyn, had been at the bottom of the ocean for days. I could have continued on to the gym, but the revelation drained all my energy. I returned to my hotel, pulled the curtains closed, and sat in the silent dark for the rest of the day and evening. I needed that time to pull myself together and come to terms with what had taken place. “Life is for the living,” John used to say. No one understood death better than John, and he would have been horrified that I was wallowing in grief. I could hear his voice in my ear. “Get the fuck up, Stevie, and get on with your life.” I was in a somewhat better place by the time I left the hotel on Thursday morning.