Word: john
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eighth grade, when the school held a father-son night, John's companion was Roosevelt Grier, the former football star who in 1968 had tackled Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. But John would not talk about his dead father and uncle; classmates recall only one history class in his Collegiate career when John mentioned the President. If you didn't know who he was, you'd take him for a typical '70s teenager, face obscured by a helmet of longish brown hair, heading to Central Park with his friends to throw a Frisbee or play with a pack...
...four friends had been doing some strenuous paddling under the Baja sun, and as soon as they pulled their ocean kayaks up onto the deserted beach, John Kennedy plunged into the Pacific. It was a glorious day in the mid-1980s. Kennedy; his girlfriend at the time, actress Christina Haag; and their old friends Lynn Weinstein and Billy Straus were vacationing together, communing with the extraordinary gray whales in Magdalena Bay. Now the others were relaxing on the beach, not paying much attention as Kennedy swam farther and farther out into the open sea, well beyond the big lines...
Which is why, on Saturday morning, when Straus and other close friends of Kennedy saw the first nonstop coverage of Kennedy's missing plane, they were more than skeptical. The media were going crazy about John again--nothing new there--and though it surely looked dire, he just had to be all right. He was the "Master of Disaster," always getting into scrapes but escaping. Perhaps he and Carolyn and her sister Lauren had ditched the plane and hitchhiked out of there, or maybe they were holed up on the beach of a tiny uninhabited island Kennedy knew, waiting...
...this seemed possible because John F. Kennedy Jr. had such a complex relationship with his own fame--sometimes amused, often appalled, always highly ironic toward the weirdness in which he lived. He had to get away from it sometimes--to Baja, to Alaska, up in the Piper Saratoga--because his celebrity had never not been there. He couldn't tell you where the media images of his childhood ended and his own memories began, and learning to live with its effects hadn't been easy. People were always approaching him, always wanting something from him, but he stood...
...point. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis received much deserved praise for the way she raised her children. But John and Caroline deserve credit, as well, for the character they displayed growing up in America's battered, beloved, hated, much chronicled almost-royal family...