Media watch

The NY mags' Kennedy state of mind

by Dan Kennedy

The media's -- and the public's -- obsession with the Kennedys continues to perplex. Although news organizations surely overdid it with their 24/7 coverage of John Kennedy's death, they were also reflecting a genuine public need to mourn for someone who was, after all, a stranger, and to tap one more time into that hoary Kennedy mythology.

Maybe it's because Kennedy was, by choice, a Manhattanite, but I thought the two publications that came the closest to getting it right were the New Yorker and New York magazine. Unfortunately, the truth that emerged was entirely accidental, since what was mainly on display was the banality of celebrity culture.

The New Yorker, which dealt with Kennedy in its "Talk of the Town" section, was, in a word, awful. On the cover, the Statue of Liberty wore a black veil that recalled Jacqueline Kennedy's at her husband's funeral. Inside, John Updike and Pete Hamill offered up self-important, unoriginal observations (Hamill even played the Irish card by quoting Yeats), and Daphne Merkin embarrassed herself with psychobabble about the need for a mother's boy (that would be Kennedy) to rebel by taking dangerous risks. At least John Seabrook did some reporting in his mini-essay. But the only mildly redeeming piece was by the novelist Rick Moody, who self-effacingly reminisced about his acting days with Kennedy at Brown.

New York published a 10-page conversation with various friends and acquaintances of Kennedy's -- even an ex-con Kennedy once prosecuted. But rather than providing any insight into Kennedy, these bits mainly served as commentary on how people expect someone of Kennedy's star status to act. They expressed universal amazement that Kennedy was a decent guy trying to make his way in the world with some degree of humility. Quincy Jones was quoted as saying, "I know people who've had a No. 13 record who've had more attitude than he did." Well, maybe it was a really good record.

The package closed with an essay by Michael Wolff, who at least had the courage to admit he has a "Kennedy obsession." Wolff neatly summarized John Kennedy's life: "His accomplishment, in other words, was to be halfway normal." Judging from the foolishness of those he was forced to live and work among, that accomplishment was apparently no small thing.

* Barnicle watch. When I die, please don't let my eulogy be read by someone who once called me a "thin-lipped, dim-witted, bad-backed polo player whose empty head can barely retain enough limited cocktail chatter to get him through dinner with that international moron, Princess Di." Amazingly, that was John Kennedy's fate on Friday night, when former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who had written those very words about Kennedy in August 1997, narrated Ted Kennedy's eulogy to his nephew on MSNBC over a backdrop of images from Kennedy's life.

Kennedy's death was both an opportunity and a trap for those shameless enough to promote their Kennedy connections. The historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written for Kennedy's magazine, George, was mocked by Slate as "the William Ginsburg of the Kennedy death circus" and a "necropublicist" for his ubiquity. (Reportedly he's been dropped from George's masthead by disgusted Kennedy loyalists.) Dan Rather and Time managing editor Walter Isaacson took their lumps as well.

But no one has been whacked around more than Barnicle, who was absolutely promiscuous with his TV face time following Kennedy's death -- not just on WCVB-TV (Channel 5), where he is, after all, an employee, but on just about every network show as well. The Boston Herald (which unearthed the 1997 column), naturally, cuffed him around, as did the New York Post and even the New Republic.

Still, Barnicle's performance didn't strike me as particularly odious -- until MSNBC handed him Ted Kennedy's words and said, "Read." It was a low moment, both for him and for the network.

Someone at MSNBC must have thought so, too. On the network's Web site, when you click to hear the eulogy, you hear not Barnicle (who also wrote, "What do you figure John Kennedy majored in at Brown? Shop?") but, rather, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw.

* The dean on the dream. The Washington Post's David Broder turned media critic in his syndicated column this week. And damn, it was refreshing.

Broder labeled as "excessive" and "exploitative" the media's obsession with the death of a nice guy of minimal accomplishments who just happened to be a celebrity. He criticized former Robert Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz for calling President Kennedy's assassination "the central event of the 20th century in American history," ahead of the Depression, two world wars, and space exploration. And he wrote that, because of the "power of the celebrity industry," "the distinction between fame and worth is being blurred and nostalgia is clouding our sense of history."

Broder obviously doesn't get it. Good for him.

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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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