A bitter family feud erupted just hours after John F Kennedy Jr, Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren were killed in a tragic plane crash – before their mangled bodies had even been recovered, a bombshell new book reveals.
In the midst of their grief, relatives began to bicker over where the couple should be laid to rest, with Bessette’s family urging that she be buried in her hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, while the Kennedys pushed back – a bitter standoff that resulted in the pair’s ashes being scattered at sea.
The extraordinary details are drawn from the private diaries of Robert F Kennedy Jr, and revealed in new book, RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise, by journalist Isabel Vincent.
Among the most explosive allegations are claims that Edwin Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s husband, was a ‘bully’ who made Bessette’s mother ‘miserable’ because he despised her daughter.
Schlossberg had rejected her request for RFK Jr to eulogize her sister and John with the withering putdown: ‘Kennedys do not eulogize non-Kennedys.’
Lisa Bessette, the surviving sister, was so furious with Schlossberg that she ‘slammed down the phone’ during a tense conference call with the whole family, according to the book.
The claims suggest that the real-life drama about Carolyn and John’s death was even greater than that portrayed in Love Story, the Hulu TV miniseries about their life.
The plane crash was one of many tragedies that have befallen the Kennedy family. But John and Carolyn’s deaths in July 1999 remains one of the most devastating.
The Kennedy heir was heading to Martha’s Vineyard to attend the wedding of his cousin Rory aboard a Piper Saratoga he had bought just three months earlier.
Although he had been taking flying lessons for nearly two decades, he did not have much experience flying at night using only his instruments, Vincent writes.
Approximately 7.5 miles West of Martha’s Vineyard he crashed nose first into the ocean: along with wife and sister-in-law.
In his diary, said to have been taken and hidden by his late ex-wife Mary Richardson in the final months of her life, RFK Jr gives new insight into how the mood turned from celebration to tragedy.
He wrote that evening he went to John’s house on Martha’s Vineyard and spoke with his friend Pinky.
‘I wasn’t worried at all because anything can happen with John’, RFK Jr wrote.
But Pinky was concerned and called Carole Radziwill, the wife of John’s best friend and cousin Anthony Radziwill, and she called the Coast Guard, that began a search.
By that point, however, there was no chance of anyone surviving.
As the Daily Mail reported last month, the crash left John’s body severed in half after going into what pilots call a ‘graveyard spiral’, so called because you never get out of it.
It was a fall of 1,100 feet in just 14 seconds, falling over 4,700 feet per minute.
By 3am RFK Jr was awoken by his sister Kerry who said the plane was missing. He wrote in his diary: ‘I knew then that John was dead.
‘I looked out of the window of Carolyn’s house from which I could see the lights on in John’s front porch and I felt empty, sad’.
Half remembering a line from King Lear, RFK Jr wrote: ‘We are to the Gods as flies to wanton boys. They kill us for their sport.’
The following morning, Ted Kennedy canceled Rory’s wedding and instead a mass was held in the morning, followed by another in the evening.
But the tensions at the heart of the Kennedy family soon exploded to the surface.
‘The bickering over the bodies began the following day even though they hadn’t yet been recovered,’ the author writes.
‘Carolyn’s mother, Ann Freeman, was ‘very upset’ about where the bodies would be buried.
‘She wanted the trio to be buried in Greenwich, Connecticut, which [RFK Jr] said would be an impossibility’.
Writing in his diary at the time, Bobby – now President Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary – said: ‘John Kennedy couldn’t be buried in Greenwich because he had no connection and for all the other reasons’.
Freeman ‘wanted her daughters close’ and was ‘terrified that they (the Kennedys) will try to spirit (Carolyn) to Brookline or Martha’s Vineyard….because both of them loved it there’, RFK Jr wrote.
RFK Jr helped to broker a meeting between the Bessette family and John’s sister, Caroline, in New York the next day.
But it went off the rails because Caroline did not show up and instead sent her husband Edwin Schlossberg, even though he ‘hated’ Bessette.
Vicky Reggie, Ted Kennedy’s second wife, was also at the meeting.
RFK Jr wrote in his diary that Schlossberg ‘did everything in his power to make her (Freeman’s) life miserable’ and bullied the ‘shattered’ mother, who was deep in grief for her two daughters.
The bodies were finally found on July 21, five days after the plane went down.
In his diary RFK Jr wrote: ‘Coast Guard found John’s body and fuselage at 2.30am and found the girls soon after’, adding that Ted Kennedy and his sons Teddy Jr and Patrick took a helicopter to be there for the recovery.
‘Teddy was shaken afterwards,’ RFK Jr wrote.
‘The bodies were in bad shape, and the autopsy would find they’d been killed on impact’, he wrote.
The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea during an emotional ceremony with the whole family who boarded a US Navy cutter to meet the destroyer USS Briscoe a mile off the coast.
The Briscoe then took them 20 miles further to Gay Head, which was a mile from the crash site.
RFK Jr wrote that Freeman and her second husband Richard ‘climbed over the landing and scattered the girls’ ashes one at a time’.
Then they spread John’s ashes at sea.
‘The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen,’ RFK Jr wrote.
‘When they let go of the ashes, the plume erupted and settled in the water and passed by in the green current like a ghost.
‘We tossed flowers onto the ghosts. Some of the girls tossed letters from a packet they’d assembled from John’s and Carolyn’s friends. It was a civil violation but the Coast Guard let it go’.
He added that a navy band played melancholy music and we all ‘cried like babies’.
The memorial services continued the next day but family tensions flared again.
According to Vincent, there was a ‘tense’ conference call where it was decided that Ted Kennedy would eulogize John and Carolyn’s close friend Hamilton South would do her eulogy.
But when Lisa Bessette, the surviving sister, suggested that RFK Jr should eulogize the couple as he knew then well, Schlossberg strongly objected.
According to RFK Jr’s diary, Schlossberg said: ‘Kennedys do not eulogize non-Kennedys.’
Lisa was ‘disgusted’ by this and claimed he had ‘made up his rules on the spot and slammed the phone down’.
Carole Radziwill was offended too and called RFK Jr to complain that Schlossberg had ‘flown into a tantrum because she hadn’t said hello to him’.
According to the diary, Schlossberg told Radziwill: ‘I know you’ve always hated me.’
Radziwill suggested to RFK Jr that the family should start an ‘I hate Ed club’.
‘[RFK Jr] agreed that there would be many members and that John Jr and Carolyn would certainly have applied,’ the book states.
