William D. Cohan on Losing Four Friends from His Boarding School, Andover, Far Too Soon—Including John F. Kennedy Jr.

As our series honoring the tragic plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Lauren Bessette continues in the leadup to the 25-year anniversary of the crash on July 16, I’m so happy to welcome William D. Cohan to the show, who wrote a book not just about his friend from Andover, John, but also about three other friends from the prep school that lost their lives far too soon. This is such an interesting concept for a book—in his book Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short, which came out in 2019, William introduces us to four of his friends from boarding school who all died far, far too soon. One of them is John, who we spend the bulk of today’s episode talking about, but we also meet Jack Berman, the child of impoverished Holocaust survivors, who achieves the American dream—only to have his life ended in a senseless act of violence. Then we have Will Daniel, the grandson of President Harry Truman and the son of the managing editor of The New York Times, who does everything to escape a family legacy he’s ultimately trapped by. He dies tragically, as does Harry Bull, who—like John would as well—takes an inexplicable and devastating risk on a beautiful summer day that ultimately ends his life. Even the story of John—who, of course, we all think we know—is told through a new lens in this book. This book will make you appreciate life and realize how very, very fragile it really is. All of these men met at Andover, the most elite of American boarding schools, and went on to forge lives for themselves, lives that, as William writes, were “ended just as they were getting going.” This book gives us a glimpse into John in his Andover years, specifically, and William writes about what it was like to know a young John, what it was like to meet Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and so much insight into John, who lost his life far too soon as just 38 years old.

William D. Cohan is a journalist perhaps most known for covering Wall Street and high finance; he’s written for Vanity Fair as a special correspondent and writes regularly for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Fortune, and is an on-air contributor for CNBC. He’s also written other bestselling books, like The Last Tycoons and House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, The Price of Silence (which is about the Duke lacrosse scandal that gripped the nation), and Why Wall Street Matters. Since Four Friends came out in 2019, he has published the 2022 book Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon about the General Electric Company. He was a senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years and also appears regularly on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, and Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor. I enjoyed my conversation with him so much, and I know you will enjoy it, too.

Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short by William D. Cohan