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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]

The war over KPFA
Stupid management tricks at a Berkeley public radio station make people care about free speech there -- even if they don't listen to it anymore.
By Anthony York
[07/17/99]

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Also Today + Famous for being famous From his salute to his father through his career at George, JFK Jr.'s triumphs were mostly style over substance. By Bill Wyman + Full coverage

There is a lot of speculation that it will not. Rumors of George's demise have been circulating for months. George's contract with its current publisher, Paris-based Hachette Filipacchi Medias, expires at the end of the year. Kennedy has long been rumored to be at odds with the magazine's publishers, and acknowledged publicly that he was considering shopping George around. He was sighted last year meeting with Conde Nast CEO Steve Florio.

Financial troubles and declining readership continue to plague the magazine. Last year, the magazine's circulation dropped nearly 5 percent, to just over 400,000. Ad revenues had fallen 20 percent in the first half of 1999, and the magazine is a long way from profitability, losing nearly $4 million a year. The New York Post had begun a virtual George death watch, regularly weighing in with evidence of its struggles.

But rumors of the magazine's demise are not new, and have proved wrong in the past. Even now, some writers remain optimistic that George will endure. "I don't think John Kennedy, as smart as he [was] in an editorial sense, is essential to [the magazine's] future," said New Yorker staff writer Kurt Andersen. But without Kennedy, it "would lose credibility as a venue for advertising. John Kennedy [was] very smart about going after advertisers."

The four-year-old political mag is Kennedy's legacy. After a well-publicized wrestling match with the New York State Bar exam, and a brief stint as a Manhattan prosecutor, Kennedy left his law career behind to found George, and he gave it the tagline, "not politics as usual." When asked about its mission, he often riffed that politics was the greatest show on earth, and he wanted a magazine that covered politics the way Sports Illustrated covered sports.

George covered politics, Kennedy-style, with a heavy dose of glamor and celebrity. It made sense for a man born in the public eye, whose every developmental stage, since birth, has been captured by the cameras. The fusion of celebrity and politics defined George, from the first issue which featured Cindy Crawford cross-dressed as a midriff-baring George Washington (the magazine's namesake)on the cover, to the most recent, dated August 1999, the political humor issue, featuring actor Ben Stiller.

"Clearly, he was not editing this magazine for people who knew a lot about politics," said Edward Klein, former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and author of several best-selling Kennedy biographies. "It was an effort to reach audiences who needed politics to be sugar-coated with pop culture -- and he being the greatest pop culture figure of them all."

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