What John resented most was the way that Ed took control and seemed to be bossing him and his sister around. John believed in bloodlines, and while Carolyn and Ed had married into the family, they were not direct descendants of their mother or father. He felt that only he and Caroline should have been making decisions about how to divide up their mother’s estate. Instead, Ed inserted himself into what should be considered a “family affair.” John characterized the tone of Ed’s involvement as, “All of this material needs to be settled up. This is just valuable stuff, and you and your stoner friends can’t be rocking in this rocking chair and dancing on this rug. We are doing stuff with it.”
The frenzied sale of his mom’s estate brought in $34.5 million, well above the original estimate. An oak rocking chair used in the second-floor Oval Room fetched $453,500. A plastic replica of Air Force One, valued at $300 to $500, sold for $48,875. The highest price—$2.6 million—was paid for the 40.42-carat diamond gifted to Jackie by Aristotle Onassis. Arnold Schwarzenegger purchased President Kennedy’s wooden golf clubs for $772,500.
John was so disgusted by the whole spectacle that he left the country during the auction. And while the final sale far exceeded expectations, John received less than $100,000. The bulk of the money went to paying off taxes due from the transfer of Mrs. Onassis’s estate. John was not impressed by the check. “After all that, this is what we get: less than a hundred grand,” he told Rob Littell. Had the sale not been successful, however, he would have been writing a check, not cashing one.
Later in the summer, John felt that Ed overstepped his bounds again when he tried to spearhead a Kennedy Center project to produce a film honoring President Kennedy’s contribution to the arts. Ed should not even be included in such a project, John believed. He was not a Kennedy; he was only married to one. This film was an issue, John said, that should have been brought directly to him or Caroline, not Ed. John voiced his discontent, and the project was canceled.
These conflicts soured John’s relationship with Ed, making it even more difficult to remain close with Caroline. The most serious blowup occurred in the fall of 1998. RoseMarie received a call one day from HBO, revealing that Ed was going to be an executive producer of a documentary about President Kennedy’s assassination and he had suggested that John serve as narrator. Everyone who knew John was aware that he never commemorated the day his father died. Never. He rarely discussed it even in private. RoseMarie went into John’s office and relayed the message to him. “Are you really going to participate in a documentary about your father’s assassination?” she asked incredulously.
John exploded. He could not believe that Ed would be so dumb, or Caroline so clueless, as to get involved in such a project. What infuriated him most was that Ed was once again crossing the line by thinking that because he had married a Kennedy, he was one. “Who the fuck is he to tell me how to honor my dad’s death?” he shouted. “I’ve never seen him so mad,” recalled a close friend. I happened to be in the George office one day when the conflict was unfolding. I walked in while John was having a heated phone conversation with Caroline. “You would never be doing this if Mummy were alive!” he bellowed before slamming down the receiver. He then turned to me as if nothing had happened, and we went out to lunch.
John stewed for days before he decided to tackle the problem head-on by summoning Caroline and Ed into his office. He sat at the head of a conference room table, Caroline settled a few seats away on his right, and Ed parked himself across the table from his wife. John, refusing to even look at Ed or acknowledge his presence, began lecturing his sister. “If you want him to be involved in defining your relationship with our father, then go ahead. But he will not interfere with my relationship with my father and his legacy. Is that understood?”
They were still at odds over the sale of Mrs. Onassis’s estate. While they had sold off many of her possessions, they still needed to decide what to do with the Hyannis house, which was one of three Kennedy homes on the compound. There was a lot of history in that house. JFK used it for his successful presidential bid in 1960 and later turned it into the summer White House. It was the place where John and Caroline would gather with their cousins during holidays and summer breaks even after JFK was assassinated. Caroline wanted to sell it, but the family worried about the possibility of having a stranger living on the compound, so they rented it to a member of the Shriver family for two years. When that lease ended, Caroline pressured John to sell. “Doesn’t she realize that it was the house where our father lived?” he asked a friend. He could not understand her eagerness to get rid of a house that played such an important role in their lives, and which he now considered a second home.
“If anything contributed to the tension between John and Caroline that summer, it was the sale of the Hyannis Port house,” recalled a close friend. In June, rather than sell the house, John chose to buy out his sister’s share. “I remember Carolyn saying that he [John] hated that he had to write a check to his sister for eight hundred thousand dollars, [which was] then half the value of the home.” And all of this took place after Caroline had taken half of all the possessions in the house and put them up for auction.
John’s relationship with his sister hit rock bottom in the summer of 1999. The visits to see her and her children—Rose, Tatiana, and Jack—whom he adored, had become less frequent. It was not the relationship that either wanted, but John could not stomach being in the same room with Ed. Occasional phone calls happened, but usually to discuss family matters. Their emotional bond, however, remained strong, and John likely assumed that they would soon make things right. And that they still had plenty of time to do so.
* * *
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Despite being under enormous pressure, John was still capable of gestures of empathy and generosity. I learned that firsthand. In the spring of 1999, I had developed a tremor in my left arm, along with unexplained twitches throughout my body. By this point, I had left Oxford and accepted a position as the dean of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. Theoretically, the move made it easier for me to commute to New York to tape my History Channel show, but since there were no direct flights, it actually took longer.
John noticed something was wrong one day while we played racquetball. During our last game, roughly a week before his Buckeye accident, I held out my left hand and showed him the tremor. I put on a brave face, telling him that I did not plan to see a doctor and would not let it interfere with my life. In fact, I was too afraid to visit the doctor, so I had no choice but to continue with my life. Without prompting, John started talking about Anthony and how courageous he was in dealing with this horrible disease. John never told me that Anthony was dying. All he talked about was how Anthony refused to complain. He used the word tough a handful of times in just a few minutes, as if prodding me to follow Anthony’s example.
On Friday, July 9, I finally decided to make an appointment to see the chief of neurology at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center. These were the early days of the internet, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I went online and found the worst possible disease with symptoms matching my own. After a few hours, I had convinced myself that I suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but I decided to see a doctor who could confirm my self-diagnosis.
I realized how primitive neurology was when I went for my two-hour exam. Much of it consisted of standing on one leg, touching various parts of my body, and using a small hammer to test my reflexes. At the end of the exam I sat on the table and asked the neurologist, “So do I have Parkinson’s?” He shook his head and said, “Well, I have good news and bad news.” The good news was that I did not have Parkinson’s; the bad news was that I could be in the early stages of ALS, popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He scheduled a series of additional tests the following Tuesday that would be more revealing.
Shaken, I called a mutual friend when I returned home and broke the news, instructing him to t
ell no one. He ignored my request and immediately phoned John. That evening I wandered around Norman, Oklahoma, for hours. Even though there was no official diagnosis I played out different scenarios in my head. Finally, around nine thirty, I headed back home and found two messages on my answering machine. “Stevie, it’s John. I hear we have something we need to talk about. Call me.” The second message came about an hour later. “Stevie, I know you’re home. It’s ten thirty P.M. on a Friday night. You never go out on a Friday night. Call me back.” I was not prepared to have that conversation with him, so I went to bed without returning his calls.
At seven o’clock central time on Saturday morning, the phone started ringing again. Fearing that something bad had happened, I picked it up and heard that familiar voice. “Stevie, I hear we have something we need to talk about.” He then gave a reassuring chuckle, letting me know he knew everything but wanted to hear it directly from me. After listening to my detailed description of the exam, which involved stripping down to my underwear and standing on one leg, John started speaking. I can still hear his voice. “For better or worse,” he said, “my family is very well connected in New York medical circles. If there’s anything you need, you let me know.” There was then a pause. “Stevie,” he said, “I’ll take care of you.” To make sure that I heard it right the first time, he repeated. “I’ll take care of you, Stevie.” He then followed with a comment that only someone worth about $100 million could utter: “And don’t worry about all that insurance stuff.” For John, medical insurance, which serves as a lifeline and often a source of constant frustration for most Americans, including me, was just “stuff.”
On Tuesday, I returned to the University of Oklahoma Medical Center for a series of excruciatingly painful tests, which consisted of shooting electricity through my arms. I felt like I was in the electric chair. But afterward, the doctor explained that I actually suffered from “benign essential tremor,” the operative word being “benign.” After the appointment, I walked out to the parking lot and used my new cell phone to call John. He was thrilled by the good news and even more excited that he was getting his cast off that week. “Not being able to exercise has been playing with my head,” he said. We made plans to play racquetball the following Monday at the New York Athletic Club. I joked that we would look like two invalids. “Stevie,” he said, “I can kick your butt with a lame leg.”
* * *
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Many Americans were still awaiting the moment when John would enter public life to fulfill his father’s unfinished agenda. The best opportunity came in November 1998, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he would not seek reelection in 2000. Several challengers emerged, including Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, but First Lady Hillary Clinton soon overshadowed him when she expressed interest in the seat.
Even many of her staff members counseled the first lady against seeking the seat, suggesting that she wait for a position to open up in her home state of Illinois. “Hillary had disadvantages running for the Senate in New York,” recalled campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle. “She wasn’t from the state. People viewed her as a carpetbagger. New York was a tough media market, and she did not have a good relationship with the media.” They assumed that her two toughest potential challengers for the Democratic nomination would be Congresswoman Nita Lowey and John. After lots of discussion, Lowey agreed to step aside for Clinton.
But no one on the campaign knew what John planned to do, and it caused the Clinton people many sleepless nights. “We were scared shitless that John F. Kennedy Jr. would run,” Solis Doyle recalled in 2019. The thinking on the campaign was that John “would be serious competition and the one person that she would not be able to beat in the primary.” He had too many built-in advantages. “John was American royalty,” she recalled. “He built his life in New York. He was a New Yorker. He was beloved nationally.” He had a close relationship with the local media, and he was one of the few potential candidates who could raise more money than the first lady. “I don’t think she would have run if John was going to run. It was going to be tough enough,” said Solis Doyle.
In February 1999, John confided in Dennis Rivera, the powerful head of Local 1199, the Service Employees International Union, that he was interested in running for the open Senate seat. But was he ready to finally make that move? On the evening of St. Patrick’s Day, Jeffrey Sachs, who was well connected in New York political circles, and Rivera met with John over dinner to discuss that question. Dennis, who had already spoken to major figures in New York Democratic politics, told John that if he wanted to run for Moynihan’s seat, “there are a number of us who will go to Hillary and tell her to stand back.” Although John had never run for public office and possessed no real track record, Rivera knew that he boasted near-universal name recognition and was beloved by people of all political persuasions. That did not mean his election would be a cakewalk. The central question that John needed to answer was, “Are you really ready to run?” It was not clear to either man that he was ready to make that decision or that he possessed the passion for campaigning.
Although John had asked for the meeting, Sachs noted that he appeared “edgy in his chair” and “was very uncomfortable” as the dinner progressed. “Is this the right thing for me to do?” John asked. “Will people take me seriously as a candidate?” John promised Dennis that he would get back to him, but he never did. Sachs called him two days later to hear his thoughts, and John confessed he was not interested. “I’m committed to George,” he said. “I have investors. And I’m very flattered, but I don’t think it’s time for me.” After this conversation, the possibility of John joining the political fray seemed to fade. At least for now, John placed his political ambitions on hold.
From the time I met him in the early 1980s, the question of whether John would enter politics swirled around him. I always sensed that other people thought more about it than he did. We all teased him about which jobs he had planned for us or which rooms in the White House we would occupy. But though he was civic-minded and well read in political history, I never detected in him a burning desire to enter the family business blindly. People speculated that his mom was holding him back, but the dynamic between them was complicated. Jackie was not opposed to John entering public life but she wanted him to make an informed decision and not feel that he was required to enter the family business. And as I watched him mature over the last sixteen years, it became clear that the prospect of running for office grew progressively more appealing to him.
John would occasionally make off-the-cuff comments that suggested he had a calling to be president. In 1989, while watching television coverage of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, he told Rob Littell that he wanted to go home someday—home being the White House. In the mid-1990s, I had lunch with John and some annoying friend who kept badgering him about running for Congress. “How many members of Congress ever become president?” John snapped. In a moment of pique, John revealed his desire to be president, but at the time, I was more interested in pointing out the fallacy of his argument. “Well, John,” I interjected, “you could start with your father,” and then I rattled off a list of other names of presidents from recent history who had once been members of Congress: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush.
I tracked John’s growing affinity for public life by how he referred to his father. When at Brown, and for a few years after, I never heard him designate his father as anything other than President Kennedy. By the early 1990s, he started identifying him as “my father.” Then, in the final years of his life, John often called his father “Daddy.” In my eyes, John did not want to join politics, as did some of his cousins, only because he felt a sense of family obligation. He first needed evidence that he had something to contribute, a concrete accomplishment that would serve as his foundation to run. Simply being JFK Jr. was not enough.
Had George been successful, it would have offered an ideal la
unching pad, but by the end of 1999, his magazine was limping along, its future uncertain. When he sat down with Sachs and Rivera, the timing still did not feel right, but he was leaning closer.
On the Sunday before he died, John called me to complain that Clinton planned to seek the Democratic nomination to fill the Moynihan Senate seat. He likely had seen the press coverage of her July 6 announcement that she had set up an exploratory committee and would begin a “listening tour” of the state. Although John had decided not to run for the seat, he believed that it should go to a native New Yorker, and not someone moving to the state solely for the purpose of seeking the office. “Stevie,” he said, “somebody [meaning me] should write an article about this carpetbagger Clinton moving to New York solely to run for a Senate seat.” I gently reminded him that his uncle Robert moved his residence to New York to run for (and win) a Senate seat in 1964. “Someone with the last name of Kennedy should not be complaining about carpetbaggers moving to New York to run for a Senate seat,” I told him. He quickly changed topics.
* * *
—
On Wednesday, July 14, John met Carolyn and her sister Lauren, a rising star at the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter investment bank, for lunch at the Stanhope Hotel’s Café M. The three had made weekend plans to fly together. John and Carolyn would be attending the wedding of his cousin Rory, the youngest daughter of John’s aunt and uncle Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy, at the family compound in Hyannis Port. They planned to drop off Lauren at Martha’s Vineyard on the way. But now Carolyn was reluctant to go to the wedding, and it appeared that John had enlisted Lauren to help persuade her to change her mind. “Oh, come on now,” a diner seated nearby heard Lauren say, “we’ll have fun.”
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