After attaining his law degree in 1989, John received another plum job working in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office headed by Robert Morgenthau, whom John’s father had appointed US attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1961. John was among sixty-nine new prospects chosen from a pool of one thousand applicants. They each earned $30,000 a year during a three-year stint.
But before he could accept the post, John had to take care of some housecleaning: $2,000 in fines for outstanding parking tickets. He almost jeopardized his job in July, when, on his way to Kennedy Airport, he was pulled over for driving sixty-three miles per hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone at three in the morning. His car was unregistered, uninsured, and uninspected. He was issued four summonses, and his car was impounded. “He had to clear himself of all judgments in order to qualify for the DA’s office,” explained Judge Bertram Shair, who heard John’s case. For John, that meant paying all his tickets.
John soon discovered that working in the DA’s office was anything but glamorous. “You did your own typing,” John’s new coworker Owen Carragher Jr. told the New York Daily News. “You would have the courthouse dust on your cuff links.” Carragher, who’d been at the DA’s office for a year before John arrived, saw at least one immediate benefit: because of a prior dispute with the cleaning lady, the office hadn’t been cleaned in months. But with the addition of his new office mate, “suddenly she made the most intrepid visit. She was cleaning under the lightbulbs, she was there for hours on end. I had the cleanest office in the building.”
Brian Steel worked with John on the late shift, from five in the afternoon until one in the morning, at the Early Case Assessment Bureau (ECAB). On his first day, John strolled into the office and introduced himself as he always did, “Hi, I’m John Kennedy.” The small office, which Steel described as “bleak,” consisted of two metal desks and four chairs. Their job was to process complaints. A police officer would come in with a complaint (the legal document the prosecutor uses to decide if the defendant will be charged), and John’s job was to review the document to see whether to process it as a violation, a misdemeanor, or a felony. “We would read the complaint in front of the officers, ask questions, figure out how to charge it, look at the penal law, and make sure that everything matched up,” Steel explained. Occasionally they would cross-examine the police officer, trying to determine if witnesses had been present. They would also question defendants, to make sure they had been read their Miranda rights.
Even while working in the DA’s office, John found a way to get outside and throw a Frisbee or organize a lunchtime game of touch football. Steel soon became a regular in John’s touch football gatherings in Central Park. He was also daring enough to go kayaking with John on the Hudson River. Once, John called him around midnight and asked him to kayak to the George Washington Bridge. On another occasion, John decided to play chicken with a large ship that was making its way to the Atlantic Ocean. Steel watched in horror as John tempted his fate with the steel hull of a cargo ship.
John was later assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau, where his team cracked down on fraud and white-collar crime. He spent most of his time doing legal research and investigation rather than litigation. Everyone gave him high marks. “He’s a team player,” said one of the supervisors. “He’s someone who wants to keep busy and have a variety of cases. He recently had a case requiring a lot of nights and weekends here, and he really did a good job.” Morgenthau described him as “a hard worker and a great kid. His performance has been excellent and is very professional. I think he has the makings of a good lawyer.”
It was while working at the DA’s office that John experienced his highly publicized struggles with the bar exam. He took it for the first time right after law school and learned in the fall that he had failed. In public, John appeared nonplussed. He did not shy away from the hordes of photographers and reporters who showed up outside his office. But privately, the misfortune ate him up. He felt embarrassed and humiliated, and the tabloid headline “The Hunk Flunks” only poured salt in the wound. Christina Haag said that John cried in her arms when he failed. “He was upset because he thought he was disappointing the people in his life,” recalled Pat Manocchia. “He cared less about himself than he did about the people around him. He didn’t worry about whether it was going to crash his opportunities. He wasn’t above embarrassment, but he would just keep working at it.”
On May 1, 1990, it was announced that John had failed the bar exam a second time. The New York tabloids had a field day, with the Daily News screaming: “The Hunk Flunks . . . Again.” John knew that he would have another chance to take the bar, but if he failed a third time, he would lose his job. “All assistants get three chances. It’s a long-standing office policy,” said a spokeswoman for Morgenthau. This was one bar that John could not surmount based on charm and hard work. But John was not alone. According to the DA’s office, fifty-eight members of the most recent class of sixty-five recruits passed the bar on the first round. Of the seven who failed, two passed the second time.
Once again, John’s public demeanor revealed none of his inner turmoil. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” John openly told reporters who had amassed outside his office. But John was truly devastated and did something unusual: he disappeared for days. He drove alone to an upstate motel with a bottle of whiskey and several self-help tapes to drown away his sorrows. Many friends believed that failing the bar for a second time sparked what Rob Littell called “a crisis of sorts regarding his father.” A few days after John’s second miss, an older colleague in the DA’s office pointed out that by the time his father was the same age—twenty-nine—he had already written a bestseller, won a Purple Heart, and been elected to Congress. John was not amused by the comment. “I’m not my father,” he snapped.
Michael Berman watched the two failed bar exams take a psychological toll on John, so he offered to help. He was surprised that no one had ever asked that John be allowed to take the test privately. The New York State Bar Association made special provisions, but only for people who were physically handicapped or had severe learning issues. When Michael suggested to John that he ask his tutor about the possibility of taking the exam alone, John was told there was no category to allow that to happen.
“Let me see what I can do,” Berman said, and he reached out. “I know there’s no special category for the overprivileged,” Berman told the tutor lightheartedly, “but this isn’t just about John.” Berman said that he “understood there have been paparazzi lining the entrance to the exam as if it were a red carpet, and the photographers were pressing their cameras against the windows to get a shot of him while everyone is supposed to be concentrating. It’s unfair to him, but it’s equally unfair to everyone else taking the exam at that location. It’s putting all of them at a disadvantage.” Several days later, John heard that he would be allowed to take the exam privately in an off-site location.
For the previous eleven months, while he was working in the DA’s office and studying for the bar, John also handled a few cases in the courtroom. The first case that he tried occurred after he had failed the bar exam twice. The police called the defendant the “sleeping burglar” because he had been found asleep in the victim’s locked apartment with her jewelry in his pocket. John prosecuted and won the case in August 1991, and it marked a significant achievement, even though journalist Murray Kempton noted that it was a carefully selected case that was almost impossible to lose. Still, John managed in that one case to acquire more trial experience than his uncle Bobby had when he was appointed US attorney general in 1961.
On July 23, 1990, John took the bar exam for the third time. He received the results on November 3. “The Hunk Finally Does It!,” exclaimed the front page of the New York Post. John invited some people to his apartment to celebrate. Berman was out of town and couldn’t make it, but when he returned a few days later, John had dropped off a couple of bottles of
wine with his doorman with a note reading: “From one bar expert to another. Cheers!”
John won all six cases that he tried. In his first case since passing the bar, John tried Venard Garvin, who’d been accused of selling heroin. A New York Times reporter sat in the courtroom during jury selection and the trial. “Mr. Kennedy’s articulation,” he wrote, “in a pleasant but unremarkable baritone, had been a bit halting in jury selection. But his opening statement was clear, and his direct examination of three police detectives and a police chemist was to the point.” He pointed out that John “lacked the theatrical flair of his rival,” but his summation was “well organized and persuasive.” The journalist said that “the Mr. Kennedy who was famous never got in the way of the Mr. Kennedy who is a prosecutor. The jury stuck to the evidence. The verdict: guilty.”
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John lent his name to numerous charitable causes while in law school and working in the DA’s office. He sat on the boards of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “He’s very intent on doing only things he’s qualified to do,” said a colleague at the institute. “He really wants to be involved.” He served on the board of Naked Angels, a creative theater group founded in 1986. He was also a board member of the Robin Hood foundation, created in 1988 to provide financial support to programs that targeted poverty in New York City.
But John made his most significant and unique contribution by founding Reaching Up. In 1989 John’s aunt Eunice Shriver held a competition among the cousins to devise proposals that would contribute to the field of intellectual disabilities. Eunice’s interest in people with special needs stemmed from the experience of her sister Rosemary, who suffered from cognitive and developmental deficits, which Joseph P. Kennedy hoped to correct by approving a lobotomy. The surgery failed, and Rosemary, permanently incapacitated, spent the rest of her life in an institution, dying there in 2005 at the age of eighty-six. John spoke about his idea to his friend Jeffrey Sachs, who had served as a health care advisor to New York governor Hugh Carey. “I want to help disabled people, but my real interest is in helping the working poor,” John told him. Sachs responded logically, “Maybe there’s something that helps both the developmentally disabled and poor people.”
Over the next few months, Sachs arranged meetings with several leading thinkers and practitioners in the health care field. All eagerly shared their ideas, but John found most of them generic and too patient focused. Finally, in their last meeting, they sat down with Michael Goldfarb, a New York health care advocate. They listened to what he had to say, but his ideas initially sounded like all the others. As they started to leave, Goldfarb shouted, “Come back!” He explained that the biggest problem facing the developmentally disabled was the amount of turnover among their professional caregivers who were trapped in low-paying jobs with no upward mobility. “There’s no chance for them to get ahead,” Goldfarb noted. Most of the people caring for the disabled were poor and often left those jobs to flip hamburgers at McDonald’s because they could make more money there.
John knew instantly that he had found an idea he could sink his teeth into because it focused on health care workers, not patients. John’s proposal won the family competition, which awarded him a $25,000 grant. He used this money to lay the foundation for a new nonprofit organization, Reaching Up. The goal was to provide a career ladder and advancement in higher education for direct care workers. John met with the chairman of the board at City University of New York (CUNY), who was the father of a child with developmental disabilities. John wanted to offer opportunities and scholarships for health care workers to take classes at CUNY, possibly even earning a degree in their field. “He realized,” reflected Bill Ebenstein, the executive director, “that you could not have good services for people with intellectual disabilities, the vulnerable elderly, or challenged children unless you had a strong workforce that was respected and educated and that had a chance to get ahead.” John, he said, “was ahead of his time.”
John, Ebenstein, and Sachs worked together to tackle the many obstacles that stood in their path. The first challenge was to create coursework at CUNY in the field of developmental disabilities. The great irony is that universities, which are designed to foster new ideas and creative thinking, are among the most ossified institutions in the country—burdened by layers of bureaucracy and overlapping jurisdictions that make change nearly impossible. Reaching Up also had to contend with faculty arrogance. “Should these workers be coming to the college?” some asked. “Will they lower our standards?” Initially, CUNY wanted to create just a certification program, but John insisted that the only way for students to advance their careers was to receive college credit.
Success would also require forming unorthodox partnerships with unions representing the workers and the employer, along with state and city officials. “John was very involved in setting it up,” recalled Ebenstein. “He used his clout to bring people to the table. Everyone wanted to meet with him: the unions, state government officials, private nonprofit organizations, and the advocacy groups.” This collaboration was the way John liked using his celebrity status—as a magnet to bring people together in pursuit of a cause he cared about deeply.
One of the first people he contacted was Dennis Rivera, the powerful head of the three-hundred-thousand-member SEIU (Service Employees International Union). “He was very interested in the plight of working people,” Rivera recalled. “A large sector of our members were poor, from minority communities, and John wanted to find a way to help them. He had a sense that we should help people who help others.” Rivera claimed that John’s ability to pick up the phone, get anyone on the line, and then convince them to support his effort was “unparalleled.” John, he reflected, “chose to cast his lot with a group of people who wanted to better their lives so they can better their families. He brought the spotlight and the attention to that issue.”
Over the next few months, John met with representatives from various constituency groups and convinced them all to participate. In its first year, Reaching Up chose ten Kennedy Fellows to receive $1,000 scholarships every semester. It gradually expanded the program by adding ten to twenty fellows each subsequent year. John was involved in every step, meeting individually with each fellow. “He paid attention, he was involved, he knew us by name,” said Kennedy fellow Getulio Rodriguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in social work at Manhattan’s Hunter College. “I was promoted twice after I became a Kennedy fellow,” he reflected in 1999. “The fellowship is more than money. It is also mentoring, networking, and being inspired to fulfill your potential.” Damian Crocevera, who was earning a master’s degree in forensic psychology, concurred with that assessment, claiming that John “was always attentive.” He admired John’s “interest in people like me, the direct care staff. I admire his vision that to make the system better we, the hands-on people, needed a chance to become better.”
Reaching Up remained a relatively small program, but the idea of providing a career path for low-wage health care workers persisted. Dennis Rivera expanded the concept to include all low-wage, dead-end jobs in health care, including child care workers, nurse aides, and home care workers. It later extended to include paraprofessionals working in special education. Today there are undergraduate and master’s programs in disability studies.
Reaching Up was John’s greatest and most unheralded achievement. “He helped create a whole field that did not exist before,” said Ebenstein. “Reaching Up was the leading edge of that movement.” John worked below the radar to establish the program and help it expand. He never took credit for Reaching Up. Rather, he showed genuine compassion for many of the workers in the program and would often spend time with them outside the classroom as well. Sometimes he would show up unannounced to classes. This venture modeled how John wanted to use his celebrity: as a force uniting different stakeholders a
nd encouraging them to invest in his vision. “He understood how to put together a coalition that benefitted the working poor,” said Rivera. “He had that secret ingredient that could make it work.”
In May 1999, just two months before his death, John delivered the commencement speech at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, which honored him for his work at Reaching Up. He told the graduates that over the previous ten years, “Reaching Up” had awarded scholarships to four hundred caregivers. Of those, two hundred went on to receive a bachelor of arts or master’s degree; fifty earned associate in arts degrees; and 95 percent were still working as caregivers. “What this means,” he declared, “is that the most vulnerable people in our society receive better support, their families feel more secure, employers experience less turnover, and caregivers are better trained, better compensated, and better appreciated.”
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Since returning to New York following her marriage to Onassis, Jackie had lived quietly with her companion Maurice Tempelsman. When not working as an editor at Doubleday, she was fighting to preserve historic buildings, including New York’s Grand Central Terminal, and spending time with her grandchildren. Caroline and her husband, Ed, had three children: Rose, born in 1988; Tatiana (1990); and Jack (1993).
Though perhaps the most famous woman in the world, Jackie resembled any other mother. “His mother looked at him like my mother looked at me,” recalled John’s Brown classmate Richard Wiese. John shared a special bond with his mom. “They both were big fun. And each one of them had such a spirit of fun and sparkle about them,” recalled Jackie’s friend Joe Armstrong. “Jackie liked John’s carefree spirit, and John gave her joy because he was fun and always had an original way of seeing things and people. They both had a great sense of humor, they loved to laugh, and possessed a playful streak that could be hilarious.” She understood John’s penchant for being independent and unpredictable, and she chose not to let it worry her. When Armstrong asked Jackie if she worried about John bicycling all over Manhattan in intense traffic and without a helmet, she responded: “I do not worry about things that I can’t do anything about.”
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