The House of Kennedy(88)
Radar records the plane’s erratic descent from 2,200 feet at 9:40, dropping several hundred feet every few seconds, the altimeter spinning toward zero as the Piper goes into a “graveyard spiral” that may have lasted as long as thirty seconds.
At 9:41 p.m., the plane disappears from radar.
*
At midnight, Carole Radziwill is startled awake by her ringing telephone. “Are they there with you?” a friend of John’s is asking. “I’m at the [Martha’s Vineyard] airport and they’re not here.”
Radziwill, a former reporter for ABC News, spends hours making calls. Around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., she calls the Coast Guard. “I said, ‘My cousin’s missing.’ He took the name, and there was a little bit of a gasp on the other end of the phone.”
*
Rory Kennedy’s wedding is postponed as the family gathers at the Kennedy compound to await news of John, Carolyn, and Lauren.
“If Jackie was alive,” Ethel says, “I don’t know how she would handle this. In fact I don’t think she could bear it.” She adds, “I always thought of Johnny as one of my own.”
President Bill Clinton orders the deployment of USS Grasp, a navy recovery ship. Addressing complaints over preferential treatment for the Kennedys over citizen accident victims, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon says, “It’s a family that has distinguished itself through public service for more than thirty years.” By the next afternoon, crash debris begins washing up along the shore: Lauren’s suitcase, a headrest and wheel from the plane, a bottle of prescription medication bearing Carolyn Bessette’s name.
After a three-day search, on July 20, 1999, an underwater sonar camera locates the main cabin at a depth of approximately 120 feet off Aquinnah (known until 1997 as Gay Head). Its wings have been sheared.
On July 21, Senator Ted Kennedy and his sons, Patrick and Ted Jr., are aboard the Grasp to witness the recovery of John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s crash-ravaged bodies. “It was very grim, very quiet and we left [Senator Kennedy] completely alone,” one of the eight crew members recalls.
“At this moment, the weight of the successive tragedies crashes down on Ted. All these years,” Kennedy adviser Lester Hyman explains, “Ted refused to see a psychiatrist or anything like that because there was just so much. He didn’t think he wanted to open the can of worms. I can think of twelve tragedies in that family, at least, just one after another after another, and the one that almost broke him was John Kennedy Jr.”
On July 22, John’s long-held wishes for a burial at sea are honored, alongside his wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren. All three are cremated, and their ashes spread from a naval destroyer in the Atlantic, within a mile of the crash site. “Catholic priests conducted the thirty-minute civilian ceremony on the ‘fantail’ of the USS Briscoe, a guided missile destroyer,” CNN reports, noting, “There is a provision allowing for such burials for people providing ‘notable service or outstanding contributions to the United States,’” and that “protocol allows sea burials for the children of decorated Navy veterans. President Kennedy was a naval officer wounded and cited for heroism in World War II.”
Kennedy and Bessette family mourners are not far from where, in July 1995, John proposed marriage to Carolyn. “He asked me to marry him out on the water, on the boat,” she told friends. “It was so sweet. He told me, ‘Fishing is so much better with a partner.’”
They were together to the last. And now, forever.
“The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. writes in his diary. “When they let go of the ashes, the plume erupted and settled in the water and passed by in the green current like a ghost. We tossed flowers onto the ghosts.”
A private memorial service follows in New York, at Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s parish, the Church of St. Thomas More on East 89th Street. As he had for his brother Bobby, and for John’s mother, Senator Ted Kennedy delivers the eulogy for John Jr., who, he says, “seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did.”
John’s beloved cousin Anthony Stanislas Radziwill comes forward to read the Twenty-Third Psalm. Radziwill’s wife, Carole, can’t shake the feeling that “John’s last hours were spent thinking about Anthony’s eulogy, and then it’s Anthony who must read at John’s funeral. And the whole time, he’s thinking, ‘It was supposed to be me.’”
Three weeks later, Anthony, too, is dead.
*
Lisa DePaulo, an original staffer at George, says, “I don’t believe John ever fathomed that he would die at thirty-eight. He didn’t buy into things like the Kennedy Curse. Stuff like that made him hurl.”
In language befitting a Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver offers her own interpretation of the clan’s repeated brushes with fate. “I’ve come to believe that it’s not what has happened to our family that has been cursed as much as it’s the fact that we’ve never been able to deal with it privately…If there’s a curse, surely it’s that.”
*
On August 4, 1999, comes the announcement of the sixteen-million-dollar Zapruder settlement, held since July 16 due to the deaths of John, Carolyn, and Lauren. The New York Times reports, “The film’s worth had been enhanced by the soaring prices commanded for Kennedy historical memorabilia in recent years.”