RFK Jr., page 17
The NTSB later determined33 that the probable cause of the accident had been John Jr.’s inexperience flying at night: “The pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze, and the dark night.”
John Jr. had also fractured his left ankle during a paragliding accident on Memorial Day. He had undergone surgery, and the cast had been taken off just a day before he flew from New Jersey. The injury likely still caused pain and might have made it difficult for him to use the rudder pedals, which are foot-operated, on the plane.
The bickering over the bodies34 began the following day even though they hadn’t yet been recovered. Carolyn’s mother, Ann Freeman, was “very upset” about where the bodies would be buried. She wanted the trio to be buried in Greenwich, Connecticut, which Kennedy said would be an impossibility. “John Kennedy couldn’t be buried in Greenwich because he had no connection and for all the other reasons,” he wrote on July 18. Ann wanted her daughters close and “is terrified that they will try to spirit her [Carolyn] to Brookline or Martha’s Vineyard . . . because both of them loved it there.”
Kennedy helped arrange a meeting between the Bessette family and John’s sister, Caroline, in New York the following day. Caroline didn’t show up and instead sent her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, who hated John Jr.’s wife. Vicki Reggie, Ted Kennedy’s second wife, was also at the meeting. According to Kennedy, Schlossberg “did everything in his power to make her life miserable” and then proceeded to bully the “shattered” grieving mother, who had just lost two of her three daughters.
The bodies were finally recovered on July 21, all of them still wearing their seat belts. “Coast Guard found John’s body and fuselage at 2:30 a.m. and found the girls soon after,” Kennedy wrote, adding that his uncle Ted and his sons Teddy Jr. and Patrick had taken a helicopter to be present at the recovery. “Teddy was shaken afterwards. The bodies were in bad shape, and the autopsy would find they’d been killed on impact,” he wrote.
The bodies were cremated and the ashes placed in three Tiffany blue boxes for burial at sea. The next day, July 22, Kennedy and other family members, including his uncle Ted, Carole and Anthony Radziwill, Maria Shriver, and Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg, among others, met at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. There they got into three vans, with a police escort, for the trip to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they boarded a navy cutter and rendezvoused with the destroyer USS Briscoe a mile off the coast. The ship took them out twenty miles off Gay Head, about a mile from the crash site.
A Kennedy family friend, the Roman Catholic priest Charles O’Byrne, who had married Carolyn and John Jr. just three years before in 1996, presided at the funeral at sea. Ann and her second husband, Richard Freeman, “climbed over the landing and scattered the girls’ ashes one at a time,” Kennedy wrote, adding that Caroline and Edwin had then spread John Jr.’s ashes over the sea.
“The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen,” he later wrote in his diary. “When they let go of the ashes, the plume erupted and settled in the water and passed by in the green current like a ghost. We tossed flowers onto the ghosts. Some of the girls tossed letters from a packet they’d assembled from John’s and Carolyn’s friends. It was a civil violation but the Coast Guard let it go.” He added that a navy band had played “mournful music and we all cried like babies.”
Kennedy and his cousin William Kennedy Smith took turns carrying Anthony Radziwill up the steps of the ship when the ceremony moved from the lower deck to the upper one.
The memorial services continued the next day, but not before protracted negotiations about who would do the eulogies for the dead. In a tense conference call, the families decided that Ted Kennedy would eulogize John Jr. and that Hamilton South, a good friend of Carolyn, would do her eulogy. When Lisa Bessette, Lauren’s twin sister, suggested that Kennedy should eulogize the couple together since he had known them both very well, Schlossberg shot down the idea, even after Kennedy had accepted to do it. “Kennedys do not eulogize non-Kennedys,” he said, according to Kennedy’s diary.
Lisa, disgusted by Schlossberg’s reaction, asked him if he made up his rules on the spot and slammed down the phone. Schlossberg’s behavior also angered other members of the extended family with Carole Radziwill calling Kennedy to complain that he had flown into a tantrum because she hadn’t said hello to him. “I know you’ve always hated me,” he told her, according to Kennedy’s diary. Carole suggested that the family start an “I hate Ed club.” Kennedy agreed that there would be many members and that John Jr. and Carolyn would certainly have applied. Through it all, Kennedy resolved to be “a good soldier” and have only positive thoughts and make positive comments about Schlossberg.
It was a difficult undertaking, since Schlossberg had annoyed many of the Kennedys with his imperious behavior. Kennedy was still angry over Schlossberg’s alleged pressure on the clan to sell patriarch Joe Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago in 1998. “Our family should never have sold it,” he wrote in his diary. “But Ed Schlossberg forced the sale. He brought in a top real estate lawyer . . . to force the family to sell. He considers himself a financial genius.”
Ted Kennedy delivered a “wrenching” eulogy for his nephew at the funeral at the small St. Thomas More Church on the Upper East Side, where “the streets were packed and the press were piled on each other like a wedding cake,” Kennedy wrote. More than 350 people attended the private service for the couple, passing through strict security measures at the church. Sharpshooters were positioned in the tower of the church and on top of nearby buildings, likely due to the presence of President Clinton and his family, according to press reports. John Jr.’s hero Muhammad Ali was among the celebrity guests. The hip hop artist Wyclef Jean, a favorite of John Jr., sang Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross.” A gospel choir sang “Amazing Grace.”
“We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side,” said Ted Kennedy, paraphrasing the William Butler Yeats poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” in the eulogy, which was released to the public by his Senate office. “But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.” John Jr. was thirty-eight when he died; Carolyn Bessette was thirty-three.
Ted also made sure to thank the Clintons for their presence and told of how, when they had once asked John Jr. what he would do if he were ever elected president, he had replied, “I guess the first thing is to call up Uncle Teddy and gloat.” “I loved that,” said Ted. “It was so like his father.”
At the reception afterward, which took place at the Convent of the Sacred Heart two blocks away from the church, where Caroline had gone to school, the senator led a choir in three songs “and danced his silly Teddy dances and sang loudly and beautifully and made everyone . . . love him,” Kennedy wrote. But when the choir sang a mournful song to conclude, the senator scolded them and said a live-lier number was needed. They closed with “Happy Days,” the anthem of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960.
Kennedy did a brief reading for John Jr. at a service for Lauren Bessette in Greenwich, Connecticut, on July 24. Mary was an usher at the ceremony at Christ Episcopal Church. It was Melody Miller, a Kennedy family aide who had begun her career by answering the thousands of condolence letters that had poured in after the assassination of John Kennedy and had gone on to work for his brothers Robert and Ted, who gave Kennedy the idea for his short eulogy to John Jr. “Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end” was from Macbeth, spoken by Ross to Old Siward in the play after he informs him that his son has just died in battle. Kennedy pronounced it perfect for John. “The service couldn’t have been better and I think Mary and I were able to be of some comfort to both families, so I am grateful,” he wrote.
On Sunday, Kennedy received more bad news after he found out that Judge Johnson had died in Alabama. He didn’t hesitate; the next day he boarded a plane for Montgomery, showing up on time for a service in the judge’s courtroom. “Judge Johnson, really through his courage35 and integrity, helped make this country a true constitutional democracy,” he said after the service. “He is as much an American hero as the leaders of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”
Kennedy might have been entitled and arrogant, but he rarely missed a funeral. “Bobby takes death very seriously,” said a former friend who has known Kennedy for nearly twenty years. “He wasn’t scoring any political points by showing up for my father’s funeral.”
Nor was he trying to score political points when he sent his Millbrook classmate Peter Jenny “a sweet note” in 1971 after he’d read that his father had died. Perhaps his thoughtfulness around death stemmed from his deep-seated conviction that he wanted to be a better person.
“I always wanted to be useful, to meet the expectation of the gifts I’d been given,” he wrote in his diary on May 27, 1999, under a thickly underlined heading reading “Service.” But he recognized that he was largely a failure because everything he did revolved around “vanity that proceeded from ego. I’ve seen people in my sobriety attend funerals and face crisis and make themselves the centerpiece—the crisis is about them and their suffering. They shout and create drama to call attention to themselves. They show up at the funeral and make a scene or don’t show up at all to make their absence a controversy. I recognize similar kinds of behavior in myself. At the dinner table, my brother will tell a story and I will tell a better one to top his. I will want the attention of someone and I will show off.”
He willed himself to “sit back and wait for God” to tell him to act, he wrote. “I must sit still and get in touch with God, praying for the ability to be useful. . . . I need to look for opportunities to quietly help rather than looking for opportunities to shine brightly.” But sitting still would prove to be almost impossible for Robert Kennedy Jr., the crusading lawyer and environmental activist. Perhaps it was his unchecked ambition to “shine brightly” that would lead to one of the worst tragedies in his family.
Chapter 7
“Things Fall Apart”
Death continued to haunt the Kennedy family in the summer of 1999. Shortly after they had attended the funerals of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the Bessette sisters, family members found themselves on their way to another somber gathering after the death of Anthony Radziwill, who had died on August 10.
The funeral was in East Hampton, where his mother, Lee, owned Dune Cottage, an oceanfront mansion on three acres. Kennedy set out at 6:00 a.m. to drive there from Westchester County. Traffic in the posh summer enclave was heavier than usual as reporters surrounded the Most Holy Trinity Church on Buell Lane in the heart of the village, although it was nothing like the swarm that had turned out for the funeral of John F. Kennedy Jr. just a few weeks before in Manhattan, Kennedy observed. Many of Anthony’s colleagues from ABC and HBO, where he had been an award-winning producer, were in attendance, noted Kennedy, who described the “sweet” eulogy that the journalist Diane Sawyer delivered, likening Anthony to a knight and echoing Sir Thomas Malory’s tribute to the fictional Sir Lancelot in the fifteenth century.
James Rubin, then assistant secretary of state for public affairs and chief spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, told Mary that his wife, CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, was not able to come because she had just landed in Kosovo and there was no way for her to get onto a commercial flight to make it on time for the funeral. “I couldn’t think of a credible reason to fly her out on a government plane, and I was scared if I did, someone in the room would report it,” he told Mary.
Caroline Kennedy gave the main eulogy, and, according to Kennedy, she had spent the previous day with Anthony’s wife, Carole, at the Mark Hotel in Manhattan consulting with Ed Schlossberg and Charles O’Byrne, the priest and close friend of the Kennedy family, to plan the Mass. John Jr. was to have done the eulogy for his best friend and cousin and had started to put together notes before he died. Although Caroline was reluctant to take his place, she finally agreed, feeling that both John and Anthony would have wanted it, according to Kennedy. “Her eulogy was beautiful1,” he said. She opened by wondering how Anthony could possibly have won so many Emmys when he always seemed to be playing practical jokes on his friends. She recalled that he had called her days before her own wedding, pretending to be a gardener, florist, and caterer with “frightening news and developments.” But the best joke, she said, had been his calling her in the guise of the German publisher of the world’s largest bodybuilding magazine to ask if her husband would pose on the cover with her cousin by marriage Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had already agreed.
Following the service and a reception at Lee Radziwill’s sprawling waterfront home, Anthony’s body was flown by helicopter to Islip, where he was cremated. Kennedy and his wife headed to his aunt Patricia Kennedy Lawford’s estate in Southampton, where he spent the afternoon in the pool. The ashes were returned to the family the same day, and family members reconvened at the Radziwill beach house to sprinkle the ashes into the Atlantic Ocean. “Lee and Carole were pummeled by the waves,” wrote Kennedy, as they waded out into the ocean accompanied by a somber procession that included Sawyer’s husband, the film director Mike Nichols, as well as Ed and Caroline, among other close family members.
Again braving summer traffic, Kennedy and Mary drove back to Westchester County and had a “great” Japanese dinner along the way. But their time together was marred by a call from Emily Black asking Kennedy about their two children. Mary fell into a rage when they got home and demanded that Kennedy leave the house with his older children. The next day, he bundled up Kick and Bobby, but she warned that he would not be allowed to take the other children—“Her kids”—and headed to Hyannis Port. “I’m really in despair2,” he wrote on Saturday, August 14, as he drove with his children to the cape. “She says the cruelest things. She says I only wanted kids to show off and wasn’t willing to take care of them and that this is what Emily used to say.”
But his escape to the cape, the scene of so many happy summers, was a bad idea. He arrived at midnight in “a dreary rain.” After putting his children to bed, he walked to the end of the dock and noticed that the lights were on in John Jr.’s home. As he walked closer to the house, called Brambletyde, the summer home of President Kennedy and his family, Kennedy half expected to see John Jr.’s friends preparing for one of their famous midnight dinners. But no one was home. When he looked through the porch window, he spotted the harpoon that he and John Jr. had used when they had dressed up as ghosts to scare the Kennedy children. “I thought, ‘This is all that’s left here—the ghosts,’” he wrote, noting that he had attended four funerals that summer. “And I walked home in the downpour. It was one of the saddest moments of my life.”
***
After a difficult summer, Kennedy headed into a busy and eventful fall, with his classes at Pace University’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and a consulting gig with Vice President Al Gore, who was putting together his campaign for the top job. He also met with Hillary Clinton, who arrived at his home surrounded by Secret Service agents, to get a briefing—“A quick seminar”—on New York’s watershed agreement3, which Kennedy and Cronin had been only marginally a part of during their time together working against Hudson River polluters. In between, he recorded “walking on eggshells4” as Mary began a new course of antidepressants that hadn’t yet kicked in.
Things were definitely weighing on him. At the end of a day of hawking with his son Conor and a few friends, he confessed to his diary that the deaths in his family and his difficulties with Mary were bringing him down. On September 19, his friend and former Harvard classmate Peter Kaplan came by his home in Bedford and told him he was mired in a midlife crisis. Kaplan was dating one of the editors at the New York Observer and enmeshed in a divorce from his first wife, Audrey Walker, the mother of his three children. Both men had turned forty-five that year, and although outwardly they seemed to be at the top of their game, they both confessed to feeling trapped by their insecurities. Kaplan, who had worked as a reporter for The New York Times and producer on Charlie Rose, was now in his fifth year as the editor of the influential weekly, whose salmon-colored pages had become required reading for anyone interested in New York’s power elite.
“He wonders, as do I5, if he’s added value, if he’s used his life and his gifts to maximize his service to others,” wrote Kennedy about his friend, adding that he had told him that the greatest measure of his life and service was how he treated those closest to him. But even as the words had come out of his mouth, he had wondered if he had followed his own counsel. “I’ve lost the sense of certitude since the early days of my sobriety when I had all the answers and saw God in everything.” Back then, when he had gotten serious about dealing with his addiction in 1984, even the death of his younger brother David had made some sense because “it brought my family together.” It had also led him into Alcoholics Anonymous and his work with Riverkeeper. In the same way, his “painful divorce” from Emily had led to his love for Mary, he wrote. “But now I feel shattered, like nothing has meaning and nothing makes sense, and ‘things fall apart.’ The title to that book rings daily in my ears as I think of a relationship I’ve lost.” The book in question was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian writer’s 1958 novel about colonialism in his native country. Achebe had taken his title from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which would have particularly appealed to Kennedy as it describes a world in which “The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
For Kennedy, it may have indeed seemed as though his life was spiraling out of control and that much of it was his own fault. “My defects are like weeds6,” he wrote. “You cut them and they stay down a while. Then they come back. You pour pesticides on them and they come back. You pull them by the roots, they come back. They pop up through the cracks.”
