NEED TO KNOW
- CNN’s new docuseries on John F. Kennedy Jr. premiered on Saturday, Aug. 9
- ‘American Prince: JFK Jr.’ interviews experts and friends of the famous first son alongside rare archival footage and photographs
- The first of three episodes, titled “The Boy Who Would Be King,” explores the pressure on young JFK Jr. following his father’s assassination in 1963
CNN’s new docuseries on John F. Kennedy Jr. premiered on Saturday, telling the story of the famous first son of John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy through interviews with family friends and political historians, as well as rare archival footage and photographs.
American Prince: JFK Jr. is a three-part series, and the first episode, “The Boy Who Would Be King,” starts at the beginning. As historian Steve Gillon notes, John was “the biggest celebrity in America when he was conceived,” making the front page of every major newspaper on the day of his birth, Nov. 25, 1960, just weeks after his father was elected president.
He spent his early years as the prince of “Camelot,” crawling under JFK’s desk in the Oval Office. But the good times would be short-lived,
On Nov. 22, 1963, just days before John turned three and his older sister, Caroline, turned six, an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas, changed not only the history of the world, but the trajectory of the life of the president’s heir apparent.
“John became not just a young son of an assassinated president, but John became almost like a nephew or a younger cousin, or even a son to the millions of people watching,” says psychologist Dr. Joseph G. Ponterotto, author of A Psychobiography of John F. Kennedy Jr.: Understanding His Inner Life, Achievements, Struggles, and Courage.
He was also, for a time, still just a little boy. In a never-before-heard audio clip in the doc, young John is asked by an interviewer, “What happened to your father?”
After fumbling a bit, his small voice answers, “He’s going to heaven.”
“Do you remember him?” the interviewer asks. When John answers in the affirmative, he’s asked, “What do you remember?”
In true toddler fashion, with a smile in his voice, John exclaims, “I don’t remember anything!”
The pressure to carry on his father’s legacy was immediate in some ways. Experts in the doc explain how JFK’s rise to popularity at the same time as the advent of television gave Americans a connection to celebrity that they’d never had before. The Kennedys — good-looking, rich, successful — were a perfect target for their affections.
“The Kennedys, I think, are the epitome of the American dream, but they’re also the epitome of everything that we hold in ambition: the politics, the wealth, the mystery. And then, in an instant, it’s cut off,” notes CNN contributor Leah Wright Rigueur.
“So now, we don’t know what that possibility is, but when we see his 3-year-old son, John, saluting the casket, the American public immediately casts all those aspirations, all those myths, all those understandings about John F. Kennedy and his unfinished legacy, onto his son. And so we see, I think, a kind of heightened intensity and focus on John, the boy who would be king.”
In some ways, it was as simple as his name. It was practically impossible for John to distance himself from his father’s legacy when he was literally his “Junior.” The press dubbed him “John-John,” though Carole Radziwill — Kennedy-adjacent by way of her marriage to Jackie Kennedy’s nephew, Anthony Radziwill — says in the doc that no one in the family ever called him that.
From childhood on, the episode details, John’s existence always included a “lifelong struggle to not be crushed by the burdens that were placed upon him.”
“In many ways, his mother raised those expectations,” Gillon says of the widowed first lady. “She was so determined to preserve the legacy of her husband that she created the myth of Camelot. That myth carried forward, and when people saw John, they saw him as the one who was going to bring Camelot alive again. And I think that became a burden for him.”
A friend, Gary Ginsberg, explains the family’s expectations concisely in one anecdote, recalling that a young John once told his uncle, Bobby Kennedy, that when he grew up, he might like to be a chef.
“Bobby’s like, ‘Are you out of your f—— mind?'” Ginsburg relates with a laugh.
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Subsequent episodes of American Prince: JFK Jr. will explore how John grew up trying to be more of a “free spirit” within his famous family, cycling around New York City and flaunting unique fashions during outings with his famous girlfriends and eventually, his wife, Carolyn Bessette.
The couple’s rollercoaster romance met a tragic end in July 1999, when John and Carolyn died in a plane crash as John was flying his wife and her sister, Lauren, from New Jersey en route to Martha’s Vineyard. They had been married for less than three years and had no children.
American Prince: JFK Jr. episode 2 premieres Saturday, Aug. 16, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN.
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