John F. Kennedy, Jr.

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John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. (November 25, 1960 – July 16, 1999), often referred to as John F. Kennedy, Jr., JFK Jr., John Jr. or John-John was an American lawyer, journalist, and publisher. He was the son of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

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Early life

Born less than a month after his father was elected to the presidency, John F. Kennedy, Jr. was in the public spotlight from infancy. He lived for the first three years of his life in the White House. His father was assassinated on November 22, 1963, three days before Kennedy Jr.'s third birthday, and the son's poignant salute of his father's casket during the funeral procession on his third birthday became a heartbreaking and iconic image of the 1960s.

John Jr. grew up primarily on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. After his father's death, his mother was married to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis from 1968 until Onassis's death in 1975, when John was 14 years old. By most accounts, his stepfather did not play a particularly significant role in young John's life.

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Education

John F. Kennedy, Jr. began his high school career at the Collegiate School in New York City, but later transferred to and graduated from Phillips Academy (in Andover, Massachusetts). For undergraduate studies, Kennedy attended Brown University, graduating in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Brown, Kennedy was a member of Phi Psi, an inactive chapter of the national Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. In 1989, he earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from New York University School of Law. He failed the New York Bar exam twice before passing on the third try.

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Career

He spoke at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a New York City assistant district attorney from 1989 to 1993. In 1995, he founded George, a glossy politics-as-lifestyle monthly which ceased publication in 2001. Through the 1980s until his death in July 1999, Kennedy was an often-seen and much-photographed personality in Manhattan.

He married Carolyn Bessette in 1996 on Cumberland Island in Georgia.

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Death

On July 16, 1999, Kennedy died at age 38, along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, when the aircraft he was piloting, N9253N, a Piper Saratoga, crashed on a hazy night into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Essex County Airport in Fairfield, New Jersey, to Martha's Vineyard, where his family has a vacation house. Kennedy, his wife, and his sister-in-law were traveling to attend the wedding of cousin, Rory Kennedy, which was subsequently delayed as a result of the accident.

Kennedy was a relatively inexperienced pilot, with 310 hours of flight experience, including 55 hours of night flying and 36 hours in the high-performance Piper Saratoga. He had completed about half of an instrument training course but was not rated for flying in low visibility conditions. The National Transportation Safety Board investigation [1] found no evidence of mechanical malfunction in airframe, systems, avionics, or engine, and determined that the probable cause was "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." The report noted that spatial disorientation as a result of continued VFR flight into adverse weather conditions is a regular cause of fatal aircraft accidents. According to literature found in most FAA approved flight training books, a pilot's inability to see the horizon leads to spatial disorientaion. The inner ear will typically give the pilot the impression that the plane is turning when it is not turning. It takes many hours of instrument training for a pilot to be able to fly in IFR conditions; conditions that most likely existed when Kennedy was flying in his route to Martha's Vineyard. Over the water at night there are few lights and those lights that existed where most likely obscured by the haze. Kyle Bailey, a pilot believed to have been the last person to see Kennedy alive at Essex County Airport, subsequently stated that he had cancelled his own intended journey to Martha's Vineyard citing that the weather on the route was "a little too hazy." It also emerged that, while Kennedy had made the journey from Essex County Airport to the Vineyard several times before, he had never made it alone and at night — factors which can make a flight challenging, especially for a noninstrument-rated pilot. Kennedy's flight instructor (CFI) stated that he offered to fly with Kennedy on the fatal journey but Kennedy replied "he wanted to do it alone." The instructor also stated that he was uncomfortable with Kennedy making a flight alone in a high-performance aircraft at night, over open water and into haze.

During the memorial service on July 23, Kennedy's uncle, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, said that "we dared to think...that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years." [2] And of his nephew's marriage, he invoked what had been said of his brother's presidency : both lasted 1,000 days. U.S. President Bill Clinton attended the service, and ordered that the flag at the White House be lowered to half-staff in honor of John F. Kennedy, Jr.

A large undisclosed payment was made to the Bessette family from the Kennedy family [3]. It is reported that this payment was made to avoid a possible highly media-covered lawsuit, since the accident was caused by human error.

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See also

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External links

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