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Can George survive without JFK Jr.?
The star-struck political magazine was losing money, ads and readers even before its founder's tragic disappearance.
By Anthony York
[07/18/99]

Boy wonder
It wasn't just JFK Jr.'s looks that made him a sex symbol.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[07/17/99]

The beautiful and the damned
Much has been given to the Kennedys, and much has been taken away
By Jake Tapper
[07/17/99]

The last Kennedy
From the moment he was photographed as a three-year old saluting the coffin of his father, he had a place in America's collective heart.
By David Horowitz
[07/17/99]

A good man, very fair, very witty, very loyal
While the world waits, Christopher Hitchens reflects on the life and career of John F. Kennedy Jr.
By Christopher Hitchens
[07/17/99]

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Also Today + Can George survive without JFK Jr.? The star-struck political magazine was losing money, ads and readers even before its founder's tragic disappearance. By Anthony York + Full coverage

JFK Jr. could have become, after such beginnings, a monster or a clown. Instead, he became a cipher. The child of the media age became its first effective recluse, under the protection of a suddenly discreet mother. Under difficult conditions -- the assassination of one uncle, the destruction of the other's national political career, his mother's cold remarriage, myriad other tragedies and embarrassments in his extended family -- he carried himself with a measure of dignity and grace.

This, again, was a triumph of style over substance, but in a family whose male members could serve as "poster boys for bad behavior," as he famously put it, it was a triumph nonetheless. The things he did accomplish -- eventually passing the bar and serving as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan -- would in some families be considered achievements, but in his represented marking time until he could find his rightful public place in the world.

When he did, through journalism, it was duly noted that his famous father had also begun that way. The comparison is unhelpful: Though it was never mentioned this pious weekend, JFK's best-known publishing accomplishment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage," is generally considered to have been the work of ghostwriters. But George, the magazine JFK Jr. launched in 1995, was not an embarrassment.

Kennedy took chances, as in his searching essay on his family's peccadilloes; more recently, in publishing a racy, well-reported look at Eleanor Mondale's personal life. One of the best attributes of the magazine was Kennedy's fluid use of his own celebrity to obtain, with rigorous regularity, interviews with high-profile, often unlikely figures, from George Wallace to Richard Mellon Scaife to Fidel Castro to Garth Brooks.

Next page | Didn't get journalism's necessary iconoclasm