After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  No one wanted answers, though, not really. The answers to most of the questions being asked were unbearable.

  For instance, it was speculated by the FAA that it probably took just three minutes for John’s plane to complete what was called “a graveyard spiral” into the ocean at nearly 5,000 feet per minute. Hitting the water at such a tremendous speed, they said, was comparable to the plane slamming into solid concrete. The National Transportation Safety Board later ruled that the crash had most likely been caused by “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.” Weather conditions in the area at the time were clear below 12,000 feet, with visibility at ten miles. With just a little over a year of flying experience, John was not licensed for instrument landings and likely not equipped to handle the kind of extremely overcast, foggy conditions that presented themselves that night.

  Interestingly, John’s good friend John Perry Barlow later recalled, “I had a phone conversation with him a couple of weeks before the accident and I said, ‘You know, it occurs to me—because I’m a private pilot—that you know just enough now to be dangerous, you know what I mean? 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.’ I said, ‘You’re in that narrow window between three hundred and five hundred hours where a lot of pilots get killed,’ which is a generally true statement. It didn’t have anything to do specifically with him, it was just an observation. He listened intently. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I just have to be careful.’ ”

  Within eight hours after being located, the three bodies of the deceased would be cremated. John’s cousins Doug and Max were at the crematorium as the bodies were being destroyed, knowing in their hearts that some members of John’s family should be present.

  For the Kennedys, all of it was simply unbearable. But those who worked with John at George were also overcome. Said the magazine’s former editor in chief, Richard Bradley, “Within the office, there was a professional relationship, of course, but underlying it there were profoundly personal feelings of warmth and loyalty for John, and I would even say love. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that people who worked for John just loved the guy. For the people who worked there, he was much more than a boss. He was someone we cared very deeply and personally about, and that’s why when John died, the office was much more affected than anyone on the outside realized, and part of that is because I don’t think people realized how much contact we had with John. I think the most common question I heard about John at that time, and even now, is, did he ever come to the office? He was a presence in our lives every day. Losing him was more than most of us could ever reconcile.”

  Within days of the cremations, seventeen members of the Kennedy and Bessette families, including Ted Kennedy and his sons, Patrick and Ted Jr.; Caroline Kennedy; Maria Shriver; William Kennedy Smith; Richard and Ann Freeman, Carolyn’s stepfather and mother; and Lisa Bessette, Carolyn’s sister, found themselves sitting in wooden folding chairs aboard the destroyer USS Briscoe as it steamed out to sea. The two families had asked that the Briscoe sail as close as possible to the exact patch of ocean that had claimed John’s plane. In front of the mourners on a card table were three very small pale blue boxes inside of which were the ashes of John, Carolyn, and Lauren. “We commit their elements to the deep, for we are dust and unto dust we shall return,” prayed the Navy’s deputy chief of chaplains, Rear Admiral Barry Black, “but the Lord Jesus Christ will change our mortal bodies to be like His in glory, for He is risen the firstborn from the dead. So let us commend our brother and sisters to the Lord, that the Lord may embrace them in peace and raise them up on the last day.”

  Also on the boat that day was John’s cousin and best friend Anthony Radziwill, who was battling cancer. During the summer of 1999, John was agonizing over Anthony’s slow decline. In fact, over a five-year period, Anthony’s illness took a great toll on John, and eventually on Carolyn too, who had grown to love Anthony and his wife, Carole. “Once it was the four of us with all our dreams and plans and then suddenly there was nothing,” recalled Carole Radziwill, who wrote a moving account of this time in her life called What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love.

  In trying to understand the relationship between John and Carolyn, it has to be understood that Anthony’s cancer was a constant, often mind-numbing issue in their lives, providing day after day of dread and concern. It was unrelenting. No matter what was going on in their lives, in the background, Anthony was dying. By the summer of 1999, John had reconciled himself to the inevitable. However, he felt that Anthony had not done so, and it worried him. Therefore, he began talking to Anthony’s wife, Carole, about what he felt needed to be done to prepare Anthony for his own death. To that end, he was reading On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, he told Carole, and he had started really thinking about the “Five Stages of Death”—anger, denial, fear, acceptance, and peace. Carole didn’t want to discuss it with John, though—not yet, anyway. As Anthony’s wife, she’d been through so much turmoil in the last five years, she was emotionally and physically exhausted. She promised that one day soon, she and John would discuss whatever they needed to in order to help Anthony with his transition. Meanwhile, John began writing Anthony’s eulogy, which he knew he would be delivering at the funeral. “A true gentleman,” John wrote in a first draft of the eulogy, which was later found in his office desk, “he was humble, decent, charming and down to earth. He had humor, intelligence and a heart as big as the ocean. You couldn’t help but love him.”

  John ended his eulogy with: “Good night, sweet prince.”*

  Now, by an awful twist of fate, it was John who was gone, not Anthony. Sadly, Anthony would follow him in just three weeks.

  Not long after John and Carolyn died, it was as if someone opened a floodgate to sensationalism and all sorts of stories began to be published alleging, among other things, that at the time of their death John had been cheating on Carolyn or she had been cheating on him, or that one or both of them were addicted to drugs. The list of unsavory allegations seemed endless. Who knows if any of these stories is true? As Jackie Kennedy once put it, “No one knows what goes on in a marriage except the two people in it.” That said, there’s no solid evidence to support any of those allegations. No credible sources have any real proof of any of these stories. “It was a difficult summer,” Carole Radziwill allows. “And I’m not going to say that it wasn’t. It was. John’s magazine, George, was struggling and Anthony was dying, and we were—we were not, any of us, really, in a good place. And there were reports that they were in marriage counseling, and that’s true. But I think what distorts everything in life is not understanding the difference between fact and truth. The fact was they were in marriage counseling. The truth is they loved each other. And I have no doubt that they would have been okay.”

  After the priest finished the service, an officer in dress whites carried the first box down a ladder to the choppy waterline, where he opened the box and scattered the ashes. As he did so, a brass quintet from the Newport Naval Base played Christian hymns, in place of the military taps. The officer returned for the other two boxes. All of the ashes were scattered into the same sea to which the Kennedys had been so devoted for so many years—the same sea John F. Kennedy Jr. had often said assured him a sense of peace and solitude, the sea he had said represented heaven. John was just thirty-eight. Carolyn was thirty-three, Lauren thirty-four.

  “It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean,” John’s father, President Kennedy, had said many years earlier on September 14, 1962, during a toast to the America’s Cup racing crew, “and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whe
nce we came.”

  What Families Do

  There would be a funeral Mass in New York for John and Carolyn at St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church on Friday, July 23, 1999, and then another the next evening for Lauren at Greenwich’s Episcopal Christ Church. Somehow, the families would get through it all, but for the Kennedys, there was an almost palpable sense that nothing would ever again be the same. With John gone, the brightest light in their lives had been extinguished. That he was also a direct link to President Kennedy, the man about whom the family had always been the proudest, made the others feel as if he deserved a special kind of respect. After all, he was his father’s son, and as long as John Kennedy Jr. walked among them, it felt as if President Kennedy was still somehow present, too. Now father and son were both gone, leaving in their wake a kind of emptiness that was impossible to quantify. “Our prince is gone,” is how Maria Shriver put it, and that was most unusual phraseology for her. The family never used royal titles when speaking about themselves. But in this case, it just seemed appropriate. Because it was true.

  “Once, when they asked John what he would do if he went into politics and was elected president,” Ted said in his moving eulogy during the service for John and Carolyn, “he said, ‘I guess the first thing is call up Uncle Teddy and gloat.’ I loved that. It was so like his father.

  “How often our family will think of the two of them,” he said of John and Carolyn, “cuddling affectionately on a boat, surrounded by family—aunts, uncles, Caroline and Ed and their children, Rose, Tatiana, and Jack, Kennedy cousins, Radziwill cousins, Shriver cousins, Smith cousins, Lawford cousins—as we sailed Nantucket Sound. Then we would come home, and before dinner, on the lawn where his father had played, John would lead a spirited game of touch football. And his beautiful young wife, the new pride of the Kennedys, would cheer for John’s team and delight her nieces and nephews with her somersaults.

  “We thank the millions who have rained blossoms down on John’s memory,” he intoned to the mourners, including President Clinton and Hillary Clinton. “He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will live forever in our memory, and in our beguiled and broken hearts. We dared to think, in that Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.

  “We, who have loved him from the day he was born, and watched the remarkable man he became, now bid him farewell.

  “God bless you, John and Carolyn. We love you and we always will.”

  After the funeral Mass, many of the Kennedys congregated for a few moments in the vestibule of the old Gothic-style church. The Kennedys were on their way outside to greet the mourners, many of them longtime friends, who had come to say goodbye and to also pay tribute to John and Carolyn and were now spilling out onto East 89th Street. Alone for a few minutes with each other and a few close friends, the family members spoke briefly about how Jackie used to take John and Caroline to this same church every Sunday for Mass. It was also here that she and her children commemorated the anniversary of Jack’s death each November. As Ted Kennedy stood in the vestibule with Vicki, Caroline—who had also given a reading at her brother’s service of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—approached him and embraced him warmly. Ethel peeked outside at the pressing crowd, shading her eyes from the sun and waving. She then stepped back inside. Soon, Eunice and Sargent were present in the vestibule, as were Pat, Joan, Jean, and some of their grown children, including Bobby and Timothy Shriver; Christopher Lawford and his sister, Sydney McKelvy; Ted Kennedy Jr.; William Kennedy Smith; and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about Grandpa all day,” Sargent Shriver said to the small group, according to the recollection of one of the relatives who was present. “And Jack and Bobby too. It’s all gone by so fast,” he said sadly.

  At that, Caroline seemed to crumble. She had managed to maintain her composure all day, but now she appeared to be completely worn down by sheer emotion. Her husband, Ed, grabbed her from behind and seemed to hold her up by her elbows, while her oldest daughter, Rose, who was just eleven, stuck close to her side. Eunice’s daughter, Maria, walked up behind her mother and wrapped her long arms around her, putting her head on her shoulder. Maria hadn’t been able to stop crying all day, her eyes hidden by large sunglasses. “Granny would say, wipe that tear away,” a comforting Eunice had told her earlier, referring to Rose Kennedy.

  “Never would I have ever believed this day would come,” Ethel said sadly. Her sons Bobby and Joe each took one of their mother’s hands and held tightly. “But we will pull together, though, and we will go on,” she told the small, tearful group, “because we are family. And that’s what families do,” she concluded. “They go on.”

  The small group of Kennedy family members finally composed themselves enough to walk outside the small church and then to their cars, all the while forcing smiles and waving to a world that had long wondered about them, long speculated about them, long loved them, and, yes, even at times hated them too. They would do what they’d been doing for more years than many of them cared to remember—they would choke back their tears.

  PART TWENTY-THREE

  Transitions

  Rosemary Kennedy—Free at Last

  Flash back to Labor Day weekend in September 1994. Four generations of Kennedys gathered at the Cape to celebrate the nation’s one hundredth Labor Day holiday, and as was very often the case, Eunice, Pat, Jean, and Ted arranged for their sister, Rosemary Kennedy, to visit the family for the holiday. She had lived more than fifty years in Wisconsin at St. Coletta’s, although after Joseph’s death in 1969 she did enjoy many one-week visits with her family during summers in Palm Beach and in Hyannis Port. Still, Rosemary, who was now seventy-six, obviously had led a very sad life. As much as the Kennedys loved their father, Joseph, they never really reconciled his actions toward his daughter, basically deciding as a family that they had no choice but to move forward and not dwell on the past.

  Rosemary arrived with two nuns from the Wisconsin facility on August 24. When Rosemary showed up, she was greeted by many members of the family who had congregated at the Big House to greet her warmly, including her sisters and brother as well as Sargent Shriver, Stephen Smith, and Ethel Kennedy. Rose—who at 104 was in a wheelchair and could barely speak or hear—seemed happy to see her daughter once again. That evening, the family had a quiet meal, and then Rosemary retired early, saying that she was exhausted from the trip.

  The next morning, Eunice and Pat planned to take Rosemary on a drive into town to buy some T-shirts, flip-flops, and other items Rosemary said she wanted for her stay at the compound. The three sisters and one of the two nuns who’d come with Rosemary piled into Eunice’s SUV, drove through the exit of the compound past the guards usually stationed there, and into one of the small Cape Cod towns. They found a small gift shop that the Kennedy women loved. It looked like a little home, a wooden structure with a flag in front of it and a couple of Adirondack chairs on a small porch, one yellow and one blue. As they shopped, Rosemary seemed to become impatient and said she wanted to go outside and sit down. One of the nuns accompanied her, and the two left the store to sit on the porch. After about ten minutes out there, according to what the nun would remember years later, someone pulled into the small parking lot in front of the store, got out of his car, and walked up to her and Rosemary. He asked for directions. Since she’d been to the Cape many times with Rosemary, she thought she might be able to help and the two began discussing the driver’s route. Confused about something, he walked back to the car to get a map, and the nun followed. They spoke at the car for about five minutes, the entire time looking down at a map. It had been just five minutes, but when the sister glanced up at the porch she realized that Rosemary was gone. Since it had been su
ch a short time, she assumed that Rosemary had gone back inside to join her siblings. She continued talking to the motorist for about another five minutes before he left and she went back inside the store. Inside, she saw Eunice and Pat debating over bath salts. She looked around the store—no Rosemary. “Is Rosie in here?” she asked the Kennedys. “What!? She’s not with you?” was the response. It didn’t take long to realize that Rosemary had disappeared.

  Panicked, the three women ran out of the store and started calling Rosemary’s name. But she was gone. “How could you allow this to happen?” Eunice demanded of the nun. According to the sister’s later recollection, Eunice was understandably upset. The nun’s explanation of what had happened didn’t make matters much better. “That was very irresponsible of you,” Eunice scolded her. “I can’t believe this has happened.” Eunice was so hard on her, the nun actually burst into tears. “There’s no time for that now,” Eunice said. “We have to find my sister.”

  Pat went one way, Eunice another, and the nun yet another, all in search of Rosemary. “She couldn’t have gone far,” Eunice said. Thirty frantic minutes later there was still no sign of her. It was then decided that Eunice and the nun would take the car and go looking for Rosemary while Pat stayed behind at the store in case she returned. So the two women got into Eunice’s car and drove very slowly down a street that ran parallel to the beach. It wasn’t long before they saw a large woman in a red tracksuit, red, white, and blue baseball cap, and large spectacles walking slowly on the beach, just seeming to enjoy the day. She seemed not to have a care in the world as she walked along, taking in the view. When she stopped to look at the ocean, the nun exclaimed, “Let’s go get her, quick.” Eunice pulled over to the side of the road, about twenty feet behind Rosemary. “No, let’s wait,” she said as she studied her sister. “What in the world is she doing?” the nun asked. Eunice smiled. “I guess she’s doing what we Kennedys have been doing for generations,” Eunice said. “She’s enjoying the beach. Let’s leave her be.”