The Boy We Called John-John

He was our child, our little boy, flitting in and out of camera range around the White House when his dad was President. He did grow up and become that elegant New York City editor, John F. Kennedy Jr., the clan’s flag bearer of what was good and glamorous. But I never could get over the memories around the White House.

The world, of course, remembered him as the three-year-old standing in front of his father’s coffin after the services in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington and lifting his chubby arm in salute. He knew, but maybe he did not know. Millions never forgot.

Before that, he tugged at his mother’s pearls when she held him and squirmed in his father’s lap when the President, who could not lift the boy because of his bad back, could corral him for a few seconds.

There were times when walking by the Oval Office, I would see John-John hopping around on the carpet with his sister Caroline, his father clapping or laughing at the display. He came by the presidential desk on Halloween as “Peter Panda,” and J.F.K. broke up with laughter at the spook.

The special quality about young John Kennedy then may have been simply that he was so normal, so much like our own kids, allowed a childhood because of the insistence of his mother Jackie Kennedy and in spite of the formidable environs of the presidential mansion.

When he could navigate to the Oval Office on his own two energetic legs, John-John discovered the candy dish on the desk of Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s secretary. She recounted to me with great glee how the President tried to enforce the rule of one piece of candy per visit. The rule never worked.

The Kennedys have lived their lives on a vast public stage where children run and tussle and accomplished grownups gather for strenuous rituals of work and play amid the gaiety and laughter. And then death steps in to stop the proceedings, again and again. There seems to be no respite in this horrible ritual.

John Jr.’s death will only heighten the memories of the Kennedy years in the presidency, the core of the legend, years when the cold war was at its most intense and there was danger in the world, years when bright young men and women flocked to Washington to take part in the New Frontier. I remember Dallas, but I still don’t begin to comprehend it. I heard the shots from the motorcade and then wandered on the lawn of Parkland Hospital throughout that afternoon as the bulletins confirmed the death of a President. So much had ended. A President had been assassinated, an Administration was finished, a family had been decimated and a friend of mine had died. But when all was said and done in those sad days, the focus fell on the family and the question of how it would fare in a world grown worshipful–and brutally curious.

Jackie and Caroline and John went off to live their lives in the shadowed wings of the great stage, but Bobby Kennedy and his brother Ted stayed in the center. The Kennedy clan marched on, and I watched as Bobby, the new Senator from New York, healed one more time from family tragedy and with mounting enthusiasm pointed himself toward the White House.

I was awakened by a phone call early one morning in 1968, and a friend in the White House told me that Bobby had been shot. We plunged back into that abyss of mourning not only for a life lost and a family devastated again, but for a promise never fulfilled in our national life.

And now John. He was not a figure of power like his father, somebody to be hated because of his political persuasion. Nor did he have that reckless streak in him that Bobby had, which compelled the uncle to fly through hailstorms for political appointments or dive into dangerous seas to get ashore faster. He was John-John, a normal kid turned young man turned adult who was sensible and kind and concerned, but burdened with the great Kennedy legend and the world with its nose pressed against his windows.

There will always be the warm memories. I was in the Oval Office one day back then, and when I walked up to the President’s desk I heard giggling and thumping underneath. John-John was in what he called his cave. Once when he peeked out and White House photographers got the picture, there was another image that traveled around the world: the reduction of great power to its simplest ingredient, a tiny boy exploring his world from the ground up.

Though we did not always see the pictures of John-John that were taken backstage by Captain Cecil Stoughton, the official White House photographer, we heard the stories of the young ham. When he lost a front tooth, he proudly looked up at Stoughton to show the great gap. Indeed, Stoughton and John-John became buddies of a sort. The photographer knew a good subject when he saw one and realized that someday history would treasure those images. John-John liked the captain’s company, so much so that often when he saw Stoughton he would squeal, “Take my picture Taptain Toughton.” And once when Stoughton had snapped a frame of John-John playing with a rabbit, he asked if the boy would take a picture of him with the rabbit. John-John took the camera with relish and clicked the shutter like a pro. In Stoughton’s book The Memories, that one is the only photograph that the captain did not take. It is now another fragment of the profound Kennedy story of promise and fun and unfathomable sadness.