The House of Kennedy(84)
“Whenever he would get on one of those best-dressed lists,” recalls Richard Wiese, a college friend, “we would just howl.” Just as Rose always criticized Jack for sloppiness, John Jr. “would always be walking around with some stain on his shirt. He was a mess.”
Of the magic of Camelot, Richard Goodwin, a former aide to JFK and RFK, observes that Jackie’s creation is in little peril—if only its caretakers remember that “magicians are only as good as their last illusions.”
*
In 1993, John Jr. finally chooses to seek out light from the Kennedy flame. While still employed by the city of New York, he and his friend Michael Berman approach potential investors with a concept for a political magazine. John is less than receptive to concerns over limited interest in the topic. “It was the worst presentation I have ever seen in my life,” says one publisher who took the pitch. “He was like, ‘I’m JFK, so there you go.’”
In an interview with JFK Jr. biographer Steven M. Dillon, Berman reveals a unique duality in his business partner. “It must be interesting to be you,” he says to John in a crowded restaurant dining room, watching heads whirl in recognition of the son of the late president. “You don’t know a soul here, but they all know who you are.”
“That’s not the weird part,” John answers. “The weird part is they all remember [JFK], and I don’t.”
John was only two years old when his father was killed, after all—he spent his third birthday famously saluting his father’s casket. But he’s reluctant to delve deeper into the meaning his name carries, or the accompanying responsibility. “It’s hard for me to talk about a legacy or a mystique,” Kennedy states in 1993. “It’s my family. The fact that there have been difficulties and hardships, or obstacles, makes us closer.”
Of his sister Caroline, John Jr. tells Oprah, “We’re obviously very close. As a younger brother, you look up to your sister. I was the ‘man’ of the family, as it were. I feel so lucky to have such a close relationship with her.”
He’s especially close with his cousins on his mother’s side, his aunt Lee Bouvier Radziwill’s children, particularly his cousin Anthony. “Anthony was more of a brother than a friend to John. He was the closest family member to John and they really did grow up together. They remained close throughout their lives and they spoke nearly every single day,” RoseMarie Terenzio recalls.
Anthony’s wife, Carole Radziwill, agrees, saying, “Given the life that John led so publicly, I think he really felt completely himself around Anthony. He knew Anthony had his back, and Anthony felt the same way about him. That was a nice thing to see, and it was nice to be around—that feeling of complete trust.”
John’s relationships with his Kennedy cousins are mainly warm if somewhat distant, and occasionally competitive. Chris Lawford describes the relationship between John Jr. and Joe, Bobby’s oldest son, as the most fraught. “I think he [Joe] loved John, hated John, and wanted to be John all at the same time,” Chris says, pointing out that rivalry among the cousins is to be expected, after all: “We were all, every one of us, raised to be President.”
As authors Collier and Horowitz remark of the Kennedy cousins in their 1981 book, The Kennedys, “Together in one place, they looked like a remarkable experiment in eugenics—several strains of one particularly attractive species.” Eunice’s children are “darkly handsome…with their father’s sensitive eyes and their mother’s aggressive jaw”; Teddy’s kids are “blond and surprisingly frail”; Jean’s children have a “round-face impassivity”; while Pat’s have her ex-husband’s “good looks—and a hint of his troubled vulnerability”; and Bobby’s kids have the “big bones and imposing size of Ethel’s family.” Unsurprisingly, Caroline and John Jr., “posing for nonstop photography since infancy…had acquired a poise all the others lacked.”
But the authors also note that Bobby and Ethel’s children (who tend to see themselves as “the most Kennedy”) “would sometimes tell their cousins, ‘You’re not Kennedys, you’re only Shrivers [or Smiths or Lawfords].’” They taunted John Jr. as a “‘Mama’s boy’ and said he wasn’t a ‘real Kennedy.’”
To the rest of the world, though, no one embodies the Kennedys more than John Jr. “I understand the pressure you’ll forever have to endure as a Kennedy, even though we brought you into this world as an innocent,” his mother writes him. “You, especially, have a place in history. No matter what course in life you choose, all I can ask is that you and Caroline continue to make me, the Kennedy family, and yourself proud.”
John Jr. is thirty-three when Jackie dies at age sixty-four on May 19, 1994, not long after receiving a diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In her eulogy, Ted names Caroline and John as “her two miracles.” At Arlington National Cemetery, under a headstone reading “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” she is buried alongside JFK, only the second First Lady, after Mrs. William Howard Taft, to be so honored.
So it falls to Ethel, the new Kennedy matriarch, to assess the latest woman to appear in John’s life: twenty-eight-year-old Carolyn Bessette, who was voted “Ultimate Beautiful Person” at Catholic St. Mary’s High School in her hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, and is now head of public relations at the fashion label Calvin Klein. “She’s an ordinary person,” John tells his friend John Perry Barlow, but “he couldn’t get his mind off her.”