SEP 2, 2009

Carolyn Jeanne Bessette Kennedy (January 7, 1966 – July 16, 1999) was the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Background

Bessette was born in White Plains, Westchester County, New York William J. Bessette and Ann Messina Freeman, an administrator in the New York public school system. She grew up in affluent Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended St. Mary's High School, where she was voted an "All-Around Beautiful Person." After graduating from Boston University in 1988, she went to work at a Calvin Klein store in Boston.

With her height and cool blonde looks, Bessette occasionally worked as a model. She worked as a saleswoman at the Calvin Klein store in Boston before being transferred to New York, where she worked as a publicist and met John F. Kennedy, Jr. The attractive couple became a popular paparazzi target, with gossip columns detailing where they ate and shopped and even covered the arguments they had. Photographers waited outside the couple's Tribeca apartment to snap photographs. Bessette was reportedly very uncomfortable with the media frenzy and the repeated comparisons to her mother-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She married Kennedy on September 21, 1996 on Cumberland Island, Georgia in a historic Baptist church, where their wedding was private and secret in an effort to elude the media.

Death

On July 16, 1999, Bessette was killed along with her husband and older sister Lauren when the Piper Saratoga II HP crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of the crash was: "[Kennedy]'s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation."^[1] Their ashes were scattered from the Navy ship USS Briscoe off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.^[2]

Legacy

In 2005, Bessette's close friend Carole Radziwill published her memoirs, containing fond memories of her cousin, including her memories of the plane crash that took place just weeks before her husband's death from cancer. Before marrying Kennedy, Bessette was in a relationship with model Michael Bergin, who wrote a memoir about the couple's relationship The Other Man, which was published in 2004.