NewStandard: 7/25/99

NewStandard: 7/25/99: "Q&A: John Kennedy, Jr. - On George and Celebrity This article is reprinted with permission from Brill's Content Magazine, March 1999. Q&A: John Kennedy, Jr. - On George and Celebrity This article is reprinted with permission from Brill's Content Magazine, March 1999. " John Kennedy, Jr., was famous even before he left the womb, and his 38 years in the media glare as the son of one of this country's most legendary politicians has formed his ideas about how politics and its players should be covered by his magazine. On January 8, Kennedy sat down for an interview with editor in chief Steven Brill and senior writer Abigail Pogrebin at the New York headquarters of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines. Kennedy explained why George fills a gap in political journalism and where he thinks it has strayed. He didn't duck questions about how personal his involvement is in the magazine, how he weathers the carping of critics who say George is irrelevant, and why he thinks, after three-plus years, he's proving them wrong. Edited excerpts of the approximately 70-minute interview follow. STEVEN BRILL: What are you trying to do with the magazine? JOHN KENNEDY, Jr.: When we started, there [had] never really been a political magazine for the general public in America that [had] been commercially successful. So, basically, the idea was to create a lifestyle magazine that was grounded in politics and American history for a broad audience, particularly with reference to people who hadn't really been drawn to political magazines before -- women and young people. BRILL: But what's a political lifestyle magazine? KENNEDY: The idea was to make it accessible, and to make it visual, and to make it entertaining -- as opposed to something you had to read in order to be literate in your job and conversant in the environment that you work [in]. Which I think the National Journals or the National Reviews or The New Republics are, for the most part. And that it has the visual cues of a lifestyle magazine -- that it be visually driven, that there be photographs, that there be color, that there be a sense of vibrancy and a kind of contemporary modern look, that are evocative of a fashion magazine or an Entertainment Weekly. Fundamentally, one of the big problems with political magazines before [was] that they really had not changed the way that they looked in 40 years. They're text driven, they're black-and-white, they're written mostly by men, mostly for men. And they don't reflect a modern sensibility, which is to try to grab people's attention and say, This is interesting. Politics is interesting. You should know about it. Come read our magazine. BRILL: So I read George this month, and I'm a 27-year-old middle manager at Microsoft. Your perfect [reader], right? I read George this month, and what do I know that I didn't know [before]? KENNEDY: That's a difficult question. There might be certain facts that are in the magazine that you didn't know. But the thing that we really wanted to do was, for any well-rounded person, politics is something one should be literate about, and people want to be. Our idea was to make politics accessible to people who wanted to have it close by, who wanted to read it and pick it up, who could talk about politics with the same sort of informed casualness that they might talk about the new movie coming out, or a new record, or the NBA strike, or whatever. And the way that we figured is the best way to do that is really through the people that inhabit the political process, and to deal with them as compelling personalities. BRILL: Give me an example of an article -- particularly in recent issues -- that you think really is emblematic of the mission. KENNEDY: I think that there are two main kinds of articles [that] do that for us. One is a piece which has not appeared yet [on Minnesota Democratic Senator] Paul Wellstone. [He] is not a terribly well-known senator, but yet [was] probably going to run for president. [He] is known as this kind of quirky eccentric within the Senate, very liberal. And not much has been reported on him. And he's had a fascinating life. He came from a very interesting background, quite passionate, quite aggressive, and feisty. He was a boxer, and that informs all his sensibilities. And you read about him, and all of a sudden, instead of just a guy you see who's in the Senate, you have a sense that you have a proximity to him as a person, to his lifestyle, to his upbringing -- that you didn't have before -- that I think only a magazine can do [and] TV can't. Conversely, when you have familiar people who have a proven ability to get the attention of the masses -- like a John Travolta -- talking about politics, talking about what he thinks about it, I think people are interested in that. Maybe not the Washington cognoscenti, but I think that it's interesting for the kind of people who we're going for to have that exchange. To hear politicians talk about popular culture, [such as Ohio Republican Congressman] John Kasich talking about his first Grateful Dead concert, which [was] in an article that we had before, or Tony Blankley [Newt Gingrich's former press secretary] on what it was like to be a conservative who smoked marijuana in a university in the late 60s. BRILL: You just mentioned the difference between the cognoscenti and everybody else. There seems to be a gap, in terms of the perception of this magazine. Washington insiders say this magazine does not have the inside story; there's no buzz about it on Capitol Hill. But when we talk to the people who subscribe to it, they like it. Does that bother you that there's that gap? Is that gap bridgeable? KENNEDY: We didn't want to be the National Journal. We've had one politician on our cover, Newt Gingrich, and we've had an old photograph of Richard Nixon. And when you have in your inaugural issue Madonna talking about, "If I were president," clearly it had not been our objective to woo the folks in Washington. They have The Hotline, they have C-SPAN, they have The [Weekly] Standard, they have The New Republic. They have their own discourse, their own conversations. BRILL: Do you care if they dismiss it? KENNEDY: Sure. No one likes to have their hard work dismissed. But I don't lose sleep over that. [We] are the largest political magazine in the country now, which is, after three years, an achievement. We have the numbers, and we have the audience that we wanted to get. And if the two shall meet, great -- and I think, occasionally, that they do. I also think George is a little bit of a closet read. There's a sense of George, particularly [for] younger staffers, younger people on the Hill, [being] a paradigm of politics that they understand. And if they don't read it to get the latest on the budget debate, that's fine. But if they read it because it's [got] an interesting article on Wellstone, or someone got an interesting thing on [Arizona Republican Senator] John McCain, and there's some great photographs that have never been there before, then I think we've done our job. BRILL: What do you think your biggest mistake has been, editorially? What would you take back? KENNEDY: (Pause) I think the magazine is more explicitly political now. We maybe shoehorned, forced, the popular-culture stuff in. BRILL: What's an example? KENNEDY: I don't want to name names. Well, why not? Demi Moore was doing, I think it was Striptease, right? That was going to be a big movie. She has an affair in the movie with a senator, I think, or something like that, so there was, tangentially, a political aspect to it. And so we had her on the cover talking about sexual politics. And that's not what people really want to hear about from her. You can't just take any movie, and you can't just take any person, 'cause people smell when you're trying to give them a bait and switch. So now we confine ourselves to what movies are dealing with a political topic, sort of a compelling social issue. For instance, A Civil Action. There were other, more glamorous folks we could have put on the cover, but they weren't going to be about a political movie. And we sort of made the choice: We're going to confine ourselves to these things. And we're not just going to put someone in a string bikini on the cover. ABIGAIL POGREBIN: But when you say it's more explicitly political now, do you mean it also has more politics? KENNEDY: Yeah. Because what we've found from researching was that people like the proximity of the popular-culture aspects to it. They got it. A lot of our reader mail is people who said, I never thought I would like a political magazine before. I never bought one. I'm really starting to understand it. I appreciate the non-biased aspect of it. But they don't want too much pop-culture stuff in there. Just like in Rolling Stone, they don't want too much politics. They want mostly music and a little bit of politics. In our magazine they want mostly politics and a little bit of popular culture. And when the balance gets out of whack, I think it [becomes] a problem. Which is good for me, because actually I know more about the political world than I do about the entertainment world. BRILL: Tell me about your own involvement in the editorial process. If I look through a table of contents, how many of the stories in there -- big or little -- would be your ideas? KENNEDY: It depends. Some issues more than others. BRILL: In the current issue you've got [former] President Reagan on the cover. Is that something where you said, Let's do that? KENNEDY: What really happens is, we have meetings with the senior staff, and there are things that interest me, and there are things that interest them, and we talk about them. And, in a kind of Socratic method, we vet the ideas. And the ones that stand up under that scrutiny, and the ones [for] which we have a writer that can deliver it, get done in the magazine. There was always, from the beginning of this magazine, a certain skepticism of me. Was I [the] front man for this? BRILL: That's why I'm asking. KENNEDY: Frankly, I'm not sure I want to dignify it with an answer. BRILL: That's why I didn't ask it directly. KENNEDY: (Laughs) This enterprise has consumed almost now six years of my life. It came at considerable, personal kind of risk. There [were] a lot of people that would have loved to see this be a farce, and it hasn't been. And I don't really care what people think as far as my involvement. I care what the people who work here think. And it works, and our readers seem to [think] we put out a good product. So I'm as involved as [an] editor in chief should be. BRILL: Do you read everything that's in the magazine? KENNEDY: Do I read every word? Mmm, no. I'll skim stories, and I'll get very involved in some stories that I think are important, and really line-edit [them]. And other ones -- for instance, the columnists -- I don't get as involved in, because they work with separate editors. BRILL: What about on the business side? KENNEDY: Well, I'm an owner, and not many editor in chiefs are owners. And I think that since part of the mission of the magazine is the challenge of, 'Could you really marry the commercial opportunities that magazines really need to live by and politics?,' [then] it's appropriate that I be the spokesman. BRILL: You sound defensive. KENNEDY: Oh, I'm not defensive. But I think it's quite important that I proselytize, that I make the case for George. BRILL: And that includes making the case to advertisers? KENNEDY: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. BRILL: One ingredient it seems you've avoided is [what] I'll call 'Your Tax Dollars at Work' -- or anything about how the government really works. Why doesn't a magazine about politics have that kind of thing in the mix? KENNEDY: Well, I'm not sure I really agree that there isn't a process aspect to the magazine because, actually, I think there is. And particularly in the front of the book there is more [of that] kind of the arcana of government and politics. The government-waste thing is an old faithful, everyone does it. We do these top tens every now and then that are sort of government excesses, or bad laws, or failed bills, or what the do-nothing Congress didn't do. But we don't want to fall back in a reflexive, antigovernment, the-government-is-fleecing-you, politicians-are-fleecing-you position. There's enough of that and we would rather sort of focus on the things that are exclusive to us. POGREBIN: What about investigative pieces? Do you feel that's something you want more of? KENNEDY: Yeah, I would love more. I mean, as you probably have found, we did one on Scientology in Germany. We've done a couple on the drug industry. Investigative pieces are difficult. We tried to do one on the Apollo Theater [in New York]; it didn't pan out. And I find that investigative reporters are a really unique batch. And that for every eight or ten that you assign, maybe you get two that really work and really deliver the goods. BRILL: I always tell people that if I were running a journalism school, I would get rid of the whole curriculum. And the only thing that would happen is that the students would be written about. The best training for any journalist is to have someone write a profile on you, and have it published in your hometown newspaper. Then you understand everything about journalism. If I'm right, that makes you the best qualified journalist on the planet. KENNEDY: (Laughs) Right. BRILL: How do you think your life makes you -- or doesn't make you -- a more sensitive journalist, or [does it just make] you want to be more vengeful? KENNEDY: I think, to be honest, it's an advantage and a disadvantage. I have a perspective on politics that I would say is unique, and one [that] I created a magazine around. There's been enough written about my family that I have notions about journalism, when it's practiced well and when it's not. However, I think good journalism has a very strong point of view, and downplays facts which go against you and plays up facts which support you. BRILL: A good piece should downplay facts that go against you? KENNEDY: Yeah, like in a good argument. Like a lawyer makes a good argument. You are trying to persuade, and you craft an argument accordingly. So I think that my own experience has made me probably more sensitive to a fairness issue. And perhaps the pieces have suffered, in that it's fun to read a really harsh, mean piece about somebody. POGREBIN: What [does] it mean to you that something is nonpartisan or post-partisan, words that you have used to describe the magazine? KENNEDY: I think the current political imbroglio has indicated that real people across America do not have the same investment in partisan politics as people in Washington do. And I think that you find people want solutions, people want government to work, they want to feel good about politics. And they'll vote the person rather than the issue a lot of the time. And I think that happens increasingly. Part of the reason why I think the Washington community maybe has not embraced George to the extent that readers across America have [is that] there is a populist element to it. We are interested in exploring the outsider sensibility about politics. And that is kind of post-partisan -- or it's a lot more nonpartisan than it is in Washington. POGREBIN: What I heard a lot from the [political and media] elite was, if [George] had a point of view it would have more edge, it would count more, it would matter more. But the readers said they like it. They don't feel like anybody is coming down on one side, and they're tired of that. But it does also feel like it's in no-man's-land. Does that bother you? KENNEDY: It is something which is the essential challenge of this magazine. I think a lot of people expected there would be a brief flurry of mouthing about [being] nonpartisan, and then it would turn into John Kennedy's soapbox. And it can't be that. The way you address that is, your stories have strong points of view, and strong sensibilities, but that you have a variety of different ones in there. The thing that people really respond to the most is that they do feel that they are not being led around by the nose. And in terms of Washington, we get a lot of access. Maybe they just think that we'll just be nice to everybody. But I do think that they think that there is an element of fairness, which, given my own experience, is very important. BRILL: Suppose the magazine assigns a piece about somebody, and that somebody doesn't want to pose for a photo. Would you assign a photographer to ambush that person? KENNEDY: It would never be necessary, because there's so much pickup [photos available from agencies] of the people that we do. I know what the question is -- would I assign a paparazzi? And it's sort of a trite question, because you don't have to. BRILL: Let's see if I can make it a little less trite. Most of the pickup you'd buy would be from those same paparazzi. KENNEDY: No, not necessarily. BRILL: But you wouldn't buy one of those shots, or you would? KENNEDY: No, I would buy them. I would get the best pickup that was available that I could. BRILL: Even if it's [a] photographer who ambushed someone? KENNEDY: I'm not a big moralizer about the paparazzi. I may not like it, and it may be a difficult aspect of my life, but it's my problem. BRILL: You don't begrudge them doing the job they do? KENNEDY: It's not something that I think is worth talking [about]. It's not a pressing public principle. BRILL: If you were the editor of Salon, would you have reported on the sex life of [Illinois Republican Congressman] Henry Hyde? KENNEDY: We may not have done it, but was I dismayed that it happened? No. Because I think that any time there is an element of hypocrisy lingering, it's interesting to read about it. BRILL: So you would or would not have done it? KENNEDY: I really don't know. For us to do it, it would have looked weird. You know, it's inconsistent. There are obviously my own family issues in which it looks hypocritical. It looks too partisan. So would I have done it in our magazine? No. Salon is obviously a magazine you know where they're coming from. They're fighting that fight. So was it appropriate for them to do it? Yeah, I think so. It's not as appropriate for us to do it. POGREBIN: When you sat down to do a Richard Mellon Scaife interview, [a lot of reporters called it] a coup. Everybody wanted [to talk to the millionaire well known for funding right-wing publications and think tanks]. And some people have said that you have a kind of Larry King style of letting people's words speak for themselves, but not necessarily nailing them to the wall. Is that something that is conscious? KENNEDY: Well, I'm very flattered by the comparison. (Laughs) I find interviews difficult, because I don't like to really do them, present situation excluded, and I know, having done a few of them, what makes me uncomfortable and what makes me feel noncooperative. BRILL: Which is what? KENNEDY: Which is sort of a sense that a reporter has an idea already about what he wants this to come to. That you're not just sitting down in a conversation and see[ing] where it will lead; there's sort of a setup going on. And I just find the people I interview are people whom I'm interested in. I worked in the Reagan Justice Department during law school, I clerked for William Bradford Reynolds in the civil-rights division. Not because I agreed with him, but because I was just interested in how they thought, which was obviously completely opposite to what I had grown up with. So I just go in to an interview, and I just ask questions that I am curious about. And, more often than not, it starts out stilted, but, [as with] Richard Mellon Scaife, he just felt comfortable, and he just talked. It's not my nature to be inquisitorial; I think it is my nature to be curious. I'm thinking about the people who read us. You're sort of being a proxy for them. BRILL: Doesn't it drive you crazy to read the stuff that belittles you and the magazine, when you're actually coming to work every day? KENNEDY: Well, there's a lot less of it now than there was in the beginning. BRILL: Did you ever think, Why did I get into this? KENNEDY: No, because I knew that was going to happen. I knew that it would irritate people no end -- the supreme irony of me going and joining a media conglomerate to be a journalist! And then to have it kind of work fairly well? I mean, we're still in business, you know? BRILL: But you like to be liked. KENNEDY: I don't really like to be liked. I never look for approval from the journalistic community. If it comes, great. But I didn't really see that as the group that I had to answer to. And then the more condescending it got, the more that I knew that I was doing the right thing. But that has stopped now, I think. I mean, we're like the Conan O'Brien of magazines. You know, we're still here. BRILL: In your column in the [February] issue, you [wrote] something about how the idea of politicians as role models is a fraud. That's what you think? KENNEDY: No. I think that people don't think of politicians as role models anymore, that there is an inherent contradiction. On one side, we perpetuate the notion that politicians should be role models, and on the other, we don't treat them as such. BRILL: Don't you think they can be, should be? KENNEDY: I think they are, merely by doing what they're doing. And if they have a marital infidelity or if they did something in college that they wouldn't do 20 years later, I don't think that makes them a role model. But I think for an industry now that has been [as] demarcated as politics, who wants to go into politics now anymore? People just roll their eyes, and I think that's really sad. When my father was president, there were 30 people covering the White House. There are now 3,000, and they're all chasing the same rabbit. So it becomes very difficult to maintain perfection under that kind of scrutiny. You're putting an impossible burden on them -- and you're setting yourself up for a sense of failure about the political system. And I think that that burden is unfair, and it makes good people stay away from government. BRILL: I've got to ask you one snide, condescending question. KENNEDY: Sure. BRILL: Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Tom Hanks, Christy Turlington, Johnny Depp. You're getting the point, right? KENNEDY: Mmm-hmm. BRILL: Bruce Willis, Charlize Theron, whoever she is. KENNEDY: Hey, she's on the cover of Vanity Fair this month, and we had her first. BRILL: Well, okay, fair enough. My point is, if you take the last year of covers, with all of the movie stars, that package doesn't say this is a magazine about politics. Are you doing with the magazine what people get frustrated and angry at politicians for, which is doing something that's popular, that brings in a crowd, and then, after the election, changing the message on them? KENNEDY: I started this as a business, and my objective is that this be a real business. Because if it's not a business then there's no point in doing it. And I don't shy away from that. Having familiar people from popular culture integrated within the political content of our magazine, that is the essence of what the magazine is, which is that politics has migrated into the realm of popular culture. And in order to maintain the attention and the interests of Americans, or viewers, they have to use the same kind of attention-getting device as popular culture, that politicians have to become personalities, in the show-business sense. And by virtue of the fact that there's been an explosion of media, personalities have an opportunity to become political. And that's really the germ of what George magazine is saying. I think we've made, perhaps, an error on one or two covers. I don't want to offend her, but Charlize Theron I think was arguably one of those. We were doing a thing about American folklore, and she was commenting about America. It would really be unsatisfying to me to have some somber politician on the cover, and we gather dust in the back of some newsstand somewhere. I mean, if I sell 180,000 copies of a political magazine -- man, I am happy. And so I could do something else, with some drawing of [South Carolina Republican Senator] Strom Thurmond and sell 20[,000], and maybe I'm serious and consequential in Washington. But if the people that I'm trying to reach are passing me by, then that's a failure. POGREBIN: What about Maureen Dowd's quote: "Celebrity distorts democracy, by giving the rich, beautiful and famous more authority than they deserve?" The idea that it's one thing to sell magazines, but to give celebrities any sense of weight, [for instance] what Pamela [Anderson] Lee has to say, is taking it a step further than you should? KENNEDY: Maureen Dowd writes, as far as I can tell, mostly about the personal, about celebrity, and about the personally trivial. And it makes for interesting [reading]. The reason why she's interesting is because she writes about the most kind of provocative personal points of people in politics. And so that comment seems sort of freighted with contradiction coming from where it does. BRILL: Should the media report about the sex lives of kids of politicians? KENNEDY: It depends how interesting their sex lives are. BRILL: You really mean that? KENNEDY: I think it's a broad question. I think you should give me a context. BRILL: Eleanor Mondale [the daughter of former vice-president Walter Mondale and the subject of a gossipy February story that had little connection to politics]. That's the context. KENNEDY: Listen, I understand the irony in that story appearing in George. But that's kind of a racy, fun story, and something that I would read. BRILL: And if she calls you up and says, "How can you, of all people, publish a story like that?" KENNEDY: I'd say: "Hey, man -- you know, I've been there. It's a pain in the neck, but, you know, it ain't as bad as all that." POGREBIN: Looking back on your famous editor's note [in which Kennedy wrote about two of his cousins' marital problems and posed tastefully nude for an accompanying picture], would you do anything differently? KENNEDY: That's almost one of [our] best-selling issues ever, so I don't think so. Without reinterpreting the letter, because hopefully the letter [spoke] for itself, though it was deliberately oblique, I did that because that was something I wanted to say and something that I had felt strongly about, which is, we judge harshly people in the public eye for being human. The picture had to accompany the letter, because otherwise the letter would have looked like I was being judgmental. And the picture had to accompany the letter because the picture exposed me to judgment. And it was not an exhibitionistic thing. There [are] 40 photographers in Hyannis during the summer that photograph me swimming [and the photos are] far more revealing. The reason I [talked] about myself in the letter was just to reinforce [that] I was not exempting myself from what I was talking about. BRILL: So you came into the office and said I have this really great idea, I'm going to write this piece and it's going to be accompanied with a nude picture of me, [and everyone said], Great idea, John. KENNEDY: They were horrified. This is how I have to do it. Listen, your magazine is obviously the product of some strong opinions you have. And if a magazine is not reflective of one person's soul, then it probably stinks. And sometimes, depending on how I'm feeling, I just kind of let it loose. Otherwise, what's the point, right? What's the point for me to have a magazine if I'm not going to use it in some way that is personal? BRILL: You seem not overwhelmingly thrilled about being in the public spotlight. Why do people keep saying that you're going to run for office? KENNEDY: (Laughs) I don't know. BRILL: Do you think you ever will? KENNEDY: I don't have any immediate desire to. Obviously this magazine brings you right up against politics, and I like that. However, do I feel a frustration about being an observer, not a participant, sometimes? Yeah, because that's my background, that's what I have in my blood. But, yet, would I want to go in, with the hell that would envelop my life? Not at this juncture of my life. I just got married. I like my privacy.