(3 of 7)
Born 17 days after his father was elected, Kennedy had no memories of his own about his father or his father's funeral; he remembered the image of himself saluting, not the salute itself. After the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy escaped with her children into the anonymity of Manhattan, moving into a five-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. The children traveled frequently with their mother, but 1040 Fifth would always be home. Kennedy attended a nearby school, St. David's, but he could be rowdy and difficult; in 1968, the year his uncle was assassinated, the third-grader was transferred to Collegiate, a private school for boys on Manhattan's West Side, where he developed friendships that would last the rest of his life. "I don't remember a time when he wasn't my friend," says record producer Billy Straus, who met Kennedy in third grade.
Kennedy was a distinctly average student, restless in class, jiggling his leg nervously, rarely speaking. His mother told him not to worry about his poor spelling; his father's had been atrocious as well. As he grew up, however, the Kennedy wit began to assert itself. In seventh grade his class was assigned to write a short play, classmate Peter Blauner remembers, and Kennedy wrote a play about being unable to write a play. "He was riffing about the various characters he'd tried to create," says Blauner, "from a ballet dancer to a deranged pretzel vendor in Central Park. It was really funny."
As he got older, Kennedy began taking the 79th Street crosstown bus to school, just like any kid might; he made sure to exit through the bus's front door, while the Secret Service agents who followed him everywhere used the rear one. And the agents were there when Kennedy, Straus and another friend went to their very first rock concert, Bob Dylan and the Band at Madison Square Garden.
In 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 of bandanna-wearing dogs. Sometimes he would lose his Secret Service detail, so he could head for the park and hang out freely with his friends; once after doing so, he was mugged. Eventually, his mother decided to send him to boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
By then, he was already learning valuable lessons from his mother. By example, she taught him how to find and exploit zones of privacy, how to build an invisible barrier around himself when in public. It was a technique he might apply at the Xenon disco, where he hung out in the late '70s: first, use personal radar to sense the approach of a stranger, then move subtly until your back is turned to the person--a way of saying "Please, leave me alone, please." But if someone breached the barrier anyway, John would then be unfailingly polite, using the Kennedy charm until he could break free. Just like Jackie.