For Carolyn, however, it’s a much bigger adjustment. “There were times when I went to their apartment on Moore Street, and you would see the paparazzi just waiting outside, behind cars, in cars, just on the sidewalk for her to leave her apartment,” Carole Radziwill recalls. “A lot of times we wouldn’t leave. We would order food from Bubby’s on the corner. Who wanted to leave and have to go walk through that? That was, like, every day of her life for the first year or more.”
Chapter 57
On Friday, July 16, 1999, a Justice Department special arbitration panel meets in Washington, DC. In a split yet binding decision, the members order the US government to pay the Zapruder family sixteen million dollars for rights to the twenty-six-second film made by Abraham Zapruder, the one-of-a-kind documentation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The dollar amount tops any price previously paid for an American artifact. But before news of the record-breaking award ever hits the wire, it’s held for an even bigger story—a triple fatality.
The name dominating the headlines is once again Kennedy.
* * *
In December 1997, a student calling himself “John Cole” registers for pilot training at the Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida. On April 22, 1998, he earns his private pilot certificate, licensing him to fly under visual flight rules (VFR) and returns for further study of instrument flight rules (IFR).
“To Flight Safety Academy, The Bravest people in aviation,” the student—a no-longer-incognito John F. Kennedy Jr.—inscribes a personal photo to his flight instructors, “because people will only care where I got my training if I crash.”
On one of John’s trips to Vero Beach, he visits the local Piper Aircraft factory and makes a three-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase—a 1995 Piper Saratoga II. The single-engine aircraft, though used, is an upgrade from his starter plane, a Cessna Skylane.
John is finally realizing his childhood dream of flying. He likes to study at the CJ Cannon’s restaurant at the local airport, where he can watch the planes take off and land. On several occasions, waitress Lois Cappelen and her famous customer talk about Jackie (“She was very strict with me,” John shares with her. “Caroline could get away with anything, but I always had to be good”), the Kennedys, and finally, flying. “He said he had wanted to fly all his life,” Cappelen recalls. “But he told me his wife didn’t want him to do it.” (Or his mother, who’d taken Lem Billings to task for allowing Caroline to try it. Unbeknownst to Jackie, John had actually begun flight training fifteen years earlier, while he was a student at Brown in 1982, but never completed it.)
However, John tells USA Today, “The only person I’ve been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife. The second it was legal she came up with me.” At the Martha’s Vineyard airport restaurant, Carolyn tells another waitress, Joann Ford, a markedly different story. “I don’t trust him,” Ford recalls Carolyn saying of her husband’s flying.
Still, on May 1, 1999, Carolyn does agree to a flight with John, from New York to Washington, for the White House Correspondents Dinner. The DC appearance is part of John’s exploratory process; he’s considering running for the seat a four-term Democratic senator from New York has decided to vacate in the year 2000. He also needs to invigorate support for George, the ad sales of which are declining just as Jack Kliger is taking over as new CEO of Hachette. Some staff changes in January 1999 have also raised eyebrows with business insiders, though John is still touted as having “brilliant editor instincts.” And everyone understands the cachet he brings. “Would this magazine exist without John?” the Observer notes. “Would anyone delude themselves that it would?”
The couple makes an indelible impression on White House reporter Helen Thomas. “They never looked more content and in love than they did that evening,” she recalls. “My God, this is Jack and Jackie all over again, isn’t it? They were so compelling, you actually couldn’t take your eyes off them. The way photographers swarmed them. It really reminded me of the old days, the so-called Camelot days.”
The feeling of romantic nostalgia is persuasive, but it might be a performance. According to friends of the couple who speak off the record to the press, John, thirty-eight, and Carolyn, thirty-three, are in marital counseling, working through issues salaciously reported as including infidelities on both sides, John’s insensitivity toward his wife, and Carolyn’s increasingly erratic behavior, often attributed to prescription and recreational drug use—though Carole Radziwill counters those claims, saying, “That’s not the truth of what was going on.” What they were all actually dealing with, she says, is her husband Anthony’s impending death from cancer. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It was a very difficult, stressful summer for all of us,” she says. “My husband was dying, and it was difficult for John to really accept that.”
John’s friend and personal assistant RoseMarie Terenzio agrees. “Anthony’s [cancer] was emotionally devastating to John,” she tells a reporter at Fox News. “I think John knew that Anthony’s passing would change his life profoundly. I don’t think we were ready for it. I don’t think he could have ever been ready for it.”
On July 14, 1999, George staffers overhear John Jr. shouting into his office phone, presumably to Carolyn, “That’s it. You’ve gone too far. Get your stuff, get out of my apartment and get out of my life.”
John checks into an uptown hotel.
Terenzio quickly gets Carolyn’s side of the story. “I’m not a priority,” Carolyn tells her. “It’s always something else. George. Somebody getting fired. An event. A trip to Italy to meet advertisers.”
John’s cousin Rory Kennedy (Ethel’s youngest daughter, the one born six months after her father’s assassination) is getting married in Hyannis Port three days later, on July 17, 1999. John Jr. tells Terenzio that he’ll be attending solo, as Carolyn is adamant that she doesn’t want to go. But somehow Terenzio and Carolyn’s older sister, Lauren (a thirty-four-year-old investment principal at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter), convince her. Lauren is hopeful that the trip might help her sister and brother-in-law reconcile.
“Come on,” Lauren says. “It will be fun.”
On Friday, July 16, John and Lauren drive together from Manhattan to meet Carolyn on the tarmac at Essex County Airport in suburban Fairfield, New Jersey. The two-leg flight will first stop in Martha’s Vineyard, where Lauren will attend a cocktail party with her new love interest, John’s cousin Bobby Shriver, a forty-five-year-old film and television producer.
John Jr. arrives at the airport on crutches, still recovering from a broken ankle he’d sustained in a Memorial Day weekend paragliding accident. He needs the full strength of both legs to work the controls on his new plane.
“You know just enough to be dangerous,” comments friend John Perry Barlow. “You have confidence in the air, which could harm you…You’re going to find yourself flying in instrument conditions because you think you can.”
By FAA standards, he can’t. Not yet.
A little over two weeks earlier, on July 1, John Jr. flew the Saratoga to Martha’s Vineyard alongside a certified flight instructor who must assist in taxi and landing because John’s ankle was still in a cast. The instructor states, “The pilot was not ready for an instrument evaluation and needed additional training.”
Nevertheless, there will be no assistance on tonight’s flight, even though John is on crutches as he makes the flight preparations, including a check of the National Weather Service’s aviation forecast. Since he will be flying under visual flight rules, he is not required to file a flight plan.
According to the New York Post, “Not only was Kennedy suffering emotional ups and downs that day, he was still taking Vicodin to relieve the pain of a recently broken ankle, plus Ritalin for attention-deficit disorder and medication for a thyroid problem.” The thyroid problem is known as Graves’ disease (similar to the Addison’s disease his father suffered).
Carolyn is the las
t to arrive, having done some last-minute shopping for the perfect dress to wear to the wedding. She calls her friend Carole Radziwill from the plane, a little after 8:00 p.m. “I remember at the end she said, ‘I love you.’…For some reason, I didn’t say I love you back, and that always stuck with me. And she said, ‘I’ll call you when I land.’ And that was the last I ever heard from her.”
* * *
As dusk falls and the weather reports take a turn, an experienced pilot named Kyle Bailey cancels his own planned flight to Martha’s Vineyard. Another pilot, Roy Stoppard, who has just flown down from the Cape, tells John Jr. that he “ran into a thick haze on the way down” and that John “might want to wait a while.”
“No chance,” John answers. “I’m already late,” exhibiting an attitude that experienced aviators like Bailey and Stoppard call “get there-itus.”
A flight instructor offers to join the flight as copilot, but John says “he want[s] to do it alone” even though a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association later explains, “Flying at night over featureless terrain or water, and particularly in haze or overcast, is a prime set-up for spatial disorientation, because you’ve lost the horizon.”
The flight takes off at 8:38 p.m., and at 8:40, John Jr. makes his sole radio transmission of the flight. “North of Teterboro. Heading eastward.”
By 8:49 p.m., there is already a problem. In his ascent, John has erroneously strayed into the airspace of an American Airlines Flight 128, descending toward Westchester Airport with 128 passengers and 6 crew on board.
Air traffic controllers are able to redirect the American Airlines flight in time to avoid a midair collision, but radio communications make it clear that John is at fault.
FLIGHT 1484: “I understand he’s not in contact with you or anybody else.”
CONTROLLER: “Uh nope doesn’t [sic] not talking to anybody.”
At a cruising altitude of 5,500 feet, John Jr. guides the Piper Saratoga through thirty minutes of smooth airtime. Then the haze that the pilots on the ground in New Jersey had warned of envelops the plane.
At just after 9:34 p.m., John is seven and a half miles from the Martha’s Vineyard airport. Private pilot Michael Bard, who had returned to Connecticut from Martha’s Vineyard about twenty minutes earlier, describes the conditions as “very hazy, and it was very dark, and it was very hard to see the horizon.” Under those conditions, Bard tells the New York Times, “if you’re not instrument rated, it could be difficult maintaining the airplane in an upright condition.”
Radar records the plane’s erratic descent from 2,200 feet at 9:40, dropping several hundred feet every few seconds, the altimeter spinning toward zero as the Piper goes into a “graveyard spiral” that may have lasted as long as thirty seconds.
At 9:41 p.m., the plane disappears from radar.
* * *
At midnight, Carole Radziwill is startled awake by her ringing telephone. “Are they there with you?” a friend of John’s is asking. “I’m at the [Martha’s Vineyard] airport and they’re not here.”
Radziwill, a former reporter for ABC News, spends hours making calls. Around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., she calls the Coast Guard. “I said, ‘My cousin’s missing.’ He took the name, and there was a little bit of a gasp on the other end of the phone.”
* * *
Rory Kennedy’s wedding is postponed as the family gathers at the Kennedy compound to await news of John, Carolyn, and Lauren.
“If Jackie was alive,” Ethel says, “I don’t know how she would handle this. In fact I don’t think she could bear it.” She adds, “I always thought of Johnny as one of my own.”
President Bill Clinton orders the deployment of USS Grasp, a navy recovery ship. Addressing complaints over preferential treatment for the Kennedys over citizen accident victims, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon says, “It’s a family that has distinguished itself through public service for more than thirty years.” By the next afternoon, crash debris begins washing up along the shore: Lauren’s suitcase, a headrest and wheel from the plane, a bottle of prescription medication bearing Carolyn Bessette’s name.
After a three-day search, on July 20, 1999, an underwater sonar camera locates the main cabin at a depth of approximately 120 feet off Aquinnah (known until 1997 as Gay Head). Its wings have been sheared.
On July 21, Senator Ted Kennedy and his sons, Patrick and Ted Jr., are aboard the Grasp to witness the recovery of John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s crash-ravaged bodies. “It was very grim, very quiet and we left [Senator Kennedy] completely alone,” one of the eight crew members recalls.
“At this moment, the weight of the successive tragedies crashes down on Ted. All these years,” Kennedy adviser Lester Hyman explains, “Ted refused to see a psychiatrist or anything like that because there was just so much. He didn’t think he wanted to open the can of worms. I can think of twelve tragedies in that family, at least, just one after another after another, and the one that almost broke him was John Kennedy Jr.”
On July 22, John’s long-held wishes for a burial at sea are honored, alongside his wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren. All three are cremated, and their ashes spread from a naval destroyer in the Atlantic, within a mile of the crash site. “Catholic priests conducted the thirty-minute civilian ceremony on the ‘fantail’ of the USS Briscoe, a guided missile destroyer,” CNN reports, noting, “There is a provision allowing for such burials for people providing ‘notable service or outstanding contributions to the United States,’” and that “protocol allows sea burials for the children of decorated Navy veterans. President Kennedy was a naval officer wounded and cited for heroism in World War II.”
Kennedy and Bessette family mourners are not far from where, in July 1995, John proposed marriage to Carolyn. “He asked me to marry him out on the water, on the boat,” she told friends. “It was so sweet. He told me, ‘Fishing is so much better with a partner.’”
They were together to the last. And now, forever.
“The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. writes in his diary. “When they let go of the ashes, the plume erupted and settled in the water and passed by in the green current like a ghost. We tossed flowers onto the ghosts.”
A private memorial service follows in New York, at Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s parish, the Church of St. Thomas More on East 89th Street. As he had for his brother Bobby, and for John’s mother, Senator Ted Kennedy delivers the eulogy for John Jr., who, he says, “seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did.”
John’s beloved cousin Anthony Stanislas Radziwill comes forward to read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Radziwill’s wife, Carole, can’t shake the feeling that “John’s last hours were spent thinking about Anthony’s eulogy, and then it’s Anthony who must read at John’s funeral. And the whole time, he’s thinking, ‘It was supposed to be me.’”
Three weeks later, Anthony, too, is dead.
* * *
Lisa DePaulo, an original staffer at George, says, “I don’t believe John ever fathomed that he would die at thirty-eight. He didn’t buy into things like the Kennedy Curse. Stuff like that made him hurl.”
In language befitting a Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver offers her own interpretation of the clan’s repeated brushes with fate. “I’ve come to believe that it’s not what has happened to our family that has been cursed as much as it’s the fact that we’ve never been able to deal with it privately…If there’s a curse, surely it’s that.”
* * *
On August 4, 1999, comes the announcement of the sixteen-million-dollar Zapruder settlement, held since July 16 due to the deaths of John, Carolyn, and Lauren. The New York Times reports, “The film’s worth had been enhanced by the soaring prices commanded for Kennedy historical memorabilia in recent years.”
Yet the latest pieces of the Kennedy story are emerging in fragments.
In a hangar at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Statio
n on Cape Cod, investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recover pieces of John’s Piper Saratoga II, assembling them in an approximation of the aircraft’s pre-crash configuration. The propeller shows “rotational damage” indicative of hitting the water while turning.
On July 6, 2000, the NTSB issues its Aviation Accident Final Report, citing pilot failure as the cause of the accident, and further explaining that “spatial disorientation as a result of continued VFR flight into adverse weather conditions is regularly near the top of the cause/factor list in annual statistics on fatal aircraft accidents.”
John “made a stupid mistake,” says Andrew Ferguson, president of Air Bound Aviation that operates out of Essex County Airport. “Like going through a stop sign. But when a Kennedy goes through a stop sign, there always seems to be an 18-wheeler truck coming from the other side.”
CODA
By November 1969, lingering complications from Joe Kennedy Sr.’s 1961 stroke have turned end-stage. He’s lost his appetite, his eyesight, his ability to breathe without the assistance of an oxygen tank.
“My poor Joe. How cruel, how cruel,” Rose murmurs as she sits by her eighty-one-year-old husband’s bedside. They have been married for fifty-five years.
On November 15, Jackie arrives with kind words for her beloved “Grandpa.”
“I know he could sense the tears in her eyes,” Joe’s nurse, Rita Dallas, says.
Pat and Jean are next to arrive, then Eunice and Sargent Shriver. “Now,” Dallas says, “Mr. Kennedy seemed to exist for only one thing—the sound of Teddy’s footsteps.”
Not four months have passed since Ted delivered his televised speech on Chappaquiddick from his father’s house. “Dad, I’ve done the best I can,” he said to Joe that night. “I’m sorry.”
The House of Kennedy Page 27