Original subtitles

[♪♪♪]

[Newsreel]: Well, this is the man

who, in the next 24 hours,

may become President of the United States,

and she, First Lady of the land.

[JFK]: So now,

my wife and I prepare for a new administration

and for a new baby. Thank you.

Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

Every degree of mind and spirit that I possess

will be devoted

to the long-range interests of the United States

and to the cause of freedom around the world.

[Sam Pate]: Just a moment, please.

Something has happened in the motorcade route.

Stand by, please.

Parkland Hospital... there has been a shooting.

Parkland Hospital has been advised to stand by

for a severe gunshot wound.

The flash, apparently official,

President Kennedy died

at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.

[Bill Hampton]: The president of the United States is dead.

I have just talked to Father Oscar Huber

of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

He and another priest tell me that the pair of men

have just administered

the last rites of the Catholic Church

to President Kennedy.

President Kennedy has been assassinated.

It's official now. The president is dead.

[Newsreel]: As the casket is returned to the caisson,

there comes a family vignette that must take its place

with those memories we hold warm and dear,

a gentle reminder from his mother,

and John John celebrates his third birthday

with a soldier's farewell to his father.

It's easy for someone to say, "Well, I'm going to be me."

Well, that's easy

when nobody gives a damn who you are,

but when somebody has definite ideas about you,

superlative ones, in John's case...

"You'll be the greatest.

You are the most handsome.

You are royalty.

You are bound and destined for greatness.

Do nothing normal. Do nothing pedestrian.

You are better than that and everyone."

That's not easy to have on your shoulders.

He's the only person we've ever seen

have that kind of greatness put upon him.

In our culture,

where we don't recognize royalty,

he was the closest thing we had to a crown prince.

He was the heir,

the heir to the promise and to the challenge,

"Don't ask what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country."

That salute of John Jr.

is the first extraordinary celebrity moment

in John Jr.'s life.

From that moment on, his life was different.

From the very beginning, you know, that little salute,

he was under scrutiny and pressure.

I think John F. Kennedy Jr.'s salute

is a defining moment in the American public,

in their psyche,

that we're going to see more from this kid.

[Larry King]: Is it tough being a junior?

I don't have a basis of comparison, so...

I mean, are there ever days you say,

"I wish my name were David"?

No, I'm pretty happy with what it is.

It's complicated,

and it makes for a rich and complicated life,

but that's, I think, part of the puzzle

to figure out in my life.

For me, it wasn't meeting

the little boy saluting the casket.

I think for my mother, it would have been that.

For me, it was like, I mean,

he's, like, a hot New York bachelor.

The first time I met him,

I was working out in my gym in Tribeca,

and a mutual friend had brought him up there

while I was working out,

and so I was on the bike, and we shook hands.

I was just fortunate enough to meet him and engage with him

and go on just a minute

of a cosmic-dust journey with him,

and it was pretty awesome.

You know, his tentacles, his love,

it reaches out from the grave. It's still here now.

A Native American said

that when somebody takes your picture,

you lose a piece of your soul.

How he retained his soul

after hundreds of thousands of pictures

is one of his greatest accomplishments.

He had a brilliant capacity

for getting people to quit looking

at the balloon of himself that he was towing overhead,

the sort of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade-sized

John F. Kennedy Jr.

to the guy that was standing there

who was remarkable in his own way

but was, you know,

put his pants on one leg at a time.

You know, one of the things

that John tried to do throughout his life

was be his own man and go his own path.

He obviously had the whole specter

of his presidential father and his very famous mother

and a family that was known for politics,

but, you know, John was very much his own man.

He marched to his own beat.

Like many sons of famous fathers,

there's a legacy.

There's sort of a big mountain to climb.

So I think he felt like he had to do something significant.

I mean, he couldn't just get a job.

[Barlow]: His being part of the Kennedy legacy,

the really important thing to know about John

in that regard

was that he was not a Kennedy.

He was a Bouvier.

His mother was the guiding, shaping force in his life,

and he looked very much like her,

but he was also very much a Kennedy,

very devoted to his family, to the name,

to the history, very, very much so.

He couldn't separate himself from that legacy,

and nor would he want to.

The process of separation

becomes a problem for a presidential child.

Their greatest single challenge is to find a separate identity.

Who am I?

He called me up one night, and he said,

"I've been thinking a lot about great men,

and it occurs to me

that it would be kind of a cakewalk

for me to become a great man.

I mean, everybody expects me to be a great man.

I'm perfectly positioned.

You know, if I don't f*** up in some major way,

I can just do it,"

and he said, "But I've been reading a lot of biographies

of great men all the way through history,

and I'm realizing that not one of them

seems to have been a good guy at home.

I mean, even Gandhi beat his family,

and, you know, and my father was no model,

and I wonder

if it wouldn't be a much more interesting challenge

in my position

to set out at this point

and see if I couldn't make myself a good man."

And that was really paramount to him.

He wanted to be good

in his relationship with his wife.

That was really important. He wanted it to work.

He wanted to be good in his relationship with his sister,

who was very important to him.

No schadenfreude at all.

He wanted his friends to succeed,

so I think John Perry Barlow's comment

about him wanting to be good

is really important in understanding who John was.

I also knew that pressures were about to enter his life

in increasing force

that would make sticking with that principle

an extremely hard thing to pull off

because everybody in the world

was going to be tugging at his sleeve.

People were going to treat him like a thing.

They already were.

It's difficult to maintain your goodness

if you're being treated like a thing.

If you were to have a son,

would you encourage

a political career for him?

I would, definitely.

I would hope he would grow up to be,

if not a politician

in the sense of devoting all of his time,

I would hope that whatever he did do,

that he would have some sense of responsibility

for what went on.

Over a quarter century ago,

my father stood before you

to accept the nomination

for the presidency of the United States.

[cheering]

In 1988, John introduced his uncle Teddy Kennedy

to the Democratic National Convention.

The place went wild.

[cheering]

Thank you.

There's a huge gravitational pull towards politics

because that's kind of what he...

I mean, he was just such a natural at it.

John was smart enough to know "I'm Junior.

I'm not John F. Kennedy. I'm not my father."

He did this counter-culture.

He didn't want to be

what everyone thought he should be or become,

and I thought that took a lot of balls.

Having people on him, fawn over him,

since he was a little baby,

especially after what had happened,

so I liked that reserved thing about him.

Easy to relate to.

John really, for me, represented someone

who had every right to be a cynic

and decided to be a romantic.

Obviously, John, to everybody, was a very charismatic person,

because of his name, because of his family,

but also because of him.

He had this very attractive personality,

part humble, part irreverent,

very handsome, very energetic,

and people projected all their hopes and dreams

on this son of this family.

You never thought of running for office?

That had to have come up

in some discussion somewhere.

No, I mean, I've certainly thought about it,

but I think that, you know,

there is this great weight

of expectation and anticipation,

and I think

that part of you wants to sort of address that

in some way

and maybe do something different,

and maybe, but just to sort of engage it.

Most people get into politics

for one of or a combination of three reasons.

It's for money,

it's for power,

or it's for fame.

John had all three the day he was born.

In Georgetown,

a hopeful crowd

waits for a glimpse of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.,

first baby to be,

who is whisked by,

heavily swaddled against the sub-freezing weather.

One of the reasons Americans loved the Kennedys

was because we didn't have this grandfather Eisenhower

in the White House any longer.

We had this young family.

We had this beautiful young wife and mother.

We had Caroline,

and, especially, we had John Jr.

We had this exciting, irascible little boy

running through the White House.

Jackie Kennedy

is an extraordinary figure in this story

because she's very bright.

People think of her as young, and so young as First Lady,

that it hardly registers

that she was a very bright young lady,

and she had done studies about presidential children.

She was a bit of an expert before her time

on presidential children.

In fact, when the Clintons were elected president,

one of the first things they did was brought in Jackie Kennedy

and ask her advice.

[Leamer]: His mother understood

the wages of celebrity, what celebrity does to you.

President Kennedy saw the advantages of celebrity...

[speaking Spanish]

[cheering]

Seeing the advantages of his beautiful wife,

what that brought to him politically,

and he saw the advantages of his children.

We have those great photos

of the kids scampering around the Oval Office.

That was the president, who knew that "Jackie's not here,"

and said to his secretary, "Go get the kids."

So they brought them from the mansion

over to the West Wing

and had them scamper around the Oval Office,

and we have those delightful pictures today.

They never would have happened on Jacqueline Kennedy's watch.

Instantly, John Jr. becomes a star.

He becomes part of the national fabric

of our lives.

Here was this kid who was sort of America's kid...

really, a part of royalty

in a country that doesn't have royalty.

[Andersen]: If you called John's name in the White House,

as Jack often did, summoned him,

he didn't come right away,

so often what you'd hear echoing down the White House halls

was "John? John? John? John?"

If you wanted to get under his skin,

you'd say, "Listen, John John,"

and, you know, that would be the "argh."

[Chermayeff]: He had a really, really nice relationship

with his mom and his sister.

You know, I mean, his mother was incredibly gracious,

but, as John said, she ran a tight ship.

It was a little...

It looked a little more free-flowing, you know,

but she was actually very together,

and John was the kind of kid that needed a lot of assistance

getting his stuff together for a long time,

and probably really irritating in a lot of ways.

[Barlow]: He was an amazing character.

He could remember not only everybody's name,

but everybody's dog's name, you know.

He had a natural talent for being graceful.

He had absolutely the best teacher in the world

in his mother,

and she passed that on seamlessly to him.

[Chermayeff]: They adored each other, all of them,

Caroline and John and their mother.

I mean, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

still is, like...

in the top five style icons that I can think of.

I mean, she's referenced constantly in fashion.

The media may overdo

how perfectly classy and perfect she was,

but she was classy.

She was.

She did dress

in a tailored, appropriate, sophisticated manner.

Jackie Kennedy, to anybody from the outside,

was this larger-than-life, iconic figure,

made so particularly, obviously,

because of what she so publicly went through.

The globalized grief and tragedy of the Kennedy assassination

and the fact

that this young, beautiful widow and mother was left...

Everyone in the world admired Jackie Kennedy.

Everybody imitated her.

Everybody felt her pain and her sadness after 1963,

and everybody watched those children

as if they were their children.

This is a little boy, you know,

born on Thanksgiving Day.

You know, his father

had been elected President of the United States.

He barely knew his own father.

He lost him in the most violent and unacceptable of ways.

For the five years

after Jack Kennedy's assassination,

Bobby Kennedy really functioned

as the father to John and Caroline.

When Bobby was gunned down in 1968,

in a sense, John and Caroline lost their father a second time.

Jackie was devastated.

[Andersen]: She said, "They're killing Kennedys,

and my children are the number-one target,

and I'm basically out of here."

And she married Aristotle Onassis.

Aristotle Onassis was not only fabulously wealthy,

but he also had a 75-man security force.

It was a kind of a charmed life, in a sense,

but, sadly, it didn't last for long.

Onassis died

six weeks after entering the American hospital here

just outside of Paris.

John's life, as we all know, was a very complicated life.

His mother kept him and his sister

sort of away from a lot of the world, you know,

and a lot of it was driven by security concerns.

You know, in the beginning,

he really kind of needed a father

that wasn't a Secret Service agent.

[Andersen]: In search of a strong male figure,

Jackie had heard of a fellow named John Perry Barlow,

who was a kind of a free spirit

who wrote songs for the Grateful Dead

and owned a ranch in Wyoming.

[Barlow chuckles]

It was fairly late in the evening.

I was sitting at the galactic headquarters

of the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company

in Cora, Wyoming.

I get this breathy voice on the phone

that says, "Hi, this is Jacqueline Onassis,"

and I said, "Well, in the highly unlikely event

that this isn't some kind of a joke,

what can I do for you?"

Two days later, he was on the ranch.

He always talked about Barlow.

You know, "Barlow this, Barlow that."

He was sort of this legendary figure in John's life.

[♪♪♪]

[Wiese]: You know, when John enrolled at Brown University,

it was, you know, pretty big news.

Brown didn't have

a Kennedy school of this or that,

or a Kennedy library,

and I think he probably liked a little of that anonymity.

You know, you'd walk around a football game

with, you know, a sign saying, you know,

"Party after the game at Phi Psi,"

and when John joined the frat, it went from advertising

to restricting people from coming in.

You know, we started getting lines out the door.

At a certain level,

as much as I could relate to John,

there's very few people on this earth

who could relate

to how he grew up

and what was normal to him.

He had been at a Rolling Stones concert,

and he might have even had, you know,

Keith Richards' guitar.

I thought, you know, "Let's face it.

Most college students,

they just sort of connive

their way into a concert.

You know, most people

aren't going to be backstage with the Stones."

One night, you know, he took me out reveling

with Hunter S. Thompson.

Can you imagine?

With John Kennedy, Hunter S. Thompson,

and I'm in this fabulous bar,

but I knew that this was special,

and maybe John would go on to something else.

So I said to him, "So, John,

do you want to be president one day?"

and he said, "Shut up, Kissy."

He just didn't entertain us going into that area.

[Andersen]: You know, Jackie also felt

that he had a destiny to fulfill,

and part of that destiny

would involve his going to law school.

John F. Kennedy's going to find out soon

if all that cramming he did has paid off.

He began taking his New York bar exams

The son of the late president will have to pass this time

if he wants to hold onto his $30,000-a-year job

as an assistant D.A.

I think when I was running for Congress,

and one time I got bad press on something,

and he sort of laughed at me and he said,

"You have no idea what bad press is

until you're on the front page of the New York Post ."

Slow news day, I guess, huh?

John, a lot of people waiting for you here.

How do you feel about...

Is it true that you passed the bar?

Uh, apparently it's true.

I got the official word not long ago, so it's true.

What do you mean, "not long ago?"

Just a few minutes ago?

I got the word.

That's really all that's important.

What many people don't know

is that John had a reading disability,

and you're supposed to get more time

on the bar exam.

He wouldn't take more time on the bar exam

because he thought people would think

that he was getting special favor,

and that was a mistake for him,

but that was part of being John.

I'm looking forward to doing some good things here,

and I'm glad it's behind me.

Are you going to stay here

in the D.A.'s office?

Sure. Absolutely.

What kind of cases are you looking forward to?

Whatever they give me.

[Coulter]: I think it's sort of unfair,

the business about him failing the New York bar exam.

For one thing, Hillary Clinton failed it,

and all I hear about is how brilliant she is,

but, moreover,

the bar exam is something you do have to study for.

It isn't an IQ test.

It's learning specific knowledge,

and here he is, you know,

the sexiest man in the universe,

according to People magazine.

He's young, he's single.

How much studying was he doing?

You can imagine, among friends,

some of the ribbing he would have, you know, got.

It was like, "John, does that mean sexiest ever?"

I mean, we used to tease him. "Qualify for it."

It turned out to be a really great way

to take the piss out of him. [laughs]

"Oh, do I have the sexiest man in the galaxy on the phone?"

[chuckles]

[Cuomo]: Did he like to have his shirt off a lot?

Yeah, sure, he did.

I would too, if I looked like that guy.

Of course, it's easy to deal with women

when you are People magazine's sexiest human in the universe.

[laughs]

Just smile. We'll do whatever you want.

[laughs]

He certainly was a hand with the ladies.

[laughs]

No question about that.

[Chermayeff]: None of those were very serious.

They made a lot out of that stuff, you know.

Sarah Jessica Parker and John

had, you know, no relationship, really,

not really,

and Madonna, not really.

Like, maybe one night. Sorry.

Who knows, maybe more. What do I know?

John really was a serial monogamist,

in spite of the fact that it was very difficult

for his girlfriends to believe that,

because he was under a continuous barrage

of other opportunities.

The actress Daryl Hannah, the star of...

At that time, she was best-known for the movie Splash ,

but she was in John's circle

because she came

from a very wealthy family of Democratic donors,

but in 1988, the same year

that he was on the cover

of the People M agazine's "The Sexiest Man Alive,"

they began a relationship,

and this was a serious relationship

that lasted five years.

They are the fun couple of '93, a paparazzi's dream.

John F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah

are traveling the world these days.

I know that, while they were together,

you know, John had a lot of concern for her,

that she understood celebrity and attention

in a way that, you know, other women could not.

This is the JFK special spotter version.

You probably can get him

at the length of two football fields easily with this.

I never have seen anyone get reactions the way he did.

Not the biggest rock star, not the biggest movie star,

because he wasn't an entertainer.

He was the real deal.

He was the living legacy

of the closest thing to greatness

a big slice of this country

thought that we had ever experienced in a leader.

That's what Kennedy was.

I remember watching,

in sort of a combination of horror and awe,

the way men and women threw themselves at him,

Even if they physically weren't throwing themselves at him,

they were emotionally throwing themselves at him.

People would come up to him

and you could see them just shedding IQ points

as they approached.

...the closer they got, the dumber they were.

You knew that they'd been pretty bright

over here someplace,

but by the time they got there, they were just dumb as bait.

When People magazine came out,

that was somewhat of a dividing line in his life.

You know, he was a single guy in New York City.

He wasn't being treated as, you know,

the son of a slain president

or, you know, son of Jacqueline Onassis.

At this point, I think, with the press,

they felt that everything was fair game.

That happened to John, like, every day,

everywhere he went,

and even in the biggest city in America,

you could see, walking on Broadway,

"pop, pop, pop."

That doesn't happen to normal people.

That doesn't even happen to most actors.

[♪♪♪]

Another layer of John's charm was that he was a New Yorker.

Welcome to the premiere of Heart of the City .

Hello. I'm John Kennedy.

There are few places on Earth

more fascinating, exciting, or glamorous than New York City.

He loved this city.

He loved everything about it.

[Oberbeck]: You know, he was on 1040 Fifth Avenue,

which is right across the street from the Met,

and so the Met became his playground.

So we played Frisbee right in front of the Met

because there were lights.

You know, it had a little more lights than normal,

so we'd be playing Frisbee right across Fifth Avenue,

you'd sort of bounce it off a taxi windshield,

and try and, you know, curve it to each other.

He loved New York. New York offered him

the right combination of anonymity

and... and hugs.

You know, it's the energy of the city.

It's the vibrance.

John, if nothing else,

was an incredibly vibrant, energetic person.

The guy was peripatetic.

He could not sit still.

Rollerblades were the biggest thing

that ever happened in John's life, I think,

because he could really go like a bat out of hell

on rollerblades.

He was like some kind of a superhero.

Funny thing about John was that, you know,

despite the six-pack abs and the great physique,

which he certainly had,

and he worked hard for and he deserved,

he was not a great athlete,

despite all the pictures you see or films you see

of him playing football in Central Park.

[Ginsberg]: He was terrible at touch football.

He played it with such intensity and seriousness,

but, you know they say there's go-to receivers?

John was not a go-to receiver.

Every moment with John was an adventure.

You know, "Let's go camping. Let's go rock climbing."

We kayaked out into the middle of the Hudson

in the middle of the night,

which is, in and of itself, is an incredible experience.

We would take the subway together uptown.

You know, he was a regular guy.

He wanted to be treated like everyone else.

One thing he kept doing in New York City,

he rode a bike around.

He wouldn't lock it, and it was, like,

"The world must know this is John Kennedy's bike," right?

Of course nobody will steal it.

Well, it would get stolen within minutes.

I don't know how many bikes he lost.

In New York City.

Here was a guy that everybody knew his whole story,

and you'd see him, like, you'd see him ride his bike.

You'd get a glimpse, and it was kind of like

seeing Santa Claus or something.

You'd be like, "Yeah, I just saw Kennedy!"

And he managed to navigate this really abnormal...

aura that was around him and thrust upon him,

and, I think, be a very normal boy despite it all,

and I do put that down to his mother,

who was an amazing force in his life.

I remember one day going with him,

you know, to the house,

you know, knock knock knock on the door.

His mum answered the door, and I remember her saying,

"Oh, angel."

She called him "angel" sometimes,

and it was just so from the heart.

She loved him to bits.

And he was one of the few adult males

who was still very much attentive

to his mother's expectations.

It mattered to him to make his mother proud.

When I first heard the news that Jackie was sick

and she had lymphoma,

I was so sad, so, so, so sad,

and I immediately called up, and I just wanted to...

just say that I was thinking of her

and, you know, praying for her.

She said, you know,

"It's all right. This is the good kind.

We can beat this kind."

[Andersen]: She says she's gonna fight this,

and she does.

There's chemotherapy, surgery,

and throughout it all, John is by her side.

John called me and said, "Mummy's coming home.

She wants to be at home,

and there's nothing more to be done."

I said, "Okay, I'm coming. I'm coming."

So I got on a plane and I came to New York,

and, on a human level, there's nothing else to say.

It was a very big tragedy, a personal tragedy.

Somebody's mum was dying.

Losing his mother was intensely personal for him,

but, again, with everything else in his life,

there were these added layers of significance to it.

Jackie O was sick,

and that meant something in American culture.

He had to process all that

and deal with all this publicity.

John! John!

[Amanpour]: Oh, my God.

Can you imagine?

How do you live like this?

How did Caroline live like this?

How did John live like this?

How did Jackie live like this?

How do you live like this?

I just never forgave

individuals or members of the press

who didn't have the decency,

especially in the worst, most painful,

most personal, most private moments,

to give them a little space.

I found it...

I found it grotesque,

especially when they have given you

the courtesy of their best and their most polite selves.

I can't talk about what happened inside that room

or inside that apartment.

It's private, but just to say

that she was surrounded by her family, her friends,

and a huge amount of love.

Last night, around 10:15, um...

my mother passed on.

She was surrounded by her friends and her family

and her books, uh,

and the people and the things that she loved,

and she did it in her own way, on her own terms,

and, uh... and we all feel lucky for that,

and now she's in God's hands.

John handled death better than anybody I knew.

He lost...

You know, he lost cousins, he lost parents,

and he was incredibly unemotional.

Not that he didn't feel it,

but externally was able to hold it together

better than anybody I knew.

I remember saying, "John, how the hell do you do it?"

Thank you all very much, and have a good afternoon.

Sorry, John...

And he said, "You know, I just learned from my family.

You just don't wallow in death.

You move on. You hold it inside."

[♪♪♪]

Her last letter to her son included the admonition

"You especially have a place in history,"

and this was a real departure for her...

Putting any kind of pressure on him at all,

which she avoided, she studiously avoided.

She knew in her heart

that someday the stars are going to line up

and he's going to be President,

and the money will be there,

the mood of the nation will be there,

the polls will be there,

the country will be ready for it,

and he will be President...

[JFK]: We choose to go to the moon in this decade

and do the other things

not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

[Amanpour]: This is the family that envisioned...

a man on the moon.

This is the family that started the Peace Corps.

Didn't you feel

an enormous amount of pressure,

you know, following in your father's footsteps?

In your mother's?

No, I mean, it was more a thing of having,

you know, a fulfilling life,

and then the other stuff takes care of itself.

It's a complex thing, right?

You have this legacy.

It's clear. You can't ignore it.

It has great privileges that come along with it.

It has very difficult things that come along with it.

There's a lot of pressure,

and yet he had enough confidence

to sort of want to live out his own life,

but he didn't want to let anybody down.

I mean, yes, it was a complicated thing

just to be that son of that fallen idol.

We're used to a certain degree of being watched,

and I think that you're aware of it

even if you're not consciously aware of it.

Just obsession.

Well, is that what it is?

Yeah.

You know, it's given both of us

great opportunities.

You know, guys like him, the people make you a king.

He's the uncrowned king, with king privileges,

and he didn't want 'em. [laughs]

As he got older, you know,

the edge started to come in.

Like, okay, what are you going to do now?

How are you going to leave

the iconic image that we all had of you

and become John Kennedy who you are?

What's your personality? What are you going to do?

What are you going to accomplish?

It took him a while to figure out what he wanted to do,

and, you know, frankly,

I don't think that really happened

until he did George .

Are you in the market for a magazine

devoted solely to politics?

Big yawn, right?

Now, if I tell you

John Kennedy Jr. is the man behind the enterprise,

what happens?

They just had no idea what to expect,

and we kept it really secret.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet George .

[Berman]: The cover

was the cover everyone was waiting for.

[applause]

Watching John Kennedy Jr. present me as "George"

for his inaugural issue,

I thought that was pretty cool.

[Hare]: Cindy Crawford

dressed up as George Washington.

Of course! I mean, Cindy Crawford

was probably the hottest model in the world.

"No problem.

No problem. We'll get Cindy Crawford.

No problem."

[Berman]: She's, like, a businesswoman,

women like her, she's hot, men like her,

she's American, she's beautiful."

I didn't really know the concept or anything,

because it was John Kennedy Jr.'s new magazine.

I think we shoved a sock down my, um, trousers,

and I literally had the balls to become George Washington.

And I remember those magazines. They were sexy.

It was like, Cindy Crawford, you know,

with the George Washington wig.

George Clooney, I remember, as one of the covers.

I mean, it was like... It was a cool magazine.

[De Niro]: He asked me to do it.

If I could be of some help getting the magazine started,

as it was my understanding,

I said, "Let me do it. Sure."

Politics isn't dry,

it isn't dull,

so why should a magazine that covers it be?

Mixing politics and pop culture,

and celebrating politics,

and boy I was drawn to that.

[Terenzio]: George was

a place where John could be John.

There was no legacy, there was no...

I mean, he was certainly, like, you know,

everyone's mentor,

and everybody wanted to be around him,

but it wasn't--

it was a situation where he could be himself

and he could be really comfortable.

A magazine is very organic, you know?

It has to be.

You get kind of a weird chemistry

with the people that you work with,

and it's a very personal expression.

You know, he kind of breaks that barrier

between a celebrity and a regular person.

You're walking to the men's room,

and he wrestles you up against the wall, you know,

because he could see maybe you were a little uptight

or something,

and he... right away, he took that away.

We did this issue called, um, "Rebels and Revolutionaries,"

and so we had all these celebrities

signed up to be various rebels in history,

like Abbie Hoffman or Rosa Parks,

and people who stood up for something,

and who was playing Rosa Parks was Whoopi Goldberg,

and he sneaks on to the bus,

and we're all just-- keep working,

we were just kind of in the moment,

and the photographer's snapping,

and John goes up to her, and he hadn't met her,

and he goes,

Would you mind going to the back of the bus?"

and she...[laughs] ...she just cracks up.

She goes, "Not a chance, buddy," she goes, you know?

[JFK Jr.]: You have to leaven the political dialogue

with funny stuff and light stuff,

so we may talk about the budget,

we may talk about, you know, Hillary's hairstylist,

and somewhere in that mix is, hopefully,

an interesting read.

[Ginsberg]: George , more than anything,

reflected John's personality.

It was... fun.

It was mischievous...

Colorful, unconventional.

He thought politics

was too important to be left to the politicians.

[Bill Clinton]: I have accepted responsibility

for what I did wrong in my personal life,

and I have invited members of Congress

to work with us to find a reasonable, bipartisan,

and proportionate response.

I was so deep in the impeachment.

I was working at the White House,

and I was on the impeachment team...

and there was a moment...

I'm sitting in my office,

I had a private fax,

and the thing starts whirring,

and it spits out a one-page note,

hand written.

It says, "Dear Mr. President,

I've been under that desk.

There's barely room for a three-year-old,

much less a 22-year-old intern.

Cheers, JK."

I have to say I took that thing into the Oval Office,

and Bill Clinton laughed so hard,

tears... It was a great release.

It was a great moment.

But being able to see the absurdity

in a constitutional crisis,

and also to sort of playfully mock

one of the iconic images of his life,

was pretty amazing.

It was a witch hunt, it was,

and it was a time of witches,

and I just don't think John was really interested

in setting people on fire

because of their sexual peccadilloes.

What we've tried to do with our writing is that...

our writers, is to really bring a sensibility

to the coverage of politics

that is different

than conventional political magazines.

He believed

that if you wanted to do something innovative,

if you wanted to be, you know, sort of disruptive,

you had to bring people in

who were not rank-and-file magazine people.

Ann Coulter, who you'd think,

what is she doing in this magazine?

My family was not a Kennedy-fanatic family,

so I never really distinguished one Kennedy from the rest,

so I knew he was at least the good-looking one

of this motley crew.

He was certainly fair to Republicans,

and no other magazine was.

He seemed to want to give some of those right-wing whackos

their voice of the day.

[Cuomo]: The media, it doesn't matter who you are,

it is a very, uh... competitive place,

where your competition is your critic base.

Your family's famous for sticking together.

Can we expect some tough stories

about Uncle Ted?

Never.

What I have decided, with regard to my family,

that I will recuse myself

and let my editor make the choices,

with the one reminder

that we have to work together in the future.

In September's George , JFK breaks ranks.

"Two members of my family

became poster boys for bad behavior.

Perhaps they deserved it.

Perhaps they should have known better."

Mr. Oliphant, you think that this is sophomoric. Why?

The interesting thing

is that what you just read is all there is.

There was now a larger number of people

who wanted to see him struggle.

Even though John was seen as an exalted figure,

now he got into the business.

Standards for public discussion ought to be high,

and I think John Kennedy doesn't come close

to even meeting minimal standards.

John takes that kind of criticism

like water off a duck's back.

He thinks philosophically.

He understands his product well.

Washington really rewards convention.

You really can't color outside the lines.

You know, in Washington, the big phrase is

"Suck up and piss down."

I never once saw him do that. Never once.

George magazine was definitely his magazine,

and the fact that there are no other magazines like that,

to this day, there's no other magazine like it,

kind of proves the point.

John went to buy a suit at Calvin Klein,

and he ran into this beautiful, ethereal blonde woman,

Carolyn Bessette.

John was attracted to women who...

were not intimidated by him.

He liked women with a point of view.

He was smitten with her from the first time he met her.

He was all loved up with Carolyn,

they were dating at the time, and he lived across the street,

they came in, and, uh...

and on the way out,

she was kind of climbing on his back.

Like, they were in love, you know?

They were being playful. She was literally...

He was carrying her out. She was on his back.

You know, he could have had, what?

The prim, proper girl

from, you know, some, you know, girls' school in Manhattan.

She was fun, gregarious, smiling.

She was very quirky, eccentric...

artistic, Bohemian.

Carolyn was hilarious.

She was sarcastic without being mean.

She was funny.

She was engaging.

You cannot tell in photographs

how beautiful she was in real life.

I never saw a picture of her that did her justice.

Carolyn was enchanting.

There was something about her

that when she focused on you,

you felt like you were the only person in the world.

[Cuomo]: Not only did John Kennedy

suffer from a, you know, a true overabundance of riches

when it came to women who found him attractive,

but to have a woman who didn't seem as though

she needed John to find her attractive,

now, that's the magic right there,

and, certainly, Carolyn had that in spades,

and I think that it really motivated John

to be his best self.

John F. Kennedy Jr.,

long regarded as the world's most eligible bachelor,

is a married man.

[Chermayeff]: The wedding was great.

The wedding was really, really nice.

It was beautiful,

and it was a beautiful little church.

[Amanpour]: His family was there,

and nobody knew till the end,

and how fabulous is that?

What a great sense of freedom.

So uncomplicated, so un-grand, so simple.

So simple.

They released one picture, and that was that.

[Terenzio]: Planning that wedding

was the most nerve-racking, terrifying thing

I have ever encountered in my life.

It was so important to them that the wedding be private.

[Cuomo]: Beautiful woman,

but it was the energy that she had,

it was she brought out in John,

it's what he drew from her

that really made that relationship what it was.

The complementary aspects on the outside

were nothing compared to what they shared on the inside.

I saw a very, very romantic side of their, you know,

newlywed life.

They'd really got affectionate

and talk in private name talk,

you know, whatever they called each other.

You know, it would get embarrassing,

where I'd be like,

"I'm going to go get that thing at the Xerox machine,"

and I'd kind of slip out.

They had a friendship as well as a marriage,

and that was really sweet and nice.

This woman has, in one swell swoop,

become the greatest celebrity, you know, of the last 10 years.

Carolyn got, you know,

dumped into the deep end of the celebrity thing,

you know, pretty unceremoniously.

She could have never anticipated the intensity

that would then be transferred onto her

because now it's not just

"Well, you're hanging out with this guy

that we all care about,"

it's "Wow, you're the one?

You're the one?"

So it became this combination

of everything you would have to deal with

if you were dating a rock star,

with...

that rock star also happens to be royalty.

Carolyn Bessette was not prepared for life

as the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr.

I mean, photographers were everywhere.

They hounded her every step.

Carolyn didn't smile ever, because she was terrified.

She wasn't used to it.

She was being bombarded with cameras and paparazzi

and people screaming horrible things at her

to try and get a reaction.

People were cruel to her,

and the media could be really cruel to her.

[Andersen]: It was too stressful for her,

and too much, and she couldn't take it,

and John was so worried

that he held a special press conference,

in which he asked the press to back off.

How was the honeymoon, John?

Good. Getting married is a big adjustment,

and for her, who was a...

a private citizen up until about two weeks ago,

it's even more so.

I don't think she quite appreciated

just how intense it was going to be.

I don't think anybody could have appreciated it.

I don't buy what people say,

that she knew what she was getting into.

No one knows what they're getting into

until they're in it.

How was the honeymoon, John?

Hold it, please, for us. Look this way!

Oh, we're not getting it.

We're not getting it, John.

Are there any little Johns on the way?

John! Whoa, whoa.

Too quick.

It kind of caused her to unravel a little bit.

She felt it was so oppressive, having those people out there.

She just would not leave the house.

I took her out at one point, and I said, "Listen, you know,

there's only one way around this,

which is to reduce the value of the currency

by making it more plentiful."

One more time, how was the honeymoon, John?

Great.

Honeymoons are great. I recommend them.

Any little Johns on the way?

Little Johns?

I mean, you've just got to go out there,

and be out there, you know, enough

so that you don't go on being

like the Howard Hughes of brides.

It can't be said enough.

There is no celebrity, even today,

who knows what it's like to have the constancy

and the intensity of interest in their life,

on all strata of society,

as John Kennedy.

John wound up striking

a very pure bargain with the media

and the rest of the culture,

which was "Okay, I get it.

You find me interesting.

Great, come on in,

but I'm going to be doing things

that I think are important.

I'm not going to be rollerblading around

with my shirt on

or taking a swim.

I'm going to be taking you places

and talking about things

and showing you people and places that matter to me,

and you're going to be there because I am."

Mike Tyson received a jailhouse visit last night

from John F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy says it was a visit between friends.

Can you tell us why you're here tonight?

Yeah, I'll do it on my way out,

if that's all right.

All right, sure.

You know, he paid this visit to the prison

in May of '99, two months before he died,

and at that point, Tyson was not a popular figure,

but John had a relationship with him,

and John felt a personal compassion for the guy.

He said, "The only reason you're in this jail

is because you're black,"

and I... And that could have been,

but I kind of disagreed at that moment.

I was really...

I was pretty much an irritant back then.

I got into a car accident,

a fender-bender,

and I was mad,

and I struck the people in the car.

They gave me two years.

He thought it was outrageous.

He came down.

I think he's a man

who really was putting his life back together,

has an opportunity to do so in the future,

has a strong family.

He has kids.

He has a wife that really looks out for him,

and, you know, I hope, you know,

perhaps coming here and telling folks that,

people might start to believe it.

[Leamer]: All John's life, perhaps coming here and telling folks that,

he wanted to be free.

He wanted to fly above celebrity.

He wanted to fly above this attention

and be his own person,

and the ultimate way to do that was to fly,

and from the time he was a boy, he wanted to do that.

John was serious about becoming a pilot,

and he went down to the famous academy in Vero Beach

to learn to fly,

where only professional pilots go.

[Barlow]: I'm a private pilot,

and had a plane that I was using a lot on the ranch.

He always wanted to go along on that,

and I eventually said,

"Obviously, you want to know

how to drive one of these things.

It's not that hard.

Let me teach you."

He was always fascinated with aviation,

and it goes back to his youth,

because that's when the whole space program

really took off under his father.

That had a major influence on his life.

[Tyson]: He would tell me

about his great ideas about flying.

He just didn't seem rational to me, you know?

Some people are...

Some people are different,

and that's what you have to respect.

In my wildest dreams,

I would never want to fly a plane by myself.

All my life, I wanted people to wait on me.

That's why I worked so hard.

[laughs] I don't want to fly the plane.

I want you to fly the go***mn plane.

On Memorial Day of 1999,

John took up this contraption that he had bought

called a Buckeye powered parachute.

I was not thrilled about the Buckeye.

I would not go up in the Buckeye.

It was a kite with a lawnmower attached to it.

I remember one time we were out in Hyannis Port,

and he was flying it around.

He was like, "Do you want to give it a shot?"

I was like, "Absolutely not."

I was afraid to fly that thing,

and, you know, I'm not afraid to fly much of anything,

but that was a very treacherous aircraft.

And he was flying around up there by himself,

and Caroline said, "He's all alone up there.

He couldn't be happier."

He went up in that thing,

and then something went wrong,

and he came down, and he came down with a crash,

and we all went running to go see him,

and the first ones to get there was my husband,

holding my son,

but he was so conscious of not freaking out.

He was like, "No, no, Phinney, I'm going to be fine," you know,

Phinney was like, "What's the matter, John?"

He was like, "No, no, I'm fine. I hurt my leg.

I'm going to go get it fixed."

[Andersen]: He survived the crash,

but he broke his left ankle,

and for the next several weeks he was wearing a cast.

It's an emotional thing.

You break your leg,

it's the beginning of the summer...

It's sort of like a symbolic, just everything's broken down.

[Amanpour]: John was going to try to get

some more funding,

and try to breathe new life into George ,

which was, you know,

suffering from some of the economic realities

around the publishing industry at that time.

Is there a conflict in your own mind

about your role in all of this?

It will succeed, in part,

because it's also the selling of John Kennedy.

I mean, I understand

that I compromise a measure of my own privacy

by doing something like this.

This is a commercial venture,

and I'm out here selling my magazine.

[Terenzio]: The ad pages

in the first two issues, you know,

it was thick as a phone book, almost.

I think that people expected that to keep going, you know.

They expected every issue to be packed with ads,

and I think we kind of expected that, too,

a little bit,

and it was tougher than we thought

to keep it going, and to keep people interested,

and to keep the advertisers coming back,

and it was important not to use John for that,

but to really have the integrity of the magazine

stand for itself.

I think it was ahead of its time,

unfortunately.

I think John saw something that today is taken for granted,

this idea of the melding of politics with culture.

You know, I guess, you know,

people didn't really care what Cyndi Lauper had to say

about Israeli politics.

I mean, it was a goofy maga... I mean, it was...

If you thought about it, it was like, you know what?

I don't know if people really care.

He had been told that Hachette was going to basically,

I think, pull back on its funding.

It was up to him now to keep it alive.

I personally think

it's incredibly important for someone like him,

that was, I think, destined for this amazing future,

to know what it's like to go around and beg for money,

and he wasn't getting the money.

Is this your life, magazine editor,

or is politics somewhere down the road?

I'm here for a good long time.

And then?

And then we'll see.

I actually think

that John was more interested in politics

than he let on sometimes, you know.

Outwardly, he would say,

" George magazine is my compromise,"

you know, "This is what I'll do.

It's political without my being in politics,"

but I think that the older he got,

the more he recognized the purpose of service.

A public career is...

is, uh, it's a lot to bite off,

and you'd better be ready for it,

and you'd better have your life set up for it,

and you'd better be prepared to do it for the long haul.

He was kind of born to be president, right?

Certainly, after his dad died,

everyone assumed that at some point

that would be his ultimate journey.

You know, it's like a great musician or something.

He was just very talented at dealing with people,

and so he had all the natural skills

to be a very successful politician.

It's in the family, it's in the blood,

and it was in him.

There was always this sense, this constant reminder,

that his father had been murdered,

and that's how everybody identified with him,

and I suspect

everybody of, like, my mom's generation

always sees him as that little boy

at his father's funeral.

His fame was both derivative and tragic.

He wasn't famous because of anything he did.

He was famous because of his existence.

We are interrupting your program this morning

for some information involving John F. Kennedy Jr.,

the son of the slain president.

ABC News has reports

that his plane is missing this morning.

A dark day for America.

John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn,

and her sister, Lauren Bessette,

still are missing tonight,

You know, as somebody

who has flown a light plane on the east coast,

you get conditions in the summer

where humidity will be so intense

that the horizon will just disappear into it.

He took off from a New Jersey airport,

heading eventually for his cousin Rory's wedding

at the family compound in Hyannis Port,

after stopping first in Martha's Vineyard.

that they went down in the crash of a single-engine plane

that Kennedy was flying last night.

As that news spread across America throughout the day,

there was a common reaction:

"This is unbelievable.

That family truly is cursed."

[Barlow]: I spent a couple of hours

trying to convince myself

that what they'd done was to...was to run away.

So I thought, "Gosh, maybe they've pulled this off.

Maybe they'll...

they'll go off and get plastic surgery

and disappear from the face of the earth, and..."

But that was a pretty optimistic view.

You know, I held out hope for a while

that he would be stranded somewhere,

like, swimming there, or whatever.

[chuckles]

Nope.

Not in a million years

did I think that there was any way possible

that that plane had gone down.

I just thought, "He's somewhere else."

You know, to be honest,

I don't think I'll ever really grasp what happened.

And a friend of mine called

and said that he had heard that John's plane was missing,

and so I called John's house

because I knew Rosemarie was staying there,

and I called Rose, I said, "Rose,

this is not true, right?"

and she broke down and said, "Yeah, it's true.

We can't find the plane,"

and, um...

that's how I found out.

For more than 40 years now,

the Kennedy family

has inspired Americans to public service,

strengthened our faith in the future,

and moved our nation forward.

Through it all, they have suffered much,

and given more.

And someone comes up to me

and said, "Oh, well, they found some of the luggage

washed up on shore,"

and, you know, when they say the stages of grief,

you know, denial,

I mean, I was, like, definitely in denial.

Part of me, in a very strange way,

was kind of mad at him

for getting himself into the situation.

It just shouldn't have happened.

And I have to say,

I immediately knew he was dead.

John Kennedy Jr.'s plane was not going to go missing.

[♪♪♪]

[Chermayeff]: The funeral here in the city

was very moving and incredibly beautiful.

Once you went inside the barriers,

which was however many blocks around Park and Madison Avenue,

there was silence.

I remember looking down

and seeing Muhammad Ali sitting on the end of one pew,

and I was like...

I smiled, you know?

I was like, "John,

you would have loved this," you know?

John liked a good show,

and I think he would have looked at it and said,

"I was treated quite well here."

Maybe a few months later,

and I was with my daughter,

I think she had just turned four,

and we were walking in the backyard,

back in towards the house,

and she said, "Mama, I had a dream last night.

I had a dream last night that you were happy,

and you weren't crying anymore,"

and I just looked at her, and I thought, "Oh, my gosh,

I've just been crying and crying and crying,"

so it was like, "Well, maybe I've got to stop."

I don't know.

[Hare]: But I think the world really missed out

on a wonderful opportunity to have a leader

with his head and his heart in the right place.

[Barlow]: We talked for a long time on the phone

about two weeks before he died.

I said, "Do you remember that conversation we had

about being a good man?"

And he said, "Of course. I think about it a lot,"

and I said, "Well, I just want you to know

that you have wildly, spectacularly,

achieved that objective.

I mean, you are as good a man as I know.

You are as clear a case

of what I consider to be virtue in an adult male

that I can think of."

That's not going to make the cover of People magazine,

you know?

[chuckles]

"Galaxy's Most Virtuous Male"...

[laughs]

...doesn't somehow have the same ring.

[laughing]

[Amanpour]: I challenge anybody

to come up with any among us,

at that time, and of his generation...

and say that he wasn't a fine man.

I miss not having that future to look forward to.

I believe that he had greatness in him,

and I don't give a damn

if that meant anything about politics.

He cared about doing things in the world.

He was unique

in terms of what he represented in our culture,

and that's gone,

and it has not been replaced,

and I don't think it ever will be.