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Even though Jack Kennedy and I were about the same age and lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same elementary school, our paths seldom crossed during the years he lived in Brookline. I'm sure that in time, I would have gotten to know him better if he hadn't moved away.

I was the first boy in the Kennedy family to graduate from college.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

I'm pretty sure that I was JFK in my past life.

I had been in so many towns and cities in America with John Kennedy, but I was not with him in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963.

In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.

I didn't know Jack Kennedy that well, but Bobby was a hero to me.

When I was 23, I went to work for Jack Nicholson reading scripts. Later, I was married to a production designer named Richard Sylbert. So I lived in Los Angeles for ten years.

Before the Kennedys were elected, there had been older Presidents. Then here was this devastatingly attractive young couple with two beautiful children. They were so intelligent, graceful, gracious and funny. They enjoyed life so much. That's what caught America's eye.

I was kind of a strange child. My parents knew early on that something must have been wrong with me. I crawled backwards until I was two, but had Kennedy's inaugural address memorized by the time I was six.