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Biography of John F. Kennedy Jr.

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John F. Kennedy Jr. (November 25, 1960–July 16, 1999), the son of President John F. Kennedy , was considered the heir to one of America's greatest political dynasties until his death in a plane crash at age 38.

In one of the most iconic photographs in American history, the 3-year-old Kennedy is seen saluting his father's casket three days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy .

Fast Facts: John F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Known For : Attorney, journalist, and son of President John F. Kennedy
• Born : Nov. 25, 1960 in Washington, D.C.
• Died : July 16, 1999 off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
• Education : Brown University, B.A.; New York University, J.D.
• Spouse : Carolyn Bessette
• Key Accomplishments : Criminal prosecutor in New York City, founder and publisher of George magazine, and founder of non-profit Reaching Up
• Famous Quote : “People often tell me I could be a great man. I'd rather be a good man.”

John F. Kennedy Jr. was born on November 25, 1960—the same month his father, John F. Kennedy , was elected to his first term as president. He became an instant celebrity, despite his parents' attempts to give him as normal an upbringing as possible. Despite spending his first few years of life in the White House, however, Kennedy later said that he had lived a "pretty normal life."

Kennedy was the second of three children born to the Kennedys. His older sister was Caroline Bouvier Kennedy ; his younger brother, Patrick, died in 1963, two days after birth.

On his third birthday, in 1963, JFK Jr. became the subject of one of the most iconic scenes in American history: standing on a Washington street, wearing a dress coat, saluting his father's flag-draped coffin as it passed by on a horse-drawn carriage on the way to the Capitol. Kennedy's father had been assassinated three days earlier in Dallas, Texas.

The president's widow moved the family to the Upper East Side of New York, where JFK Jr. attended a Catholic elementary school. He later attended Collegiate School for Boys in New York and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, much of the American public waited for the young Kennedy to join the political world that had already been shaped by his family.

Careers in Law and Journalism

JFK Jr. graduated Brown University in 1983 with a degree in American history. He then attended law school at New York University, graduating in 1989. Many considered his law degree a precursor to a political career, but JFK Jr. instead went to work in the Manhattan district attorney's office for four years.

In 1995, Kennedy launched a magazine, George , which blended celebrity and public affairs. The magazine was meant to be a mass-market political journal, or, as one of its editors explained, "a political magazine for Americans turned off by political magazines." Kennedy wrote and served as editor-in-chief for George . Its publication ended in 2001, after Kennedy's death.

Marriage to Carolyn Bessette

In 1996, JFK Jr. arranged a secretive wedding to Carolyn Bessette, a fashion publicist. The couple went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their nuptials from the public. The wedding was held on an island 20 miles off the coast of Georgia; they chose that particular island in part because it had no access by road or telephone, and almost no lodging. The public learned of their marriage a week after it happened. The couple had no children.

On July 16, 1999, Kennedy was piloting a small single-engine airplane headed towards Martha's Vineyard, with his wife and her sister onboard. The plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The bodies of the three crash victims were found off the coast of Martha's Vineyard five days later, on July 21.

One year later, in 2000, the National Transportation Safety Board ruled the crash an accident caused by Kennedy's "failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation." The government agency said haze and darkness were factors in the crash.

Kennedy was raised to abide by a scriptural passage found in Luke 12:48: "Of those to whom much is given, much is required." It was in that spirit that, in 1989, he founded a nonprofit called Reaching Up, which helps low-wage health and human-services professionals attain higher education, training, and career advancement. Reaching Up continues to help students pay for tuition, books, transportation, child care, and other education costs.

• Blow, Richard. American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr. Henry Holt & Co., 2002.
• Grunwald, Michael. “JFK Jr. Feared Dead in Plane Crash.”  The Washington Post , WP Company, 18 July 1999, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfkjr/stories/kennedy071899.htm .
• Seelye, Katharine Q. “John F. Kennedy Jr., Heir To a Formidable Dynasty.”  The New York Times , The New York Times, 19 July 1999, www.nytimes.com/1999/07/19/us/john-f-kennedy-jr-heir-to-a-formidable-dynasty.html .
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Biography: JFK Jr. The Final Year

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Examines the last year of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s life in an entirely new way.

Related content.

John F. Kennedy Jr.'s Remarkable Life in Photos

The Last Days of JFK Jr.

July 16, 2019 marks the 20-year anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death. This two-hour documentary special, airing on the anniversary, reframes the last year of his life in an entirely new way. Inspired by Steven M. Gillon’s upcoming book, America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., this captivating special is the most substantive documentary to date and includes convincing new evidence regarding his political aspirations before his untimely death. This compelling documentary shines an unexpectedly poignant light on 1999, his last year, as he coped with the fatal illness of his closest friend and cousin, Anthony Radziwill, struggled to save his marriage and tried to rescue his political magazine, George.

With the guidance of historian and longtime friend Steven M. Gillon, along with never-before-seen footage and the recollections of Anthony Radziwill’s widow, Carole Radziwill who is speaking in-depth for the first time, a new story emerges. As the story unfolds, viewers are given a behind the scenes look at memorable moments in JFK Jr.’s life including his speech at the 1988 DNC convention with never-before-broadcast footage of Kennedy rehearsing for the event, exclusive stories and photos from his wedding, reflections on George and more.

The documentary also features extensive on-camera interviews with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former George publisher David Pecker, friend Gary Ginsberg, former assistant and close friend RoseMarie Terenzio as well as childhood friend Sasha Chermayeff.

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• World Biography

John F. Kennedy Jr. Biography

Born: November 25, 1960 Washington, D.C. Died: July 16, 1999 Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts American magazine publisher and lawyer

John F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late president John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), avoided politics and followed his own path as a magazine publisher. After attending his own father's funeral as a child, Kennedy, Jr., saw a series of early deaths in his family. He himself was claimed by a tragic accident in the prime of his life.

President's son

While campaigning in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, the president was shot and killed. Just three months earlier, the family had grieved when new baby Patrick died two days after his birth. The death of John F. Kennedy shocked the nation, and the image of the president's three-year-old son at the funeral, wearing a short coat that revealed his bare knees, saluting his father's coffin as it passed, was heartbreaking.

Always in the public eye

In 1964 Jackie Kennedy moved with her children to an apartment in New York City, where she hoped they might be able to avoid the media. The family would soon suffer another difficult loss. On June 6, 1968, the late president's brother, Robert Kennedy (1925–1968), who had become a father figure to his nephew and niece, was assassinated in California while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Four months later, Jackie Kennedy married the wealthy businessman Aristotle Onassis (1906–1975).

The young Kennedy would sometimes get into fights with reporters and photographers who followed him and his sister around. The media criticized him for being self-centered and for his less than outstanding record at school. After high school he became more serious about his education. First, he studied environmental issues at a school in Africa. He would later return to Africa following his freshman year at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. While in Africa he worked with a mining firm in Johannesburg, South Africa, and met student and government leaders in Zimbabwe. During his college years he also worked with the Peace Corps in Guatemala to help earthquake victims.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in American history in 1982, Kennedy studied at the University of Delhi in India. When he returned to the United States he went to work for the New York City Office of Business Development in 1984. In 1986 he entered New York University Law School, mainly to please his mother. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention he gave a speech to introduce his uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy (1932–), that earned him a two-minute standing ovation and led many to wonder if he was preparing to run for office. He passed his bar exam (a test that a person must pass before he or she is allowed to practice law) on the third try and was hired in August 1989 as an assistant prosecutor in the Manhattan office of New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau (1919–). He won all six of the cases that he prosecuted in court before leaving the position in 1993.

New ventures

In September 1995 Kennedy cofounded George magazine, which had the slogan "Not politics as usual." He wrote essays and interviewed people for the publication. Some observers suggested that his magazine venture was a way for him to gain the public-affairs knowledge that he would need in order to run for office, but he denied that he was planning to enter politics. On September 21, 1996, he married Carolyn Bessette (1966–1999) in a private ceremony on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. It was one of the few major events in his life during which he managed to avoid publicity. He and his wife appeared to be a happy couple as they made their home in New York.

On July 16, 1999, Kennedy, his wife, and her sister Lauren Bessette (1964–1999) were declared missing at sea after their plane crashed into the water near the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Kennedy was an amateur pilot who had earned his license in April 1998. All three bodies were eventually recovered from the wreckage and buried at sea on July 22, 1999.

For More Information

Blow, Richard. American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2002.

Hinman, Bonnie. John F. Kennedy, Jr. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001.

Landau, Elaine. John F. Kennedy, Jr. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 2000.

Leigh, Wendy. Prince Charming: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Reed, J. D., Kyle Smith, and Jill Smolowe. John F. Kennedy Jr.: A Biography. Chicago: Time, 1999.

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“You Just Don’t Wallow in Death. You Move On. You Hold It Inside.”: The Struggle of John F. Kennedy Jr., American Prince

By William D. Cohan

Only one American high school has produced two presidents of the United States: Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, known simply as Andover. It was no surprise, really, that people emerged from Andover thinking they could do, or be, anything they wanted, or so the myth went. In my new book, Four Friends, I explore these twin burdens of privilege and expectation through the experiences of four of my Andover classmates, all people of great promise whose lives were cut tragically short. The most privileged and most burdened of them all, of course, was John F. Kennedy Jr., son of an assassinated president, striver, tabloid fixture, quintessential American celebrity, who died tragically, piloting his own plane with his wife and wife’s sister. Below is a part of his story, in the week of the 20th anniversary of his death on the way to Martha’s Vineyard for a summer weekend.

A few days before Jackie Kennedy Onassis died, in May 1994, she wrote a letter to her son John, to be opened only after her death. “I understand the pressure you’ll forever have to endure as a Kennedy, even though we brought you into this world as an innocent,” she wrote. “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.”

For John Jr., her death was scary and transformative. “[He said] things like, ‘Until both of your parents are dead, you don’t really know how alone you are,’” Christiane Amanpour, the CNN anchor, told an oral historian. But John’s friend Gary Ginsberg said he thought John handled death better than anyone he knew. “He lost cousins, he lost parents, and he was incredibly unemotional,” he told me. “Not that he didn’t feel it, but externally was able to hold it together better than anybody I knew. I remember saying, ‘John, how the hell do you do it?’ And he said, ‘You know, I just learned from my family. You just don’t wallow in death. You move on. You hold it inside.’”

Another friend, Sasha Chermayeff, told me Jackie’s death and the deathbed letter further ratcheted up the pressure on John. “It’s a complex thing, right?” she said. “You have this legacy. It’s clear. You can’t ignore it.There’s a lot of pressure. And yet he had enough confidence to sort of want to live out his own life, but he didn’t want to let anybody down.”

On the morning after his mother’s burial, John was back at his desk at George magazine, the political glossy he’d cofounded with Michael Berman in 1993. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done,” a friend told Esquire. “He went back to work.”

Jackie’s death occasioned other changes in John’s life too. Ironically, given Jackie never liked his girlfriend Daryl Hannah, her death was a catalyst for John to move on from her. Soon after his mother’s death, he moved out of Hannah’s apartment on the Upper West Side, back down into a newly renovated loft apartment in an industrial-looking building on N. Moore Street.

Around that time John went to the VIP showroom at Calvin Klein and saw Carolyn Bessette there. A mutual friend thought they would hit it off. The head of public relations at Calvin Klein, Carolyn was a bombshell with an exotic look. He was gobsmacked immediately. “John was attracted to women who were not intimidated by him,” his friend Richard Wiese said. “He liked women with a point of view.” Carolyn grew up in a big, white clapboard house on Lake Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended St. Mary’s High School where, in 1983, she was voted the “Ultimate Beautiful Person.” At Boston University she majored in elementary education and appeared on the cover of a calendar, “The Girls of B.U.” After college she did publicity for a few nightclubs in Boston, before being spotted by Calvin Klein and lured to New York to work at his headquarters on West 39th Street.

John first told his friend John Perry Barlow about Carolyn in early 1994. He was still living with Hannah, but he told Barlow that he had met Bessette, and that she was “having a heavy effect on him.” He added that he wasn’t going to “pursue her,” because he was loyal to Hannah. “But it was hard for him,” Barlow said, “because he couldn’t get his mind off her.” Barlow asked John about her and who she was. “Well, she’s not really anybody,” he said. “She’s some functionary of Calvin Klein’s. She’s an ordinary person.”

Barlow met Carolyn in the fall of 1994, after John and Hannah had split. “Carolyn was as charismatic as John was,” he said. “ Charisma, you know, was once a theological term meaning ‘grace.’ And she had that. I was also impressed with the fact that she was a bit eccentric. She was not conventional in any sense.” She reminded him of Jackie “in her quirkiness” and in “her unbelievable capacity to engage one’s attention.” Carolyn, Barlow continued, had Jackie’s ability to “be talking to six people at one time, and make everyone feel like the only one in the room.”

Sasha Chermayeff, a friend of John’s from Andover, was also struck by her physical beauty, among other things. “Carolyn was hilarious,” she told me. “She was sarcastic without being mean. She was funny. She was engaging. You cannot tell in photographs how beautiful she was in real life. I never saw a picture of her that did her justice.”

Some two months after John’s friends had been summoned to Martha’s Vineyard for his supposed wedding to Hannah, he was spotted kissing Carolyn at the finish line of the New York City Marathon. They were just there watching the race, but the picture of them together was on the cover of the New York Post, much to the irritation of Michael Bergin, a Calvin Klein underwear model and Carolyn’s on-and-off lover. “Yes,” she told Bergin, when he called her about the picture. “It’s nothing.”

By Bess Levin

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By Eric Lutz

“Nothing!” he yelled at her incredulously, knowing that even he could not compete with John.

Ed Hill, another friend from Andover, said he thought the reason behind John’s attraction to Carolyn was similar to what attracted him to Hannah: that she seemed to be able to handle his fame while at the same time using her own wiles to attract her own attention, thereby taking some of it away from him.

Sometime in the spring of 1995, she moved into John’s loft on N. Moore Street. RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s assistant at George, could tell they were getting serious about their relationship because he always took her call when she phoned the office. His sister was the only other person whose calls he always answered. When some of John’s close friends had taken her measure and decided, for one reason or another, that she was not in John’s league, John wouldn’t hear of it. He was totally smitten.

Over the Fourth of July weekend in 1995, Carolyn and John headed to Martha’s Vineyard. At one point John asked Carolyn to go fishing. While they were out on the water, John asked her to marry him. “Fishing is so much better with a partner,” he said to her. He added that many things in life are better with a partner. He gave her a platinum ring surrounded by diamonds and sapphires, courtesy of Maurice Tempelsman, his mother’s boyfriend at the time of her death. Carolyn did not respond to John affirmatively for three weeks. (The press made it out to be because there were problems in their relationship, but Terenzio, in her book, wrote that was not true; it was more a matter of making sure she wanted to become the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr., and what that meant about surrendering her privacy.)

Bergin confronted Carolyn again about John, and again she said John was “just a friend” who was “going through a difficult time.” And she kept on lying to Bergin about the depth of her relationship with John, despite the fact that they were all living in New York City—Carolyn kept her own apartment, even though she was basically living with John. She would still, on occasion, be with Bergin, a fact that he relayed in his 2004 memoir, The Other Man.

Somehow, though, John and Carolyn managed to keep the explosive news of their engagement under wraps until the Friday before Labor Day. That’s when the New York Post reported their engagement, according to a “good friend” of the couple’s, and for good measure showed a close-up of Carolyn’s diamond-and-sapphire engagement ring.

The following February 25, on an unseasonably warm day, the full range of John and Carolyn’s emotions would be on public display, and unfortunately for them, both were captured by a video photographer for all to eventually see. What started out as an innocent enough walk to Washington Square Park on a gorgeous day, with his new dog, Friday, in tow, turned into a shouting and shoving match ending in tears. At one point, it seemed, John succeeded in ripping the engagement ring he gave Carolyn off her finger.

Carolyn and John’s engagement was news to Bergin, whom Carolyn was still seeing on occasion. In March 1996, she called him up out of the blue. “She seemed to have reached a breaking point,” he remembered in his book. “She could only go a few months without seeing me: she needed her fix.” In April she called Bergin again and said she needed to talk, and invited him to her new one-bedroom Washington Square apartment, even though she was spending most of her days and nights with John on North Moore Street.

They sat on her bed together for a long minute, holding hands and not saying anything. “The reason I came to see you last week is that I was pregnant,” she told him. “I needed someone to talk to.”

“You’re having a baby?” he asked, no doubt recalling that when she had previously become pregnant by him, she decided to have an abortion. “No,” she told him. “I lost the baby. I had a miscarriage.”

Bergin spent the night with her. “I knew it was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, but we both found ways to justify our behavior,” he remembered. He still thought he might have a chance of winning her back. “The way I saw it,” he continued, “she probably didn’t even tell John Jr. about the pregnancy. She had come to me. What did that say about their relationship?” The next morning at seven o’clock, they woke to the sound of one of their mutual friends banging “crazily” on Carolyn’s apartment door. “Get the fuck out of here,” he told Bergin. “He’s on his way over.” John had been trying to reach her, but she had taken her phone off the hook, and so when she continued not to answer, he decided to go to her apartment and see if she was there, having called their mutual friend first to see if he knew where she was. Carolyn was “freaking,” he recalled, and he got “the hell out of there,” carrying his shoes, since he didn’t have enough time to put them on. The next time he saw Carolyn, she was a married woman.

Jackie with John and Caroline in southern France, 1973.

After Labor Day 1996, John’s fellow George colleagues noticed he was having trouble focusing. He was in a good mood, but he was skipping editorial meetings, signing off quickly on story ideas, and leaving the office early. “He was practically whistling through the corridors,” Richard Blow, the magazine’s executive editor, recalled in Vanity Fair. “It could mean only one thing: after about a year and a half of dating, John and Carolyn were getting married. Everyone at George, I think, guessed John’s secret. But no one said a word to him.”

In the end John used every piece of wisdom he had gained through a lifetime of deft media manipulation—both avoidance and charm—to keep his wedding plans secret. He and Carolyn decided to get married at the tiny, whitewashed First African Baptist Church on the northern end of Cumberland Island, Georgia. (He had visited the same church years earlier on a trip with his then girlfriend Christina Haag. ) The wedding ceremony occurred at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 21, 1996. John’s sister was the matron of honor, and her two daughters, Rose, eight years old, and Tatiana, six years old, were flower girls; her son, Jack, three years old, was the ring bearer. Anthony Radziwill, his cousin, was John’s best man. Sen. Ted Kennedy toasted them. The biggest coup of the event, though, was that it had been pulled off without the press knowing. “It was the paparazzi fake-out of the decade,” one magazine concluded.

There was some (misguided) thinking that with John married, and settled down, perhaps the media focus on him and Carolyn would abate. After all, as a newlywed, he was now unavailable, so to speak. But in fact, the media attention on the couple seemed only to intensify, and in a way that began to cause problems both for them and for those around them. Fresh from his two-week honeymoon in Turkey, on Sunday morning, October 6, dressed elegantly in a navy blue suit and red tie, John came downstairs from his North Moore Street loft to the stoop at the front of the building. There was no doorman, and barely a lobby. When he got there he was met, as usual, by a swarm of photographers who always seemed to be charting his every move and those of his new bride. His thought was to charm the photographers by asking for their indulgence when it came to Carolyn. It was a risky ask—after all, the appetite for pictures of them was nearly insatiable. The National Enquirer had reportedly paid $250,000 for the photos of John and Carolyn fighting in Washington Square Park.

He stood on the metal stoop, and in his best aw-shucks voice asked for forbearance. “This is a big change for anyone,” he said to the assembled gaggle. “For a private citizen, even more so. I just ask [for] any privacy or room you could give her as she makes that adjustment. It would be greatly appreciated.” Then he turned around, went back inside, and a few minutes later emerged with Carolyn holding his hand tightly.

John’s plea failed. In December, John nearly “came to blows” with one photographer who trailed after him on the streets of Tribeca. In Hyannis Port one summer, he took a bucket of water and dumped it on a paparazzo’s head. Before Christmas, another time, he confronted the two photographers who had taken the pictures of his fight with Carolyn in Washington Square Park. First he talked to them, then he jumped on the hood of their car—staked out near his apartment—and reached through the roll down window to try to grab the car keys. The incident won John and Carolyn a cover story in the National Enquirer under the headline, “JFK Goes Berserk.” There were the rumors that accompanied the photos. There was one about how Carolyn ran off to Europe to be with her sister after a particularly nasty fight. There were rumors about her infertility, about Carolyn consulting with her lawyer to figure out how to increase the $1.36 million she would be paid if their marriage lasted fewer than three years. She supposedly disliked John’s Brown University friends; he supposedly disliked her expensive shopping sprees. “Carolyn got dumped into the deep end of the celebrity thing pretty unceremoniously,” said John Perry Barlow. According to Chris Cuomo, “She could have never anticipated the intensity that would then be transferred onto her, because now it’s not just, Well, you’re hanging out with this guy that we all care about, it’s, Wow, you’re the one? You’re the one. So it became this combination of everything you would have to deal with if you were dating a rock star, when that rock star also happens to be royalty.”

Complicating matters—whether John knew or not—was the fact that Carolyn had not gotten over Michael Bergin. By April 1997, he had moved to Los Angeles to join the cast of Baywatch, the long-running television series about Los Angeles lifeguards. Shortly after his move, Carolyn had called him and asked him when she could see him again. According to Bergin’s memoir, they began an affair in July 1997 while John was kayaking in Iceland. He claimed the affair continued off and on through the fall of 1997 and spring of 1998, in Los Angeles, in a motel in rural Connecticut, and during a funeral for a mutual friend’s mother in Seattle. According to Bergin, Carolyn seemed desperate and begged Bergin to “save” her from her marriage to John. When they were in Seattle together, “She began to bawl uncontrollably, huge, gasping sobs, so powerful she could hardly catch her breath,” he wrote. “I was getting scared. I was watching her come apart at the seams and I didn’t know what to do.”

He believed that she was asking him “to give her strength” to leave John. In the end he could not do what she wanted him to do. He loved her, yes, but he did not want to be the one responsible for breaking up her marriage. That would be a scandal for the ages, and he did not want any part of it. It was too late for them. He told her no, and eventually left the motel in a cab and returned to his Los Angeles apartment, ultimately refusing her pleas. He never saw her again.

There are those who dispute Bergin’s account of the affair he had with Carolyn after her marriage to John. In American Legacy, C. David Heymann quoted any number of Carolyn’s friends who said it wasn’t true that Carolyn and Bergin had rekindled their affair, and that John was the love of Carolyn’s life. He also poked holes in Bergin’s timeline. It’s hard to figure out the truth. Heymann’s book about John is itself riddled with mistakes. But John’s closest friends believed it was true, whether John could bring himself to believe it or not.

John’s closest friends seemed to know that something was not right with John’s marriage. Ed Hill said Carolyn was complicated; she fit perfectly with what John thought he wanted in a wife, but she was also often more than he could handle. “John inhabited the world of [Calvin’s wife] Kelly Klein ’s beach house in Southampton,” he told me. “That wasn’t the only world he inhabited, but it was a big part of his world, and it was a part that he couldn’t avoid because he was the Prince of America. So he needed someone by his side who was, in his words, ‘a player,’ who could navigate that world with him. You could not intimidate her. She could pull rank. She could turn a cold shoulder. She had all the skills. At the end of the day, she was selfish and manipulative and damaged in her own way.”

Sasha Chermayeff said that after the wedding “everything changed” between John and Carolyn. “She got nervous as hell,” she said. “It sort of went down and down, and by the last year, they were not able to communicate—like not at all.” She said Carolyn was “obsessed” with Bergin “being her salvation,” and hoped that she could “go back and kind of pretend” with him that her life wasn’t what it was with John.

It was the pressure of celebrity, and John’s role in it, that made their relationship so impossible. “It just broke her down to the point of real fear and paranoia. Like she wouldn’t go out of the apartment,” Chermayeff continued. “Her excuse—that she was really shut down sexually—wasn’t really true. But she was shut down from him.” Chermayeff said she spoke with John about the fact that his wife wouldn’t sleep with him anymore. He was upset about it. He was in therapy. He may have, eventually, had casual sexual interludes with Julie Baker, a former girlfriend, but he was, Chermayeff said, “very serious, and very seriously committed to the fact that he had fallen madly in love with Carolyn.”

Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette at the Municipal Art Society gala in NYC.

On November 22, 1997, John and Carolyn went for three days to Argos, Indiana, of all places, to the headquarters of Buckeye Industries. A Buckeye executive was dispatched to Chicago and flew Carolyn and John back to the Argos area on a private jet. John had two purposes for the trip: to get his basic flight-instructor rating for the Buckeye, and to trade in his single-seat Buckeye Falcon 582 for a new Buckeye Dream Machine, a powered parachute. Carolyn took her first solo flight in Argos, and she seemed to love the experience as much as John did. “Now you know why we are here,” he told her after she had landed, “to get a two-seater so we can fly together.” They went out to breakfast with the Buckeye executives, who completely fell for John and Carolyn. They especially found Carolyn to be warm and funny—and very pleased to be out of the Manhattan spotlight.

Gary Ginsberg said that for John, flying was a total and necessary release from the unending pressure on him. “He literally wanted an escape from being on the ground, where the pressures on him were so immense,” he told me. “The physical pressures on him in New York City, the constant attention—and the lack of any way to avoid it. Going up in the clouds in the sky was a really important physical escape for him. He talked about that. He talked about the solitude of being in the air. It gave him great comfort, which I think is as much a reason why he wanted to fly as wanting a way to get to the Vineyard. It was a psychological escape for him.” But Ginsberg worried about his friend flying, and whether his mind was sufficiently logical to be a pilot. “He was the most nonlinear thinker I knew,” he continued, “and to fly required an ability to think very logically and very linearly. You’ve got to go down a checklist essentially, and that’s a physical checklist, and that was so not the way John approached problem-solving.”

Over Memorial Day weekend 1999, John and Carolyn went to Red Gate Farm in Martha’s Vineyard (now on sale for $65 million). They were joined by a number of John’s old friends, such as Rob Littell and Chermayeff, her husband, and their son, Phinny. Littell and his wife flew up with John and Carolyn in the new Saratoga plane he had also recently bought, along with John’s flight instructor. John was in control the whole flight. “His landings were barely noticeable,” Littell recalled in his book about John, “something he took pride in. None of us felt nervous about flying with John. He was the opposite of reckless, with the attitude of a cautious and serious pilot.”

At one point as sunset was approaching on Saturday, John decided to go up in his Buckeye Dream Machine, the two-seater version of the flying parachute. He took off from the lawn of Red Gate Farm. “We were all watching,” Chermayeff remembered. They then were going to go to the beach and would meet John after he finished his flight. “He went up, and we saw him have problems, and then we saw him crash,” Chermayeff recalled. “When he crashed he went up and down, and we all went running to him.” The Buckeye had hit a tree that John had tried to avoid, and crumpled to the ground. His foot had been bent backward, and the ligaments in his ankle shredded.

Two days later back in New York City, John had surgery to put a metal plate in his leg. Littell urged John to “slow down”—to take the crash as a sign to cut back on his grueling work schedule, and on the tough job of being him.

John had decided to spend many of the following summer weekends in Martha’s Vineyard to be with his cousin—and best friend—Anthony Radziwill, who had been diagnosed with cancer and knew he was dying. John “wanted to help Anthony just relax that summer,” Chermayeff said. After John broke his ankle, which obviously put a serious damper on his mobility, he waxed philosophical about why he thought it had happened. “He was upset with himself,” Chermayeff said. “But he said he thinks it happened because he’s just meant to sit down in a rocking chair with Anthony and they could just spend the summer, the two of them, just sitting there and not being able to do anything while Anthony died. He kind of immediately saw the good side of that accident.”

John still had a hankering for politics, beyond just editing a magazine about it. In November 1998, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he would retire from the Senate at the end of his term, meaning that a U.S. Senate seat from New York was up for grabs. Many people urged John to run for it. “John immediately started exploring his viability,” Ginsberg told me. He and Ginsberg spoke sporadically about the possibility of John running for the Senate, and studying the numbers to see if it might work. Ginsberg, who had recently left George to be the head of public relations at News Corporation, introduced John to Roger Ailes, the onetime political operative who had created Fox News. “He and I spent a long time with Roger discussing whether he would be viable and how he would put together a candidacy or campaign,” Ginsberg said. “And Roger was very supportive.”

One person who was not particularly supportive of this idea was John’s wife, Carolyn. She continued to shun the spotlight. But it was quickly a moot point. Hillary Clinton effectively thwarted John’s plan to run for Moynihan’s Senate seat by announcing that she was moving to New York and running for it. “John felt like he could not go against her because it would be too disruptive to the state Democratic Party,” Ginsberg said. “He would look disloyal, and he felt like she just outranked him in the pecking order. And for his first campaign, he did not want to go after a sitting first lady. He thought that it would be too bruising, so he decided to drop it.” But he still had not abandoned the idea of entering politics. Instead he just reoriented his thinking. Rather than running for the Senate, he decided he would challenge New York Governor George Pataki in the 2002 gubernatorial election, an idea he discussed with his friends. “John recognized that he was a much more natural executive than he was a legislator,” Ginsberg said.

Other friends of John’s, including Brian Steel, a colleague from the Manhattan D.A.’s office, were aware of John’s serious interest in running for public office. “John said, ‘I’m not going to run,’” Steel told me about John’s decision not to run for Moynihan’s seat. “John is telling me this story, but then he said, ‘You know what? If I had to run for anything, I want to run for governor. Listen, a lot of people from my family have run for office—I think that’s great—but no one’s been a governor. I like being the boss. I like being a CEO. I think I’m better suited to be governor.’” The big unknown was what would happen with Carolyn. “She had to stabilize herself, because she was pretty unstable at that point,” a close friend of John’s told me.

During one of their many arguments, Carolyn had shared with John that she was still sleeping with Bergin. “She threw Michael Bergin in John’s face,” the Hollywood producer Clifford Streit told Vanity Fair. “I think she used Michael Bergin in any way she could to get whatever she wanted out of John. The only one in the world who thought Carolyn would choose Michael over John was John.” John wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, but what with her mood swings, her drug use, and her extreme reticence, he wanted her to see a psychiatrist. She agreed. In March 1999, he agreed to join her at marriage counseling.

On July 12, Carolyn moved out of their bedroom into a spare room in their loft that John used to store his exercise equipment. John checked into the Stanhope hotel, on Fifth Avenue. It was just down the street from where he grew up.

John spent a lot of time on the phone, contemplating with friends how things had spun so badly out of control. “It’s all falling apart,” he told one friend. “Everything is falling apart.” That afternoon, with his ankle still in a cast, he flew in his Saratoga with a copilot to Toronto to meet a second time with the Magna executives.

On July 14, Richard Blow was sitting in his office at George, which was near John’s, and he could hear John screaming through the closed doors. “In startling, staccato bursts of rage, John was yelling,” he recalled in Vanity Fair. “His yells would be followed by silences, then John’s fury would resume. At first I could not make out the words. Then after a particularly long pause, I heard John shout, ‘Well, goddamnit, Carolyn. You’re the reason I was up at three o’clock last night!’ The shouting lasted maybe five minutes, but John’s office door stayed shut for some time.” For lunch that day, John met Carolyn and her older sister, Lauren, an investment banker for Morgan Stanley, at the Stanhope hotel. Carolyn’s sister thought the get-together would be a good idea to try to clear the air and get the marriage back on track.

At the lunch Lauren also convinced her sister to fly with John that Friday night up to Hyannis Port for the long-scheduled wedding of his cousin Rory Kennedy. In her fit of pique, Carolyn had decided she would not go to the wedding. But of course her absence would be noticed and remarked upon. Even though their marriage was troubled, John wanted to avoid that at all costs, and was desperate for Carolyn to agree to attend the wedding with him. In that regard Lauren played a crucial role, convincing her sister not only to attend the wedding, but also to fly up to Hyannis Port with John in the Saratoga. Lauren agreed to go with John and her sister, even though she was spending the weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, not in Hyannis Port. She convinced John to fly to Martha’s Vineyard, drop her off, then continue on to the wedding. “Come on,” she told them, “it’ll be fun.” John and Carolyn agreed to the proposal. “Great,” Lauren said. “Then I’ll see you guys at the airport.”

But John was still very unhappy. That night from his room in the Stanhope, he was on the phone with a friend, unleashing on Carolyn. “I want to have kids, but whenever I raise the subject with Carolyn, she turns away and refuses to have sex with me,” he told his friend. “It’s not just about sex. It’s impossible to talk to Carolyn about anything. We’ve become like total strangers.... I’ve had it with her! It’s got to stop. Otherwise we’re headed for divorce.” He told the same friend he had even picked out a name for his son—Flynn.

John also was having a difficult time getting along with his sister. There was an ongoing dispute about what to do with the furniture and the significant family memorabilia at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. “There was this battle over all this stuff, and John and Caroline didn’t actually speak for almost an entire year,” said a friend. But that summer, with things between John and his wife becoming increasingly tense, he picked up the phone and called his sister. “They had this really, really good conversation,” the friend continued. “And I knew about it because he told me about it...and all I can say is fortunately for her, because they hadn’t spoken for almost a year.” (Caroline Kennedy declined to be interviewed.)

With a cast off his leg for the first time since Memorial Day weekend, John was hobbling around the George office on Friday, July 16, on crutches. He met with Jack Kliger, his boss at Hachette, to discuss ways to revitalize George. “He and I agreed that there had not been a well-thought-out business plan,” Kliger told the New York Times. “So we said, ‘Let’s figure out how to go forward.’” Kliger said John left the meeting feeling “fairly positive” about the outlook for George.

At around one o’clock John spoke by phone with an employee at the airport hangar in New Jersey, where he kept his Piper Saratoga, confirming that he wanted to fly the plane later in the day, and that he planned to get to the Essex County Airport between 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m.

As they headed back up to George ’s 41st-floor offices, after having lunch together, Blow asked John what he was doing for the weekend. He said he was flying up to Hyannis Port for his cousin Rory’s wedding. “I glanced at John’s foot—even the short walk from the restaurant had tired him—then gave him a skeptical look,” Blow recalled.

“Don’t worry,” John told him. “I’m flying with an instructor.”

“Just don’t crash, okay?” Blow replied. “Because if you do, that speech about all of us having jobs at Christmas goes right out the window.”

“Not to worry,” John said. “I’ll be fine.”

Before he left work, he sent an email to his friend John Perry Barlow. Barlow’s mother had just died. He commended Barlow for being at his mother’s side. He knew something about that kind of loss too. “I will never forget when it happened to me,” John wrote, “and it was not something that was all that macabre. Let’s spend some time together this summer and sort things out.” Barlow did not open the email until later the next day.

John and Lauren Bessette left the George offices and encountered heavy traffic along the way to New Jersey, especially as they made their way through the Lincoln Tunnel. At 8:10 p.m., with the light beginning to fade, John and Lauren pulled into the West Essex Sunoco gas station across the street from the airport. Wearing a light gray T-shirt, John went into the store and bought a banana, a bottle of water, and six AA batteries. When they arrived at the airport a few minutes later, Carolyn was not there. By prior arrangement she was to come to the airport separately in a black sedan.

Where was Carolyn? Following her sister’s intervention at the Stanhope two days earlier, Carolyn had reluctantly resolved to join John at Rory’s wedding in Hyannis Port. On Friday afternoon she went to designer boutiques on the third floor of Saks Fifth Avenue to find a dress that she could wear for the wedding the next day. For $1,640 she found what she wanted: a short black dress by designer Alber Elbaz. From there Carolyn decided to get a pedicure.

At around 8:30 p.m., Carolyn arrived at the Essex County Airport. Moments later she, John, and Lauren climbed into the Saratoga and strapped themselves into the comfortable leather seats. At 8:38 p.m., 12 minutes after sunset, the airport tower cleared John and the Saratoga for departure, and they were off.

John had told Blow that he would be flying with his flight instructor, and not to worry. But in the end, primarily because of how late the hour had gotten, John told the flight instructor he would go it alone. Ed Hill recalled to me: “That night there was a flight instructor. He said to John, ‘You’re taking off late. There’s cloud cover over the Vineyard. Like most Americans I’m willing to inconvenience myself out of my love for you. I will fly up there with you and bring the plane back, or get my ass back to New Jersey somehow. Don’t go without me.’” But John told the instructor to go home and be with his family. He would fly alone. “He did [go alone],” Hill said. “It was magnificently stupid that he did.” According to a subsequent report by the National Transportation Safety Board, John told the flight instructor that he “wanted to do it alone.”

The night was hazy, hot, and humid. And it was difficult to see the horizon as the haze accumulated and the light faded. John had not filed a flight plan with the FAA, nor was he required to do so. He also had not engaged a private tracking service to monitor his flight—nor was that a requirement either. At least one other pilot at the Essex County Airport that night had decided not to fly because of the hazy conditions. Kyle Bailey told Time that he canceled his planned flight because of “a troubling haze that had already reduced visibility,” and that when he “looked off in the distance,” he could not see a familiar mountain ridge. “That is a test that most pilots use at the airport,” he said.

At about 34 miles west of the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, John began to descend at a rate of between 400 and 800 feet per minute, at an airspeed of 160 knots.

At around 9:38 p.m., John turned the plane to the right, heading in a southerly direction. Thirty seconds later John leveled the plane out at an altitude of 2,200 feet and began a climb that lasted another 30 seconds. At 9:39 p.m. the plane leveled off at 2,500 feet and headed in a southeasterly direction. About a minute later John climbed the plane to 2,600 feet and made a left turn, and then began descending at a rate of 900 feet per minute. “For nearly five minutes the plane’s descent continued at this relatively steep rate, losing about two-thirds of its altitude until it was just 2,300 feet above the Atlantic wavetops,” Jeff Kluger and Mark Thompson wrote in Time a few days later. “Martha’s Vineyard was by now only 20 miles away, but if the Piper kept dropping at this rate, it would hit ocean well before it reached the landing strip. For a pilot flying in better conditions—even an inexperienced pilot—the next step would be obvious: look out your window, get your bearings, and level out your plane. JFK Jr. didn’t have that option. No matter how low he flew, there was still haze. Kennedy, who had earned his pilot’s license only 15 months ago, now found himself flying a plane that might as well have had no windows at all. The first rule pilots are taught, in a vertiginous situation like this, is to ignore the signals your body is trying to send. The inner ear is equipped with an exquisitely well-tuned balance mechanism, but it’s a mechanism that’s meant to operate with the help of other cues, particularly visual ones. Without that the balance system spins like an unmoored gyroscope.”

Then John, increasingly disoriented, turned right; the speed of the plane increased, and it was descending rapidly, at a rate of 4,700 feet per minute. “Perhaps he was still searching for a break in the haze, or perhaps merely stumbling about,” Kluger and Thompson continued. “If he followed his flight training—and his reputation as a generally cautious pilot suggests he would have—he would now have performed what’s known as ‘the scan,’ a quick survey of half a dozen key instruments that would reveal his plane’s altitude, attitude, and direction. But his brief experience with instrument piloting—he was certified to fly only under eyeball conditions—left him ill-equipped to handle a confusing situation.

As the dials on the panel and the signals in his brain told him two different things, his eyes probably bounced back and forth between the instruments and the windows in a frantic attempt to reconcile the two. ‘He was like a blind man trying to find his way out of a room,’ a Piper Saratoga pilot surmises. And like a blind man, he now completely lost his way.”

William D. Cohan

William d. cohan is a special correspondent at *vanity fair.*.

By Susan Page

By Julie Miller

By Kase Wickman

By Mark Seal

John F. Kennedy Jr.'s Close Friend Sheds Light on the Former First Son's Final Days in New Biography

In the last year of JFK Jr.'s life, America's golden boy was considering a run for governor.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

• Gillon shares details about the difficulties John Kennedy Jr. was having in his marriage to Carolyn Bessette .
• Previously unreleased Secret Service letters show Jackie Kennedy's tense relationship with the Secret Service after JFK died.
• In the last year of his life, JFK Jr. was contemplating running for governor of New York.

It's been twenty years since John F. Kennedy Jr. died when the tiny plane he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999. Also killed in the crash were his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette . As the anniversary of their deaths draws near, a new biography by historian Steven Gillon sheds new light on the life of America's "reluctant prince." An A&E documentary—with appearances from those who knew John best, including Carole Radzwill who was married to his cousin and best friend Anthony —will also premier on July 16.

America's Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr.

Gillon was actually a close friend of John's—the two met in the 1980s when Gillon was a teaching assistant at Brown University, where John majored in American studies. The author spoke with T&C about his memories of John, what Jackie Kennedy really thought about the Secret Service, and whether John would have followed in his father's footsteps.

You knew John from his college days. How well did you know his wife Carolyn?

I met Carolyn twice, one was at this very elegant dinner for G eorge magazine at Federal Hall in New York. I was sitting next to her, I was the fill in at John's table. As people like Puff Daddy would show up, they were late and I would move from chair to chair because John didn't want his table to look empty. [laughs] So I was seated next to her for a while.

She was so refined and so elegant, and was just mesmerizing. She looked at you with those eyes and made you feel like you were the only person in the universe.

It's clear they were not prepared for the obsessive paparazzi.

I think neither Carolyn nor John believed that the press would remain interested in him once he got married . John thought they would say "oh he's a married man, he's no longer the sexiest man alive or the most eligible bachelor" and that they would just let them be. And just the opposite happened. Carolyn was fragile to begin with, and this became the dominant issue in their relationship.

.css-4rnr1w:before{margin:0 auto 1.875rem;width:60%;height:0.125rem;content:'';display:block;background-color:#9a0500;color:#fff;} .css-gcw71x{color:#030929;font-family:NewParis,NewParis-fallback,NewParis-roboto,NewParis-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.625rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.8125rem;line-height:1.1;}}.css-gcw71x b,.css-gcw71x strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-gcw71x em,.css-gcw71x i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} "I think she never found her identity as John's wife. She felt captive."

The paparazzi treated her horribly. Her life was pretty miserable while she was married to John and it wasn't anything that John did, it was because of who he was and what people expected of him. I think she never found her identity as John's wife. She went from being this vivacious and energetic person, and now she feels captive.

What was their relationship like in the last year of their lives?

Not long after that George dinner, John and I had dinner at the Odeon and he told me about this letter he'd received from Hachette that was really critical of his leadership at George . I was a contributing editor but I wasn't in the office day in and day out, and he wanted an objective opinion. His apartment on North Moore was just a few blocks from the restaurant so we walked over and went up into the apartment. It was really dark and the curtains were drawn.

Carolyn was sitting in the sofa in an oversized Columbia University sweater. John and I were at the kitchen counter and he showed me the letter, and they were passing a cigarette back and forth while I read it. And then she just exploded on him. She was completely different. I was struck—she wasn't angry with Hachette for writing this incredibly abusive letter to her husband. She was mad at John for not fighting back. That was her big complaint, that he just let people walk all over him and he didn't stand up for himself. She felt that many of his friends were using him and she was trying to push many of his friends out of his life.

You found a chilling letter Jackie Kennedy wrote to the Secret Service saying "if anything happens to John, I won't be as nice to you as I was after Dallas."

He spent the first 16 years of his life living in a bubble. The Secret Service was required by law to make sure nothing happens to John, but where did their rights end and Jackie' s parental rights begin? I actually sued the Secret Service and they turned over 500 pages of documents that no one has seen before—not only the letters between Jackie and the Secret Service, but also the internal debates among the Secret Service about how to handle her.

"I think John as an adult had a pent up desire for freedom."

They asked her on a few occasions to give up the protection if she wanted John to grow up like a normal child, but she didn't want to do that. Every time John left the house there was this movement of people and resources. When he went skiing he had a secret service agent skiing next to him. They had agents at the house, on vacation. So I think John as an adult—being on his bicycle and being able to ride around New York City wherever he went—that was a pent up desire for freedom.

There were always rumors that John would run for office. Did he ever talk about that?

He had this exploratory meeting in March 1999 about whether to run for the Senate so he was definitely thinking about it but George was in a bad state, his marriage was in a bad state. He wasn't ready. He's fighting with his sister. His best friend is dying. He had a lot on his plate. But also, he didn't want to be a legislator—he always saw himself as an executive. Maybe he would run for governor of New York.

Is that something he actually wanted or he felt was his destiny?

"I think he was finally embracing that politics was in his DNA and he could be good at it."

My view is he did not want to go into politics because he was a Kennedy. He wanted to do things that no one expected him to do. He wanted to really find out who he was based on his own experiences. When I first met him in the 80s he always referred to his father as "President Kennedy." Almost as if he's trying to keep his memory at a distance. Later on in the early 90s he's referring to him as "my father." The last time I spoke to him he called him "my daddy." I think he was finally embracing that politics was in his DNA and he could be good at it.

What do you think he would be doing now?

Everyone asks that, but I want John to be remembered for the life that he lived and not for what he might have become. When you think about John, you don't have to think about the unfulfilled potential. You can think about the life of dignity that he led.

What do you miss most about John?

John was so generous. He helped friends out financially when they were in a jam, but he also was available to them if they needed emotional support or were looking for a job. He knew what clout he had, and he rarely used it for himself, but he would be the first one to use it for other people. The Friday before he died, I went to the doctor because I thought I had ALS. I called a mutual friend and I said "don't tell anybody." But he told John and that Friday night I get two phone calls from him but I didn't want to talk. Then Saturday morning I get a call and it's John and he's like "Stevie I hear we have something to talk about." And he said, "Stevie, I'll take care of you." And he repeated it a second time. "Stevie, I'll take care of you." That's who John is.

Liz Cantrell is the assistant to the Editor in Chief of Town & Country , covering arts and culture, and has previously written for Esquire.

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Congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy (circa 1946-47) in his Congressional Office.

Courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

A portrait of JFK, in full

Brett Milano

Harvard Correspondent

New biography aims to chronicle a complex life amid a pivotal time for a nation

One of the revelations about John F. Kennedy in Fredrik Logevall’s new biography, “JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917‒1956,” is that the man was an excellent letter-writer and diarist. The Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of history makes effective use of the collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, part of which has become available only recently.

“He always had a knack for the English language, even if he was an indifferent student in prep school and in his first years at Harvard,” Logevall says. “His teachers, frustrated by his lack of application overall, were always impressed by his way with words. It is an interesting contrast with his older brother, Joe Jr., the family’s supposed golden child, whose writings had a more dutiful, less imaginative quality.”

The first of a two-volume set, “JFK” aims to give the clearest picture yet available of the 35th president set against the historical, political, and cultural context of a pivotal age. The book begins with great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy’s arrival in Boston during the Irish potato famine and runs through Jack’s childhood, studies at Harvard, and military duty, and finally his rise in politics in 1956, when he almost became the Democrats’ vice presidential pick. Logevall spoke with the Gazette recently about the man and the book.

Fredrik Logevall

GAZETTE: There have certainly been many books written about JFK. What were you able to find that hadn’t been found before?

LOGEVALL: You’re quite right. There are a lot of excellent books out there on various aspects of his life and career, and especially the presidency — one thinks, for example, about the many studies of the Cuban missile crisis, Civil Rights, the Bay of Pigs disaster, the marriage with Jackie, and the assassination in Dallas. But we don’t have many true biographies, even one that is a full-scale examination of the entire life and that looks closely at his early life, in particular his teens and 20s, which I believe were key years for him (as they are for most of us). Mine is a “life and times” biography that places Kennedy in his own context, that of a rising American power in world affairs. I guess the conceit of the book is that I can tell two stories together: the story of John F. Kennedy’s rise and the story of America’s rise. I believe we can better understand the first half of the so-called American Century through the lens of Kennedy’s life.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (from left), Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., and John F. Kennedy in Southampton, England, July 2, 1938.

Courtesy of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

GAZETTE: What did you find that people have missed about JFK in the past?

LOGEVALL: One thing that people have underplayed is the degree to which he was a serious student of democracy and world affairs at an earlier point than we imagine. We tend to think of him as a callow playboy, not serious about public policy or his career until quite late, until he runs for Congress in 1946, and maybe not even then. But you can look at the papers he wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard, some of which are available, and you can look at his senior thesis which became a best-selling book [“Why England Slept”] and see a young man already thinking deeply and in sustained fashion about important issues. A second finding is that the young Jack Kennedy was in important respects his own master. Though his father was a towering force in his life and those of his eight siblings, Jack proved willing and able, to a degree I did not expect, to chart his own course. The Harvard years are interesting in this regard: In 1939‒40, as World War II began and debate raged in the U.S. about how to respond, Jack showed himself willing in a way his older brother, Joe Jr., never was to separate himself from his father. Long before Pearl Harbor, Jack had become an interventionist while his father adhered throughout to a staunch isolationist position. Later, during his political campaigns, Jack always kept the key decision-making role for himself, notwithstanding the common misconception that his father called the shots. [gz_soundcloud title=”John F. Kennedy recording for public speaking class at Harvard, 1937″ track_id=”321147626″ playlists=”” height=”350″ show_artwork=”false”] [/gz_soundcloud]

GAZETTE:   Another family relationship we learn more about is with his brother Bobby, and how this became increasingly important.

LOGEVALL:  Yes, the age difference between the two brothers was such — 8½ years — that in the early years, when Jack was at prep school and then at Harvard, they weren’t particularly close. But what we see especially in 1951, when they traveled together along with their sister Patricia on an extended tour of the Middle East and Asia, is that they developed a strong bond. Bobby admired his brother to no end, and Jack could now see Bobby’s intelligence and loyalty and good cheer. Then in 1952 Bobby, all of 26 at the time, came aboard to take charge of Jack’s floundering Senate campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge and helped to turn the thing around. Jack could now see just how important Bobby could be to his career, could see the powerful combination of doggedness, shrewdness, and ruthlessness that his brother possessed.

The Kennedy family at Hyannisport, Mass., 1931. Robert (from left), John, Eunice, Jean (on lap of) Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (behind) Patricia, Kathleen, Joseph, Rosemary.

Photo by Richard Sears, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

GAZETTE: He was quite a complex character. He did have his playboy side, but some of his war actions can be called heroic.

LOGEVALL:  Yeah, I think that is right. There is a seriousness of purpose which you see in his letters home from the South Pacific, and more dramatically in the actions he took to help save his crew after his boat, the PT-109, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Was there heroism there? I believe so, even if he deserves no accolades for allowing his boat to be rammed. The efforts he made in the succeeding days to try to save his crew were really quite extraordinary. We might note here as well that he came back from the war, as many of the servicemen did, with a seriousness of purpose evinced to some degree before but deepened as a result of seeing combat. He was convinced that the U.S. would need to play a leading role in world affairs, even as he also had a skepticism about the use of the military’s power that he would carry with him for the rest of his days.

GAZETTE: His coming out against Joseph McCarthy seems to be a bit of a political turning point.

LOGEVALL: Well, he never fully came out in stark opposition, which was a problem. The relationship with McCarthy was complicated, partly because of family ties. He never felt the kind of personal connection to McCarthy that Joe Sr. felt and that Bobby felt. And there were a lot of aspects of McCarthy’s political persona that he found off-putting — the disdain for senatorial good manners, the disregard for facts, for reasoning from evidence. That said, liberals at the time had good reason to be frustrated by JFK’s reluctance to really condemn McCarthy. Even in 1954, when McCarthy’s influence was in decline and the Senate held a censure vote, JFK, recovering in the hospital following a serious surgery, did not instruct his aide Ted Sorensen to register his position on the vote. He could have done so, but he didn’t, and that caused a lot of grief for him with liberals later on. He preferred to sidestep the issue, aware that there were an awful lot of Irish Catholic voters in Massachusetts who still backed McCarthy. He didn’t want to get on their bad side.

A page in Kennedy’s diary from fall 1951. The first part reads: “Oct. 3 — Paris — I talked with General Eisenhower Biddle and MacArthur at SHAEF Headquarters. Eisenhower looking very fit — seemed disturbed at news of last few days.” Lt. Kennedy on board PT 109, July 1943.

Photo by Joel Benjamin (left), courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

GAZETTE: The book deals a lot with the influence of World War II on his character development. Do you think he took a lot from other aspects of American life at the time, including popular culture?

LOGEVALL: To a degree, certainly. When he returned from the war and was figuring out what he wanted to do, he had a fascinating stint as a journalist. He showed good reporting instincts and could have made it a career. In this period he also liked to pal around in Hollywood, where his father had been a movie mogul in the 1920s and still had connections. Jack dated actresses like Gene Tierney and liked to be on the set, liked to go to movies. Popular music I think interested him less, and until Jackie came along he evinced little interest in art. He did like poetry, and he memorized a lot of it starting already in prep school at Choate. But the Hollywood connection is interesting to me, and probably plays some role in his later skill at using images and film to advance his political career. He was among the first politicians to see that images matter, that the right use of film can make a powerful difference. Television was a huge emerging thing as his career builds, and he had that savvy understanding of the medium and how he could use it to his advantage, kind of like FDR used radio so effectively.

GAZETTE: Many of the reviews I’ve read have focused on his womanizing, which we already knew about. Do you think that’s ultimately that important a part of his character?

LOGEVALL:  Yes, the womanizing is an important part of who he is. His father led by example, carrying on with innumerable women in the 1920s and 1930s, and the older kids knew very well what was going on. Joe Sr. made clear he expected his sons to follow his ways. But I can’t have it both ways: If I’m going to argue that JFK was able to resist his father’s pressure and be his own man when it came to politics and career choices, I have to maintain that he could have broken with him on this issue too. Here he was his father’s son, with a tendency to see women as objects to be conquered. But there are paradoxes here, among them the fact that his administration took important progressive steps, establishing, for example, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, with Eleanor Roosevelt as chair. In 1962, at the urging of the commission, Kennedy ordered federal agencies to cease sex discrimination in hiring.

Sen. John Kennedy and his then-fiancée Jacqueline Bouvier in Hyannis Port, Mass.

Photo courtesy of Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital Images & Slides Collection

GAZETTE: In the second volume you’ll have to unravel the mystery around the assassination. Do you have a sense of how you will approach that?

LOGEVALL: There is certainly a fascination, and it shows few signs of fading. It is a vexing issue to any biographer of JFK, and it has spawned a whole cottage industry of its own. I haven’t yet written Volume 2 so I haven’t fully decided how I will proceed on this. But certainly I will talk about Lee Harvey Oswald’s background, about what led him to take this action, and will give the reader a full sense of how it all culminated in this terrible moment. And I think I will owe the reader my assessment of what I believe happened. So I will provide it. I don’t think I will get heavily into the deliberations of the Warren Commission or the various conspiracy theories that have sprouted up over the years. That’s another book, not to mention a potential morass.

GAZETTE: What do you think happened?

LOGEVALL: My reading of the evidence we have indicates pretty clearly to me that Oswald was the lone gunman. Claims to the contrary all come up short. Oswald’s associations and meetings in the weeks leading up to the assassination are worthy of investigation, however, and have been examined in recent studies. I will delve into that material and be interested to see what I find.

Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

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‘Biography: JFK Jr.—The Final Year’ Examines His Struggles Before Death

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Tuesday, July 16 marks the 20th anniversary of JFK Jr.’s death, when the plane he was piloting crashed off Martha’s Vineyard with his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, aboard.

In commemoration, Biography examines the last months of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline’s only surviving son, inspired by the new book America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr. , by historian Steven M. Gillon, his longtime friend.

Aided by thousands of hours of footage of the Kennedy scion and recollections from those in his circle, the filmmakers focus on the book’s last chapters. During his difficult final six months, the man Gillon remembers as “nonpartisan, open-minded, decent, and kind” was struggling with numerous issues that would affect his life.

A&E Biography Celebrates American Icons Farrah Fawcett & John F. Kennedy Jr.

His strained marriage.

Every public disagreement between the couple (above) became tabloid fodder with reports that Carolyn “felt trapped” by the incessant paparazzi. “John was struggling to make [the relationship] work, but not succeeding,” says Gillon.

His troubled magazine, George

Auspiciously launched in 1995, the celebrity-filled blend of politics and entertainment was losing advertisers, jeopardizing its future. “John had to scramble to find new investors,” says Gillon. “He did not like going around asking people for money.”

(RoseMarie Terenzio)

The imminent death of Anthony Radziwill

Though he would not accept that his beloved cousin and best friend’s cancer was fatal and insisted on paying for experimental treatments, “John spent his last week writing a eulogy for Anthony,” says Gillon.

A decision on a political career

“He didn’t want to run for office just because he was a Kennedy,” says Gillon, who believes John was readying to run for governor of New York. “We lost someone who could’ve made a great contribution to our public life and discourse.”

'Bobby Kennedy for President': 3 Things You'll Learn From the Netflix Docuseries

Biography: JFK Jr.—The Final Year , Documentary Premiere, Tuesday, July 16, 9/8c, A&E

John F. Kennedy Jr.

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• Seen & Heard

Oral Biography of JFK Jr. Coming This Summer

BY Michael Schaub • Jan. 25, 2024

A new book will tell the life story of John F. Kennedy Jr. through the words of the people who knew him well, People magazine reports .

Gallery Books will publish RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil’s JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography this summer. The press describes the book as “an extraordinarily intimate, comprehensive look at the real man behind the myth.”

Kennedy, the son of President John F. Kennedy, was born in Washington, D.C., just two weeks after his father won the 1960 presidential election. A photograph of Kennedy saluting his father’s coffin after the 1963 assassination became one of the most enduring American images of the 20th century.

He was educated at Brown University and worked as an attorney and journalist before his death in 1999, when the airplane he was piloting crashed near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. His wife, Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, were also killed.

In their biography, Terenzio, Kennedy’s former executive assistant, and McNeil, a People editor-at-large, share stories from Kennedy’s “closest friends, confidantes, lovers, classmates, teachers, and colleagues,” Gallery says.

“There was no one like John F. Kennedy Jr.,” McNeil told People . “He was so curious, not only to learn about other people but also to figure out who he was apart from his famous family. This book is our exploration into who John really was from the voices of those who knew him best.”

JFK Jr. is scheduled for publication on July 16, the 25th anniversary of his death.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.

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JFK Jr. The Final Year

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Life of John F. Kennedy

Growing up in the kennedy family.

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was a very disciplined and organized woman, made the following entry on a notecard, when her second child was born:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy  Born Brookline, Mass. (83 Beals Street) May 29, 1917 

In all, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy would have nine children, four boys and five girls. She kept notecards for each of them in a small wooden file box and made a point of writing down everything from a doctor’s visit to the shoe size they had at a particular age. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was named in honor of Rose’s father, John Francis Fitzgerald, the Boston Mayor popularly known as Honey Fitz. Before long, family and friends called this small blue-eyed baby, Jack. Jack was not a very healthy baby, and Rose recorded on his notecard the childhood diseases from which he suffered, such as: "whooping cough, measles, chicken pox."

On February 20, 1920 when Jack was not yet three years old, he became sick with scarlet fever, a highly contagious and then potentially life-threatening disease. His father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was terrified that little Jack would die. Mr. Kennedy went to the hospital every day to be by his son’s side, and about a month later Jack took a turn for the better and recovered. But Jack was never very healthy, and because he was always suffering from one ailment or another his family used to joke about the great risk a mosquito took in biting him – with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die! 

When Jack was three, the Kennedys moved to a new home a few blocks away from their old house in Brookline, a neighborhood just outside of Boston. It was a lovely house with twelve rooms, turreted windows, and a big porch. Full of energy and ambition, Jack’s father worked very hard at becoming a successful businessman. When he was a student at Harvard College and having a difficult time fitting in as an Irish Catholic, he swore to himself he would make a million dollars by the age of 35. There was a lot of prejudice against Irish Catholics in Boston at that time, but Joseph Kennedy was determined to succeed. Jack’s great-grandparents had come from Ireland and managed to provide for their families, despite many hardships. Jack’s grandfathers did even better for themselves, both becoming prominent Boston politicians. Jack, because of all his family had done, could enjoy a very comfortable life. The Kennedys had everything they needed and more.  By the time Jack was eight there were seven children altogether. Jack had an older brother, Joe; four sisters, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, and Patricia; and a younger brother, Robert. Jean and Teddy hadn’t been born yet. Nannies and housekeepers helped Rose run the household. 

At the end of the school year, the Kennedy children would go to their summer home in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod where they enjoyed swimming, sailing, and playing touch football. The Kennedy children played hard, and they enjoyed competing with one another. Joseph Sr. encouraged this competition, especially among the boys.

He was a father with very high expectations and wanted the boys to win at sports and everything they tried. As he often said, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." But sometimes these competitions went too far. One time when Joe suggested that he and Jack race on their bicycles, they collided head-on. Joe emerged unscathed while Jack had to have twenty-eight stitches. Because Joe was two years older and stronger than Jack, whenever they fought, Jack would usually get the worst of it. Jack was the only sibling who posed any real threat to Joe’s dominant position as the oldest child.

Jack was very popular and had many friends at Choate, a boarding school for adolescent boys in Connecticut. He played tennis, basketball, football, and golf and also enjoyed reading. His friend Lem Billings remembers how unusual it was that Jack had a daily subscription to the  New York Times . Jack had a "clever, individualist mind," his Head Master once noted, though he was not the best student. He did not always work as hard as he could, except in history and English, which were his favorite subjects.

"Now Jack," his father wrote in a letter one day, "I don’t want to give the impression that I am a nagger, for goodness knows I think that is the worse thing any parent can be, and I also feel that you know if I didn’t really feel you had the goods I would be most charitable in my attitude toward your failings. After long experience in sizing up people I definitely know you have the goods and you can go a long way…It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young, and that is why I am urging you to do the best you can. I am not expecting too much, and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and understanding." 

Jack graduated from Choate and entered Harvard in 1936, where Joe was already a student. Like his brother Joe, Jack played football. He was not as good an athlete as Joe but he had a lot of determination and perseverance. Unfortunately, one day while playing he ruptured a disk in his spine. Jack never really recovered from this accident and his back continued to bother him for the rest of his life.  The two eldest boys were attractive, agreeable, and intelligent young men and Mr. Kennedy had high hopes for them both. However, it was Joe who had announced to everyone when he was a young boy that he would be the first Catholic to become President. No one doubted him for a moment. Jack, on the other hand, seemed somewhat less ambitious. He was active in student groups and sports and he worked hard in his history and government classes, though his grades remained only average.

Late in 1937, Mr. Kennedy was appointed United States Ambassador to England and moved there with his whole family, with the exception of Joe and Jack who were at Harvard. Because of his father’s job, Jack became very interested in European politics and world affairs. After a summer visit to England and other countries in Europe, Jack returned to Harvard more eager to learn about history and government and to keep up with current events.  Joe and Jack frequently received letters from their father in England, who informed them of the latest news regarding the conflicts and tensions that everyone feared would soon blow up into a full-scale war. Adolph Hitler ruled Germany and Benito Mussolini ruled Italy. They both had strong armies and wanted to take land from other countries. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. 

By this time, Jack was a senior at Harvard and decided to write his thesis on why Great Britain was unprepared for war with Germany. It was later published as a book called Why England Slept. In June 1940, Jack graduated from Harvard. His father sent him a cablegram from London: "TWO THINGS I ALWAYS KNEW ABOUT YOU ONE THAT YOU ARE SMART TWO THAT YOU ARE A SWELL GUY LOVE DAD."

World War II and a Future in Politics

Soon after graduating, both Joe and Jack joined the Navy. Joe was a flyer and sent to Europe, while Jack was made Lieutenant (Lt.) and assigned to the South Pacific as commander of a patrol torpedo boat, the PT-109. 

Lt. Kennedy had a crew of twelve men whose mission was to stop Japanese ships from delivering supplies to their soldiers. On the night of August 2, 1943, Lt. Kennedy’s crew patrolled the waters looking for enemy ships to sink. A Japanese destroyer suddenly became visible. But it was traveling at full speed and headed straight at them. Holding the wheel, Lt. Kennedy tried to swerve out of the way, but to no avail. The much larger Japanese warship rammed the PT-109, splitting it in half and killing two of Lt. Kennedy’s men. The others managed to jump off as their boat went up in flames. Lt. Kennedy was slammed hard against the cockpit, once again injuring his weak back. Patrick McMahon, one of his crew members, had horrible burns on his face and hands and was ready to give up. In the darkness, Lt. Kennedy managed to find McMahon and haul him back to where the other survivors were clinging to a piece of the boat that was still afloat. At sunrise, Lt. Kennedy led his men toward a small island several miles away. Despite his own injuries, Lt. Kennedy was able to tow Patrick McMahon ashore, a strap from McMahon’s life jacket clenched between his teeth. Six days later two native islanders found them and went for help, delivering a message Jack had carved into a piece of coconut shell. The next day, the PT-109 crew was rescued. Jack’s brother Joe was not so lucky. He died a year later when his plane blew up during a dangerous mission in Europe. 

When he returned home, Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his leadership and courage. With the war finally coming to an end, it was time to choose the kind of work he wanted to do. Jack had considered becoming a teacher or a writer, but with Joe’s tragic death suddenly everything changed. After serious discussions with Jack about his future, Joseph Kennedy convinced him that he should run for Congress in Massachusetts' eleventh congressional district, where he won in 1946. This was the beginning of Jack’s political career. As the years went on, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, served three terms (six years) in the House of Representatives, and in 1952 he was elected to the US Senate. 

Soon after being elected senator, John F. Kennedy, at 36 years of age, married 24 year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, a writer with the  Washington Times-Herald . Unfortunately, early on in their marriage, Senator Kennedy’s back started to hurt again and he had two serious operations. While recovering from surgery, he wrote a book about several US Senators who had risked their careers to fight for the things in which they believed. The book, called  Profiles in Courage , was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. That same year, the Kennedys’ first child, Caroline, was born. 

John F. Kennedy was becoming a popular politician. In 1956 he was almost picked to run for vice president. Kennedy nonetheless decided that he would run for president in the next election.

He began working very long hours and traveling all around the United States on weekends. On July 13, 1960 the Democratic party nominated him as its candidate for president. Kennedy asked Lyndon B. Johnson, a senator from Texas, to run with him as vice president. In the general election on November 8, 1960, Kennedy defeated the Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon in a very close race. At the age of 43, Kennedy was the youngest man elected president and the first Catholic. Before his inauguration, his second child, John Jr., was born. His father liked to call him John-John.

John F. Kennedy Becomes The 35th President of the United States

John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural speech he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," he said. He also asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." President Kennedy, together with his wife and two children, brought a new, youthful spirit to the White House. The Kennedys believed that the White House should be a place to celebrate American history, culture, and achievement. They invited artists, writers, scientists, poets, musicians, actors, and athletes to visit them. Jacqueline Kennedy also shared her husband's interest in American history. Gathering some of the finest art and furniture the United States had produced, she restored all the rooms in the White House to make it a place that truly reflected America’s history and artistic creativity. Everyone was impressed and appreciated her hard work.  The White House also seemed like a fun place because of the Kennedys’ two young children, Caroline and John-John. There was a pre-school, a swimming pool, and a tree-house outside on the White House lawn. President Kennedy was probably the busiest man in the country, but he still found time to laugh and play with his children.  However, the president also had many worries. One of the things he worried about most was the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. He knew that if there was a war, millions of people would die. Since World War II, there had been a lot of anger and suspicion between the two countries but never any shooting between Soviet and American troops. This 'Cold War', which was unlike any other war the world had seen, was really a struggle between the Soviet Union's communist system of government and the United States' democratic system. Because they distrusted each other, both countries spent enormous amounts of money building nuclear weapons. There were many times when the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States could have ended in nuclear war, such as in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis or over the divided city of Berlin.  President Kennedy worked long hours, getting up at seven and not going to bed until eleven or twelve at night, or later. He read six newspapers while he ate breakfast, had meetings with important people throughout the day, and read reports from his advisers. He wanted to make sure that he made the best decisions for his country. "I am asking each of you to be new pioneers in that New Frontier," he said. The New Frontier was not a place but a way of thinking and acting. President Kennedy wanted the United States to move forward into the future with new discoveries in science and improvements in education, employment and other fields. He wanted democracy and freedom for the whole world.  One of the first things President Kennedy did was to create the Peace Corps. Through this program, which still exists today, Americans can volunteer to work anywhere in the world where assistance is needed. They can help in areas such as education, farming, health care, and construction. Many young men and women have served as Peace Corps volunteers and have won the respect of people throughout the world. 

President Kennedy was also eager for the United States to lead the way in exploring space. The Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in its space program and President Kennedy was determined to catch up. He said, "No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space." Kennedy was the first president to ask Congress to approve more than 22 billion dollars for Project Apollo, which had the goal of landing an American man on the moon before the end of the decade.  President Kennedy had to deal with many serious problems here in the United States. The biggest problem of all was racial discrimination. The US Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that segregation in public schools would no longer be permitted. Black and white children, the decision mandated, should go to school together. This was now the law of the land. However, there were many schools, especially in southern states, that did not obey this law. There was also racial segregation on buses, in restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places.

Thousands of Americans joined together, people of all races and backgrounds, to protest peacefully this injustice.

Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the famous leaders of the movement for civil rights. Many civil rights leaders didn’t think President Kennedy was supportive enough of their efforts. The President believed that holding public protests would only anger many white people and make it even more difficult to convince the members of Congress who didn't agree with him to pass civil rights laws. By June 11, 1963, however, President Kennedy decided that the time had come to take stronger action to help the civil rights struggle. He proposed a new Civil Rights bill to the Congress, and he went on television asking Americans to end racism. "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free," he said. "This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds…[and] on the principle that all men are created equal." President Kennedy made it clear that all Americans, regardless of their skin color, should enjoy a good and happy life in the United States. 

The President is Shot

On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy flew to Texas to give several political speeches. The next day, on November 22, as his car drove slowly past cheering crowds in Dallas, shots rang out. Kennedy was seriously wounded and died a short time later. Within a few hours of the shooting, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with the murder. On November 24, another man, Jack Ruby, shot and killed Oswald, thus silencing the only person who could have offered more information about this tragic event. The Warren Commission was organized to investigate the assassination and to clarify the many questions which remained. 

The Legacy of John F. Kennedy

President Kennedy's death caused enormous sadness and grief among all Americans. Most people still remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington for the President's funeral, and millions throughout the world watched it on television.  As the years have gone by and other presidents have written their chapters in history, John Kennedy's brief time in office stands out in people's memories for his leadership, personality, and accomplishments. Many respect his coolness when faced with difficult decisions--like what to do about Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. Others admire his ability to inspire people with his eloquent speeches. Still others think his compassion and his willingness to fight for new government programs to help the poor, the elderly and the ill were most important. Like all leaders, John Kennedy made mistakes, but he was always optimistic about the future. He believed that people could solve their common problems if they put their country's interests first and worked together.

Biography: JFK Jr. The Final Year

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July 16, 2019 marks the 20-year anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death. This two-hour documentary special, airing on the anniversary, reframes the last year of his life in an entirely new way. Inspired by Steven M. Gillon’s upcoming book, America’s Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., this captivating special is the most substantive documentary to date and includes convincing new evidence regarding his political aspirations before his untimely death. This compelling documentary shines an unexpectedly poignant light on 1999, his last year, as he coped with the fatal illness of his closest friend and cousin, Anthony Radziwill, struggled to save his marriage and tried to rescue his political magazine, George.

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Biography: JFK Jr.: The Final Year

1h 25m | 2019 | CC |

The Biography special shines a light on 1999, JFK Jr.'s last year, as he coped with the illness of his closest friend and cousin, and struggled to save his marriage and his political magazine, George.

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JFK Jr. Was in Lifelong Therapy, Wanted to Return to the White House & More Revelations from New Biography

“No one will ever live a life like John F. Kennedy Jr. ,” says his friend and historian Steven M. Gillon. Growing up the only son of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy , JFK Jr. was surrounded by cameras.

“There’s probably no one who’s ever walked this earth that was the focus of such media attention their entire life,” Gillon says.

Twenty years after the plane crash that killed John, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy , and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette , Gillon’s biography, America’s Reluctant Prince , which is excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE, reveals a JFK Jr. more complex, more introspective and more human than the world ever knew.

With his confidence and charm, John carried the weight of history with an uncommon grace. But, as Gillon reveals, those expectations also led him to question who he really was and he was in therapy almost his whole life.

• For more on John F. Kennedy’s privilege and pain and for never-before-seen photos from friends, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.

“John was pretty open about his therapy,” Gillon tells PEOPLE. “There was one day a week where you knew where John was. There were two things John always had scheduled: his massage and his therapy appointment.”

As a result, Gillon says, “John was the best person in the world to get advice from. You could tell he had spent a lot of time analyzing himself and by doing so, he had a better sense of other people. His nearly lifelong therapy was an immense help to him but also made him a fantastic listener and problem-solver for his friends.”

Still, John had his struggles. While he had a very close bond to his sister, Caroline Kennedy, Gillon’s book details the mounting tension between them. In the final months before John was killed, the two were barely on speaking terms.

There was friction over their spouses: Caroline’s husband, Ed Schlossberg, and John’s wife, Carolyn. “John just never liked Ed [Schlossberg]” a friend told Gillon. “And Carolyn told John that his sister and her husband, Ed, viewed him as ‘the family f— up.’ “

“John felt like Caroline was dismissive of him, and she didn’t like he was involved with George magazine,” Gillon explains, “but the real tension was with Ed. The Sotheby’s auction in 1996 of his mother’s belongings after she died — John wanted a private auction, Ed thought that a public auction would raise more money. What John resented was that Ed was making the decision.”

RELATED: How JFK Jr. Coped with His Father’s Assassination — and Once Said, ‘Bobby Knew Everything’

There were other arguments as well, says Gillon, who notes “John believed that he and Caroline were the only two Kennedys, the only descendants of their mother and father, and the only two who could make decisions related to the family.”

In the days before he died, John had one last conversation with his sister.

“She was gracious,” Gillon says. “They agreed they needed to do a better job of staying in touch. John loved Caroline. I think they probably both thought they had time to work it out.”

• For more on JFK Jr.’s world and sudden death, pick up PEOPLE’s 96-page special edition John F. Kennedy: An American Life , available now on Amazon and wherever magazines are sold.

In the book’s final chapters, Gillon illuminates how, despite the challenges in his life, there was a resolve to John as he became more clear about his future and was finally able to answer a key question: What was he here to do?

“John didn’t want to enter politics because of his last name and not because people expected him to,” Gillon says. “He wanted to develop his own identity, and what he discovered was politics was part of his DNA.”

In his last months, Gillon says, “John was becoming more comfortable with his political ambitions. He wanted to run for governor of New York and his ultimate goal was to return to the White House.”

RELATED: JFK Jr. ‘Shouldn’t Have Gone Up’ the Night of Plane Crash That Killed Him and Carolyn Bessette, New Book Says

Gillon describes a moment, years earlier, when John was watching the 1989 presidential inauguration of George H. W. Bush on television with a close friend.

“John said he wanted to go home again,” Gillon recalls, “and by home the meant the White House.”

Looking back, he says, “I think in the year before he died, John planned to be president of the United States at some point.”

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Parent item expand the sub menu, the scenario may be different, but prada group continues to grow, inside the wnba draft’s impact on designers, understanding miu miu’s soaring popularity in asia, meet jack schlossberg: john f. kennedy jr.’s look-alike nephew and caroline kennedy’s son.

Jack Schlossberg resembles his late uncle John F. Kennedy Jr.

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LONDON — Known for sharing the charm and good looks of his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr ., John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg — otherwise known as “Jack” after both Jacqueline Kennedy and President Kennedy’s names — is the only grandson of the late U.S. President. 

Born in January 1993, he is the youngest child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. His sisters are Rose and Tatiana. 

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Last year, Schlossberg passed the New York barrister examination that qualified him as a lawyer. He shared his accomplishment on his personal Instagram with a picture of him  paddle-boarding (one of his favorite activities) in Manhattan and the caption “TFW [that feeling when] passed the bar — Jake Cyborg, Esq!”  

Schlossberg is active on social media and doesn’t shy away from showing his wit to the public — he most commonly posts Instagram stories of himself singing along his car radio or shares his everyday thoughts and observations on Twitter. In 2018, he made his acting debut appearing in an episode of “Blue Bloods.”

He is also vocal of his political beliefs and makes his opinion known on his social accounts. 

Jack Schlossberg’s Style Over the Years: A Look Back at Caroline Kennedy’s Son, Photos

In July 2023, he posted an Instagram video endorsing U.S. President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

“President John F. Kennedy is my grandfather and his legacy is important. It’s about a lot more than Camelot and conspiracy theories. It’s about public service and courage,” he said in a part of that video. 

The resemblance he has with his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. was pointed out by Schlossberg’s Instagram followers after he had posted a picture of himself in swim trunks in May last year. 

The image looked similar to one taken of a shirtless JFK Jr. in 1980. 

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News Analysis

Biden, Eyeing Threat From R.F.K. Jr., Turns to His Famous Family for Help

The rollout of endorsements from the Kennedys signaled the urgency the Biden campaign feels toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid, and its desire to discredit him.

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Kennedy Family Endorses President Biden

At a campaign rally in philadelphia, members of the kennedy family endorsed president biden, rejecting one of their own, robert f. kennedy jr., an independent candidate..

I’m joined here today with my sisters, Kathleen and Rory, with Joe and Chris and Max. And with my hero, President Joe Biden. We want to make crystal clear our feeling that the best way forward for America is to re-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to four more years. That’s right, the Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president.

By Adam Nagourney ,  Nicholas Nehamas and Michael Gold

Adam Nagourney reported from Los Angeles, and Nicholas Nehamas and Michael Gold from Philadelphia.

• April 18, 2024

The elaborate rollout of a Kennedy family endorsement of President Biden on Thursday — talk-show interviews, a campaign event with the president — was the most powerful sign yet of rising concern in the Biden camp that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent White House bid presents a serious threat to the president’s re-election prospects.

Members of this prominent Democratic family, including most of Mr. Kennedy’s siblings, had already signaled their support for Mr. Biden. Mr. Kennedy’s estrangement from much of his family had grown increasingly apparent over the years, as he became a leading spokesman against Covid vaccines and promoted conspiratorial theories about the 1968 assassination of his father, Robert F. Kennedy.

But this was the first time Mr. Biden’s campaign had been so aggressively involved in promoting the Kennedys’ strong backing of the president, making an open push to discredit any enduring Democratic credentials Robert F. Kennedy Jr. carries because of his family name.

After leaving the work to outside liberal groups , the Biden campaign has now joined the effort to define Mr. Kennedy beyond the gauzy memory of his father and two uncles, who for many members of Mr. Biden’s fraying coalition, including Black voters, Latinos and blue-collar workers, continue to symbolize Democratic politics in America.

Democratic worries about Mr. Kennedy have grown as he has turned up his attacks on the president and worked to win ballot lines in critical battleground states. Michigan election officials announced on Thursday that he had secured a spot as a member of a little-known third party.

“I can only imagine how Donald Trump’s outrageous lies and behavior would horrify my father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who proudly served as attorney general of the United States, and honored his pledge to uphold the law and protect the country,” Kerry Kennedy, one of the independent presidential candidate’s siblings, said as she stood next to Mr. Biden, addressing about 150 people at a recreation center gym in Philadelphia. “Daddy stood for equal justice, for human rights and freedom from want and fear. Just as President Biden does today.”

“Nearly every single grandchild of Joe and Rose Kennedy supports Joe Biden,” she said. “That’s right: The Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president.”

Responding on social media, Mr. Kennedy avoided engaging with his family’s rejection of his candidacy.

“I hear some of my family will be endorsing President Biden today,” he wrote . “I am pleased they are politically active — it’s a family tradition. We are divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other.”

Mr. Biden, thanking the Kennedy family for its support, spoke repeatedly about how much the Kennedys — in particular John and Robert F. Kennedy — had shaped his views and political career.

“Today I sit behind the Resolute Desk where President John F. Kennedy once sat,” he said. “I sit at that desk and I look in front of the fireplace. To the left is a bust of Martin Luther King. To the right is a bust of your dad.”

In truth, the debate remains open about whether a Kennedy candidacy hurts Mr. Biden more than it hurts former President Donald J. Trump. (One point of agreement between the two major candidates’ camps is that there is little chance Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could win the White House himself.)

Mr. Biden’s advisers argued that Democrats who might be drawn to the Kennedy name will drift away as they learn more about his promotion of conspiracy theories and the financial support that a major Trump donor has given to his super PAC .

Voters have expressed increasing disapproval of Mr. Kennedy, according to 538’s polling average . As Mr. Kennedy has earned more exposure from the news media over the last month, the percentage of Americans with an unfavorable view of him has increased by roughly six percentage points. In Wisconsin, a key battleground, Mr. Kennedy is taking more votes from independents and Republicans than from Democrats, according to an April poll by Marquette Law School .

Still, given the tough re-election fight Mr. Biden faces, his campaign is moving forcefully, and the events on Thursday were the latest example of that.

While the Kennedy family is not what it once was in American politics, fading in relevance for a new generation of voters who may be more familiar with the Clintons than the Kennedys, it is still potentially influential among the kinds of voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania who appear at risk of moving to Mr. Trump.

“There’s a very famous tour that J.F.K. did of smaller western Pennsylvania towns in the ’62 midterms,” said Conor Lamb, a Democratic former congressman from Pennsylvania. “There’s still pictures on the walls in every one of those towns of Kennedy being there and how much he meant to them.”

At 70, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks very much like his father and his uncles, John and Edward M. Kennedy. In the Kennedy family, he had — before his ideological drift in recent years — been viewed as the most politically gifted of Robert F. Kennedy’s children, with the most potential to embark on his own career in elective politics.

Now, though, a Democratic president’s campaign is seeking to define him as a candidate who, despite his name and legacy, is more politically aligned with Mr. Trump than with the Kennedy whose portrait appears on those walls in western Pennsylvania.

“You put the name Kennedy on the ballot and Democrats are going to feel torn,” Joseph P. Kennedy II said in an interview after the event. “And we are trying to make them understand that this is an issue that they do not have to feel torn about.”

Asked if he would encourage his brother to drop out, he said, “Of course I would.”

Still, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stays in the race, Democrats hope that they can ensure his support comes mainly from voters who might otherwise have backed Mr. Trump, at once bolstering Mr. Biden and weakening his Republican rival. Mr. Trump seems wary of this danger, and has stepped up on his attacks on Mr. Kennedy , trying to paint him as part of the “radical left.”

The main super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, MAGA Inc., introduced a website this week pushing those attacks, criticizing Mr. Kennedy over his policies on taxes, gun control and climate change. (The website’s name uses Mr. Kennedy’s initials to call him “radical” and an epithet used to express disdain.)

Still, Mr. Trump has privately spoken with associates about the notion of choosing Mr. Kennedy as his running mate, though it is unclear if he is serious about the idea. When pressed at a campaign stop in Harlem on Tuesday, Mr. Trump described Mr. Kennedy as a “nice guy” and a “good person.” Mr. Kennedy has said he would not accept a spot on a Trump ticket.

After the endorsement event, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Joseph P. Kennedy III, a former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, met with residents at a lush community garden in a quiet residential neighborhood of Philadelphia that has been gentrifying.

One man tried to give the younger Kennedy two baseball caps for Philly sports teams. “I know you’re never supposed to reject a gift,” Mr. Kennedy joked as he held them.

He then encouraged the roughly dozen people there to volunteer for the Biden campaign, arguing that their help could decide the election.

Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 campaign. More about Adam Nagourney

Nicholas Nehamas is a Times political reporter covering the re-election campaign of President Biden. More about Nicholas Nehamas

Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold

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John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy, the 35 th U.S. president, negotiated the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and initiated the Alliance for Progress. He was assassinated in 1963.

Quick Facts

U.s. navy service, u.s. congressman and senator, wife and children, 1960 presidential campaign, u.s. president, assassination and death, release of assassination documents, who was john f. kennedy.

John F. Kennedy served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate before becoming the 35 th American president in 1961. While in the White House, Kennedy faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and the Alliance for Progress. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. He was 46 years old.

FULL NAME: John Fitzgerald Kennedy BORN: May 29, 1917 DIED: November 22, 1963 BIRTHPLACE: Brookline, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Jaqueline Kennedy (1953-1963) CHILDREN: Caroline Kennedy , John F. Kennedy Jr. , and Patrick Kennedy ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were wealthy and prominent Irish Catholic families in Boston. John’s paternal grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, was a wealthy banker and liquor trader, and his maternal grandfather, John E. Fitzgerald, nicknamed “Honey Fitz,” was a skilled politician who served as a congressman and as the mayor of Boston. Kennedy’s mother, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald , was a Boston debutante, and his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr. , was a successful banker who made a fortune on the stock market after World War I. Joe Kennedy Sr. went on to a government career as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and as an ambassador to Great Britain.

John, nicknamed “Jack,” was the second oldest of a group of nine extraordinary siblings. His brothers and sisters include Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy , and Ted Kennedy , one of the most powerful senators in American history. The Kennedy children remained close-knit and supportive of each other throughout their entire lives.

Joseph and Rose largely spurned the world of Boston socialites into which they had been born to focus instead on their children’s education. Joe Sr. in particular obsessed over every detail of his kids’ lives, a rarity for a father at that time. As a family friend noted, “Most fathers in those days simply weren’t that interested in what their children did. But Joe Kennedy knew what his kids were up to all the time.”

Joe Sr. had great expectations for his children, and he sought to instill in them a fierce competitive fire and the belief that winning was everything. He entered his children in swimming and sailing competitions and chided them for finishing in anything but first place. John’s sister, Eunice, later recalled, “I was 24 before I knew I didn’t have to win something every day.” John bought into his father’s philosophy that winning was everything. “He hates to lose at anything,” Eunice said. “That’s the only thing Jack gets really emotional about—when he loses.”

Despite his father’s constant reprimands, young Kennedy was a poor student and a mischievous boy. He attended a Catholic boys’ boarding school in Connecticut called Canterbury, where he excelled at English and history—the subjects he enjoyed—but nearly flunked Latin, in which he had no interest. Despite his poor grades, Kennedy continued on to Choate, an elite Connecticut preparatory school. Although he was obviously brilliant, evidenced by the extraordinary thoughtfulness and nuance of his work on the rare occasions when he applied himself, Kennedy remained at best a mediocre student, preferring sports, girls, and practical jokes to coursework.

His father wrote to him by way of encouragement, “If I didn’t really feel you had the goods, I would be most charitable in my attitude toward your failings... I am not expecting too much, and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and understanding.” John was, in fact, very bookish in high school, reading ceaselessly but not the books his teachers assigned.

He was also chronically ill during his childhood and adolescence; he suffered from severe colds, the flu, scarlet fever, and even more severe, undiagnosed diseases that forced him to miss months of school at a time and occasionally brought him to the brink of death.

After graduating from Choate and spending one semester at Princeton University, Kennedy transferred to Harvard University in 1936. There, he repeated his by then well-established academic pattern, excelling occasionally in the classes he enjoyed but proving only an average student due to the omnipresent diversions of sports and women. Handsome, charming, and blessed with a radiant smile, Kennedy was incredibly popular with his Harvard classmates. His friend Lem Billings recalled, “Jack was more fun than anyone I’ve ever known, and I think most people who knew him felt the same way about him.” Kennedy was also an incorrigible womanizer. He wrote to Billings during his sophomore year, “I can now get tail as often and as free as I want, which is a step in the right direction.”

Nevertheless, as an upperclassman, Kennedy finally grew serious about his studies and began to realize his potential. His father had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain, and on an extended visit in 1939, John decided to research and write a senior thesis on why Britain was so unprepared to fight Germany in World War II . An incisive analysis of Britain’s failures to meet the Nazi challenge, the paper was so well-received that upon Kennedy’s graduation in 1940 it was published as a book, Why England Slept , selling more than 80,000 copies. Kennedy’s father sent him a cablegram in the aftermath of the book’s publication: “Two things I always knew about you one that you are smart two that you are a swell guy love dad.”

Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to command a patrol torpedo boat in the South Pacific. On August 2, 1943, his boat, PT-109 , was rammed by a Japanese warship and split in two. Two sailors died, and Kennedy badly injured his back. Hauling another wounded sailor by the strap of his life vest, Kennedy led the survivors to a nearby island, where they were rescued six days later. The incident earned him the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for “extremely heroic conduct” and a Purple Heart for the injuries he suffered.

However, Kennedy’s older brother, Joe Jr., who had also joined the Navy, wasn’t so fortunate. A pilot, he died when his plane blew up in August 1944. Handsome, athletic, intelligent, and ambitious, Joseph Kennedy Jr. had been pegged by his father as the one among his children who would some day become president of the United States. In the aftermath of Joe Jr.’s death, John took his family’s hopes and aspirations for his older brother upon himself.

Upon his discharge from the Navy, John worked briefly as a reporter for Hearst Newspapers. Then in 1946, at the age of 29, he decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives from a working-class district of Boston, a seat being vacated by Democrat James Michael Curly. Bolstered by his status as a war hero, his family connections, and his father’s money, the young Democrat won the election handily.

However, after the glory and excitement of publishing his first book and serving in World War II, Kennedy found his work in Congress incredibly dull. Despite serving three terms, from 1946 to 1952, Kennedy remained frustrated by what he saw as stifling rules and procedures that prevented a young, inexperienced representative from making an impact. “We were just worms in the House,” he later recalled. “Nobody paid attention to us nationally.”

In 1952, seeking greater influence and a larger platform, Kennedy challenged Republican incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge for his seat in the U.S. Senate. Once again backed by his father’s vast financial resources, Kennedy hired his younger brother Robert as his campaign manager. Robert put together what one journalist called “the most methodical, the most scientific, the most thoroughly detailed, the most intricate, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anywhere else.”

In an election year in which Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, Kennedy nevertheless won a narrow victory, giving him considerable clout within the Democratic Party. According to one of his aides, the decisive factor in Kennedy’s victory was his personality: “He was the new kind of political figure that people were looking for that year, dignified and gentlemanly and well-educated and intelligent, without the air of superior condescension.”

Kennedy continued to suffer frequent illnesses during his career in the Senate. While recovering from one surgery, he wrote another book, profiling eight senators who had taken courageous but unpopular stances. Profiles in Courage won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and Kennedy remains the only American president to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Otherwise, Kennedy’s eight-year Senate career was relatively undistinguished. Bored by the Massachusetts-specific issues on which he had to spend much of his time, Kennedy was more drawn to the international challenges posed by the Soviet Union’s growing nuclear arsenal and the Cold War battle for the hearts and minds of Third World nations.

Shortly after his Senate election, Kennedy met a beautiful young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party and, in his own words, “leaned across the asparagus and asked her for a date.” They were married on September 12, 1953, until John’s death a decade later.

The couple first expected to become parents in 1956, but Jackie delivered a stillborn girl they intended to name Arabella. John and Jackie then welcomed their daughter, Caroline , in November 1957 and their son John Jr. in November 1960. In August 1963, their son Patrick was born prematurely and died two days after his birth.

In 1956, Kennedy was very nearly selected as Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s running mate but was ultimately passed over for Estes Kefauver from Tennessee. Four years later, Kennedy decided to run for president himself.

In the 1960 Democratic primaries, Kennedy outmaneuvered his main opponent, Hubert Humphrey, with superior organization and financial resources. Selecting Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy faced Vice President Richard Nixon in the general election. The election turned largely on a series of televised national debates in which Kennedy bested Nixon, an experienced and skilled debater, by appearing relaxed, healthy, and vigorous in contrast to his pallid and tense opponent.

On November 8, 1960, Kennedy defeated Nixon by a razor-thin margin to become the 35 th president of the United States of America. Kennedy’s election was historic in several respects. At the age of 43, he was the second youngest American president in history, second only to Theodore Roosevelt , who assumed the office at 42. He was also the first Catholic president and the first president born in the 20 th century.

Delivering his legendary inaugural address on January 20, 1961, Kennedy sought to inspire all Americans to more active citizenship. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he famously said. “Ask what you can do for your country.” During his brief tenure as president, Kennedy did much for America.

Foreign Affairs

Kennedy’s greatest accomplishments came in the arena of foreign affairs. Capitalizing on the spirit of activism he had helped to ignite, Kennedy created the Peace Corps by executive order in 1961. By the end of the century, over 170,000 Peace Corps volunteers would serve in 135 countries. Also in 1961, Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress to foster greater economic ties with Latin America, in hopes of alleviating poverty and thwarting the spread of communism in the region.

Kennedy also presided over a series of international crises. On April 15, 1961, he authorized a covert mission to overthrow leftist Cuban leader Fidel Castro with a group of 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban refugees. Known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion , the mission proved an unmitigated failure, causing Kennedy great embarrassment.

In August 1961, to stem massive waves of emigration from Soviet-dominated East Germany to American ally West Germany via the divided city of Berlin, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall , which became the foremost symbol of the Cold War.

However, the greatest crisis of the Kennedy administration was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Discovering that the Soviet Union had sent ballistic nuclear missiles to Cuba, Kennedy blockaded the island and vowed to defend the United States at any cost. After several of the tensest days in history, during which the world seemed on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in return for Kennedy’s promise to not invade Cuba and to remove American missiles from Turkey.

Eight months later, in June 1963, Kennedy successfully negotiated the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, helping to ease Cold War tensions. It was one of his proudest accomplishments.

Domestic Policy

President Kennedy’s record on domestic policy was rather mixed. Taking office in the midst of a recession, he proposed sweeping income tax cuts, raising the minimum wage, and instituting new social programs to improve education, health care, and mass transit. However, hampered by lukewarm relations with Congress, Kennedy only achieved part of his agenda: a modest increase in the minimum wage and watered down tax cuts.

The most contentious domestic issue of Kennedy’s presidency was civil rights . Constrained by Southern Democrats in Congress who remained stridently opposed to civil rights for Black citizens, Kennedy offered only tepid support for civil rights reforms early in his term.

Nevertheless, in September 1962, Kennedy sent his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to use the National Guard and federal marshals to escort and defend civil rights activist James Meredith as he became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962.

Near the end of 1963, in the wake of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. ’s “I Have a Dream” speech , Kennedy finally sent a civil rights bill to Congress. One of the last acts of his presidency and his life, Kennedy’s bill eventually passed as the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964.

On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy flew to Fort Worth, Texas, for a campaign appearance. The next day, November 22, Kennedy, along with his wife and Texas governor John Connally, rode through cheering crowds in downtown Dallas in a Lincoln Continental convertible. From an upstairs window of the Texas School Book Depository building, a 24-year-old warehouse worker named Lee Harvey Oswald , a former Marine with Soviet sympathies, fired upon the car, hitting the president twice. Kennedy died at Dallas’ Parkland Memorial Hospital shortly thereafter at age 46.

A Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald days later while he was being transferred between jails. The death of President Kennedy was an unspeakable national tragedy, and to this date, many people remember with unsettling vividness the exact moment they learned of his death. While conspiracy theories have swirled ever since Kennedy’s assassination, the official version of events remains the most plausible: Oswald acted alone.

For few former presidents is the dichotomy between public and scholarly opinion so vast. To the American public, as well as his first historians, Kennedy is a hero—a visionary politician who, if not for his untimely death, might have averted the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s. In public-opinion polls, Kennedy consistently ranks with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as among the most beloved American presidents of all time. Critiquing this outpouring of adoration, many more recent Kennedy scholars have derided Kennedy’s womanizing and lack of personal morals and argued that, as a leader, he was more style than substance.

In the end, no one can ever truly know what type of president Kennedy would have become had he finished out his first term or been reelected. Nor can we say how the course of history might have been different had he lived into old age. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote , it was “as if Lincoln had been killed six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Roosevelt at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Marshall Plan.”

The most enduring image of Kennedy’s presidency, and of his whole life, is that of Camelot , the idyllic castle of the legendary King Arthur . As his wife, Jackie Kennedy, said after his death, “There’ll be great presidents again, and the Johnsons are wonderful—they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll never be another Camelot again.”

On October 26, 2017, President Donald Trump ordered the release of 2,800 records related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The move came at the expiration of a 25-year waiting period signed into law in 1992, which allowed the declassification of the documents provided that doing so wouldn’t hurt intelligence, military operations, or foreign relations.

Trump’s release of the documents came on the final day he was legally allowed to do so. However, he didn’t release all of the documents, as officials from the FBI, CIA, and other agencies had successfully lobbied for the chance to review particularly sensitive material for an additional 180 days.

• For time and the world, do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past, or the present, are certain to miss the future.
• Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
• We need men who can dream of things that never were and not ask why.
• If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
• Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
• A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles, and dangers, and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.
• The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high—to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future... For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.
• If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
• The cost of freedom is always high—and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose and that is the path of surrender or submission.
• We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
• The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
• Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
• Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
• [O]ur most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

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Watch CBS News

RFK Jr. siblings endorse Biden as their brother pursues independent bid against president

By Aaron Navarro

Updated on: April 18, 2024 / 8:00 PM EDT / CBS News

Over a dozen members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s family, including six of his siblings, endorsed President Biden in Philadelphia Thursday , even as he pursues an independent bid for Mr. Biden's job.

"The Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president," said Kerry Kennedy, a sister of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as she stood alongside the president. 

"We want to make crystal clear our feelings that the best way forward for America is to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to four more years," she added. 

Kerry Kennedy praised Mr. Biden as a "hero," and she referred to him as a leader in the mold of her father, Robert F. Kennedy, who "stood for equal justice, human rights and freedom from want and fear — just as President Biden does today." 

Her father served as attorney general in John F. Kennedy's administration and was running for president himself when he was assassinated in 1968.

Speaking for the family members who are endorsing Mr. Biden, Kerry Kennedy had harsh words for presumptive Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump.

"I can only imagine how Donald Trump's outrageous lies and behavior would have horrified my father," she said, and she accused Trump of "running to take us backwards, attacking the most basic rights and freedoms that are at the core of who we are as Americans." She accused Trump of planning to "use his power to punish his enemies, silence his opponents and incite more chaos."

She did not mention her brother's presidential run. On Thursday, RFK Jr. qualified for the ballot in Michigan, as the nominee of the Natural Law Party, the office of the secretary of state confirmed. He is now on the ballot in two states, having qualified in Utah, too.

Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former congressman and a brother of RFK Jr., replied, "Of course," when asked by reporters if he would encourage his brother to drop out of the race. 

"We cannot do anything that in any way, strips even one vote from President Biden. You put the name Kennedy on the ballot and Democrats are going to feel torn. We are trying to make them understand that this is an issue that they do not have to feel torn about," he told reporters while attending a post-rally meet-and-greet with Philadelphia voters. 

During the rally, Mr. Biden called the endorsement by the Kennedy family members "an incredible honor" and throughout his speech, he spoke of about how Robert F. Kennedy had been a hero to him. He cited a speech Robert F. Kennedy delivered in Indianapolis the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Mr. Biden also mentioned that in the Oval Office, he has busts of both King and Robert F. Kennedy. "I keep looking to remind myself of what they would do in tough calls," he said.

He also said he spoke recently with Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, to wish her a happy 96th birthday. 

"Your dad, I never got to meet him," Mr. Biden told the Kennedys, but recalled a visit by Robert F. Kennedy to Syracuse while he was in law school. "But he inspired me. And his passion and clarity inspired a generation." 

Several of RFK Jr.'s family members have already expressed their opposition to their brother's independent candidacy. When he announced in October that he would drop his campaign for the presidency as a Democrat and run instead as an independent, four of his siblings — documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, former Rep. Joe Kennedy II and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend — called his decision to oppose Mr. Biden "dangerous to our country." In a statement at the time, they said, "Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment." The four said of his decision to run as an independent that, "We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country."

In addition to Kerry Kennedy, RFK Jr.'s siblings, Rory Kennedy, Joe Kennedy II, Christopher Kennedy, Maxwell Kennedy and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, as well as several other relatives, endorsed Mr. Biden Thursday.

Kennedy said in a social media post Thursday morning that he's "pleased" his family is being politically active, calling it a family tradition. He added that they are "divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other," adding that the sentiment could also be shared by Americans to "restore civility and respect to public discourse."

"My campaign, which many of my family members are working on and supportive of, is about healing America — healing our economy, our chronic disease crisis, our middle class, our environment, and our standing in the world as a peaceful nation," he said. 

Last month, on St. Patrick's Day, Mr. Biden gave members of the extended Kennedy family a private tour of the Oval Office and West Wing and celebrated with them and hundreds of guests at a holiday reception. Kennedy family members posted photos with the president, signaling that they stand with him rather than with the Kennedy running against him.

Several of the Kennedys joined Mr. Biden for a grassroots organizing event and helped with voter outreach, according to the campaign.

Gabrielle Ake, Kristin Brown, Allison Novelo and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Aaron Navarro is a CBS News digital reporter covering Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign and the 2024 election. He was previously an associate producer for the CBS News political unit in the 2021 and 2022 election cycles.

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