A salute to JFK Jr. and our ‘checkered’ past

COULD it really be 20 years? Two decades ago, I awoke in a beach shack on the North Shore of Long Island and noticed an unusual number of planes seemed to be scouring the coast line. It was an odd sight because a heavy dull haze still hung over the Sound that morning.

Then came a call from Jon Auerbach, now at CNN but then my editor at The Post. “John John’s plane is missing,” he said, referring to John F. Kennedy Jr., who I chronicled as the founder of George magazine, an irreverent political and lifestyle publication that popped onto the scene in the 1990s. “They’ve already postponed Rory’s wedding,” he said of JFK Jr.’s cousin, Rory Kennedy.

The planes, it turned out, were tracing the path that John would have flown in his private plane from New Jersey’s Essex County Airport to Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard to drop off sister-in-law Lauren Bessette on his way to Hyannis Port with his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, for his cousin’s wedding.

It was July 17, the birthday of my dad, Jack Kelly, and we were going to drive to the town pool and then back for a family BBQ. “I guess it’s all hands on deck,” I said to my editor. I dropped my wife, Pat Walsh, and young son Ruairi (now getting set to be a second lieutenant in the USMC) off at the pool. On the way over, I passed Sts. Philip & James School, where as a fourth grader on a Friday in November 1963, I learned from the nuns that President Kennedy had been shot. Less than five years later, in early June 1968, as an eighth grader in the same school, I heard the news that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, shot the night before, was not expected to make it.

And now as I passed by my old schoolhouse on July 17, 1999, my gut told me the “rescue mission” that the Coast Guard was still conducting was futile. A few days later, divers brought the bodies of John and Carolyn and Lauren Bessette to the surface off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

My involvement with JFK Jr. started long after he had been declared “Sexiest Man Alive” by People in 1988, still its best-selling “Sexiest” issue ever.

It was 1994 at a Folio magazine conference when I caught up to him on the down escalator to ask why he was there. Kennedy family friend Joe Armstrong, a publishing veteran, had worked secretly with John and his then-business partner, Michael Berman, for nearly a year on George before it emerged publicly in September 1995. But at this point, he was tight-lipped about his plans and apparently still searching for a backer.

I finally asked if he ever were to start a magazine, would he tell me first? He said sure, and I handed him my card.

Fast forward a year and half later in 1995, and I was working at influential advertising trade magazine Ad Age, when JFK Jr. and Berman gave me the first exclusive interview only days before the much-anticipated debut of George, which carried the tagline “Not Just Politics As Usual.”

It ran on Page 1 at 60 column inches — one of the biggest stories ever in Ad Age. I’d like to think John gave the first interview to me because he was keeping his word from that escalator encounter at the New York Hilton. The reality is that David Pecker — then CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media, the company that was backing George — probably thought a detailed story about its target audience, young demographics and editorial mission would go further than another “sexist man alive is trying to launch a magazine” story.

George was debuting with about 375 ad pages, then a record for a magazine’s first issue. Over the next few years, John would attract cover subjects including Cindy Crawford, Harrison Ford, Drew Barrymore, Barbra Streisand and Demi Moore. Who was going to say “no” to JFK Jr.? But he and Pecker also knew it was ad support and circulation that would be George’s lifeblood if it was going to thrive.

We had our ups and downs, JFK Jr. and me, as his magazine had its ups and downs. While still at Ad Age, we once met at trendy restaurant Jonathan Swift’s down in the Bowery. John biked over. We had a beer, played a game of three-dimensional checkers and hit the back room for a burger.

There was the infamous photo of John, appearing to be nude (although partially in a shadow) while gazing up at an apple, in the September 1997 issue of George. In the uproar that followed, he dropped me a personal letter: “Nude is nude. That’s not nude. Perhaps you spent too much time in Catholic school.” And he signed off “Cheers, John Kennedy.” When news broke in 1998 that I was jumping from the Daily News to The Post, which I secretly suspected was his favorite paper, he sent me another letter, wishing me luck and saying he hoped to speak with me more in the future. Surely, the magazine had its flaws. And JFK Jr.’s family history probably made him loath to tackle the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton sex scandal that dominated politics for a while in the 1990s. But the one thing he captured early on was the fusion of pop culture and politics. With a monthly circulation of 400,000, George still stands as one of the largest-circulation political magazines ever published. While the official date of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. was July 16, when the plane went down, to me, the last embers of Camelot were extinguished on July 17 — the moment 20 years ago when I drove by SSPJ school and instinctively knew he was gone. And I miss him even still.