The House of Kennedy(87)
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 last 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.”