John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr, who was 38, was killed on July 16th in an aeroplane accident over the waters off the coast of Massachusetts near Martha's Vineyard. His wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, were with him in the plane and were also killed. By Sunday night, the Coast Guard had reluctantly abandoned hope of finding survivors in the cold waters. ["]You hit the water at that speed of descent, and it's like hitting cement,["] a spokesman said. In a sad and ironic turn of fate, pieces of the small private plane which was piloted by Mr. Kennedy are washing up on a stretch of shoreline on a beachfront at Gay Head, which is owned by Kennedy and his sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. Yesterday afternoon the flag at the family's compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts was lowered to half mast, and Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, John's uncle, and the spokesman for the family, acknowledged the deaths in a statement issued from Caroline Schlossberg's home on Long Island: ["]We are filled with unspeakable grief and sadness by the loss of John and Carolyn and of Lauren Bessettewe pray that John, Carolyn and Lauren will find eternal rest, and that God's perpetual light will shine on them.["]
John Kennedy, the only son of the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born in Washington, DC, on Thanksgiving evening, November 25th, 1960, just three weeks after his father's election to the presidency. He was the first baby ever born to an American president-elect. During the thousand days of the Kennedy's in the White House, John was the darling of press photographers. He was an imp of a little boy, trying to be wherever his famous father was, either in his arms or under his desk. The world remembers the last picture of the two of them together, when an almost-three-year-old John in a short blue coat saluted his father's passing casket outside St Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, DC.
After the President's death, John, his mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and his sister Caroline, moved to Manhattan where John briefly attended St David's, an exclusive Catholic day school for boys. He later transferred to Collegiate School for Boys in Manhattan, and finished his secondary education at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Unlike a chain of Kennedys who attended Harvard, young Kennedy broke with that tradition to enrol at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from there in 1983.
At one stage in his life, he aspired to become an actor, but gently dissuaded by his mother from pursuing that precarious career, he went to law school instead at New York University. Having failed twice to pass the New York bar exam, Kennedy once remarked: "I'm clearly not a legal genius." While his aunt, Ethel Kennedy, summered with her children in the family compound in Hyannisport, Jackie Kennedy preferred to keep her children at a distance from the rough and tumble life of the boisterous Robert Kennedy clan. In 1968, she married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate, but 1040 Fifth Avenue, the Kennedy's apartment overlooking Central Park, would always be home to the Kennedy children.
His exceptional good looks, his grace and style, and especially his Kennedy name, made John Kennedy a natural candidate for political office in the US. There is speculation that he would have eventually run for office, perhaps for the Senate from New York, and even the presidency itself. His one foray into that world was a well-received introduction of his uncle Ted that he made at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. After his graduation from law school, he spent four years as an assistant district attorney in New York but eventually found the work there repetitive and boring and left to embark on his new venture as publisher of George, a journal of politics. Kennedy took a hands-on position on his magazine, both as a writer and an interviewer. He caused a mild furore with an article about his two cousins, Joe and Michael Kennedy, whom he called "poster boys for bad behaviour", referring to Michael's amorous involvement with the family's teenaged babysitter.
Kennedy was often seen in New York with some of the country's most glamorous and beautiful women on his arm, including Madonna, Julia Roberts, and Daryl Hannah. But in 1994, he lost the woman who had always been the most important in his life, his mother, Jackie, who died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma that year. They had always been extremely close, and her death was a deep and abiding loss to him.
When Carolyn Bessette entered John Kennedy's life, he knew that he had found his life's partner. A stunningly beautiful, stylish woman, a graduate of Boston University, and a public relations executive for Calvin Klein, Ms Bessette and Kennedy made a handsome, hip, and elegant figure together. Every nuance of their romance and courtship was followed by the media including extensive coverage of a lovers' quarrel they had in Central Park. However, they managed to thwart the media and keep their wedding on a small island off the Coast of Georgia a private affair.
Ms Bessette (33), and her sister Lauren (34), were on Kennedy's plane when it went down. The Kennedy's had no children. A friend of the family remembers seeing John Kennedy at a family get-together last summer, playing with great gusto with a large group of children. He thought at the time what a great father John would be when his time came. John Kennedy's uncle, Joe, who had been destined to run for the presidency, was in a plane that went down in the second World War on a bomber mission. His aunt Kathleen died in another air crash. His uncle Ted was critically injured in a plane crash in l964 that proved fatal to other passengers.
His mother, who tried so hard and successfully to shield her two children from the damaging and eroding glare of the media spotlight, and to instill in them the admirable virtues which she valued, was very proud of her graceful, elegant son.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr: born 1960; died July, 1999