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John became the focal point of a new culture of celebrity that emerged in the 1970s. The failure in Vietnam, the Johnson administration’s duplicity in explaining it away, and the exposure of Richard Nixon’s illegal behavior in the Watergate affair combined to erode public faith in the integrity of its elected leaders. The journalist Tom Wicker of The New York Times wrote that many Americans had come to view their government as “a fountain of lies.” “All during Vietnam, the government lied to me,” declared The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. “All the time. Watergate didn’t help matters any. More lies. . . . I’ve been shaped, formed by lies.” A 1976 study revealed that 69 percent of respondents felt that “over the last ten years, this country’s leaders have consistently lied to the people.” Pollster Daniel Yankelovich noted that trust in government declined from 80 percent in the late 1950s to about 33 percent in 1976. More than 80 percent of the public expressed distrust in politicians, 61 percent believed something was morally wrong with the country, and nearly 75 percent felt that they had no impact on Washington decision-making.
The new skepticism found expression in the way the media dealt with political leaders. Believing they had been duped by Johnson and Nixon, reporters developed a more assertive and confrontational style, challenging the official version of events. Inspired by the example of Watergate heroes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, many journalists went in search of the next big scandal. “A lot of young reporters today are more likely to ask the right questions of the right people than before Watergate,” observed an editor at The New York Times. Investigative reporting emerged as a major franchise in numerous newsrooms, which organized reporting teams and provided them with big budgets. This adversarial style, combined with the real corruption it exposed, reinforced further the notion that political leaders were dishonest.
Even John’s father’s record fell prey to the new skepticism. The 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study of the Vietnam War that Daniel Ellsberg leaked to The New York Times, exposed the failings of both JFK’s and LBJ’s strategy for fighting the Vietnam War. The revelations of these previously secret documents threatened the image of JFK as a pragmatic leader and cast doubt on the claim among Kennedy loyalists that the president had not been committed to Vietnam and would have pulled out after he won reelection in 1964. Revisionist historians deconstructed every dimension of Kennedy’s foreign policy, accusing him of convincing the nation that it had an obligation to fight Communism in the Third World and preparing it to sink more deeply into the Vietnam quagmire.
By the mid-1970s, revelations about JFK’s private life also started leaking to the public when a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence discovered connections between the president and Judith Exner, who was also involved with two prominent mob figures. In a December 1975 news conference, Exner acknowledged her love affair with JFK. Suddenly kiss-and-tell stories appeared everywhere. Historian Arthur Schlesinger once joked with me that, in light of all the revelations, it was surprising that Kennedy had had any time to get work done.
John struggled to reconcile these new exposés with the stories he had grown up hearing from David Powers. By the time I met him, John had read some of the newer revisionist books, and he was already familiar with the friendly accounts written by Kennedy partisans: Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days, Pierre Salinger’s With Kennedy, and Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers’s “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. John was gratified that the sordid details of his father’s private life did little to dampen public support for JFK, whom Americans continued to rank as the nation’s favorite president. But he always feared there would be a tipping point. What other disclosures would be revealed, and would the public eventually turn against his father? It also bothered John to learn how much his father disrespected his mother. Jackie reassured both John and Caroline that whatever their father’s indiscretions, they still loved each other, and he most certainly loved them.
It seemed to John that people fell into two camps: those who wished to promote the myth and those who wanted to tear it down. Over time he was able to integrate these competing views of his father into a more coherent narrative. He would come to see his father as a man of great strength who, like all humans, was flawed. He acknowledged that his father had made mistakes, but he was also convinced that leaders should be judged by their ability to inspire the nation. He recognized that his father did not live long enough to leave a significant policy imprint, but he took pride in how his father’s noble idealism had ignited hope and action in an entire generation. I think that one of the reasons John came to trust me was because I shared a similar view of his dad. I was fascinated by him, viewing him as a dynamic and inspirational leader who was constrained in office by a slim mandate and a conservative Congress. Many people wanted to focus on JFK’s private life, but I felt that such titillating stories were not central to understanding his presidency.
The new cynicism toward politicians also affected the way journalists covered Hollywood stars, business titans, and other celebrities. On March 4, 1974, the first issue of People hit newsstands, with Mia Farrow on the cover. According to Landon Y. Jones, who joined the magazine a few months after the first issue, the editors discovered “that readers were more interested in Mia Farrow the woman, mother, and personality than in Mia Farrow the actress.” They wanted to see behind the curtain and get a glimpse of the way celebrities really lived their lives. “If celebrities didn’t want their problems turned into public fodder, too bad,” he reflected. “It was the duty of the press to be accurate about the lives of the rich and famous. And readers demanded to be inspired and moved, but also titillated and amused.”
The same formula infused Page Six, which the New York Post launched on Monday, January 3, 1977. Editors wanted Page Six to revive the lost art of the gossip column. In the past, gossip columns had focused on Hollywood, but Page Six was just as likely to write about Wall Street moguls as it was about Broadway stars. Not surprisingly, the first column included snippets about John and his mom. They would be the first of hundreds of items that would appear in the paper over the next two decades.
John was acutely aware that his fame stemmed solely from an accident of birth. The public fascination with him revolved around not what he accomplished but what he represented. The tension between others’ expectations of him and his personal need to establish a healthy, independent identity would become the central struggle of his life. As a result, he developed an odd relationship with the tabloid press. Like many celebrities, John complained about the intrusions on his privacy, but he also kept track of how often he was covered by People and Page Six. If he did not appear for a few months, it was a good bet that he would show up somewhere with his shirt off. I used to call John Superman, only instead of going into a phone booth to put on his cape, he went to the park to take off his shirt. John, who could laugh at himself as easily as he laughed at others, would always chuckle.
This cult of celebrity gave birth to a new form of photographers: paparazzi. Italian movie director Federico Fellini first used the term in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita to describe a photographer who chased relentlessly after celebrities and Hollywood stars. The original Italian word was usually used to describe an insect that constantly buzzed around, and the term seemed apt for the new phenomenon. By the 1970s, as more celebrities retained press agents and surrounded themselves with bodyguards, photographers found the only way to capture “authentic” pictures of their subjects was to surprise them.
On September 24, 1969, on her first day back in New York after a relaxing summer in Greece, Jackie was ambushed by a freelance photographer waiting behind the bushes. The man was thirty-eight-year-old Ron Galella from the Bronx, who claimed that he had been trying to capture “the full range of human emotions.” Galella stalked Jackie at her home, hid behind bushes in Central Park, and ho
vered over her when she walked down the street. He bribed maids and the doorman in her building, as well as those nearby. He even dressed as a sailor once to get photos of her on Scorpios. For Galella, it was all about the money, as he got paid more for pictures of Jackie than anyone else. “The only pictures that would pay better, if anyone could get them,” he said, “might be exclusive pictures of Howard Hughes,” the wealthy, eccentric film producer-director, aviator, and business mogul who spent his last twenty-five years in seclusion. Jackie’s “value” never depreciated. Magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and Life paid up to $5,000 for a cover and inside spread. Overseas, the most interest concentrated in Italy and Germany, but foreign demand also existed in Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia.
In 1971 the Secret Service filed a lawsuit against Galella on Jackie’s behalf. It charged that on one occasion, he jumped from behind a stone wall and landed directly in front of John and his mother. John, in order to avoid a collision, swerved his bicycle and almost crashed to the pavement. Kathy McKeon, who accompanied John that day, recalled later that John lost control of his bike and would have “gone off the sidewalk into Fifth Avenue traffic if the Secret Service agent close behind hadn’t grabbed him.” On another occasion, John was at a horse show in New Jersey escorting Caroline’s horse back to the stable when Galella “suddenly jumped from behind a tree in a crouched position with the camera at the ready. His action startled the horse and the horse broke free momentarily causing John to lose control.” John gave what appeared to be a well-rehearsed deposition in the case. “Mr. Galella has dashed at me, jumped in my path, discharged flashbulbs in my face, trailed me at close distances—generally imposed himself on me. . . . I feel threatened when he is present.”
On October 14, 1971, Jackie received a restraining order to prevent Galella from interfering with the Secret Service’s job of protecting John and Caroline. He ignored the order, so Jackie took him to court in February 1972. Galella’s attorney claimed the case centered on “a photojournalist’s right to pursue his occupation.” But the court disagreed, and, after a twenty-six-day trial, the judge ruled that Galella had to stay fifty yards away from Jackie and seventy-five yards away from the children. An appeals court reduced the distance for Jackie to twenty-five feet and thirty feet for John and Caroline.
John learned a crucial lesson from the way his mother handled Galella. Her attempts to have him arrested, in addition to the high-profile court proceeding, turned the public against her. The New York Times described the trial as “the best off-Broadway show in town.” The public sympathized with Galella, who came off as a hardworking guy simply trying to do his job by taking photographs of “the number one cover girl in the world.” Years later, when John was launching George, Galella contacted his office to ask permission to attend the launch and take photos of him. Surprisingly, John sent back word that he was welcome to attend.
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As a child John had been small and scrawny, and even as a young teen, he had yet to grow into the heartthrob image that would soon define him. Family friend Billy Noonan, whose father had worked on JFK’s 1952 Senate campaign, described John as “almost comically awkward.” At the age of fourteen, John, he observed, “moved disjointedly and had no build. He had a big nose, braces, and pimples.” Fashion was never a priority for John. As a teenager, he often wore an untucked button-down shirt and rumpled chinos. “He looked like an unmade bed,” Noonan recalled. John became less conspicuous around the city once he lost Secret Service protection in 1976. Paparazzi still followed him, but the pressure was not as great as it would become later, when his handsome features grew more pronounced and he built his muscular physique.
There remained, however, constant reminders that John was different. He knew that my older brother was a boxer and that we grew up in Philadelphia, the home of heavyweight champion Joe Frazier. John told me that he had attended the second of three fights between Frazier and Muhammad Ali, held at Madison Square Garden in January 1974. After the bout, which Ali won by a unanimous decision, someone escorted John to his locker room. The now former champion, told that John was in the audience, had summoned him. They shared a brief conversation, and as John was leaving, Ali handed him the silk robe he had worn during his entrance into the ring. John told the story so matter-of-factly that it was as if everyone got invited back to the locker room following a momentous fight. Of course, I joked with him that Frazier had reached out to me before the fight and asked for advice on countering Ali’s “rope-a-dope” tactic. “No wonder he lost,” John wisecracked.
John developed close friendships with three of his cousins. He saw a great deal of both William Kennedy Smith, who lived in the city, and Timothy Shriver—the middle child of John’s aunt Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her husband, Sargent Shriver, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1972—who was nearby in Washington, DC. In 1975 Anthony Radziwill, who had resided in London for the previous sixteen years, moved back to the United States to attend boarding school at Choate in Wallingford, Connecticut. In the past, John and Anthony had spent some summers together on Scorpios, but now that they were living just ninety miles apart, there were more opportunities to see each other. Their friendship, already strong, now deepened.
John, however, kept his distance from RFK’s kids. He remembered how they used to call him a mama’s boy, and now that they were older, he felt they wore their family name on their sleeves. John also found them overly wild. He resented that Ethel allowed them to run around the Hyannis property, showing no regard for his mother’s house. In many respects, he was also following his mother’s wishes. “After Bobby died, Jackie deliberately kept John away from his cousins as much as she could,” Rose Kennedy’s secretary told author Wendy Leigh. “Ethel’s children were raised wildly, with no system, no schedule, and Jackie didn’t want her children to be brought up like that.”
As a young teen, John seemed to possess endless curiosity and unbounded energy. In August 1972 Jackie wrote Rose Kennedy, whom she referred to as belle-mère (French for mother-in-law), describing their trip to London, where Caroline and John viewed the popular exhibition of priceless artifacts from the ancient tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun—King Tut. “John asked so many intelligent questions,” she noted proudly, that the head of trustees “got into a panic and said, ‘I must send for an Egyptologist to answer all this boy’s questions!’” She pointed out that John “reminded me of Jack with all his curiosity [and] intelligence.”
Mrs. Onassis searched for outlets for John’s energy and need for adventure. She always feared that her son would grow up “soft” because of his privileged background. So in addition to making sure he had male influences, she sought to toughen him up by organizing rugged adventures. In August 1971 she sent John and Anthony Radziwill to the Drake’s Island Adventure Centre, located off the southwest coast of England. During the day, the two cousins took courses in sailing and rock climbing and explored the neighboring woods. She wrote Rose Kennedy, describing the camp as “very spartan” and “primitive.” John called shortly after his arrival to complain about the living conditions. “John and Anthony sound as if they are in prison camp,” Jackie told Rose. She noted, however, that “it should be good for him after Scorpios.” Furthermore, Jackie wanted to ensure that the Secret Service would not try to rescue John in the event of an accident, so she instructed the agents, as usual, to be “very discreet and remain in the background.” She requested that no agent be present on the island and that “John partake in the program of the island without being aware that an agent is nearby.”
In 1976 John and Timothy Shriver, who was one year older, traveled to Guatemala to help victims of an earthquake there. “They ate what the people of Rabinal ate and dressed in Guatemalan clothes and slept in tents like most of the earthquake victims,” recounted a Catholic priest who oversaw the relief efforts. “They did more for their country’s image than a roomful of ambassadors.” It was fitting gi
ven that Timothy’s father, Sargent Shriver, was the first director of the Peace Corps program that President John F. Kennedy established by executive order in 1961. From Guatemala, John and Timothy traveled to Panama. The trips had such an impact on John that he would write about them in his college application. Furthermore, the fifteen-year-old enjoyed relative anonymity while traveling abroad. At one point in Panama, John and Timmy were approached by two women on the dance floor in a disco. One woman’s eyes widened when she saw the JFK monogram on John’s raspberry-colored shirt. She elbowed her friend and pointed out the initials, asking, “JFK . . . isn’t that an airport?”
The following summer, Jackie enrolled John in the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Maine. The Outward Bound schools, like the Drake’s Island experience, celebrated the idea that qualities such as tenacity, curiosity, and self-awareness could be enhanced through a rugged wilderness experience. John was enrolled in the only Outward Bound school based at sea. The basic program lasted twenty-six days and had separate groups for boys and girls, each composed of twelve students and two instructors. Half the time was spent sailing in open, ketch-rigged pulling boats. Students charted courses to dozens of islands that dotted the Maine coast. John, like everyone else, had to spend three nights alone on an uninhabited island, where he was supplied with only one gallon of water and was forced to forage for most of his food. When asked later about what he learned from the experience, John responded, “I learned I’ll never allow myself to be that hungry again.”
In 1978 Mrs. Onassis sent her seventeen-year-old to work on a ranch in Wyoming. Apparently, John had become more rambunctious and mischievous since losing his Secret Service protection. He continued to see a psychiatrist for most of his teen years and beyond, although it’s unclear if he was on medication and, if so, for how long. Jackie feared that he would get into trouble with his antics, which included mixing five gallons of wallpaper paste and pouring it down the mail chute in her Fifth Avenue building. She contacted a Wyoming congressman who happened to be a family friend and asked, “Do you have a friend who has a ranch that John could work on?” The congressman knew just the right guy and introduced her to John Perry Barlow, owner of a large ranch called Bar Cross.
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