What I Learned About America Working at JFK, Jr.’s Magazine The Summer He Died

When John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane went down, on July 16, 1999, I was a wide-eyed 21-year-old intern at his doomed political magazine, George.

John F. Kennedy, Jr.: Nov. 25, 1960-July 16,1999

“How’d you break your foot, anyway?” I said.

“Paragliding,” John replied.

“What’s paragliding?”

This might have been a forgettable exchange between a 21-year-old summer intern and his boss. Had my boss not been the only son of the late 35th president of the United States and, throughout my childhood, an unmitigated hunk perennially gracing the cover of supermarket tabloids.

This exchange between John F. Kennedy, Jr., and me, which transpired in the elevator as we headed back up to the office following our respective lunches, still might not have been so notable. Had it not been for the fact that less than nine hours later, John was dead.

As the world would learn late the following day, on the evening of Friday, July 15, 1999, the Kennedy crown prince capitulated to the family curse and crashed his plane into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. John died in this accident at age 38 along with his style-icon wife, Caroline Bessette-Kennedy, 33, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34.

As fate would have it, I was one of the last to speak to John at the end of his short but storied life.

The following day, my friend Michael, a graduate student in French, woke me up with a phone call to the landline in my summer dorm room up at Columbia. It was there, during the previous fall semester, that I’d decided to become a reporter—after an article I wrote about how undergrads got their fake IDs was a huge hit and I got a lavish compliment from the editor in chief of the school paper (who later won a Pulitzer, but after that receded from view).

John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane had gone missing, Michael told me.

It was 1999, people actually had to call you with bad news.

I swiftly got on the 1/9 (the 9 train would be a casualty of Sept. 11, but at the time was still up and running) and dashed down to George magazine’s offices in Midtown Manhattan. The imposing Paramount Plaza skyscraper stood on the opposite side of Broadway from the Winter Garden Theater, where by some inexplicable accident of fate the cloying musical Cats was still purring through its 9^th life.

I’d been an intern at George—the brainless political-magazine brainchild of the man who would be president—for only six weeks. So I was hardly in a position to relate to the increasingly moribund distress seeping through the office as the ashen-faced staff trickled in and waited for news of John, as he was known, whose precise whereabouts were still unknown. To me, John wasn’t a man. He was a gorgeous celebrity descended from Olympus.

But to the staffers he was a treasured colleague and in some cases, a long-time friend.

And as it became painfully apparent, he was all-too mortal.

Sweet Stephanie broke down in tears. Only a few years older than I, she worked in the art department. Life wouldn’t be kind to Stephanie, who went on to marry one of Bernie Madoff’s sons and then lost her husband to suicide after his father’s Ponzi scheme came to light and dragged all those closest to him down into the mire.

Stephanie, now Stephanie Madoff Mack, in the George office

“John is very resourceful,” intoned my supervisor, Tsalem Mueller, in his Southern drawl. And again, as if the mantra would somehow resurface John from what by mid-afternoon on Saturday, July 17 we all knew must have been a watery grave: “John is very resourceful.”

I mentioned that my mother had recently died. Neither Tsalem nor anybody else heard a word I said.

John was dead.

The last People cover

The remainder of the summer would take my own unprocessed grief over my mother’s death from brain cancer six months prior and funnel it through a vortex of baroque national grief. Plenty of Americans, I would discover, had still not finished processing President Kennedy’s assassination 36 years prior.

The following week, I had my first brush with tabloid infamy after, like some perverse game of telephone, my elevator ride with John wound up memorialized—and fictionalized—by veteran gossip columnist Cindy Adams. Somehow the story of John’s last day in the office, in Adams’ creative mind, had a “sort of bored” Kennedy in his office, waiting for his delayed sister-in-law and passing the time by waving into his office a “young, low-level summer intern” to chat. A few days later, Howard Stern quipped on his show that John F. Kennedy, Jr. was such a loser that he had nothing better to do than hang around with the interns in his office.

Only in New York…

That time I realized that the gossip columns are pure fiction. Yes, I actually had to track down this column on microfilm at the NYPL!

Everyone at the magazine had been strictly instructed not to talk to the press. So I got hauled into the office by the higher ups and asked if I’d blabbed. “Obviously not,” I said, noting how far off Adams and Stern had been. I have always presumed that someone from the elevator ride said something to someone else and the story took off from there.

George was the type of fin-de-siècle, pre-D.E.I., high-gloss rag where much of the staff got their job because they’d gone to some tony prep school with somebody else. When I started, one of the outgoing interns, I learned, was a scion of the Mellon Scaife dynasty, for God’s sake.

The managing editor, who had the misfortune of being named Richard Blow (he later changed his last name to Bradley), was fortunate enough to have gone to Choate with John.

Now-veteran journalist Sasha Issenberg, left, was my age but was considered a staffer and had an office and got to write for the magazine—much to my envy! Richard Blow is on the right. He wrote a very fine book about John that some people saw as a gossipy betrayal of confidence. I thought he was unfairly maligned and told him so when I ran into him at a reading of the doomed Gen X poster girl, Elizabeth Wurtzel.

But the publication was too cheap to actually pay for a receptionist. So the interns—six of us, paid $25 a day to sit in a tiny, windowless room and pretty much do nothing for 10 weeks with the promise of getting a letter of reference signed by not just a Kennedy, but the Kennedy—manned the phones.

Legend had it that one of the previous interns was not a native English speaker and once answered the phone, “Rich’s Blow office!” and was promptly relieved of ever having to answer the phone again.

The first half of the summer of 1999 had been listless and dull, but with the occasional spark of intrigue. Like when Ann Coulter stopped by and started gushing about what a louse Bill Clinton was for what he did with Monica Lewinsky, and didn’t I agree? (I was too dumbstruck to reply. I saw Coulter at a friend’s birthday party last summer and was still too dumbstruck to say anything to her.) Or when I picked up the main phone line and was subjected to a seething, hysterical woman insisting—with remarkable moxie—that I had to put John on the phone this instant, and where was he anyway? (We got a lot of kookie calls about John, but this one took the cake.) Until finally she mentioned that she was his wife and I went scrambling to find someone who could at least get Carolyn to calm down.

George and me, at age 21. It was a schizoid summer. I was beset with grief over my mother’s death, but delighted to be living on my own for the first summer in my life. And then my famous boss fell out of the sky and died.

Little did I know that midway through the summer the interns would be running a crisis hotline for distressed patriots.

Or at least I ran one. I’d been trained as a peer counselor at school, and was eager to practice my skills as a pseudo-professional empath. The other interns—this included a smooth talker named John Paul who made up for being, as he loved to say, “just a farm boy” by using Harvard as an adjective, noun and verb in every sentence, and his classmate Doug, who was as lazy about work as he was industrious about working the phones for a Crimson investigation the whole summer—weren’t especially interested in entertaining the blubbering and howling of the vox populi.

Back in those analog days, no one could turn to Twitter to sound off. Some wrote letters to the editor. Others picked up the phone to complain. Or in this case, to grieve. For weeks, I stayed on the line with people who called to gush over how much John-John meant to them, over how heartbroken they were over the loss of such a promising First Son, and how much they wanted with every fiber of their being to get their mitts on a copy of the Inaugural Issue of George.

I had no choice but to disappoint them all. Not only did the George office become a wake that day after he died, it also became a crime scene. Someone—it was never discovered who—snuck into the store room and stole every last remaining copy of the first issue of George, the one with Cindy Crawford costumed as George Washington in a crop-top on the cover.

The Inaugural Issue of George: Oct./Nov. 1995. It’s on sale on Amazon for $1,900, I just found out.

You’d think that issue No. 1 was the Lindberg baby how desperately everyone wanted to track it down. Day in and day out, sorely lacking as they were of a functioning Interweb on which there might one day be a great resale website named eBay, they pleaded for a copy. One guy got so distressed, he started screaming and cursing at me and hung up in a fury. But then he called back and told me that his wife had only recently died and how sorry he was for yelling at me. We talked about grief and loss for a good half an hour. Later a caller called me a faggot and I threw the phone against the wall in exasperation.

Edward Kennedy’s office was the other obvious place for America to call in hopes of processing its sorrow over the loss of Teddy’s nephew, as I learned when I had to coordinate something with them and the beleaguered Senate aide I spoke with was so frazzled by it all that she lost her damn mind with me.

John and Teddy

In time, though, I stopped thinking of the constant callers as crackpots. Ever the English major, I pieced together the prevailing themes. These people all had one thing in common: They had held tight to the myth of Camelot. They refused to believe that a bullet fired that tragic day in Dallas could end the dynasty. And so they prayed for a revival: that one day, that handsome young man on the cover of People magazine might ascend to the Capitol and once again ask them what they could do for their country. They hoped to be the first to volunteer an answer.

Camelot: a First Family soon shattered by assassination

When John’s plane hit the water that summer night 25 years ago, millions of Americans’ dreams of a return to a halcyon time so replete with hope went down into the ocean along with him.

I stopped seeing their need to call a perfect stranger to cry about a man who, however famous, was also a stranger, as pathetic. I saw it as tragic. But also beautiful. To think that there was once a time when people could be that innocently patriotic. To have held such enduring faith in the myth of America.

Finally, the summer ended.

And a few years later, so did George.

Me with an intern named Sonya, who I sadly lost touch with. Does anyone know what became of her?

A few years after that, I was walking up Sixth Avenue just below W. 8^th Street one summer afternoon when my eye landed on a copy of a magazine sitting on the sidewalk, its cover facing out, its back propped against the red-brick exterior wall of a doomed Barnes & Noble that would shutter a few years later along with so many glossy magazines as the internet devoured the old economy.

You’ll think I’m just spinning a tidy ending to this myth when I tell you what magazine it was.

It was a copy of the Inaugural Issue of George.

Dumbstruck, I looked around. Was some peddler selling the issue? No. There wasn’t anyone nearby laying claim to this treasure. It was as if by divine providence, the magazine had simply descended from the heavens.

“This belongs to me,” I said.

I took it home.

I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun.  I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation and New York.

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