Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Harry was not reckless, Pam said. “Everybody who knew him knew he wasn’t,” she said. “The funny thing was, at the lake house in Hayward, we would be up there with the kids and friends sometimes with kids or cousins with kids and Harry was the one who always wanted them to wear their life jackets even just running around on the docks and stuff, so that we didn’t have to be so worried. He would make them wear the life jackets to play on the beach so we could have a glass of wine and not be like, ‘Where are the kids?’ Not that we weren’t watching them.”

  To this day, it is understandably a very difficult subject for Pam to discuss. “I don’t think I can,” she said. “I spent seven years in therapy over it and I still can’t. You’re like you lost ten years of your life or something. I couldn’t open my day planner because nothing was relevant anymore. I had been planning a birthday party for Maddie. Nothing that was in the book was my life anymore.”

  Tom Kyros did not want to think about what exactly might have happened. He recalled how on Wednesday night—the “most terrible night of them all”—his wife, Sally, was staying with Pam, and they were woken by three thunderbolts. “These were the only three thunderclaps that were heard that night,” he said. The recollection of the thunderstorm was the best answer he could muster about what happened. “I will not talk about it with anybody, and don’t think about what really happened,” he said. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to speculate. It’s too painful and scary, and so anytime I ever get close to it, it’s change the subject time. So don’t plan on asking me that question.”

  * * *

  ON AUGUST 19, SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES returned to the Semper Spero, which by then had been towed to Larsen Marine, a company in Waukegan. The deputies collected a few more items from the boat, including a Chicago Tribune from August 15, a blue Squaw Creek Resort sweatshirt, a bag of Crayola crayons, a Bic lighter, and a current Saks Fifth Avenue catalog. There was also a green-and-black duffel bag with the words SEMPER SPERO HARRY on the side, which held Harry’s wallet, containing $192 in cash, and his Nokia cell phone. The deputies concluded that there was “no evidence which would be consistent with foul play.” Larsen Marine also inspected the boat and concluded that all mechanical and electrical systems were operating properly. On Harry’s car, the deputies found two notes: one from his father telling him to call the Coast Guard—“They are looking for you. Call Pam and mom too”—and one from Andrew Lewis, a longtime Bradner employee, giving Harry the coordinates for where to meet him at the PGA golf tournament that was held at Medinah Country Club, in Medina, Illinois. The deputies had a few meetings with Rick Bull. Rick had the awful task of sailing the Semper Spero from Larsen Marine back to Monroe Harbor, and told the deputies that the boat was functioning properly, other than that the jib cleats were out of alignment.

  The deputies gave Rick a nautical chart that showed where the bodies of Harry and Lexi had been found. He told them that, given the autopilot setting of 135 degrees southwest and where the bodies were found, he believed Harry was heading toward Wilmette, where a Bull family member lived along the shoreline. Apparently what the Bulls liked to do when sailing along the coast north of Chicago was to contact the relative and, once he’d sighted them through his telescope, go to visit with him.

  * * *

  GILES MCNAMEE, HARRY’S FRIEND from both Andover and (briefly) Yale, is skeptical that Harry’s death was accidental. He conceded there is little evidence of foul play—in our conversations, he referred to what he thought was Harry’s missing wallet as one potential piece of evidence of foul play, although his wallet was found with cash in it—but he said he can’t reconcile the meticulous, law-abiding, responsible Harry Bull that he knew so well with his senseless death and that of his two daughters. He hadn’t been drinking. The weather was calm. There is no logical explanation for what happened. “From the facts, it struck me that there might have been foul play of some sort,” he said. “The facts didn’t add up to the outcome.” He said the Harry he knew would play by the rules, meaning that young children would wear life jackets on the sailboat and when going swimming. “Harry would have had a life preserver on and the girls would have had [life preservers] on,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense, and even if it was a circumstance where say he got hit in the head with the boom and got knocked out, the girls were little and they wouldn’t have been without life preservers. It just was, that’s not him, so it didn’t make any sense to me.… You can’t have little kids on a boat without having life preservers on little kids. That’s the law and Harry would have obeyed the law. If they jumped in after life preservers, they would have been wearing life preservers.” Of course, all the life preservers on the boat were stowed away. And Harry and his two girls still ended up in the water.

  But McNamee is ultimately right to be puzzled and confused. The events of those August days remain nearly inexplicable.

  * * *

  HOW PAM WAS ABLE TO RECOVER from this inconceivable tragedy is itself unfathomable. But she did. “I feel very lucky that Harry came into my life,” she said. “I feel lucky for the years I had with the girls and Harry. It’s because of the foundation they left me with that I was able to go on.” Baby George helped, of course. He was eleven months old at the time of the tragedy. “George was at a very cute age,” she said. “He took his first three steps the day of the funeral. And George is a bright little star, too, so he’s a good guy and he’s a handful, so that kept me busy.” She got involved with the Boys and Girls Club. She said her girlfriends helped her get through the extraordinary pain of the loss of her husband and two of her three children. Before George was in school, she would spend the winters with him in Arizona at her parents’ home. Her parents and their friends would eat dinner at 5 p.m. She would go and order a glass of wine. With her braces, she looked so young she got carded. “I felt like I lost a lot of time in my life,” she said. “I felt like I lost ten years.”

  She put George in the Hinsdale public schools. She stayed in the house in Hinsdale, even though the memories were painful. “Maybe it was too hard to move because I had all those boxes of things I would’ve had to go through.…”

  When George was still a baby, she quit the nearby Salt Creek Club. There were bad memories there, and she wasn’t using it anymore. But when George was three years old, she decided to rejoin. That’s where she met Paul Garvin. He was the director of racquet sports at Salt Creek. Paul was always nice to Pam, who was thirty-nine years old when Harry died. “I couldn’t always tell if he was being especially nice,” she said. But he never asked her out or anything, and Pam never got the hint that perhaps he was interested in her. Paul would always give George a Tootsie Roll when he saw him at the club.

  It turned out that one of Paul’s favorite restaurants was Bob Chinn’s Crab House, in Chicago. “They have great key lime pie,” he told Pam. But she didn’t take the hint. Her friends told her that Paul was probably sitting by himself at Bob Chinn’s waiting for her to show up. During the winter, Paul was a ski bum in Banff. So he was only around Hinsdale during the summer months. The following summer, Pam was in downtown Chicago one day and noticed a sign declaring that another Bob Chinn’s was opening up downtown. That night she went to Salt Creek for a “ladies drill,” where Paul instructed a group of women on their tennis games. “The way Paul would tell the story,” Pam said, “is like in front of twenty ladies, I pinned him against the fence and said, ‘I was in the city today. Bob Chinn’s is opening,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to check that out,’ and I said, ‘When you do, I want to go with you.’ And right away, he didn’t drop the ball. He said, ‘How about Friday?’ So that was our first date, so we went all the way downtown to dinner and then there was a family from Salt Creek with little kids sitting at the table next to us going, ‘Hi, Coach Paul.’” He took her ice climbing in Banff. He took her to Paris to go to the French Open, one of her dream vacations. They got married in 2005. People usually assume that Paul is George’s father.

  * * *


  ON AUGUST 23, 1999, THE REVEREND Christine Chakoian led a funeral service for Harry and his daughters at the Community Presbyterian Church, in Clarendon Hills. It was the congregation that Harry had been part of for most of his life. Pam’s brother Tom said what everyone was thinking: “These people left us far too early. There is an overwhelming sense in all of us that they were robbed of the incredible future that was promised by their amazing potential.” He remembered what Maddie had once told him: that people are like flowers and balloons. “They don’t last forever.”

  In her homily, Reverend Chakoian spoke for everyone else. “A week ago today, Harry, Maddie, and Lexi were having a wonderful time—sharing a ride on their sailboat, enjoying the wind and the sun, and most of all reveling in each other’s company,” she said. “Then suddenly, tragically, it was over, in the blink of an eye. Three vibrant lives cut short. Till our days’ end, we may never know what happened; till our last breath, we will not know why it had to turn out this way.”

  She urged the grieving to learn from the tragic deaths. “Our days are never certain,” she said. “None of us can ever know what time we have left to spend with those we love. None of us can ever know how many days are ours to make a difference in the world. Life is so precious, and the loved ones that people our lives are only ours to borrow briefly. It is so easy to be careless with our time, to imagine that we have forever to be kind, to accomplish our dreams, to give back to the world. Today is always the only day you may have: Seize the day. It is so easy to be thoughtless with our loved ones, to take them for granted. Treasure them with your whole heart. In life and in death, Harry and the girls have taught us this: In the end, the largest paycheck or the fanciest house or the most coveted title doesn’t matter. The meaning of our lives is gained from the joy that we share and the good that we do and the people whom we love. There is much that we will never know about how or why this tragedy occurred. In many ways, it really doesn’t matter. It is what we know that matters more: that Harry and Maddie and Lexi’s lives have meant the world to us; and that even their deaths have the capacity to ennoble us, inspiring us to pledge ourselves to what ultimately matters.”

  Harry and Lexi are buried next to each other in the small cemetery down the road from the house they lived in together with Pam and George. There is also a grave marker there for Maddie. Harry’s parents have both since passed away as well. After Harry’s mother died in 2016, Pam replaced the three separate grave markers for Harry, Maddie, and Lexi with one headstone for the three of them, flanked by headstones for Harry’s father and mother. They are all buried near one another, allowing Pam and George to visit them whenever they want. Each passing season, Pam replaces the besotted flowers on the headstones of Harry and their two young daughters.

  John

  FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, NEITHER he nor his mother liked the name John-John. His mother told Paul Fay, one of her husband’s navy buddies, that she “took issue” when he referred to “John-John.”

  “The president never called him John-John,” she told him.

  “Jackie, you’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “He called him John-John all the time.”

  “He did not call him John-John,” she replied. “He called him John.”

  Concluded Fay: “Well now, how do you argue with something like that? I mean, you could take any number of people around the president who knew that he called him John-John.”

  John F. Kennedy Jr. was the first—and so far only—child in history born to a president-elect of the United States. The coverage of his birth in the heightened period of a presidential transition was especially dramatic. His birth was scheduled for cesarean section on December 1 at the Georgetown University Hospital. The precautions were a medical necessity given that his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy, had suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and, a year later, a stillborn.

  Despite the careful planning, John’s arrival twenty-two minutes after midnight on November 25, 1960, took everyone by surprise. With his wife on doctor-ordered bed rest at the couple’s Georgetown home on N Street, the president-elect had headed down—at eight o’clock the previous evening, in the family’s two-engine Convair private plane—to his father’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, for a post-election vacation. “There was not the slightest indication,” the Times reported, “… that the birth of the child was imminent.” Two hours later, though, as Kennedy was approaching Palm Beach, his wife called Dr. John Walsh, her physician. Walsh ordered an ambulance to take Mrs. Kennedy to the Georgetown University Hospital. Word of her emergency was conveyed to the president-elect a few minutes before his plane landed in Palm Beach.

  On the ground, Kennedy walked “briskly” through a crowd of “a few hundred,” the Times reported, to an office inside the Palm Beach International Airport. He spoke to a nurse at the Georgetown hospital by phone. She told him that his wife was in surgery, having entered the operating room at 11:30 p.m. He promptly turned around and informed the Secret Service that he was returning to Washington. The family Convair was abandoned in favor of a chartered American Airlines DC-6 that had ferried the press corps to Palm Beach. Accompanied by his aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy commandeered the front of the jet, along with the Secret Service, for the return flight to Washington.

  He was told of his son’s birth at 1:15 a.m., by radio, as he cruised at thirteen thousand feet above the eastern coastline of Florida. The news was relayed to the press in the back of the plane by the captain, resulting in a spontaneous burst of applause. Dressed in his shirtsleeves, Kennedy then visited with the press. Seven minutes later, at 1:22 a.m., Kennedy went into the cockpit of the plane, donned earphones, and heard directly from the hospital that both mother and son were “doing well.”

  At 2:50 a.m., as Jackie was being wheeled out of the delivery room, Thomas Freeman, an Associated Press photographer who had hidden away in an empty hospital room, took her picture with a flash camera. “Oh, no, not that,” she said. The Secret Service agents nearby seized Freeman’s camera and took out the film. The president-elect arrived at the Georgetown hospital at 4:18 a.m. He caught a quick glimpse of his six-pound, three-ounce son, in an incubator in the nursery before heading to see his wife in her room. Dr. Walsh told the press that John Jr. was “good looking and healthy.” Asked if he resembled more his mother or his father, the doctor said, “Frankly, new babies look mostly like new babies.”

  On December 8, John’s baptism in a chapel at the Georgetown Hospital made the front page of the New York Times. Dressed in his father’s white “christening gown” that he had worn in 1917 and a white lace bonnet that belonged to his mother, John was asked by the Reverend Martin Casey, the pastor at the Holy Trinity Church, “Wilt thou be baptized?” Mrs. Charles Bartlett, the baby’s godmother, delivered John’s response: “I will.” For his part, John “gave one subdued cry during the eleven-minute ritual and opened his eyes when a news photographer took his picture,” the paper reported. “Otherwise the baby appeared relaxed and drowsy.” After the ceremony, the twenty or so guests—chiefly family members and close advisers to the president-elect—returned to Jackie’s third-floor room for sandwiches and champagne. At one point, Jackie held John in her arms and asked her husband: “Isn’t he sweet Jack? Look at those pretty eyes.”

  The media could not seem to get enough of John or his sister, three-year-old Caroline. They had been left behind in Palm Beach for their father’s inauguration, but their February 4 move into the White House was also front-page news. Two bedrooms in the White House had been newly renovated prior to their arrival: John’s was white, with light-blue trim on the moldings and doors; Caroline’s was pale pink, with white woodwork and lots of chintz curtains. As an infant, John slept in the same white wicker bassinet that Caroline, and before that their mother, had used. Their White House code names were Lark, for John, and Lyric, for Caroline.

  John’s ability to stand up in his own crib—at ten months—also made the news, along with the fact that he had
seven teeth, four on top and three on the bottom. “He’s a very healthy baby,” Jackie’s press secretary said. “He stands in his crib and he crawls on the floor.” As his first birthday approached, the White House released several “official” photographs of John, two of which, of course, made it to the front page of the New York Times: one of him being held by his mother and smiling, the other of him playing with one of the toys given to him by President and Madame de Gaulle.

  * * *

  JOHN F. KENNEDY JR. (unlike Will Daniel, for instance) never even had the option of hiding, of being decidedly invisible or, as a grown man, of ratcheting down his extraordinary star power. He had the lost president’s name and was even more handsome. But even before his father’s death, the hopes and dreams of an entire nation seemed to be fully invested in the life of John F. Kennedy Jr., and there did not seem to be a whole lot he could do about it.

  Two pictures on the front page of the New York Times, in May 1962, captured John’s first steps and his first appearance in the Oval Office. The pictures, under the headline “The President’s son displays new and old skills,” showed John in his overalls taking a few steps and also crawling on the floor of the office. On October 5 of that year, the White House announced that a twenty-two-month-old John would start nursery school in the next week in the solarium in the White House, along with Caroline who was to start kindergarten there. The idea, at least at first, was for the children to be homeschooled in the White House. Even John’s haircuts and change of haircut styles became news. (Indeed, his hairstyle became a point of contention between the president—who wanted John’s hair short—and the First Lady—who wanted it longer and in the European “fringe style” that she preferred.)