Politics and Pop

With George, the politics-and-celebrity magazine he founded and had edited since 1995, John F. Kennedy Jr. channeled the public attention that was his inheritance into a field where attention is the major currency. David Pecker, the former president and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi, George’s publisher, recalls that after the 1992 election, Kennedy “became fascinated with the convergence of politics and pop culture,” which was the organizing principle of George. Sporting Cindy Crawford on its first cover, George sought to draw celebrity-mad readers to politics, if not always for the most serious reasons–for instance, it ran a beefcake photo of a strategically bared Kennedy in September 1997. George profiled entertainers; it gave bylines to headline-grabbing political figures like Alfonse D’Amato; it asked Claire Danes and Denis Leary what they would do if they were President. Yet it also hired noted journalists and essayists to write long, earnest pieces, like a recent report on the environmental legacy of the pork industry. Even the magazine’s political writing, however, has tended to emphasize personality over issues. While George may have been correct in identifying politicians as celebrities, that trend was hardly a blessing for political discourse.

Though George built a circulation (lately around 400,000) much larger than that of more staid political journals, the magazine was losing money, and Kennedy had been negotiating George’s fate with Hachette. Just last week an industry newsletter reported that the magazine’s owners were ready to shut it down. Kennedy told staff last week that he was negotiating with other potential publishers. But if George’s future looks doubtful without Kennedy, it will at least be an important artifact for having bridged the worlds of politics and celebrity–worlds that John F. Kennedy Jr. knew from both sides.

–By James Poniewozik. With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York