Page 6 Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein
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John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn died in a 1999 plane crash.
Photo: Dave Allocca/DMI/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kept secret diaries that were found by his wife, Mary, who committed suicide last year in the midst of a contentious divorce. The Post, which was provided copies of the journals by a source, previously reported how the volumes detailed RFK’s “lust demons” while chronicling his sexual conquests with 37 women. Now, newly revealed entries show the family’s reaction to JFK Jr.’s death in 1999.
The tragic death of John F. Kennedy Jr. was marked by deep sorrow — and intense family bickering over the funerals before the bodies were even recovered, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s secret diary.
The journal’s entries in the aftermath of the July 16, 1999, plane crash that killed Kennedy, 38, wife Carolyn Bessette, 33, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette, 34, provide a rare eyewitness account of the intensely private scene at the Kennedy compound and the petty, tense squabbling over whether Carolyn deserved the royal Kennedy treatment.
Kennedy reports on a heated meeting in New York City, three days after the crash, during which other Kennedy family members tell Ann Freeman, Carolyn Bessette’s grieving mother, that JFK Jr. would be buried in the family plot in Brookline, Mass., and “that they could do with Carolyn as they pleased.”
The heart-wrenching drama of JFK Jr.’s death was one of many private family moments Kennedy chronicled in thick, red journals reviewed by The Post.
In mid-July 1999, the family was coming together at their Hyannis Port, Mass., retreat for the wedding of RFK Jr.’s sister Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
RFK Jr.’s wife had visited JFK Jr. and Bessette a week earlier and Bessette told her that her husband was “so depressed” because he was fighting with his sister, Caroline, over furniture at the Martha’s Vineyard home that once belonged to their mother and had been left to them when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994. JFK Jr. was in the process of buying out his sister’s share in the Red Gate Farm estate.
Kennedy notes that “John confided to me also about how hurt he was by Caroline’s actions.” (Last spring, Caroline Kennedy, who is about to be sworn in as the US ambassador to Japan, put part of the estate on the market for $45 million.)
Kennedy also mentions JFK Jr.’s struggles with George magazine, which he co-founded, and the uproar caused when he invited Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to join his table at that year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Sen. Ted Kennedy had written nephew John a “disappointed letter” about the decision and “John was hurt by that because his family is so important.”
Kennedy doesn’t say anything about the marital troubles between John and Carolyn, strife that largely came to light after their deaths.
“Mary and I resolved we will go see them this weekend and spend a lot of time with them,” RFK Jr., now 59, wrote of his cousin, who was seven years his junior.
The couple stopped by JFK Jr.’s house in Hyannis Port before the wedding rehearsal dinner the next night, at 6 p.m., but he wasn’t there.
They went back at 9, 10 and 11:30 that night, Kennedy writes. A friend and the housekeeper were there and had prepared dinner expecting to eat together, but John and Carolyn were nowhere to be found.
“I wasn’t worried at all because anything can happen with John,” he writes.
But at 3 a.m., Kennedy writes, he was awakened by his sister Kerry, who said their cousin’s plane was missing.
“I knew then that John was dead,” he writes.
He looked over to the porch light burning at his cousin’s house and felt empty and sad.
The next day, Sen. Ted Kennedy announced Rory’s wedding had been postponed, as the press gathered at the compound.
“The water was 68 degrees so some people had hope they might still be alive but I had none,” Kennedy writes.
The bickering over the bodies began the next day, July 18, before they were even recovered.
The Bessette family was “very upset” about where the trio would be buried, with the girls’ mother preferring a plot in Greenwich, Conn., close to her home.
“Ann wants them close by and is terrified that the K family might try to spirit them to Brookline,” Kennedy writes.
The Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline is the resting place of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, the family patriarch and matriarch.
After more frantic phone calls, Kennedy says a meeting in New York City was arranged with Ann Freeman and Caroline Kennedy. Instead, Kennedy sent her husband, Ed Schlossberg, along with Vicky Reggie, Ted Kennedy’s wife, RFK Jr. notes.
“All the Bessette family knows that Ed hated Carolyn and did everything in his power to make her life miserable and . . . he bullied, bullied, bullied the shattered grieving mother,” he writes.
The relationship between Carolyn Bessette and her sister-in-law and brother-in law had long been frosty. By one account, Caroline Kennedy criticized Carolyn for being late to her own wedding in 1996.
The bodies were recovered on July 21, all still in seat belts.
In the end, the burial fight proved moot. The bodies were cremated, the remains placed in “Tiffany blue” cardboard boxes, and a burial at sea was planned.
The next day, July 22, Kennedy and other family members, including his uncle Ted, got into three vans, with a police escort, for the trip to Woods Hole, Mass. There they boarded a Navy cutter and rendezvoused with the destroyer USS Briscoe a mile off the coast. The ship took them out 20 miles off Gay Head, Mass., about a mile from the crash site.
“The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen. 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,” Kennedy writes.
He notes that the Navy band “played mournful music and we all cried like babies.”
The next day, July 23, Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy for his nephew at the funeral at St. Thomas More Church on the Upper East Side. At the reception afterward, the senator led a choir in three songs “and danced his silly Teddy dances and sang loudly and beautifully and made everyone . . . love him,” RFK Jr. writes.
But when the choir sang a mournful song to conclude, the senator scolded the group and said a livelier number was needed.
“They closed with ‘Happy Days,’ ” Kennedy notes.
RFK Jr. did a brief reading for his cousin the next day at a service for Lauren Bessette in Greenwich, Conn.
Kennedy says he had been “trying to get through as a good soldier and making only positive comments and thoughts about Ed Schlossberg.”
But he recounted that his cousin Caroline’s husband was behaving like a dictator. At one point, he refused to allow RFK Jr. to deliver a eulogy for John and Carolyn at the St. Thomas More service.
“Kennedys don’t eulogize non-Kennedys,” Schlossberg told Carolyn’s sister, Lisa, RFK Jr. writes.
Lisa angrily responded, “Ed, do you make up these rules as you go along?” before slamming down the phone, Kennedy recalls.
A few weeks later, Carole Radziwill, the wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin and best friend, Anthony Radziwill, called to relate more of Schlossberg’s bad behavior.
“She says she wants to start an ‘I hate Ed Club.’ There would be many, many members. John & Carolyn would have certainly applied,” he writes.
On July 28, 1999, Kennedy learned that his cousin left him $250,000 in his will.
“I cried. I’ve lost such a good friend,” he writes.
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