“Where are you, man?” John wanted to know. “You’re gonna make us late.”
“I can’t get there in time,” Gustavo Paredes said on the other end of the phone line. “You guys go ahead without me. I’ll meet you there.”
“Typical, Gustavo,” John said. “Now we’re gonna be late.”
“Yeah, I know.”
It was July 16, 1999, and John Kennedy and Gustavo Paredes planned to fly, along with Carolyn, to the Cape for Rory’s wedding. John would fly his new Piper Saratoga, purchased a couple of months earlier, which was more luxurious, comfortable, and better in performance than his Cessna 182. On the way, they would drop off Carolyn’s thirty-four-year-old sister Lauren at Martha’s Vineyard. Lauren, a human rights activist, was just as striking as Carolyn, with her long dark hair and impossibly thin figure. She looked like a catwalk model and had dated Eunice’s son Bobby. She didn’t mind flying with John and had done so a number of times in the past. She and her sister would sit in the two seats behind John and try to catch up, straining to hear each other over the din.
Gustavo knew that his mother, Provi, was already at the compound, helping Ethel with wedding preparations. “Be careful up there, John,” he told his longtime friend.
“Don’t worry about me,” John said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about,” Gustavo said, laughing.
John loved to fly, and everyone in the family knew it. Ever since he was a small child, he had loved planes. Back when his father was President, he actually thought Air Force One belonged to him. Were his friends and family members worried about his flying? Some were, but for the most part there was a pervasive sense that John was somehow invincible. After all, he’d always been in one scrape or another, so much so that they’d lost count of the number of times one limb or the other was in a plaster cast. No matter the circumstance, he always seemed to emerge with a loopy grin and a great story. “You never imagined that anything could ever happen to him,” said John Perry Barlow, who first introduced John to flying in Wyoming in a Cessna. “He was the one who took care of everyone else. Plus, even if you were worried, there was nothing you could do about it. Ever since his mother died, he was determined to make every second count. If you loved him, you wanted him to live the kind of life he wanted for himself. You felt like he deserved to fly.
“When he bought the new plane, we chuckled about it among ourselves because John was the kind of guy who would lose his car keys or his wallet every day,” Barlow added. “He was that guy whose socks never matched, so it could be said that precision and accuracy wasn’t his forte. A lot of his klutziness had to do with his ADD. So the idea of John flying? Each time he went up in a new plane, it was a little scary. I mean, if you knew the guy. We didn’t call him the ‘Master of Disaster’ without good reason. Since I’d introduced him to flying, I always felt responsible for him and tried to keep an eye on him, but I admit there were times I was sorry I had endorsed the idea.”
Carolyn had originally been dead-set against John’s flying. However, during those times he convinced her to go up with him and it was just the two of them, she couldn’t help but note the advantage of being, at long last, alone with the man she loved with no interruptions. It was almost cosmic, she would have to admit. Therefore she actually began to look forward to those solitary moments with him. Still, though, she was usually on edge. Though she would try to relax and would sometimes be able to do so, for the most part she was nervous. “If John had ever decided to abandon his beloved hobby,” said Gustavo Paredes, “she definitely wouldn’t have fought him on it, put it that way.”
On the evening of Friday, July 16, 1999, at about eight-thirty, John took off in his Piper Saratoga from Essex County Airport in Caldwell, New Jersey, headed first to Martha’s Vineyard and then to Hyannis Port, with Carolyn and Lauren. As we all know, they didn’t make it. The plane ended up nosediving into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
John Perry Barlow had a conversation with John just two weeks before the tragedy during which he warned him of the danger of depending on his own perception while flying in hazardous conditions rather than on a plane’s instruments. “I told him I felt like he knew just enough about flying to be dangerous,” John would recall. “My exact words to him had been, ‘You’re always late because you are constantly enchanted by whatever is going on in the immediate present. This means you’re going to fly yourself into conditions that wouldn’t have existed had you left on time. Which means that you will find that you are flying on instruments whether you have an instrument rating or not.’” In fact, John didn’t have an instrument rating, meaning he was only certified to fly under visual flight rules. “I have just one thing to ask of you,” John Perry Barlow recalled telling John. “Which is if you lose sight of the horizon, don’t look for it. Just put your eyes on the instruments and believe them. Pay no attention to what may seem to be going on outside the aircraft. But when John flew into the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard about an hour later than he’d planned, he lost sight of the horizon due to a well-known ocean effect that I had encountered many times while flying back east. And he did exactly the wrong thing.”
Since that awful night, details of this great American tragedy of July 16, 1999, have been dissected and analyzed so repeatedly by reporters, newscasters, historians, biographers, and, of course, close friends and family members, there seems little reason to explore any of it again. Suffice it to say, it was later speculated that John may have suffered from spatial disorientation, meaning that, due to foggy bad weather, his balance and depth perception were compromised, making it impossible for him to distinguish the plane’s position in the sky. “In other words,” said one investigator, “up became down. Down became up.”
The National Transportation Safety Board also hypothesized that tension could have played a part in John’s inability to control the plane. According to the Aeronautical Information Manual, “stress from everyday living can impair pilot performance, often in subtle ways. Distractions can so interfere with judgment that unwarranted risks are taken, such as flying into deteriorating weather conditions to keep on schedule.”
Whatever the case, much of America would wake up the next morning to ominous televised imagery of nothing but vast blue ocean and the sound of solemn newscasters fearing the worst about a man some lovingly called the “Prince of Camelot.”
It was Anthony who was tasked with tracking down Caroline Kennedy at Mountain Village Lodge in Idaho, where she and her family were vacationing, to give her the news. This was where the Schlossbergs had planned to celebrate their thirteenth wedding anniversary and also Ed’s fifty-fourth birthday (both on July 19). Anthony had trouble reaching her, but finally, with the help of the local police, managed to leave a message for her at about four-thirty in the morning on the seventeenth. She called him back immediately. “It’s John,” he said. “His plane was supposed to arrive here hours ago. He hasn’t shown up.”
From that moment on, it would be just one frantic call after another from Caroline to friends and family, including her uncle Ted, as she and Ed tried to figure out exactly what was happening. That evening, the Schlossbergs boarded a private plane, headed back home to New York. “I helped them with their luggage,” recalled Ken Nedeau. “Few words were exchanged, but you could see the panic in Caroline’s eyes.”
Once they got back to New York, the Schlossbergs would retreat to their home in Sagaponack, Long Island. Though everyone in her midst tried to be optimistic about John’s safety and that of his passengers, Carolyn and Lauren, Caroline seemed to know better. “I can’t feel him,” she told Ed. “Usually I can feel his presence. But I can’t now. I think he’s gone.”