Brown faculty and administrators bristle at any suggestion that the university’s sudden popularity had anything to do with John. It is true that there were other unique features that made Brown enticing to prospective students. Publicly, the university credited “the attractiveness to students of Brown’s flexible curriculum, particularly in a time when many other selective institutions are reinstating less flexible, core-type programs.” It is also impossible to ignore the role that Howard Swearer played in stabilizing the school’s rocky finances and improving morale on campus.
Years later, Rogers bragged that in his two decades as Brown’s admissions director, his greatest contribution “was the admission and matriculation of John.” He observed correctly that “people began to talk about Brown.”
* * *
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The summer before entering Brown, John signed up for another outdoor adventure. This time he and thirteen other students successfully completed a six-week National Outdoor Leadership School course in Kenya. The course required participants to hike sixty-two miles through the Maasai territory, surviving on dehydrated food, flour, and cheese. John’s group spent the first week in dense bush country, where they managed to get lost. A member of the group remarked that John’s main worry was “how concerned his family would be if his experience ever made newspaper headlines.” The worried course director, Lou Awodey, sent out planes and even Maasai warriors, who found the team several days later. Awodey, impressed by John’s performance, recalled, “John acquitted himself very well. He really enjoyed physical challenges of all sorts. His experiences had enough danger and adventure to hold any young person’s interest, and his ordeal on the hike proved he can be counted on to keep a cool head. He took a tremendous step toward maturity during this grueling course.”
On August 12 John wrote Sasha from a small café where he was amusing himself by watching a chicken digging for bugs while pooping on his foot. He joked that he spent a good deal of time going to the bathroom while on safari, earning himself the nickname “DIRTY Johnny” or “Johnny Rotten.” “Food is so rough!” he wrote. And while he marveled at the interesting animals, apparently the biggest attraction for him was the “GREAT REEFER,” which sold for only $2 per ounce.
* * *
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On September 10, 1979, John stood in line outside Alumnae Hall, along with hundreds of other freshmen, to register for classes. Brown had made no special accommodations for him to register privately. He arrived at two o’clock, and, within seconds, photographers and reporters swarmed around him. Initially, John marched away in frustration. “Come on, you guys!” he pleaded, before a photographer offered a deal: if he posed for photos, they would leave him alone. John agreed, but as soon as they finished the photo session, a television crew arrived and began filming. The Providence Journal described John as “pleasant and accommodating” while fielding questions, telling reporters that he was thinking of majoring in history but had not yet settled on a career.
Adjusting to college life was demanding enough, but John also found himself pulled into the family business, as his uncle Senator Edward Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries. Amid soaring inflation and rising unemployment, Carter’s presidency had hit a low point. By the fall of 1979, Teddy faced a decision that had plagued him every four years since the death of his brother Robert: whether to run for the presidency. Publicly, Kennedy declared that he expected the incumbent to win the nomination and insisted he would support him. But privately, he thought of challenging Carter in the upcoming primaries. National polls showed the senator outpacing the president by a 3-to-1 margin. Carter was not intimidated by the polls, however, telling reporters that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll kick his ass.”
For one day in October, the two men put aside their differences when Carter joined the Kennedy family to celebrate the opening of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. John sat next to his mom and sister, listening to his uncle tell the seven thousand attendees that his brother “would’ve loved this site and the library his family and friends and country have built to celebrate his life.” Carter praised the slain president as a man who “summoned our nation out of complacency and set it on a path of excitement and hope.” Then Caroline introduced John, who read a poem by the Englishman Stephen Spender, “I Think Continually of Those.”
I think continually of those who were truly great . . .
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Oddly enough, this event marked the first time many people had heard John speak. “One thing that surprised us was his not having an accent,” noted a photographer. “His cousin Joe and all his other cousins have Boston accents. But John didn’t sound like Boston—or New York, either. His voice was flat, with no accent at all. But he was gorgeous, and everyone watching that day were stunned by his looks and his charisma.”
By the time he attended Brown, John was no longer the scrawny kid whom his cousins dismissed as a mama’s boy or the awkward teenager with braces. Christina Haag, who had known John in high school and was now a junior at Brown, was surprised by how much he had changed by the time he arrived on campus. “Something about him was different,” she reflected. “In a summer, he had changed. Taller, more handsome; I couldn’t put a finger on it.” He seemed more mature and confident. In a short period of time, his body had filled out with muscle—from working out for hours at the gym—and his face took on the handsome features that would define him for the rest of his life.
The evening before the event, John traveled to Boston with Billy Noonan and Tim Shriver. They had not made a hotel reservation, no one had a credit card, and John never carried cash, yet they still managed to scrounge enough money to afford a room for the night at the elegant Park Plaza. John did not tell anyone his last name. The concierge, who did not recognize John, was reluctant to rent a room to three teenagers paying cash, so John found a pay phone and called his mother. “Mommy, I’m here with Billy and Timmy in Boston, but the hotel won’t take our cash, and I don’t have any checks. What should I do?” Mrs. Onassis asked for the name of the desk clerk. John hung up, turned to his friends, and said, grinning, “Let’s go back to the desk to watch this.”
A few seconds later, the phone rang at the front desk. “Yes, this is Robert,” the concierge answered. “Yes, I see the three boys.” Suddenly his eyes snapped open. “Can you repeat that? . . . Oh, my God, yes, of course we can. . . . Yes. . . . Of course.” He immediately summoned the bellhop. “Please take Mr. Kennedy and his friends up to their room,” he requested, and then proceeded to apologize profusely to John’s mom.
The truce between Carter and Ted Kennedy did not last for long. On November 7, 1979, at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Kennedy announced his bid for the presidency. Portraying Carter as a weak and ineffective leader who had abandoned the party’s liberal tradition, he declared confidently, “The only thing that paralyzes us today is the myth that we cannot move.” Teddy adopted the same themes as John’s dad had when he ran for president in 1960, arguing that the nation needed new leadership to tackle the challenges ahead. Teddy also deeply understood John’s charisma on the campaign trail. What better way to remind voters of the connection between the past and present than to see and hear from the son and namesake of his slain brother? Teddy wanted John to play an active role in the campaign, but John resisted. Not only was he not ready for the exposure and the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race, but he also wanted to be a “normal” college student—or at least as normal as his life could allow.
John made only a few appearances for his uncle. In December he visited Portland, Maine, where hundreds of people turned out to hear him speak. John avoided specific political issues and instead commended his uncle’s leadership qualities, saying that he had the rare ability to “galvanize the nation.” John also made clear that he would not take a semester off to campaign. “It’s my first year,” he insist
ed. “I think it’s better if I stick it out.” Many audience members did not care much about the substance of what John said. “All I can remember is the picture of that little kid saluting at his father’s funeral,” said a state legislator.
The following month, John appeared at a press conference in the downtown law office of a former governor serving as chairman of the Kennedy campaign in Rhode Island. John was slated to present a ninety-six-year-old woman with a complimentary ticket to the senator’s $100-per-person fund-raising event later that month at Providence College. Staffers for the senator told reporters that John’s presence indicated that he would be taking an active role in his uncle’s campaign, but John clarified that he would spend most of his time studying even as he did “a couple of things” to help the campaign. “I’m glad to do anything for my uncle,” he said, adding that he would make himself available to student groups to “help make my uncle more visible and to answer questions about his positions.”
This offer, however, did not always benefit John. His friend and Brown student government president Charlie King convinced John to meet with some student leaders at Providence College. While driving to the meeting, Charlie assured John that only a few people would be in attendance. “What should I say?” John asked. “Should I have prepared something?” “No, no,” King promised him; it would be very casual and informal. But upon arriving on campus, they were escorted into an auditorium filled with hundreds of guests and a handful of television cameras. They both were shocked. John, furious with Charlie, stumbled through an awkward presentation. The next day, the local papers panned his performance, starkly contrasting him with his eloquent father. The Providence Journal noted that his speech was “unlikely to be graven in marble” and that John displayed “none of the charisma his father would have used.” A decade later, when he ran into King, John confessed that his appearance that night was one of the most embarrassing of his life.
Furthermore, John’s presence on the campaign trail did little to boost his uncle’s presidential bid. Though launched with high expectations, Kennedy’s campaign quickly imploded. It was not simply that he remained unable to articulate a clear reason for running. The 1969 tragedy on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, in which a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after Kennedy’s car plunged off a small bridge and into a pond late at night, also came back to haunt his campaign.
At the same time, two foreign policy crises boosted Carter’s stature. On November 4, 1979, five hundred young Iranians occupied the US embassy in Tehran and held fifty Americans hostage. The students were bitter toward the United States for its having long supported the oppressive regime of the Shah of Iran, who’d gone into exile after being ousted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, replaced by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a seventy-six-year-old Muslim cleric and politician who blasted the United States as “the great Satan.” Then, as the American hostages entered their eighth week of captivity, another crisis developed. On Christmas Day, Soviet troops invaded neighboring Afghanistan, toppling that nation’s bumbling puppet regime. The American people instinctively rallied around the president during a time of international crisis. As Kennedy’s campaign wilted in the patriotic afterglow, Carter secured his party’s nomination on the first ballot in August 1980.
Carter was to face former California governor Ronald Reagan in the general election. The well-known movie and TV actor, who’d switched parties from Democrat to Republican in 1962, articulated a simple but compelling message: love of country, fear of Communism, and scorn of big government. Responding to fears that America’s stature in the world faced decline, Reagan called for a muscular foreign policy, including huge increases in military spending. According to John’s friend Richard Wiese, as of Election Day John had not registered to vote yet, but Rhode Island offered same-day registration. So that morning, the nineteen-year-old donned a Rastafarian hat and headed to the polling station to cast his ballot. Later that afternoon, and before the announcement of election results, John wrote Sasha about casting his first vote in the presidential election. Though he had voted for Carter, he felt “thoroughly stressed about the prospects.” The possibility of a Reagan victory, he wrote, gave him “the dry heaves.” Given Reagan’s bellicose language, John worried about the prospect of war, asking Sasha if she would attend his good-bye party before he shipped out for basic training. He had reason to be worried, as Reagan trounced the sitting president, receiving 43.5 million votes (51 percent) to Carter’s 34.9 million (41 percent). Carter became the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland in 1888, and the first incumbent chief executive since Herbert Hoover in 1932, to be voted out of the Oval Office.
His uncle’s failed campaign further distracted John from his studies. Rob Littell, a star lacrosse player from Princeton, New Jersey, who bonded with John during the first week of school, pointed out that John “carried the schedule of two people most of his life. He got at least twice as much mail, twice as many phone calls, and three times as much unsolicited advice as the average busy person. There was always something going on, whether it was a Kennedy Library event or a cousin’s campaign or a charitable obligation.” John, however, compounded the problem by taking two challenging seminars. In the fall, he signed up for an intensive seminar taught by his advisor Edward Beiser, a political scientist and Harvard-trained lawyer whose classes were considered essential for anyone planning to attend law school. Beiser gave John a failing grade on his first paper, though John ultimately did pass the class. “He was really shaken,” Beiser remembered. “He said, ‘What am I going to tell my mother?’”
John had even less success in the spring, when he enrolled in Charles Neu’s seminar on the history of the Vietnam War. John never should have been in that class, which was designed for third- and fourth-year students with some previous background in American foreign policy. Neu was also a demanding professor who never coddled students. Apparently, John told his freshman advisor that he wanted to take the class, and instead of discouraging him, the advisor took the unusual step of contacting Neu and asking him to accept John. Neu worried that even a bright, academically disciplined freshman would be overwhelmed by the material, but since the request came directly from a respected colleague, he agreed reluctantly.
Why did John lobby to get into a class for which he was clearly unprepared? He likely believed that having grown up reading about his father and listening to tales from former administration officials such as Dave Powers and Robert McNamara, he had a grasp on the war. He probably had never been exposed to the biting critique that Neu offered of his father’s handling of Vietnam and especially of Defense Secretary McNamara’s role in expanding the conflict. “I detest McNamara and his arrogance,” Neu declared, and that contempt showed in class. Over the course of thirteen weeks, Neu dissected many of the myths that John grew up believing—namely, that his father bore little responsibility for expanding the war and that he would have withdrawn after the 1964 election.
Neu remembers John as an indifferent student who spent most of the class staring out a window. Although participation was an important component of the course, he believed that John never truly tried to engage the material. He also made no effort to write the required seminar paper that accounted for a significant portion of one’s grade. “Each student in my Vietnam seminar came in to see me, to discuss paper topics. I don’t recall that John ever came in,” Neu revealed. “Toward the end of the semester, I ran across him on the Brown green, and he said that he needed to see me about his paper. I told him that it was far too late in the semester to begin to research and to write a twenty-five-page paper.” Neu said that under these circumstances, most Brown undergraduates “would have appeared during my office hours and made a case for an extension. He never did, and he received no credit for the class.”
John was placed on academic probation at the end of his freshman year. On July 2, 1980, John’s mother wrote to Dean Karen Romer to acknowledge that she had received a copy of the l
etter sent to John informing him that he needed to complete two classes in order to remain in “good standing.” However, John was in South Africa at the time and not expected home until the end of August. She promised to try to get in touch with him to see if he could return earlier so that he could start working on the classes. “I know he was upset that the professor of his Vietnam course would not give him an extension on the paper he wished very much to write.” She claimed that John went to a dean to complain and was told to “leave matters as they were.” Reading those words three decades later, Neu responded, “Of course he wasn’t going to tell his mother that he had done little of the work for the seminar and that, in fact, he had little interest in writing a paper.”
Mrs. Onassis reassured Dean Romer that John took his “academic responsibilities” seriously and that being placed on probation had “galvanized” both her and John. She said she never sought “special consideration” for her children, but she went on to state that “there was an extra burden John carried this year that other students did not. He was asked to campaign almost every weekend for his uncle.” She blamed John’s academic problems on his trying to do too much “rather than try to get by with as little as possible.” Six weeks later, she responded in writing to another dean’s message that John had failed to sign up for a required class. She promised Dean Romer that she and John were having “long discussions” about changes he could make during his sophomore year to establish some structure and discipline in his life. “I look forward to hearing that he is off probation—and to never getting another notice that he is on it.”
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