Remembering JFK Jr. 25 Years After His Tragic Death

Has it really been 25 years?

It was a hot and hazy morning in July when I received a call from the business editor of the New York Post.

”John John’s plane is missing,” said Jon Auerbach. Kennedy had departed the evening before on July 16th in the small private plane he owned, with his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren in what would be his last day on earth before crashing into the sea about seven miles off of Martha’s Vineyard. But we did not know that at the time. I remember an unusual number of planes seemed to be flying low over Long Island Sound, it turned out searching for what would have been his route, hugging the coast line north.

Instead of driving to celebrate my dad’s birthday on July 17 with my oldest son, not quite two years old, and my wife Pat, very pregnant with son number two, I drove back from Long Island to the Post newsroom. Our oldest son, Ruairi, is now a captain in the USMC stationed in Kuwait. Second oldest son, Luke, is a young ambulance driver with the FDNY/EMS in the South Bronx. You wonder if John and Carolyn had had kids, what promising careers would their offspring would be embarking upon themselves today?

On the way in, I passed the Sts. Philip & James school house where I had gone to elementary school. It was where I had learned that President Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963 and that his brother Sen. Robert Kennedy was killed a few years later in June 1968.

I had an ominous feeling about the fate of the latest Kennedy who I had come to know in my years covering him as a media columnist. The connection started casually, ever before he would launch his political magazine George, when I spied him taking in a seminar at the Folio: show at the Hilton Hotel entitled “How to Launch Your Own Magazine.” (There was a time when running a magazine was considered a cool thing to do.) The instructor informed the class they could launch a magazine about anything except religion and politics. Kennedy was undeterred. He would go on to launch George for what he hoped would be a post-partisan era in American politics and the melding of politics and pop culture.

As he was descending an escalator at the Hilton I caught up to him. “Hey John, are you thinking of launching your own magazine?” He was polite but noncommittal. “Well if you ever do decide to launch a magazine, will you promise to tell me first?”

By the time he did get ready to unveil his debut issue, I had moved on to Ad Age, the bible of the media industry, and his first pre-launch interview was going to me. The romantic in me always liked to think it was John keeping a vague promise he made on an escalator a year earlier, one Irishman to another. But in reality, it was probably at the urging of his boss, David Pecker, who would go on to infamy when he later owned the National Enquirer but at the time was the CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media, and he had agreed to bankroll Kennedy’s magazine to the tune of $20 million.

In its developmental days, Kennedy had the habit of picking up the extension of Rose Marie Torenzio, his executive assistant who now has a new book out on her one-time boss “JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography. It is co-written by Terenzio and People magazine editor-at-large Liz McNeil and it is sure to be a bestseller.

Pecker knew Kennedy was a hot topic, but wanted less coverage of “sexiest man alive does magazine” since JFK Jr. had already had been profiled in Newsweek, Esquire and New York–all without actually being interviewed. I remember asking Kennedy if he was launching the magazine about politics as a stepping stone to a political career. And he had a quick answer. “There are easier ways to get into politics than launching a magazine.” Some months later, we enjoyed a Guinness and a meal at Swift’s Hibernian Lounge just off the Bowery. I remember John arriving via bike. He played a game of three dimensioal checkers at the bar with a young woman who challenged him to a match, When we adjourned for dinner in the back room, I remember us talking more about Ireland than publishing or American politics. I delicately broached the topic of the media running a clip of the argument that he was seen having in Central Park with a then-unknown woman who would turn out to be Carolyn Bessette, who he’d end up marrying that September. He flashed the only sign of anger I ever saw from him. “I think it’s disgusting,” he snapped of the unwanted intrusion into his private life.

I moved to the Daily News shortly thereafter and chronicled that the attention–and ad support–that George enjoyed at its 1996 debut had begun to flag. Kennedy always stayed off the cover, not wanting to cash in on the Prince of Camelot celebrityhood which clearly would have boosted sales. But he did write a monthly editor’s note with an accompanying photo. And in one issue, he appeared looking up at an apple wearing swimming trunks which were shrouded in a shadow so that it looked at a quick glance that he had posed nude. Circulation jumped at this sneak peak at the bod of Sexiest Man Alive--but some advertisers felt the nude–or near-nude–photo was a stunt not fit for a serious magazine where they were spending their ad dollars.

Kennedy wrote me after our story ran. “Nude is nude. That’s not nude. Perhaps you spent too much time in Catholic school.” I still have the letter. Good-natured humor was a Kennedy trademark.

Not long after, I moved to become the Media Ink columnist at the New York Post. And the move was duly noted by Kennedy in another personal letter, where he wrote, “congratulations on the new job. I hope to deal with you more in the future.” And he signed it, “Cheers. John (not John John) Kennedy.” It was July, 1998. By the following July, he was gone.

But the time he died in the plane crash on July 16, George had circulation of over 400,000 which was more than the National Review, The Nation and the New Republic combined. But it was having trouble sustaining the ad support that a major, big circulation consumer glossy needed to survive.

I’m of the unshakeable belief that Kennedy ultimately would have run for the US Senate, but only after he proved that the scion of a political dynasty could also be a successful entrepreneur who could push George into the black.

I think whenever he ran, he would have won in a landslide. And imagine where we’d be if someone of his graciousness and humor was on the national stage today. He would be only 63 years old if he had lived. Twenty five years after his passing, I miss him more than ever.