Hillary Honors JFK Jr.

First lady Hillary Clinton wrote a poignant remembrance of John F. Kennedy Jr. in her newspaper column Wednesday, CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported.

She recalled his last visit to the White House in March 1998 for a screening of segments of Tom Hanks' 12-hour HBO special From the Earth to the Moon.

Much to her surprise, Kennedy said it was his first visit to the White House since 1963.

However, his memory may have been faulty, reported Knoller. The Nixon Library said the Nixons hosted Jacqueline Kennedy and her children at the White House in February 1971 - which would have made JFK Jr. 10 years old.

"[He] had trouble sorting out what he remembered from what he had seen only in pictures," Mrs. Clinton wrote.

"We showed him the room where he slept, and we walked around the grounds where he and his sister played," she continued.

"In the Oval Office, he saw the president's desk - the same desk under which he was caught by a photographer playing hide-and-seek as a toddler - and the garden named in honor of his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy," she recalled.

Mrs. Clinton writes that the John F. Kennedy Jr. she met at the White House "was elegant and eloquent - a man who had lost so much as a child, but who went on to live a life filled with love, adventure, accomplishment and, as he said, 'relative normalcy.'"

Because of his death, the prospective Senate candidate postponed a three-day political trip to New York on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton is eyeing a run for the New York Senate seat being vacated next year by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The seat was once occupied by the late Robert F. Kennedy, uncle of the John F. Kennedy Jr.

"At this point it's postponed because of the Kennedy tragedy," Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton's Senate exploratory committee, said Monday morning. The midweek trip was to have taken the first lady to Elmira, Bath and Ithaca in the Southern Tier-Finger Lakes region of New York state.

"Mrs. Clinton joins with the president in sending her prayers and thoughts to the Kennedy and Bessette families during this very difficult period," a statement from Mrs. Clinton's committee said.

The political trip would be rescheduled for some time over the next month, Wolfson said.

Mrs. Clinton is in the midst of a summer-long "listening tour" of New York as she contemplates the Senate race.

She still planned to travel to Cape Canaveral Wednesday evening to watch the space shuttle's rescheduled launch.