John F Kennedy Jr was ready to pursue politics, determined to save his marriage before plane crash

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Steven M. Gillon can vividly recall when he and his pal John F. Kennedy Jr. were at a bar watching a fight on the big screen and a man pushed him aside and exclaimed “You’re John!” hugging the son of late President John F. Kennedy.

“He said, ‘I loved your father,’” Gillon recalled to Fox News. “That happened a lot. A couple of minutes later, the guy comes out again. He’s dragging his wife behind him and says, ‘Marilyn, I want you to meet my friend, John F. Kennedy Jr.’ John reaches out and he says, ‘Hi, Marilyn. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m glad I finally got to meet you.’ And I looked at him. He had just met this guy 20 minutes ago. And John said, ‘What was wrong with that? I made two people really happy.’”

Gillon, a historian, first met Kennedy at Brown University in 1981 when Kennedy was his teaching assistant. The two bonded over history and racquetball, becoming fast friends. Gillon recently wrote the biography, “America’s Reluctant Prince,” which examines Kennedy’s life.

On July 16, 1999, the 38-year-old’s plane crashed just off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts — killing him, his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister Lauren Bessette.

A&E’s documentary titled “Biography: JFK Jr. — The Final Year,” which is airing on Tuesday, the 20-year anniversary of his death, explores the events impacting Kennedy before he perished, including coping with the fatal illness of his closest friend and cousin, Anthony Radziwill, his struggling marriage and his quest to rescue his political magazine, George. It features interviews with those who knew Kennedy over the years, including Gillon.

“We don’t want John to be remembered as ‘the hunk flunks’ or ‘the sexiest man alive,’” Gillon explained. “John was a very complicated guy. And I think for the first time this documentary captures that complexity and shows John as a man of many different dimensions, a guy who had problems in his relationships just like we all do, but a man who was full of life. A man who was enormously generous and kind. And I think that’s the image of John that we wanted to present.”

“I taught John,” Gillon continued. “I had numerous conversations with John. I was surprised by how well read he was, especially about modern politics and his father’s presidency. John’s issue was he had a really short attention span, and that was one of the reasons why I think he struggled with the bar and he struggled on other standardized tests. But… he was passionate about civil rights, he was passionate about the Supreme Court. He could be as engaged and as thoughtful as any person I’ve ever met.”

Gillon said he hopes people will remember his friend not for what he could have achieved in his life, but for the legacy he left behind.

“What surprised me is just how humble he was,” said Gillon. “John grew up with all these expectations imposed upon him by the public, by his family, that he was going to be the heir of Camelot, and there were expectations. It was a burden that would have crushed most people. And what was remarkable to me was how John dealt with it with such enormous grace. The fact that John, despite the circumstances in which he grew up, turned out to be such a decent, kind, down-to-earth, unpretentious human being is probably the greatest testament to his character.”