The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Determined to erase the pictures from my brain, I tried to conjure up other, more comforting possibilities. I imagined, though I didn’t believe it, that they were hiding somewhere. I told Frannie that the three of them were probably sitting on No Mans Land, a tiny island off the Vineyard that was used for military target practice. John was getting ready to cook up some endangered plover eggs for breakfast.

  I dressed in a daze, feeling as though I was choking in the airless condo with my family looking at me worriedly. The resort we were staying at was at the foot of a little mountain, and without thinking, I walked out the door and started to climb. It felt like something John would do—go outside, be in Nature, climb a mountain. I was practically running by the time I reached the top. I stayed there for a moment, then headed back, leaping and sliding down the gravelly trail as John and I had done together in Ireland. About halfway down, something—my mind? my body? my friend?—came to my rescue. I stopped on the hill and felt a presence to my right. And John told me, “It’s okay, Rob. I’m all right.”

  I knew that this vision—because that’s what it felt like, a vision—was in my mind, but it was powerful just the same. John’s spirit, which lives within me and everyone else who loved him, felt utterly real, like something I could hear and feel and touch. And despite my total disbelief in the supernatural, I trusted this. My unspeakable fear, that John and Carolyn and Lauren had suffered pure, unimaginable terror as their plane went into an irrecoverable dive, was allayed. John told me that he was okay that morning on the hill, and I hold it as true.

  For reasons I don’t fully understand, John’s and Carolyn’s ashes were ceremoniously tossed into the Atlantic from a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Briscoe, off the Massachusetts coast near Martha’s Vineyard. Only close family attended the ceremony. John wasn’t in the navy, he wasn’t a seaman, and he didn’t live in Massachusetts. There is no place to go and pay tribute to and reflect upon John. (Though when I go swimming at the Jersey Shore each summer, I figure that, in some logarithmically infinitesimal way, we’re swimming together.)

  The next week is blurry in my memory. The television and the newspapers carried endless news, but there was no real news. I stopped listening or reading. The whole world was mourning my friend, which I guess is weird but seemed completely right. John’s many friends began to arrive in the city and seek out one another. Randy Poster, a friend from Brown who’d moved to Los Angeles, hosted a gathering of John’s acting buddies. Maura, the sister of John’s artist friend Sasha, had a bunch of old New York friends over, a mix that he’d met from grade school to grad school. There was a dinner held by the George gang at Café Loup on Thirteenth Street. John meant so much to so many people. And none of us had ever considered that he wouldn’t be a part of our lives for the duration. The loss and the shock were enormous. So we all gravitated to one another, looking to console ourselves in the connections we had to him. It was uplifting, because it felt as if John’s presence was amplified when we were together.

  The USS Briscoe carrying the ashes of John and Carolyn and Lauren Bessette to a burial at sea off Martha’s Vineyard on July 22, 1999. (Courtesy of Corbis)

  The memorial service for John and Carolyn was beautiful, probably the first time in my life I understood the consoling power of rituals like funerals. The logistics of the service were taken care of by Teddy’s office. On Thursday I received a call from a staff member informing me that I was a pallbearer. That was the word, though there was no casket. Within the hour a clean-shaven young man showed up at my door with invitations for Frannie and me, small cards that we needed to get through several security checkpoints.

  Friday was warm and sunny and we took a cab uptown about ten A.M., walking the last few blocks to the Church of St. Thomas More, on East Eighty-ninth Street, through throngs of people who’d come to pay their respects. The service itself was sad, but not unbearably so. I’m not sure why. Maybe we’d exhausted our tears. Or maybe, where Carolyn and John were concerned, there was solace in knowing they’d died together. No doubt, Teddy Kennedy, so sadly accustomed to burying his beloved family members, knew how to guide us. He gave a moving and powerful eulogy, filled with humor as well as warmth. And there was the fact, which John’s friends talked about later, that he would have been devastated to see people so sad on his account. The most difficult moment was when Ann Freeman, Carolyn and Lauren’s mother, somehow found the superhuman strength to stand and read from a book called the Facts of Faith. I can’t fathom how she did it. Caroline read from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which John had performed in. The sight of these bereaved family members acting with such strength straightened my spine. Near the end of the service, Wyclef Jean sang “Many Rivers to Cross,” the melancholy, faith-infused Jimmy Cliff song. As his voice filled the vaulted apses, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me, but I also sensed something transcendent that was beauty or love or spirit. I didn’t want the song to end. I wanted to hold on to that hopeful moment. But it ended, and as the music finished, the other pallbearers and I, with no casket to carry, began to cry.

  There was a reception right after the funeral, held at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a few blocks away. It was a quiet affair, not tearful but resigned. Our good-byes were made somewhat easier by the reunion of so many of John’s closest friends. We told stories, shared how we were coping, wondered if we’d ever see one another again. People laughed—we all had too many happy memories of John and Carolyn not to smile sometimes. Besides, it was hard not to believe that John was watching us that day, deeply sorry for our grieving and smiling at our good-natured quips. As the crowd slowly thinned out, John’s friends lingered. We sat around a couple of tables and drank orange juice and vodka, knowing that John had collected us, in a way, and sensing an esprit de corps because of it. I remember only a few conversations clearly from that day. One was with Caroline, whom I sought out immediately. We had not been close, but I desperately wanted to talk to her. I found her and expressed my condolences, saying, “Caroline, I’m so terribly sorry. Your brother loved you so much.” She replied, “Thank you, Rob. John loved you.” Six words. They still fill my cup five years later.

  I spoke with Efigenio, too, who told me he’d had a vision similar to mine. It happened a day or two after the crash. He said that he was driving along the sandy road that leads from the beach to the house at Red Gate. Something caught his eye at the edge of one of the ponds. When he got closer, he saw that there were words and names etched in the sand. The words were “We are okay.” The names were John, Jackie, Carolyn, and Lauren. I didn’t ask him any questions, just added his words to my comfort.

  That night Pat Mannochia arranged a less formal memorial at his huge gym, La Palestra. It was a big group, including many grieving friends who hadn’t been invited to the church. Some were angry, others sad, that they hadn’t made “the list.” But no one was completely surprised. John’s celebrity had always been a complicating factor, in death as in life. Pat’s gathering let us, friends who felt like our own kind of family, mourn and also enjoy our memories. It wasn’t a tearful event, more like a party with an overlay of sadness. As always, everyone told lots of stories. I remember the actor Nick Chinlund telling how he and John had gone to a Knicks game. Nick had played basketball at Brown and was excited that he’d be courtside at the Garden. But John had brought the wrong tickets with him, so they were turned away from the front row and ended up in the dreaded “blues” high atop the arena. Kissy Amanpour spoke movingly about both John and Carolyn, and John Hare did the same. I finished up the speeches by suggesting that the Irish tradition of cutting down a tree when a life has been cut short didn’t apply in this case. That’s because John had lived life so large and in such an intimate, fulfilling way. As midnight passed, I found myself sitting with Kissy and her husband, Jamie Rubin, Billy Noonan, Santina, and Dan Samson. We all knew one another because of John, and we marveled at his ability to sew us all together over the years.

  The next day in Greenwich, there was a ser
vice at an Episcopal church for Lauren Bessette. To me, this seemed an infinitely sadder event. Lauren’s many friends, some who had come from halfway around the world, looked stricken and numb. There in the church, with her parents and sister, Lauren’s death seemed without consolation. Again, Ann Freeman was calm and gracious, talking to each of us after the service. She made a point of asking everyone to keep in touch with her and Lisa, her surviving daughter. Lisa was equally generous, though she had to struggle with the fearsome bubble we created around her with our profound unease. What do you say to a woman who has just lost her sisters? It was a heartsick evening and, for those of us who didn’t know Lauren well, unrelieved even by memories of her.

  The idea that John was to blame floated in the air that night. Not officially—there were prayers said for Carolyn and for John—and not in the open-hearted manner of Mrs. Freeman and Lisa. But it was there just the same. An old friend of mine from Brown, someone I’d once been close to, made the charge explicitly. He’d never been particularly friendly with John. But in the small world we all live in, he and his wife had become dear friends with Lauren while they all lived in the Far East and London. He walked up to me that night and said bitterly, “Your friend killed my friend.”

  I’m sure he spoke from some place of overwhelming sadness, but I refused to accept his words. I puffed up and replied angrily, “What did you just say?” not believing that he’d continue.

  In fact, he did, saying, “If John weren’t so reckless, Lauren would still be alive.”

  I wanted to punch him, but I quoted Carolyn instead: “Live your own life, man.”

  In the years since John, Carolyn, and Lauren died, there have been constant attempts to blame someone for the crash. I’ve read that Carolyn was to blame, because she demanded a new coat of toenail polish during a pedicure, which made them late. I’ve read that Lauren held the group up. And, endlessly, I’ve heard that John was reckless. Why this blamefest? Will it bring them back? Does anyone feel better for the exercise? For the record, I’m sure John would have accepted responsibility for what happened. He was at the controls. And he was a deeply responsible person. I imagine his last thought was a bottomless remorse for harming his beloved wife and her sister. But I also know that accidents happen, even to conscientious people. And John was a careful pilot, trained and thorough and doing something he’d done many times before.

  I need to emphasize this: John was not a reckless man. On his own, especially in his youth, he pushed himself far, seeking the limits of his courage. He had to. Given his father, his family, his own determination to be something more than the name he was born with, how could he not? There’s an aircraft carrier and a space center that share his name. He’d inherited a free lifetime subscription to Aviation Week Space Technology from the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, his father. He was not going to be content playing golf. John also studied long and hard to master whatever skills would let him explore the natural world that he loved so much: He was a certified diver, an experienced camper, a masterful swimmer and skier. Yes, he loved adventure. His privileged life afforded him opportunities to do things most people can’t: go heli-skiing and white-water rafting and kayaking. But regular people learn to fly planes, climb mountains, search for undersea wrecks—and nobody calls them reckless until something goes wrong. I was with John on some of his thrill-seeking adventures, and he was as disciplined and careful as they come. He followed the rules, knowing that diligence and respect are the keys to mastery.

  I understand that John made a fatal error that night in his plane. And I also understand, from everything I’ve read, that this error was something that can happen even to experienced pilots. According to the final accident report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), he did what he was supposed to do. Before takeoff, he “obtained weather forecasts for a cross-country flight, which indicated visual flight rules (VFR) conditions with clear skies and visibility that varied between 4 to 10 miles along his intended route.” During his flight, the report states, “airports along the coast reported visibility between 5 and 8 miles.” And “in the 15 months before the accident, the pilot [John] had flown either to or from the destination area about 35 times. The pilot flew at least 17 of these flight legs without a CFI [certified flight instructor] on board, of which 5 were at night.” Stated simply, the skies were reported clear and this was his milk run. There was no indication of trouble. None. However, the report notes that “pilots flying similar routes on the night of the accident reported no visual horizon while flying over the water because of haze.” As John’s plane neared his destination, this haze, together with the darkness, left him in a dark gray envelope, oriented to nowhere. The result of losing the horizon is spatial disorientation—you can’t tell up from down or right from left. Spatial disorientation is like being very dizzy, and you have almost no time to recover before the plane is out of control. The instruments don’t matter. Being in a squirrelly plane doesn’t matter. You’re screwed. In the NTSB’s words, “spatial disorientation … is regularly near the top of the cause/factor list in annual statistics on fatal aircraft accidents.” The haze that snuck up on John was not on the radar, not reported on the radio, and not in the weather reports. From what I can tell, they got bushwhacked.

  While researching John’s final flight, I found this coincidental NTSB report: “On March 30, 2000, about 2025 Eastern Standard Time, a Boeing 767-332, operated by Delta Airlines as flight 106,” took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The plane was headed to Frankfurt, Germany, with 225 people on board. As it was making its climb from the airport, with the first officer flying and the autopilot not engaged, the airplane suddenly rolled to the right. The pilot grabbed control of the plane, dumped twenty thousand pounds of fuel, and returned safely to Kennedy. What had happened was that the first officer had lost control of the plane, telling the NTSB “there was no horizon, stars, or moon, and all he saw was darkness.” The report noted that “the first officer’s failure to maintain control of the airplane … was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the incident were the cloud layer and dark night.” Just like for John. But the first officer was an experienced pilot with nine thousand total flight hours for Delta and training in both the T-38 and F-15 aircraft when he’d been an officer in the air force.

  I’ll believe in Moshup’s curse long before I buy into any kind of Kennedy curse. John enjoyed adventure, but he was neither naive nor rash. He was brave but deliberate, someone who lived his life to the fullest—with more opportunity than most—without forgetting that every action has a consequence. His number came up short that night in July. His luck and preparation—you need both—failed him, and Carolyn and Lauren, too. And yet, without the hindsight of what happened, I can’t think of a single reason why I wouldn’t have gotten on the plane with him that night with my family.

  Twenty-one

  LIVE FOR THE DAY

  IN THE FALL of 1998, John told an interviewer that “the beginning of life is just preparation.” It wasn’t hyperbole: John had consciously spent his years preparing to be of service and value to his country. But before the curtain rose on Act Two, the lead actor left the building.

  He’d begun his efforts with George. His next goal was to be a New York senator, or possibly governor. And then he would have run for President. Maybe the election of 2012. That morning on the Vineyard when we joked about my needing to work on my Hindi, I asked John how much time I had. He responded laughingly, “How about 2012? Unless you need more time, of course.” It was only partly a joke. In 2012 John would have been fifty-two. He’d already been offered the opportunity to run for Senator Lautenberg’s seat in New Jersey, presumably using his mom’s Peapack address as his home base. He’d rejected that idea but had begun to put a team together to develop a road map for his political future. John was intensely dedicated to his destiny, and he had his nose quietly to the grindstone.

  John had the potential to do great things. He embodi
ed a unique convergence of factors: a good and smart person born with extraordinary access and real power, endowed with the trust and goodwill—both inherited and earned—of most of the world. His entire short life, he worked diligently to turn all that he’d been born with into something of value. I’d bet the ranch he would have been President, but there were other jobs he could have done well, too. We used to puzzle over what President Clinton would do after his second term ended, since he was relatively young to be retired from the top of the world’s biggest totem pole. John mentioned that the United Nations had never had an American secretary-general. It’s a thought.

  I used to tell my wife—because I couldn’t really tell anyone else—that John would be there when his country needed him. He wasn’t there when the Twin Towers fell, though that day made me understand much more clearly what exactly he could have contributed. John had a worldly and inclusive vision of America, a deep patriotism that was nonetheless open-hearted and sophisticated about the connectedness of the world’s nations. In this he was like his father, who in a speech not long after World War II spoke of the world’s need to “recognize how interdependent we are.” He had a motley and marvelous pantheon of heroes, including Abraham Lincoln (John loved the quote “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”) and Mustafa Atatürk, the brilliant general who defeated the Allied powers at Gallipoli in World War I and went on to turn Turkey into a modern, democratic, secular state.

  Back when we first got out of school, I was a little afraid of John’s future as a politician. I worried I’d lose touch with him. Personally, I’d have been happy just to grow old with him, a not-quite-average citizen who was my dear friend. (Though I would have made a fine ambassador.) Not long after the crash, someone asked me what I was going to do without the sparkle and glamour he brought to my life. No more courtside tickets at Knicks games. No more paparazzi shots of the two of us in the New York Post. I was offended, but actually it was a fair question. Certainly I knew and loved John outside of his fame. But it’s also true that my day-to-day life is very different without him. No special access, no trips to the Vineyard, no flashbulbs. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t miss that—it was fun, especially because it was with John.