John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. (November 25, 1960 – July 16, 1999), often referred to as John-John or JFK Jr., was an American socialite, attorney, magazine publisher, and journalist.

[1] His father, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, had been elected president less than three weeks earlier[2] and was inaugurated two months after his son's birth.

In a famous moment, Kennedy stepped forward and rendered a final salute as his father's flag-draped casket was carried out from St. Matthew's Cathedral.

[10] They moved to the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. for a short time, and then to a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where Kennedy grew up.

In 1967 his mother took him and Caroline on a six-week "sentimental journey" to Ireland, where they met President Éamon de Valera and visited the Kennedy ancestral home in Dunganstown.

[16] In 1976, Kennedy and his cousin visited an earthquake disaster zone at Rabinal in Guatemala, helping with heavy building work and distributing food.

[21] He co-founded a student discussion group that focused on contemporary issues such as apartheid in South Africa, gun control, and civil rights.

He was appalled by apartheid when visiting South Africa on a summer break and arranged for U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to speak about the topic at Brown.

[22] By his junior year at Brown he had moved off campus to live with several other students in a shared house[23] and spent time at Xenon, a club owned by Howard Stein.

[24] In January 1983, Kennedy's Massachusetts driver's license was suspended when he received more than three speeding summonses in twelve months and failed to appear at a hearing.

"[27] He graduated that same year with a bachelor's degree in American studies and took a break, traveling to India and spending some time at the University of Delhi where he did his post-graduate work and met Mother Teresa.

[28] After the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Kennedy returned to New York to earn $20,000 a year at the Office of Business Development, where his boss said that he worked "in the same crummy cubbyhole as everybody else.

[34] If he had failed a third time, he would have been ineligible to serve as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA's Office, where he worked for the next four years;[35][36] handling such matters as consumer fraud and landlord-tenant disputes.

[41] Kennedy made his New York acting debut on August 4, 1985 in front of an invitation-only audience at the Irish Theater on Manhattan's West Side.

[41] Kennedy officially launched the magazine at a news conference in Manhattan on September 8 and joked that he had not seen so many reporters in one place since he failed his first bar exam.

[42] Each issue of the magazine contained an editor's column and interviews written by Kennedy,[43] who believed they could make politics "accessible by covering it in an entertaining and compelling way", allowing "popular interest and involvement" to follow.

"[45] In July 1997, Vanity Fair published a profile of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, claiming that he was sleeping with his press secretary (which both parties denied).

[46] That same month he wrote about meeting Mother Teresa, declaring that the "three days I spent in her presence was the strongest evidence this struggling Catholic has ever had that God exists.

"[51] By early 1997 Kennedy and Berman were locked in a power struggle, which led to screaming matches, slammed doors, and even a physical altercation.

After meeting again at the wedding of his aunt Lee Radziwill in 1988, they dated for five and a half years, though their relationship was complicated by her feelings for singer Jackson Browne, with whom she had lived for a time.

On September 21, 1996 they married in a private ceremony on Cumberland Island, Georgia,[66] where his sister, Caroline, was matron of honor and his cousin Anthony Radziwill was best man.

[75] Kennedy had checked in with the control tower at the Martha's Vineyard Airport but the plane was reported missing after it failed to arrive on schedule.

[76] Officials were not hopeful about finding survivors after aircraft debris and a black suitcase belonging to Bessette were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean.

[78] Within the next two days, the fragments of Kennedy's plane were found by NOAA vessel Rude using side-scan sonar, subsequently prompting Navy divers to descend into the 62 °F (17 °C) water.

[82] The National Transportation Safety Board determined that pilot error was the probable cause of the crash: "Kennedy's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.

"[83] Later that evening, the bodies were autopsied at the county medical examiner's office and taken from Hyannis to Duxbury, Massachusetts, where they were cremated in the Mayflower Cemetery crematorium.

The invitation-only service was attended by hundreds of mourners, including President Bill Clinton, who presented the family with photo albums of John and Carolyn on their visit to the White House from the previous year.

[88] Kennedy's last will and testament stipulated that his personal belongings, property, and holdings were to be "evenly distributed" among his sister Caroline’s three children – Rose, Tatiana, and Jack – who were among fourteen beneficiaries in his will.

Kennedy had been a member of the Senior Advisory Committee of Harvard's Institute of Politics for fifteen years and an active participant in Forum events.

[91] In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 presidential assassination, the New York Daily News re-ran the famous photograph of the three-year-old Kennedy saluting his father's coffin during the funeral procession.