John and George

Kennedy liked to say his magazine was about the confluence of politics and pop culture. The truth is that it was always about himself.

by Dan Kennedy

Last October, George magazine published its "Conspiracy Issue." Among the hypes on its celebrity-drenched cover was a piece by Oliver Stone, director of JFK, a 1991 film that presented as fact the most absurd pseudo-theories about the president's assassination. PARANOID AND PROUD OF IT! the Stone tease read.

Now, there was nothing remarkable about a national glossy magazine's flogging conspiracy theories and asking a famous moviemaker to lend his name to the project. What made the George package interesting -- indeed, the only thing that made it worth even a second glance -- was the identity of the magazine's editor-in-chief and president: John F. Kennedy Jr., son of JFK. The psychic juxtaposition of the fallen president and the rising son was far more compelling than anything the magazine might have had to say.

John Kennedy's death has called into question the future of George, a four-year-old political monthly that was reported to be running on fumes even before last weekend's plane crash. The expectation is that Hachette Filipacchi, the French publishing conglomerate that bankrolled George to the tune of $20 million, will quietly pull the plug.

The deeper truth -- left unspoken, no doubt out of respect for Kennedy, universally regarded as a decent guy who worked hard to make a success of his magazine -- is that, without Kennedy, there simply isn't any reason for George to exist. As the "Conspiracy Issue" suggests, by far the most fascinating thing about George was what Kennedy chose to publish, and what that said about his own thinking about the tarnished but ever-shimmering Kennedy myth.

Whether it was publishing a cover photo of Drew Barrymore as Marilyn Monroe (complete with the caption "Happy Birthday, Mr. President") or criticizing his cousins as "poster boys for bad behavior," George was about John Kennedy -- and the Kennedys. The trouble is that George just isn't a very good magazine; it's shallow and uneven, despite the occasional standout article. Thus, the magazine has never been able to rise above its identity as a vehicle for one famous individual. Invariably, the context was more interesting than the content.

In an interview with Brill's Content earlier this year, Kennedy asked, "What's the point for me to have a magazine if I'm not going to use it in some way that is personal?" A fair question. But Kennedy's personal involvement wasn't just an aspect of George; it was the whole thing.

Kennedy liked to say that George was a nonpartisan magazine for a postpartisan era, existing at the juncture of politics and pop culture. "Not Just Politics as Usual" is the magazine's motto. In fact, George's pop-culture sensibility was the perfect cover for its true raison d'être. More than anything, George afforded Kennedy an opportunity to confront his family's demons and to laugh at them; to work through, haltingly, sometimes embarrassingly, what it meant to be a Kennedy. (Nondisclosure: John Kennedy and I are not related.) And it was a chance for this most private of public figures to deal with those issues in a brazenly public way -- even posing semi-nude next to the commentary in which he blasted his cousins.

Naturally, George's staff is hoping this isn't the end. "John loved George. He would want nothing more than for George to thrive," says contributing editor Lisa DePaulo. She adds, though, that in the aftermath of Kennedy's stunningly sudden death, there has been little talk of what the future may hold: "It's still so shocking, I don't think anybody's even gotten to that yet." But given that the magazine was losing readers and ad revenues even with Kennedy at the helm, it's hard to fathom how it could find a steadier financial footing without him.

No one can riffle through George without wondering, almost on a page-by-page basis, what Kennedy must have been thinking. Between the party pix ("We the People") and the Hollywood profiles, there's more cleavage than you'll find on Revere Beach; in George, though, boobs aren't just boobs but a reminder of the Kennedy men's dodgy history with women. His own interviews with his father's nemeses, such as George Wallace and Fidel Castro, were bland and boring -- except for the fact that it was he who conducted them. Tony Blankley writes an uninteresting column, but his very presence says, Look, a Kennedy hired Newt Gingrich's former flack! A DePaulo profile of rumored Clinton paramour Eleanor Mondale includes this quote from the Washingtonian's Chuck Conconi: "This is the kind of woman the president should be screwing." What's implied is that Eleanor Mondale is the kind of woman JFK would have screwed: no blowjobs from chubby interns back in Camelot, by God. Even a full-page ad from the National Rifle Association raises questions as to why Kennedy would have accepted such an ad, given the way his father and his uncle died.

"Everything in the magazine was filtered through the fact that he was the editor, through the medium of his presence," says cultural critic Steven Stark. "I don't know where it goes without him."

George has had some moderate successes, both journalistic and popular. Even though its circulation of about 400,000 was some 200,000 short of what Kennedy himself said he needed to break even, it was by far the largest-circulation political magazine in the country. By contrast, the New Republic and the Nation sell slightly fewer than 100,000 copies per issue. The problem is that George isn't competing with those smaller magazines; rather, George is competing with magazines such as Vanity Fair (circulation: one million) for big-name freelancers and big-budget features.

As for the magazine itself, despite much that is stupid and superficial (the current issue includes George's third professional-wrestling feature this year and a photo of Bob Dylan whose sole purpose is to justify a cover hype), it occasionally delivers on Kennedy's most laudable stated aim: to engage a new generation of apolitical young people in politics and public affairs.

This month's feature on the "Toughest Bosses in Congress," by Vincent Morris, for instance, is not only entertaining but important, since you can learn a lot about a public official by knowing how he deals with his underlings. I particularly enjoyed finding out that Senator Arlen Specter's aides refer to him as "Mr. Burns." D'oh!

A recent profile of the New York Times' hatchetman editorial-page editor, Howell Raines, by Slate's Timothy Noah, was insightful even though Raines himself declined to be interviewed. The best part was Raines's predecessor, Jack Rosenthal, explaining that he banned the use of the words "must" and "should" from Times editorials because they suggested "footstomping, childish petulance. . . . `You must, by God, because we said so, and we're the fucking New York Times.' " Rosenthal makes his case so well that you're compelled to disagree with Raines's decision to undo the ban.

From George's early days, a Lisa DePaulo profile of Ruth Shalit -- a twentysomething prodigy who was briefly infamous for her plagiarism-plagued, error-laden work for the New Republic -- stands as the definitive word on a media moment.

But George, unfortunately, is defined more by such touches as a map plotting out the country's nude beaches than it is by sharp political and media analysis. And though Kennedy liked to talk about delivering substance to his readers, too often the articles are short rehashes of stuff that has appeared elsewhere, with perhaps an extra dollop of sex and celebrity. For all his desire to engage young people in politics, he failed to recognize that what makes politics interesting is ideas, a point of view. His focus on celebrity rather than partisanship made for some deadly reading.

"The idea that you'd have a magazine that covers politics the way Vanity Fair covers Hollywood sounded good, but it didn't work out," says Tucker Carlson, a staff writer for the Weekly Standard who wrote several stories for George early on.

This celebrity orientation also left George with an aversion to complexity. Danny Schechter recalls being asked to write a piece on the shortcomings of investigative journalism on network newsmagazine shows such as Dateline, 20/20, and 60 Minutes -- a theme he treated in depth in his 1997 book, The More You Watch, The Less You Know. Schechter dealt with one of Kennedy's editors, whom he describes as "hot to trot. He came over to see me. And then I never heard back from him at all." When Schechter was finally able to track down the editor and pry an answer out of him, he recalls, "my impression was that it wasn't anecdotal enough, that it was too hard-hitting."

Even though Kennedy insisted that George was a long-term commitment, he clearly wasn't going to run it for the rest of his life. The possibility that he was going to do something more important is what makes his death particularly poignant. In an odd way, George was Kennedy's vehicle for integrating the two disparate halves of his life -- his Bouvier side, with its orientation toward culture and its distrust of celebrity, and his Kennedy side, with its emphasis on politics and public service.

"I think that John-John was Jackie's child and JFK's offspring," says Richard Parker, a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center, part of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Parker, a sometime adviser to the Kennedys with whom John Kennedy consulted before launching George, thinks Kennedy had long been more Bouvier than Kennedy. Only recently, Parker says, had Kennedy shown signs that he was maturing into his father's son.

In that sense, George, flawed though it is, was Kennedy's journey, not his destination. Sadly, now we'll never know what that destination would have been.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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