John F. Kennedy Jr. was more than an heir to an American dynasty; he was a living symbol of promise and tragedy. From the boy who saluted his father’s coffin to the man whose life ended too soon, JFK Jr. carried a public mythology that shaped how the country saw him and how he moved through the world. Three decades after he launched George magazine, and with a new television series revisiting his life and romance with Carolyn Bessette, it’s worth returning to what George tried to do — and what its brief life tells us about politics, media and democratic engagement.
George was a surprising project. Launched in 1995, it was a political magazine that refused to read like one. Kennedy set out to break the conventions of political coverage by fusing politics with pop culture, treating public life as something that could be vivid, human and accessible rather than solemn and remote. The first cover — Cindy Crawford posed as George Washington — announced this sensibility with a smile and a provocation. It was playful, irreverent and unmistakably intentional.
But the purpose went beyond cleverness. George sought to invite people who had tuned out of conventional political discourse back in. It wasn’t about dumbing down politics; it was about raising the level of engagement by meeting readers where they already were: at the intersection of celebrity, image and everyday concerns. By making politicians feel like people — by showing them in contexts that were cultural as much as institutional — the magazine offered a different model of civic conversation: one that saw voters as participants, not passive consumers.
Kennedy’s editorial choices reflected a willingness to confront the contradictions of his inheritance. He staged covers and features that read like acts of personal reckoning as much as editorial gambits — Drew Barrymore styled as Marilyn Monroe, for example, invoked the shadows that hovered over the Kennedy name; an interview with George Wallace, the segregationist who clashed with JFK Sr.’s civil-rights legacy, was not a stunt but an attempt to force uncomfortable conversations into the open. These choices treated politics as a human drama, messy and morally ambiguous, rather than as an arena of polished postures.
There was also a deeper belief at work: democracy cannot be sustained by solemnity and solemn rituals alone. Kennedy grasped that civic life needs to be inviting and emotionally intelligible. If politics feels distant, people disengage; if it feels alive, they return to it. George’s tone — playful, stylish, earnest — tried to revive curiosity about public life by making it feel relevant and even seductive. In an era of dry policy pages and insider op-eds, that was a bold experiment.
After Kennedy’s death, George could not survive. Its collapse marked more than the end of a magazine; it signaled the premature loss of an early experiment in reshaping political storytelling. The culture, perhaps, was not ready for the model he proposed: one where politics and popular culture intersected in a way that aimed to enlarge participation rather than merely entertain.
The larger question posed by Kennedy’s life and work is one of identity and authenticity. Public figures born into legacy face a paradox: they are expected to carry the weight of history and yet are judged harshly when they try to be themselves. For Kennedy, the search for self was public and fraught. He moved away from the most obvious paths — he did not simply step into elected office — and instead sought forms of expression that allowed him to define his own relationship with politics and memory.
Authenticity, in that context, is the radical act. In moments when performance masquerades for seriousness and polish is taken for purpose, being genuine becomes a political stance. Kennedy’s approach was less about theatrical gravitas and more about presence: the capacity to make people feel something real, to open up possibility rather than instill fear. That kind of charisma is not mere celebrity; it’s a form of civic magnetism that can draw attention back into democratic life.
We can mourn not only what Kennedy’s life became, but what his experiment suggested might have been possible — a modern, candid, communicative model of public leadership that refused easy binaries and sought to engage citizens honestly. The strongest legacies are not always those that culminate in office or title; sometimes they are experiments left unfinished, ideas that outlive their institutions and continue to provoke imagination.
Three decades on, George remains a reminder that political life can be reimagined. Its covers and conversations still prompt the question: how do we connect democratic ideals to the people whose votes and voices sustain them? The answer the magazine offered — imperfect, brave and ephemeral — was that politics should meet people where they are, not demand they meet it on its own solemn terms.
[This piece was originally published in Greek in Athens Voice.]
[Casey Herrmann edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
