John F Kennedy Jr

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on November 25, 1960, seventeen days after his father was elected President. He lived his first three years in the White House. His father was killed on November 22, 1963, and the state funeral was held three days later, on John's third birthday; outside St. Matthew's Cathedral he stepped forward and saluted his father's coffin.

He grew up in Manhattan with his mother and his sister Caroline, studied American studies at Brown, and took his law degree at New York University. He worked four years as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, founded Reaching Up, a nonprofit for the workers who care for people with disabilities, and in 1995 launched George, a magazine meant to make politics something people wanted to read.

He married Carolyn Bessette on September 21, 1996, on Cumberland Island, Georgia. He had wanted to fly since he was a boy and earned his pilot's licence in April 1998. On the evening of July 16, 1999, he flew his Piper Saratoga out of New Jersey for Martha's Vineyard with Carolyn and her sister Lauren. In the dark and the haze over the water he lost control of the plane, and all three were killed. Navy divers brought them up on July 21, and the next morning their ashes were committed to the sea from the destroyer USS Briscoe. He was thirty-eight.