The tragic death of John Jr., the victim of a plane crash on the night of 16-17 July 1999, resurrects the mythology of this American family famous for its power and wealth, misfortunes and escapades.
The fate of the Kennedy
Carolyne Bessette and John Jr Kennedy
The tragic death of John Jr, the victim of a plane crash on the night of July 16-17, revives the mythology of this American family famous for its power and wealth, its misfortunes and its escapades
John Kennedy Jr was just 3 years old when he saw a journalist photograph him. "Why do you take a picture of me?" He asked, "My daddy is dead." The anecdote, reported by William Manchester in his book Death of a President, reveals the child's astonishment at the attention it provokes in his incongruous eyes and which only his father, President John Kennedy, assassinated In November 1963 in Dallas, was to be the object. This celebrity received as an inheritance as in other days a kingdom, this astonishing, undeserved fervor which it has aroused, John Jr. welcomed it all his adult life with a vaguely surprised look, the sketch of a Reticence, an ingenuous smile, and unfeigned modesty. It will be so until his death, Friday, July 16, shortly after dark, off the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, aboard a plane he was piloting himself, And in the accident of which also his young wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. Icarus and two divine princesses, in flight to a clan wedding transformed into a funeral vigil. A death that upsets America while John never really tried to move him, even if he did not hate, from time to time, to seduce her.
For that, it was enough for him to be himself, a great young man, very dignified, discreet and handsome as an Apollo, an honest and gallant man, a good friend for his few close friends. He knew both to take advantage of his name and to protect his anonymity, which proves some capabilities to trickery, or an exceptional innocence. We do not know, with him, public figure finally very secret. He was at least a flashing star, an unprecedented concept, knowing to turn on his aura like a neon on a boulevard to flirt with the young girls of Hollywood or to invent a job - boss of a magazine, George, concept one (The show-biz of politics), disappointing recipes and random destiny, but that would not have denied his father, a great artist of power. He also knew how to extinguish it, this aura, and become ordinary again, in spite of his beautiful face and his photo in all the tabloids, to blend into the little joys of daily anonymity, the time of a Frisbee party in Central Park Or a metro ride, where the correspondent of L'Express in New York had met him on a summer evening in 1995. He was quietly reading the last issue of George - looking pretty satisfied with the result - next to A Chinese family in full palavers and a Hispanic woman too sleepy to pay him the slightest attention.
He went out to Tribeca's Franklin station to join his loft on 20 N. Moore Street. The tourists, the strangers who were strangers to the neighborhood, turned round, but no one approached. It was the time, less than five years ago, when New York let him still breathe, blossom. He could go and buy a newspaper at the local kiosk without provoking riots. He came every morning to Socrates, the Greek boui-boui of Hudson Street, throwing a sonorous "Yasou Filos" (Hi my friend!) To the boss, George Dounrountou, remembering, perhaps, another life in the Cyclades, at M. Onassis's.
The paparazzi would fit in from time to time, even in shorts on his terrace, tickling the actress Daryl Hannah in nightie. They were rummaging about a new conquest, a Carolyn Bessette, a young patrician at Calvin Klein's, but their hunt stops at the barriers of Sheep Meadow in Central Park, the revisited perimeter of her secret garden. At that time, the young living god still remained human and the hordes of tabloids gnawed their brakes while waiting for him at the turn.
His marriage to Carolyn, two years later, caused the siege of his loft by the photographers, agony of abuse by the neighborhood. His anonymous steps have been transformed in recent years into a catafalque, a parterre of crowns and dazibaos of silly or moving epitaphs, watched by two rows of cameras awaiting a ghost, while the coast guards were still searching Sea of Martha's Vineyard. They seek less the body of Icarus than that of a good type. A man named John Kennedy, celebrity and discreet.
His fame, long protected by New York tact, sensitive to his natural courtesy and simplicity, was for him a fatality with which he knew how to compose, a responsibility of which it was vain to want to escape, and which he assumed From then on with grace. He was a reluctant, elegant, ironic heir, the last resigned flag-bearer of a legendary family. And it is this legend, today, that vanishes with him.
A legend that begins with the arrival in 1849, in East Boston, of a poor emigrant from Ireland, a certain Patrick Kennedy, who will be the last of his lineage to die in 1858, in anonymity. His son, Patrick Joseph, became a commercial tenant and a great figure of the Boston Democratic machine, where all were not angels. Patrick Joseph is the father of Joseph Patrick, aka Joe Kennedy, who refines the saga, accumulating, between sprains to the Prohibition, his flair to Wall Street and his talent in Hollywood to bring cinema into the industrial era, One of the greatest private fortunes of the first half of this century.
She is lent to many mistresses, few scruples in business and some connections with organized crime. It is then, like the Gatsby of Scott Fitzgerald, magnificent and megalo. In London he was to be an embarrassing Ambassador of Roosevelt's America, who was relentlessly advocating the appeasement of Hitler's Germany. He will be, finally and most importantly, the father of John, one of his nine children, and who was not his favorite. John was not much wiser than his father in love, when Marilyn Monroe, to quote only her, dressed in a dress sewn to the skin, publicly whispered: "Happy birthday, Mr. President." Nor was he too scrupulous when necessary, and some of his friends, even friends of his friends, were scarcely presentable.
But he had a modern political vision of a world in progress, boundless, based on freedom and racial integration, and possessed the gift of conviction in order to make this project a national ambition. The legend, when John was elected president in 1960, then knows, with his wife, Jackie, his most beautiful pages. And soon its most tragic. In spite of the errors and procrastination, it persists despite the Bay of Pigs, the Wall of Berlin or Vietnam. It has only recently faded, ever since America realized that Kennedy, the adulteress, had done much worse than Clinton, humiliated him, in the alcoves of the White House. With the death of John Jr, today, the book closes.
It is finished, if not of the Kennedys themselves - there are still a few dozen of them - at least of their saga, of that incredible family gesture which has dominated the American political and social scene for nearly a century. Which could most resemble, in this republic of the New World, that of a royal family-tyrannies, heart-pains, and voltigeous loves included. For even today, other members of the clan survive to John Jr., old and young, dragging their name, fortune, glory, mistakes, sorrows, ideals, escapades and overdoses as so many He and he alone were the last of the Kennedys.
And had taken the torch fairly late, and because it had to be well put. He did so as much by fidelity as by default. Faithfulness had come to her as an inheritance. It was this charm, that charisma, that thick mane smoothed like a dark wave, and that voluntary jaw, that taste for sport and the open air, that smile of white teeth that evoked so much his father. And it was this reserve, too, and this determination, this elegance, this irony, where one found the firm imprint of his mother. And, above all, he was the only one of all the Kennedy children of his generation who could still stand on the front of the stage without stumbling. The other offspring, when not already dead, live reclusive, like his sister Caroline, brilliant lawyer, author of two novels, one on the right of the victims and the other on the protection of the privacy.
This discreet mother of the family flees worldliness. Some, too, had better stay hidden. Until now, the young Kennedy did not really shine for their love of the public service and the common good that made the glory of their parents. Their grandfather took liberties with morality and law, and their fathers took power. They just had a good time.
Cousin David, for example, was found dead in 1984, the victim of a heroin overdose, in a hotel near the Kennedy family property in Palm Beach, Florida. Another cousin, Patrick, who has since entered politics, was treated medically for his addiction to cocaine in the early 1980s. A third cousin, Joseph, left a girl paralyzed for life after a car accident, and a fourth, Michael, whom his wife had discovered in bed with their 14-year-old babysitter, killed himself on December 31, 1997, at the age of 39, striking a tree while practicing with his friends his favorite game : Football on skis, one hour after the aperitif! There was finally the calamitous trial of a nephew of Ted Kennedy, William Kennedy Smith, acquitted in 1991 of a rape charge during a watered night in Palm Beach. Ted himself, a senator who had become a brick-faced patriarch, the younger brother of the president, had already fallen from the top of Chappaquiddick's footbridge on the outskirts of Martha's Vineyard in July 1969.
He had escaped, but not his secretary, Mary Jo Kopechne, trained at the bottom, with hopes of presiding over the awkward driver. It is exactly thirty years ago. Nor did he go out of his nephew's escapades. In this distressing picture of rich kids believing everything allowed, John Jr is desperately normal, no stories. He had, it seems, a tiny tattoo on the skin, and it is the only little madness that is known to him. Like his father, and before him, his grandfather, he also had love affairs with actresses - Daryl Hannah, a charming mermaid - and, if we believe the rumor, the singer Madonna.
But he trained with Carolyn Bessette, married in September 1996, away from the media, on an island off Georgia, a couple both very beautiful and very contemporary, as Jack and Kennedy were in their time. John Jr. reported that he assumed the role of the torchbearer when he wrote a vitriolic article in George on his turbulent cousins, entitled "Poster boys for bad behavior", in other words, the kings of the dummies. John broke the ranks, broke the family omerta on the children's escapades. One of them, Joe, currently campaigning for the post of governor of Massachusetts, singing a famous phrase from President Kennedy ("Do not ask what America can do for you, ask yourself what you can How for America "), had the bad taste to answer:" Do not ask what you can do for your cousins, ask yourself what you can do for your magazine. " What John Jr could do was tell the truth, "the primary responsibility of a journalist," in the journal Salon, on the Internet, one of the best historians of the Kennedy family, David Horowitz, Author, with Peter Collier, of a remarkable narrative: The Kennedys, an American Drama.
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He has always been the most famous son in America. The first child ever born of a president-in-office in the entire history of the United States. Then the orphan son of a father he no longer knew if he really remembered. His memory was blurred, he said, by the images of himself as a child, playing in pajamas under his father's office at the White House, or saluting the latter's coffin with a moving military salute. The day of his third birthday, after the assassination of the president three days earlier. "There were so many pictures ... You never really know if you remember what you saw in pictures or if it was something real," he said in an interview with USA Today. From his early childhood, he had no more precise memories, except that of a slide installed in the gardens of the White House and that one of his dogs climbed by sliding on the ramp. "I feel like I remember that."
John Jr. was born on November 25, 1960, a Thanksgiving day, a day of thanksgiving, an irony of the calendar in the face of the dramas that marked his life. Even among the very Catholic Kennedy - women are so fervently, often; The men would rather be of the inveterate sinners kind - it should not be very easy to thank the Good God while the family believes itself pursued by bad luck. However, on November 25, 1960, everything went well. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whom everyone calls Jack, was elected president of the United States seventeen days earlier. Jack and Jackie - Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy - their daughter Caroline and soon the little John invade the White House and with it the imagination of an entire nation. It is youth and elegance, life, optimism and charm that take power. And the birth of John Jr, from then on, is news in the gazettes, as will be his first steps, his laughter and his games.
He is the little boy of America, who looks at him from the first moment. A reporter once heard the president call his son in the corridors of the White House: "John! John!" He believes it is the nickname of the child and makes it known. John Jr soon becomes for all Americans - but not for his parents, who will never call him that - John John. A foolish scoop for an affectionate baptism.
Death, which has just struck in the last days of the century the Kennedy clan, is a familiar companion of the family. The president, in his youth, had already lost a brother, Joseph Jr, the eldest kamikaze and presidentiable. In 1944 he was to steer a plane packed with explosives on a German base after ejecting himself at the last minute. He was a volunteer for this impossible mission. His charge exploded, well before the hour, over the Channel. He was 29 years old.
He also lost his sister, Kathleen, a party and dissident, who in 1948, at the age of 28, came to be engaged with a Protestant against her father's will. Their millionaire zinc, which was rushing towards Nice in spite of a storm, crashed in the Ardèche. This shadow of death hangs over little John. In August 1963, Jackie gave birth to a third child, Patrick, born prematurely. Victim of a respiratory problem, he will live only forty hours. John Jr will then lose a little brother whose impatience he awaited. In November of the same year, his father was assassinated. A friend of the family was in charge of announcing this last trip: "In the sky, with his big plane, when will he come back?" Would have replied the child. Then, in June 1968, his uncle Robert, Bobby Kennedy, godfather, paternal substitution, fierce protector of John and his sister Caroline, is assassinated in his turn. John John is not 8 years old.
After the president's death, Jackie drags her children into anonymity in Manhattan. Five bedrooms and park view at 1040 5th Avenue. She does it to remove them from the uncontrollable tribe of Bobby's offspring, the funny Hickory Hill, the lustics of Hyannis Port, potty smokers and rock'n'roll crazy. It is also driven by a paranoia that is difficult to judge unfounded. "If we kill the Kennedy," she said after Robert's death, "my children are in the front line."
From then on they would pass an almost ordinary childhood, taking the buses from Manhattan like everybody else, but under the discreet escort of agents of the secret service. John John, then a looped predo, with the codenamed "lark" ("lark"), sowed his gorilla one day in Central Park and, within three minutes, was stripped of his bike at the corner of A grove. Jackie, hiding her holy shudder, had pretended to rejoice at the initiatory incident. John had to present a detailed apology to the Federal Agent. Yet he will later reoffend. His first flirtations, his borders with his friends, were the obsessions of his protectors, whom he planted at the service door or lost in the crowd of Bob Dylan's concerts. Jackie, the blouse of the White House, enjoyed without a word the son's rebellion, a token of independence and virile education.
Caroline and John gradually disappear from the traffic. Their mother, who watches to preserve their tranquility, makes during this time the Newspaper when she marries the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis. She becomes Jackie O., a traitor to her family, but her marriage contract includes an autonomy clause, the inalienable right to spend six months a year in New York with her children, to rub them, 5th Avenue, to the realities of the world. One day, John, who was accompanying his mother in the streets of Manhattan, wanted to buy a junk from a street vendor, Jackie refused, saying the object was too expensive. "What," replied the child, "you are the richest woman in the world, and you think it is too dear?" Jackie, no doubt, was a good mother and her death from cancer of the lymphatic system, in May 1994, saved her from mourning again, which she once did with so much dignity, One of his children.
These, throughout their childhood, range from their chic pensions on the East Coast to a dream vacation in Skorpyos, the fortified island of Onassis. Their youth away from the decomposed clan their cousins form now explains the distance that separated John from these. A rather average student, he broke the family tradition by preferring to Harvard, his father's alma mater, Brown University College, in Providence, Rhode Island. He loves theater and made his professional actor debut in a play by Brian Friel, Winners in Manhattan, in August 1985. His mother does not approve of this passion for the boards, which she considers vulgar and unworthy of her name . He then entered the law school of New York University in 1986. He is a young man a little floating and undecided, but he reappears in the tabloids, as beautiful as can be, in the imagination of the Americans, a real Kennedy. Athletic and pretty boy, the press nicknamed him "The Hunk", the beautiful male.
More condescending than honorable. He misses the New York bar examination twice. "The Hunk Flunks." The male crashes, headlines the popular press.
It revolves around politics, never taking the step. He introduced his uncle, Ted, to the national convention of the Democratic Party in Atlanta in July 1988, evoking, rarely, the memory of his father. The activists paid him an enthusiastic tribute, but he returned to the discretion of becoming an assistant prosecutor in Manhattan in 1989. He remained there four years after winning his six trials. Already, it feeds a project a little crazy: a magazine where the "glamor" goes with politics. Vision finally very kennedyenne of the power.
The first issue will be launched in great pomp in September 1995. Cindy Crawford, powdered wig and quasi naked under her period tunic, is on the cover, evoking a sexually sexy George Washington. John is in heaven. He tells journalists that he has never seen them so numerous to take an interest in him since his failures at bar exams.
He is 35 years old when he finally invented a career, that of a magazine editor, which is a success in terms of readership (about 400 000 copies), but a disappointment in terms of advertising revenue. The magazine is eclectic, liberal, fun, provocative and serious. His life, then, makes sense. And besides, he's in love.
Carolyn Bessette is so beautiful that a single shopping stop at Calvin Klein had led her straight into the ranks of the brand's mannequins and then to the noblest floors of public relations services. She spawns, among other sublime parties, with the Benetton's heir, before falling into the arms of Prince Charming, John Kennedy. It is a revenge for her, who was long taunted by her family for having, during some studies of pedagogy at Boston University, especially shined for a denuded appearance in the calendar of the "super girls" of the university.
The daughter of a very smart cardiologist in Greenwich, a haven of billionaires and stars in Connecticut, Carolyn had two sisters: Renaissance historian Lisa and Lauren, who had disappeared with her on Kennedy's plane, Discreet, golden girl venture capitalist at Morgan Stanley. Lauren had only recently joined the socialites of the most prominent couple in New York, fascinated by the aura of Kennedy and seduced by the charm of her latest boy-friend, Robert Shriver, one of John's cousins . Carolyn, meanwhile, was not intimidated by the Kennedy. She nearly left John, throwing her engagement ring into the grass of Central Park, and maybe that's how she conquered him. He was tired of the hysterical hordes that tanned him at every cocktail.
One day, leaving his newspaper at a coffee table, he had seen four women fight to seize the relic. Carolyn resisted him in the bad days, and, in the good ones, treated him as an equal, a partner, insensible to the limelight, rushed with the media. Recently, however, they had put her nerves in a ball so that she lived a secluded time in their loft in Tribeca, leaving only outfitted with a scarf and black glasses (Jackie O.?). It would have failed to break, assure the social chroniclers, before John, at an impromptu press conference on his steps, calls for the first time the pack to some meekness.
It had no great effect, but Carolyn had recently regained her joie de vivre. She laughed at her baptism of fire, a few months ago, at the gala of the presidential correspondents of Washington. She was with Sean Penn, the spooky Jack Rubin, spokesperson for Madeleine Albright, and his wife, CNN star Christiane Amanpour. She was looking at John and nothing seemed to stop them.
But fate wanted John to buy a piper to fly with his own wings,To join his father whom he had believed he had left in the sky, formerly, aboard his big plane.
Source: express.fr
The fate of the Kennedy
Carolyne Bessette and John Jr Kennedy
The tragic death of John Jr, the victim of a plane crash on the night of July 16-17, revives the mythology of this American family famous for its power and wealth, its misfortunes and its escapades
John Kennedy Jr was just 3 years old when he saw a journalist photograph him. "Why do you take a picture of me?" He asked, "My daddy is dead." The anecdote, reported by William Manchester in his book Death of a President, reveals the child's astonishment at the attention it provokes in his incongruous eyes and which only his father, President John Kennedy, assassinated In November 1963 in Dallas, was to be the object. This celebrity received as an inheritance as in other days a kingdom, this astonishing, undeserved fervor which it has aroused, John Jr. welcomed it all his adult life with a vaguely surprised look, the sketch of a Reticence, an ingenuous smile, and unfeigned modesty. It will be so until his death, Friday, July 16, shortly after dark, off the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, aboard a plane he was piloting himself, And in the accident of which also his young wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. Icarus and two divine princesses, in flight to a clan wedding transformed into a funeral vigil. A death that upsets America while John never really tried to move him, even if he did not hate, from time to time, to seduce her.
For that, it was enough for him to be himself, a great young man, very dignified, discreet and handsome as an Apollo, an honest and gallant man, a good friend for his few close friends. He knew both to take advantage of his name and to protect his anonymity, which proves some capabilities to trickery, or an exceptional innocence. We do not know, with him, public figure finally very secret. He was at least a flashing star, an unprecedented concept, knowing to turn on his aura like a neon on a boulevard to flirt with the young girls of Hollywood or to invent a job - boss of a magazine, George, concept one (The show-biz of politics), disappointing recipes and random destiny, but that would not have denied his father, a great artist of power. He also knew how to extinguish it, this aura, and become ordinary again, in spite of his beautiful face and his photo in all the tabloids, to blend into the little joys of daily anonymity, the time of a Frisbee party in Central Park Or a metro ride, where the correspondent of L'Express in New York had met him on a summer evening in 1995. He was quietly reading the last issue of George - looking pretty satisfied with the result - next to A Chinese family in full palavers and a Hispanic woman too sleepy to pay him the slightest attention.
He went out to Tribeca's Franklin station to join his loft on 20 N. Moore Street. The tourists, the strangers who were strangers to the neighborhood, turned round, but no one approached. It was the time, less than five years ago, when New York let him still breathe, blossom. He could go and buy a newspaper at the local kiosk without provoking riots. He came every morning to Socrates, the Greek boui-boui of Hudson Street, throwing a sonorous "Yasou Filos" (Hi my friend!) To the boss, George Dounrountou, remembering, perhaps, another life in the Cyclades, at M. Onassis's.
The paparazzi would fit in from time to time, even in shorts on his terrace, tickling the actress Daryl Hannah in nightie. They were rummaging about a new conquest, a Carolyn Bessette, a young patrician at Calvin Klein's, but their hunt stops at the barriers of Sheep Meadow in Central Park, the revisited perimeter of her secret garden. At that time, the young living god still remained human and the hordes of tabloids gnawed their brakes while waiting for him at the turn.
His marriage to Carolyn, two years later, caused the siege of his loft by the photographers, agony of abuse by the neighborhood. His anonymous steps have been transformed in recent years into a catafalque, a parterre of crowns and dazibaos of silly or moving epitaphs, watched by two rows of cameras awaiting a ghost, while the coast guards were still searching Sea of Martha's Vineyard. They seek less the body of Icarus than that of a good type. A man named John Kennedy, celebrity and discreet.
His fame, long protected by New York tact, sensitive to his natural courtesy and simplicity, was for him a fatality with which he knew how to compose, a responsibility of which it was vain to want to escape, and which he assumed From then on with grace. He was a reluctant, elegant, ironic heir, the last resigned flag-bearer of a legendary family. And it is this legend, today, that vanishes with him.
A legend that begins with the arrival in 1849, in East Boston, of a poor emigrant from Ireland, a certain Patrick Kennedy, who will be the last of his lineage to die in 1858, in anonymity. His son, Patrick Joseph, became a commercial tenant and a great figure of the Boston Democratic machine, where all were not angels. Patrick Joseph is the father of Joseph Patrick, aka Joe Kennedy, who refines the saga, accumulating, between sprains to the Prohibition, his flair to Wall Street and his talent in Hollywood to bring cinema into the industrial era, One of the greatest private fortunes of the first half of this century.
She is lent to many mistresses, few scruples in business and some connections with organized crime. It is then, like the Gatsby of Scott Fitzgerald, magnificent and megalo. In London he was to be an embarrassing Ambassador of Roosevelt's America, who was relentlessly advocating the appeasement of Hitler's Germany. He will be, finally and most importantly, the father of John, one of his nine children, and who was not his favorite. John was not much wiser than his father in love, when Marilyn Monroe, to quote only her, dressed in a dress sewn to the skin, publicly whispered: "Happy birthday, Mr. President." Nor was he too scrupulous when necessary, and some of his friends, even friends of his friends, were scarcely presentable.
But he had a modern political vision of a world in progress, boundless, based on freedom and racial integration, and possessed the gift of conviction in order to make this project a national ambition. The legend, when John was elected president in 1960, then knows, with his wife, Jackie, his most beautiful pages. And soon its most tragic. In spite of the errors and procrastination, it persists despite the Bay of Pigs, the Wall of Berlin or Vietnam. It has only recently faded, ever since America realized that Kennedy, the adulteress, had done much worse than Clinton, humiliated him, in the alcoves of the White House. With the death of John Jr, today, the book closes.
It is finished, if not of the Kennedys themselves - there are still a few dozen of them - at least of their saga, of that incredible family gesture which has dominated the American political and social scene for nearly a century. Which could most resemble, in this republic of the New World, that of a royal family-tyrannies, heart-pains, and voltigeous loves included. For even today, other members of the clan survive to John Jr., old and young, dragging their name, fortune, glory, mistakes, sorrows, ideals, escapades and overdoses as so many He and he alone were the last of the Kennedys.
And had taken the torch fairly late, and because it had to be well put. He did so as much by fidelity as by default. Faithfulness had come to her as an inheritance. It was this charm, that charisma, that thick mane smoothed like a dark wave, and that voluntary jaw, that taste for sport and the open air, that smile of white teeth that evoked so much his father. And it was this reserve, too, and this determination, this elegance, this irony, where one found the firm imprint of his mother. And, above all, he was the only one of all the Kennedy children of his generation who could still stand on the front of the stage without stumbling. The other offspring, when not already dead, live reclusive, like his sister Caroline, brilliant lawyer, author of two novels, one on the right of the victims and the other on the protection of the privacy.
This discreet mother of the family flees worldliness. Some, too, had better stay hidden. Until now, the young Kennedy did not really shine for their love of the public service and the common good that made the glory of their parents. Their grandfather took liberties with morality and law, and their fathers took power. They just had a good time.
Cousin David, for example, was found dead in 1984, the victim of a heroin overdose, in a hotel near the Kennedy family property in Palm Beach, Florida. Another cousin, Patrick, who has since entered politics, was treated medically for his addiction to cocaine in the early 1980s. A third cousin, Joseph, left a girl paralyzed for life after a car accident, and a fourth, Michael, whom his wife had discovered in bed with their 14-year-old babysitter, killed himself on December 31, 1997, at the age of 39, striking a tree while practicing with his friends his favorite game : Football on skis, one hour after the aperitif! There was finally the calamitous trial of a nephew of Ted Kennedy, William Kennedy Smith, acquitted in 1991 of a rape charge during a watered night in Palm Beach. Ted himself, a senator who had become a brick-faced patriarch, the younger brother of the president, had already fallen from the top of Chappaquiddick's footbridge on the outskirts of Martha's Vineyard in July 1969.
He had escaped, but not his secretary, Mary Jo Kopechne, trained at the bottom, with hopes of presiding over the awkward driver. It is exactly thirty years ago. Nor did he go out of his nephew's escapades. In this distressing picture of rich kids believing everything allowed, John Jr is desperately normal, no stories. He had, it seems, a tiny tattoo on the skin, and it is the only little madness that is known to him. Like his father, and before him, his grandfather, he also had love affairs with actresses - Daryl Hannah, a charming mermaid - and, if we believe the rumor, the singer Madonna.
But he trained with Carolyn Bessette, married in September 1996, away from the media, on an island off Georgia, a couple both very beautiful and very contemporary, as Jack and Kennedy were in their time. John Jr. reported that he assumed the role of the torchbearer when he wrote a vitriolic article in George on his turbulent cousins, entitled "Poster boys for bad behavior", in other words, the kings of the dummies. John broke the ranks, broke the family omerta on the children's escapades. One of them, Joe, currently campaigning for the post of governor of Massachusetts, singing a famous phrase from President Kennedy ("Do not ask what America can do for you, ask yourself what you can How for America "), had the bad taste to answer:" Do not ask what you can do for your cousins, ask yourself what you can do for your magazine. " What John Jr could do was tell the truth, "the primary responsibility of a journalist," in the journal Salon, on the Internet, one of the best historians of the Kennedy family, David Horowitz, Author, with Peter Collier, of a remarkable narrative: The Kennedys, an American Drama.
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He has always been the most famous son in America. The first child ever born of a president-in-office in the entire history of the United States. Then the orphan son of a father he no longer knew if he really remembered. His memory was blurred, he said, by the images of himself as a child, playing in pajamas under his father's office at the White House, or saluting the latter's coffin with a moving military salute. The day of his third birthday, after the assassination of the president three days earlier. "There were so many pictures ... You never really know if you remember what you saw in pictures or if it was something real," he said in an interview with USA Today. From his early childhood, he had no more precise memories, except that of a slide installed in the gardens of the White House and that one of his dogs climbed by sliding on the ramp. "I feel like I remember that."
John Jr. was born on November 25, 1960, a Thanksgiving day, a day of thanksgiving, an irony of the calendar in the face of the dramas that marked his life. Even among the very Catholic Kennedy - women are so fervently, often; The men would rather be of the inveterate sinners kind - it should not be very easy to thank the Good God while the family believes itself pursued by bad luck. However, on November 25, 1960, everything went well. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whom everyone calls Jack, was elected president of the United States seventeen days earlier. Jack and Jackie - Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy - their daughter Caroline and soon the little John invade the White House and with it the imagination of an entire nation. It is youth and elegance, life, optimism and charm that take power. And the birth of John Jr, from then on, is news in the gazettes, as will be his first steps, his laughter and his games.
He is the little boy of America, who looks at him from the first moment. A reporter once heard the president call his son in the corridors of the White House: "John! John!" He believes it is the nickname of the child and makes it known. John Jr soon becomes for all Americans - but not for his parents, who will never call him that - John John. A foolish scoop for an affectionate baptism.
Death, which has just struck in the last days of the century the Kennedy clan, is a familiar companion of the family. The president, in his youth, had already lost a brother, Joseph Jr, the eldest kamikaze and presidentiable. In 1944 he was to steer a plane packed with explosives on a German base after ejecting himself at the last minute. He was a volunteer for this impossible mission. His charge exploded, well before the hour, over the Channel. He was 29 years old.
He also lost his sister, Kathleen, a party and dissident, who in 1948, at the age of 28, came to be engaged with a Protestant against her father's will. Their millionaire zinc, which was rushing towards Nice in spite of a storm, crashed in the Ardèche. This shadow of death hangs over little John. In August 1963, Jackie gave birth to a third child, Patrick, born prematurely. Victim of a respiratory problem, he will live only forty hours. John Jr will then lose a little brother whose impatience he awaited. In November of the same year, his father was assassinated. A friend of the family was in charge of announcing this last trip: "In the sky, with his big plane, when will he come back?" Would have replied the child. Then, in June 1968, his uncle Robert, Bobby Kennedy, godfather, paternal substitution, fierce protector of John and his sister Caroline, is assassinated in his turn. John John is not 8 years old.
After the president's death, Jackie drags her children into anonymity in Manhattan. Five bedrooms and park view at 1040 5th Avenue. She does it to remove them from the uncontrollable tribe of Bobby's offspring, the funny Hickory Hill, the lustics of Hyannis Port, potty smokers and rock'n'roll crazy. It is also driven by a paranoia that is difficult to judge unfounded. "If we kill the Kennedy," she said after Robert's death, "my children are in the front line."
From then on they would pass an almost ordinary childhood, taking the buses from Manhattan like everybody else, but under the discreet escort of agents of the secret service. John John, then a looped predo, with the codenamed "lark" ("lark"), sowed his gorilla one day in Central Park and, within three minutes, was stripped of his bike at the corner of A grove. Jackie, hiding her holy shudder, had pretended to rejoice at the initiatory incident. John had to present a detailed apology to the Federal Agent. Yet he will later reoffend. His first flirtations, his borders with his friends, were the obsessions of his protectors, whom he planted at the service door or lost in the crowd of Bob Dylan's concerts. Jackie, the blouse of the White House, enjoyed without a word the son's rebellion, a token of independence and virile education.
Caroline and John gradually disappear from the traffic. Their mother, who watches to preserve their tranquility, makes during this time the Newspaper when she marries the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis. She becomes Jackie O., a traitor to her family, but her marriage contract includes an autonomy clause, the inalienable right to spend six months a year in New York with her children, to rub them, 5th Avenue, to the realities of the world. One day, John, who was accompanying his mother in the streets of Manhattan, wanted to buy a junk from a street vendor, Jackie refused, saying the object was too expensive. "What," replied the child, "you are the richest woman in the world, and you think it is too dear?" Jackie, no doubt, was a good mother and her death from cancer of the lymphatic system, in May 1994, saved her from mourning again, which she once did with so much dignity, One of his children.
These, throughout their childhood, range from their chic pensions on the East Coast to a dream vacation in Skorpyos, the fortified island of Onassis. Their youth away from the decomposed clan their cousins form now explains the distance that separated John from these. A rather average student, he broke the family tradition by preferring to Harvard, his father's alma mater, Brown University College, in Providence, Rhode Island. He loves theater and made his professional actor debut in a play by Brian Friel, Winners in Manhattan, in August 1985. His mother does not approve of this passion for the boards, which she considers vulgar and unworthy of her name . He then entered the law school of New York University in 1986. He is a young man a little floating and undecided, but he reappears in the tabloids, as beautiful as can be, in the imagination of the Americans, a real Kennedy. Athletic and pretty boy, the press nicknamed him "The Hunk", the beautiful male.
More condescending than honorable. He misses the New York bar examination twice. "The Hunk Flunks." The male crashes, headlines the popular press.
It revolves around politics, never taking the step. He introduced his uncle, Ted, to the national convention of the Democratic Party in Atlanta in July 1988, evoking, rarely, the memory of his father. The activists paid him an enthusiastic tribute, but he returned to the discretion of becoming an assistant prosecutor in Manhattan in 1989. He remained there four years after winning his six trials. Already, it feeds a project a little crazy: a magazine where the "glamor" goes with politics. Vision finally very kennedyenne of the power.
The first issue will be launched in great pomp in September 1995. Cindy Crawford, powdered wig and quasi naked under her period tunic, is on the cover, evoking a sexually sexy George Washington. John is in heaven. He tells journalists that he has never seen them so numerous to take an interest in him since his failures at bar exams.
He is 35 years old when he finally invented a career, that of a magazine editor, which is a success in terms of readership (about 400 000 copies), but a disappointment in terms of advertising revenue. The magazine is eclectic, liberal, fun, provocative and serious. His life, then, makes sense. And besides, he's in love.
Carolyn Bessette is so beautiful that a single shopping stop at Calvin Klein had led her straight into the ranks of the brand's mannequins and then to the noblest floors of public relations services. She spawns, among other sublime parties, with the Benetton's heir, before falling into the arms of Prince Charming, John Kennedy. It is a revenge for her, who was long taunted by her family for having, during some studies of pedagogy at Boston University, especially shined for a denuded appearance in the calendar of the "super girls" of the university.
The daughter of a very smart cardiologist in Greenwich, a haven of billionaires and stars in Connecticut, Carolyn had two sisters: Renaissance historian Lisa and Lauren, who had disappeared with her on Kennedy's plane, Discreet, golden girl venture capitalist at Morgan Stanley. Lauren had only recently joined the socialites of the most prominent couple in New York, fascinated by the aura of Kennedy and seduced by the charm of her latest boy-friend, Robert Shriver, one of John's cousins . Carolyn, meanwhile, was not intimidated by the Kennedy. She nearly left John, throwing her engagement ring into the grass of Central Park, and maybe that's how she conquered him. He was tired of the hysterical hordes that tanned him at every cocktail.
One day, leaving his newspaper at a coffee table, he had seen four women fight to seize the relic. Carolyn resisted him in the bad days, and, in the good ones, treated him as an equal, a partner, insensible to the limelight, rushed with the media. Recently, however, they had put her nerves in a ball so that she lived a secluded time in their loft in Tribeca, leaving only outfitted with a scarf and black glasses (Jackie O.?). It would have failed to break, assure the social chroniclers, before John, at an impromptu press conference on his steps, calls for the first time the pack to some meekness.
It had no great effect, but Carolyn had recently regained her joie de vivre. She laughed at her baptism of fire, a few months ago, at the gala of the presidential correspondents of Washington. She was with Sean Penn, the spooky Jack Rubin, spokesperson for Madeleine Albright, and his wife, CNN star Christiane Amanpour. She was looking at John and nothing seemed to stop them.
But fate wanted John to buy a piper to fly with his own wings,To join his father whom he had believed he had left in the sky, formerly, aboard his big plane.
Source: express.fr
