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September 21, 1999. Today would have been John and Carolyn's third
wedding anniversary. I have left this page up since July and I don't intend
to take it down.
My name is Gerard Mulcahy. I was born on December 3, 1960, in Worcester, Massachusetts, eight days after John Kennedy Jr. was born in Washington. My mother used to tell people that, as if it made us cousins. In an Irish Catholic house in Massachusetts in the sixties, it very nearly did. My grandmother had President Kennedy's picture on the kitchen wall next to the Pope's, and when I was small I thought they were related too. So I grew up alongside him, in a way. Not really, of course. He had the whole world watching him and I had my three older sisters. But when I saw the news on that Saturday morning in July, it felt like losing somebody from my own class. I think a lot of people our age felt that way. I made this page that week because I didn't know what else to do. |
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The salute
Everybody knows the picture. November 25, 1963, outside St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington. It was his third birthday. His father's casket was being carried past, and his mother leaned down and whispered to him, and the little boy in the short coat stepped forward and raised his hand in a salute. I was eight days short of three myself. I don't remember it. I only remember my mother crying every time the picture was shown again, for years. For most of his life, that picture was what people thought of when they heard his name. I think one of the best things about him is that he grew up and became somebody else, on his own terms, anyway. |
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His life
School. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1979 and from Brown University in 1983, where he studied American history and acted in student plays. People who saw him said he was good. The law. He earned his law degree from New York University in 1989. He failed the New York bar exam twice, with the tabloids on him both times, and passed it on his third try. Then he went to work as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office for four years, and won every case he took to trial. I have always admired the way he handled the bar exam. He just went back and took it again. George. In 1995 he started George, a magazine about politics for people who didn't think they liked politics, named after George Washington. The first cover had Cindy Crawford dressed up as the first President. I bought it at the newsstand on Main Street in Worcester and I still have it. I have every issue since. Carolyn. He married Carolyn Bessette on September 21, 1996, in a tiny wooden church on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia, and somehow they kept it a secret from the entire press corps until it was over. That made me laugh out loud when I read about it. Flying. He earned his pilot's license in the spring of 1998. |
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July 1999
On the evening of Friday, July 16, John took off from an airport in New Jersey in his small plane with Carolyn and her sister Lauren. They were going to drop Lauren on Martha's Vineyard and then fly on to Hyannis Port for his cousin Rory's wedding. The plane went down in the ocean off Martha's Vineyard. After days of searching by the Coast Guard and the Navy, divers found the wreckage, and on July 22 their ashes were committed to the sea from a Navy ship. The next day there was a memorial Mass for John at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York, and Senator Edward Kennedy gave the eulogy for his nephew. John was 38. Carolyn was 33. Lauren, who worked at an investment firm in New York, was 34. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating, and I am not going to guess about the cause here. Please don't e-mail me your theories. Three people died. That is enough. |
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What I keep thinking about
He could have been anything he wanted, and the whole country had an opinion about what that should be. He picked his own work, made his own mistakes in public and fixed them, and by every account he was kind to people who couldn't do a thing for him. His neighbors in TriBeCa said so. The people at the magazine said so. People who met him once, riding his bicycle around the city, said so. In the week after, people left flowers and notes and candles outside his building in TriBeCa, piles of them, all week long. My sister went down on the train and left one for me. I'm 38 now too. I've got two kids, a mortgage, and a lot fewer years than I thought I had. Hug your families. |
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