What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love

What Remains is a memoir by Carole Radziwill, an award-winning ABC News journalist who married into one of the most famous families in American history. The book traces her working-class upbringing, her career in television news, her marriage to Anthony Radziwill, a Polish prince and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, and the devastating summer of 1999 in which she lost both her husband to cancer and her closest friend, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, in a plane crash.

The memoir opens on the night of July 16, 1999. Three weeks before Anthony died of cancer, his cousin John Kennedy Jr. crashed a small plane into the Atlantic Ocean off Massachusetts, killing John, his wife Carolyn, and Carolyn's sister Lauren. Carole had spoken to Carolyn just before takeoff, making plans to meet the next day on Martha's Vineyard, where Anthony was spending what everyone quietly understood might be his last summer. She reconstructs the crash from the accident report: John became disoriented in fog, entered a fatal spiral, and the plane struck the water. She introduces the Roman goddess Fortuna, who dispenses good and bad fortune indiscriminately, as the guiding idea of her story.

Carole moves backward to her wedding to Anthony on August 27, 1994, an oceanfront reception in East Hampton, and surveys the crowd with hindsight: guests who will die, couples who will divorce. She traces her origins to Suffern, New York, and the hamlet of Mount Marion, where summers revolved around Grandma Millie, a mischievous matriarch who organized grandchildren for nighttime raids on neighbors' crops. Her Suffern household was chaotic: five children, a father who owned a struggling restaurant, a mother who enrolled in college at 27, and Grandma Binder, her maternal grandmother, an Austrian immigrant who imposed what order she could. Grandma Binder's death during Carole's junior year of high school planted a lasting distrust of hospitals.

Carole's path to journalism began with watching the space shuttle Challenger explode on television. She landed a nonpaying internship at ABC's 20/20 and worked her way up to production associate. Her breakthrough came with the Cambodia documentary Peter Jennings Reporting: From the Killing Fields, produced by Leslie Cockburn. At 25, Carole traveled alone to Thailand and Vietnam, negotiating with Thai generals and filming Khmer Rouge soldiers at refugee camps. The documentary won an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton.

She met Anthony in March 1990 at a hotel in Beverly Hills, where both were covering the Menendez murder case. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and educated at elite English boarding schools, Anthony was the son of a Polish prince and nephew of President Kennedy. At a rented house on Long Island, Carole met John Kennedy Jr. for the first time and Anthony's mother, Lee Radziwill. Carolyn Bessette entered Carole's life at the same house one morning, walking out of a bedroom "blonde and ten stories high, in a white cotton nightgown" and connecting with Carole over shared teenage jobs at Caldor department stores. Carolyn and John broke up that weekend, and Carole did not see Carolyn again for two years.

In August 1993, Anthony asked Carole to feel a small bump on his stomach. They dismissed it. Months later, doctors scheduled what they believed was routine surgery, but the mass proved to be a high-grade fibrosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. Carole found a medical reference book in the Sloan-Kettering basement library stating that in the best-case scenario, Anthony would live five years. He proposed on Mother's Day at his mother's beach house. Carole said yes despite doubts about whether she could watch him die. During their honeymoon in Hawaii, she discovered a new bump on his scar.

The cancer recurred relentlessly. John secured an appointment at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a senator, where Anthony met Dr. Steven Rosenberg, chief of the Cancer Institute's surgery branch. Rosenberg recommended surgery over chemotherapy, which had very low success rates for fibrosarcoma. In April 1995, Anthony underwent a bilateral thoracotomy, a procedure opening both sides of the chest to remove lung tumors. All 21 were removed, but more operations followed through 1998 as new tumors appeared. Carolyn began accompanying Carole to the NIH, bringing flowers and hanging a photo of her dog on Anthony's hospital wall. She left a note telling Carole she would never let her go through this alone again. The two women got matching amethyst rings at Tiffany's inscribed "s.f.f.," for secret friends forever.

In September 1996, John and Carolyn married secretly on Cumberland Island, Georgia. The cancer stayed in remission for nearly a year. Anthony took a vice presidency at HBO, and he and Carole renovated their apartment, selling one of President Kennedy's rocking chairs at auction for over $400,000 to fund the work.

By 1998, the cancer had moved into the mediastinum, the area between the lungs, wrapping around Anthony's trachea. Anthony endured five rounds of chemotherapy at Columbia-Presbyterian. During treatment, his kidneys were quietly failing, a fact Carole did not fully grasp until he was hospitalized with a massive septic infection. In intensive care, his organs shut down one by one. John arrived late at night in a tuxedo, sat by the bed, and sang "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," a children's song John's mother used to sing to them both. Doctors expected Anthony to die, but he survived. Carole and Carolyn sustained each other through this period with a shared fantasy called "The Townhouse," an imagined Gramercy Park mansion where they would live as glamorous spinsters hosting dinner parties.

In the summer of 1999, Carole and Anthony moved to Martha's Vineyard. Anthony called it a vacation; Carole felt they were going there to die. She gave ambulance drivers directions to the house and hid an oxygen tank in a closet. After emergency heart surgery revealed Anthony's heart was three times its normal size from cancer-related fluid, his cardiologist, Dr. Girardi, told Carole her husband had weeks left. It was the first time in five years anyone had said it directly.

On July 16, Carolyn called before takeoff. At midnight, word came that the plane had not arrived. Carole worked the phones from the kitchen, confirming the plane left Caldwell, New Jersey, at 8:59 p.m. but never landed. She called Carolyn's mother, Ann Freeman, and had to tell her that Lauren was also aboard. The bodies were found on Tuesday, seven miles from the Vineyard. Family members boarded the Navy destroyer USS Briscoe, where ashes were scattered into the sea. At the funeral at St. Thomas More, Anthony read the Twenty-third Psalm and Carole read from the Book of Ruth.

Three weeks later, on August 10, Anthony woke speaking incoherently. Doctors started morphine. Carole climbed into the hospital bed behind him, her arm across his chest, and listened to his heartbeat grow fainter until it stopped. She planned his funeral at the same East Hampton church where they married. Carolyn's mother pressed Carolyn's amethyst ring into Carole's hand. Holly, a close friend, delivered funeral clothes to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home and revealed that Anthony had ordered a Tiffany birthday gift for Carole before he died: a diamond pendant cross with a card reading, "To my Peanut. Happy Birthday."

The memoir closes not with the deaths but with Christmas 1998, the last gathering of the four and a tradition Carolyn insisted on creating. They exchanged gifts, planned trips to Cuba and Greece, and teased each other. As the evening ended, Carolyn whispered in Carole's ear: "It was nice, wasn't it? We should do it again next year, shouldn't we?" Carole answered, "Yes, we will."