America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  John and Michael also marveled at how technology was transforming the way that politicians communicated with the public. John’s father had been the first to use television to project his image into American living rooms. Now the emergence of cable television and twenty-four-hour news cycles was redefining the nature and experience of publicity; CNN and C-SPAN delivered unedited political news almost immediately as it occurred. Given the force and reach of this new media, politicians needed to adapt accordingly. In the most famous example, Bill Clinton played Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on his saxophone, while wearing hip dark shades, during an appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show. President George H. W. Bush appeared on MTV, and third-party candidate Ross Perot announced his bid on Larry King Live. Vice President Al Gore’s appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, just two months into the Clinton-Gore administration, produced the show’s highest-rated program. “Al Gore!” John would say incredulously, given the vice president’s reputation for being stiff and pompous.

  Michael and John observed another significant trend: the line between entertainment and politics had blurred beyond recognition, as politically themed films proliferated, and politicians became regarded as heroes. They used the example of the hit movie Dave, a 1993 political comedy about a man who bears such a striking resemblance to the commander in chief that the Secret Service recruits him to fill in while the real president lies in a stroke-induced coma. But it turns out that the substitute president is everything the original is not: honest, decent, and incorruptible. Berman and Kennedy believed the movie was important not only because it had a positive message, reaffirming that good people could still change a corrupt political system, but also because it highlighted the convergence between Hollywood and popular politics.

  That convergence began with John’s father, who turned to Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford—to reinforce his image as a celebrity politician, and peaked in the early 1990s. Ronald Reagan may have been the first Hollywood actor to become president, but his policies were too conservative for most stars in the entertainment community. It took the campaign and election of Bill Clinton to consummate the marriage between Washington power and Hollywood celebrity. Each had what the other desired. Celebrities wanted access to power. No longer content to hand over cash at star-studded fund-raisers, they insisted on sharing with those in power their views on everything from protecting the environment to promoting the arts. Politicians, who had seen their status decline since Watergate, understood that stars could not only fill their campaign coffers but also boost their stature and generate buzz. A picture taken with Robert Redford, Sharon Stone, or Richard Gere would land in newspapers and magazines and get more attention than any campaign event or commercial. It was no surprise that two A-list producers, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, produced The Man from Hope, the schmaltzy Clinton biography that debuted at the 1992 Democratic Convention.

  Once Clinton won election, a steady stream of celebrities flowed into the White House. Some commentators quipped that Barbra Streisand spent more time at the White House than members of the president’s Cabinet. “The Clinton White House is extravagantly starstruck,” complained The New York Times.

  Now convinced that the federal government was in capable hands, Hollywood’s elite turned out films that presented politicians in a more sympathetic light. John and Michael, however, believed that consumer demand accounted for Hollywood’s sudden eagerness to make big blockbuster films about politics. “We the people are insisting on more information about the personalities who shape the issues and ideas that define our times,” they wrote.

  John’s determination to create a magazine went beyond a celebration of celebrity for its own sake. He grew up listening to stories of the “good old days” when the public looked up to its leaders and the media focused on meaningful issues and not personal peccadilloes. Like many members of his family, John harbored a certain nostalgia for his father’s presidency. Former advisors Kenny O’Donnell, Dave Powers, and Robert McNamara regaled him with glorious tales about JFK’s administration—how his dad used his star power to rally the nation to fight the Communist threat globally, jump-start the economy, and advance civil rights. Of course, they did not tell him that his father had also exaggerated the Soviet threat or that he had been slow to address civil rights violations. By the time John and I were having these conversations in the 1980s, he was well versed in the critical literature about his father, but he clung to the basic notion that had his father lived, the nation could have avoided much of the turmoil that shaped the 1960s.

  I experienced this nostalgia firsthand when I helped John prepare a short speech about Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense under both JFK and LBJ. In March 1998 Time magazine celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary with a gala at Radio City Music Hall to honor those who had graced its cover over the decades. The event included political leaders such as President Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union; Hollywood A-list celebrities (Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, Tom Hanks); and dozens of journalists, including NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. John was asked to deliver a speech honoring McNamara. He asked me to help him write the tribute, so we went to dinner at a small Italian restaurant not far from his apartment.

  “I understand that McNamara made a mistake in Vietnam,” he said, “and I don’t want to ignore that, but he was loyal to my father and to my family. That counts for something.” As we talked about walking that tightrope, John made a passing comment that his father would have pulled troops out of Vietnam had he lived. I questioned that assumption, pointing out the political blowback he would have received had he allowed South Vietnam to fall to Communism. The longer we debated, the more I realized that he had learned just about everything he knew about Vietnam from the surviving members of his father’s administration. (No wonder he failed his Vietnam seminar at Brown!) The next day, John called me at home to say, “I talked to Bob McNamara last night, and he said you are completely wrong.” I surrendered, not because John had convinced me but because I knew the issue was deeply personal for him. We were, after all, talking about his father.

  Over the next few weeks, John faxed me drafts of his speech, which I would edit and then send back. We finished the day before the event, and I felt confident about the speech. But the content of the speech John delivered was completely different, and much better, than the one I had worked on. Clearly, he had called in the pros at the last minute. Taking a cue from his father’s Profiles in Courage book, which honored senators who had made politically risky decisions, John spoke about McNamara’s character. He wisely chose not to relitigate the Vietnam War, instead describing the courage that McNamara had shown by later admitting his own mistakes. However, one sentence did remain constant throughout each draft: “I would like to thank him for teaching me something about bearing great adversity with great dignity.”

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  John was too well read and too sophisticated to accept the myth of Camelot, but he retained his father’s ideals, his sense of public service, and his desire for change. I remember talking with him about the influential article and, later, bestselling book “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” written by Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam. Published in an academic journal in 1995, the article used a wealth of statistical data to chart the decline of civic culture in the United States. Americans, Putnam pointed out, were no longer civically engaged—they were less likely than other generations to attend public meetings, go to church, or even participate in local sports. Americans, as Putnam reported memorably, were even bowling alone.

  John found the argument wholly convincing and very disturbing. It appealed to him because it offered a new perspective that did not fall neatly into tired liberal and conservative orthodoxy. It underscored for him that the nation needed to find ways to get
people—especially young people—invested in their communities and to care about political decisions that impacted them. An older generation may have grown too cynical to change, but John saw George as reaching young people who had yet to be tainted by the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. Most of the magazines that covered politics, such as The New Republic and National Review, were ideologically driven and written for political junkies. While John did want those in Washington to read the magazine, his true ambition lay in extending his reach beyond the Beltway.

  In short, John intended to take a different approach to politics and journalism, promising that their venture would “be informational, not ideological.” Both he and Berman believed that politics did not simply involve exercising the franchise; it was also about the colorful personalities and offbeat stories that helped voters to understand the human side of the political process. John was particularly sensitive to the necessity of humanizing politicians. He saw how his uncle Ted had been turned into a caricature by his conservative opponents. What if they could see Ted the way he did? This treatment should work both ways, John believed: liberals, too, needed to gain a deeper understanding of even the most controversial figures on the right, such as Alabama governor George Wallace and South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. “George is a magazine that understands culture is more powerful than politics,” John and Michael opined. Their goal was to “showcase politics as engaging, exciting, and hip” by combining “policy wonk” topics with “stylish, provocative reporting and writing.”

  They had the concept; what they needed next was a name. They tried to get away from names that included the word politics, since it made the magazine sound too much of an inside-the-Beltway production. But nothing worked. At the time, John was still dating Daryl Hannah, and the name George was the brainchild of her brother-in-law Lou Adler, the founder of Dunhill Records who was responsible for signing and recording such groups as the Mamas & the Papas and the comedy duo Cheech & Chong. “Yours is the first postpartisan magazine,” he said. “Why not name it after our first president?” Both John and Michael loved the idea; more important, their testing showed that potential readers also responded warmly.

  Not everyone had a clear idea of the magazine’s vision, though. When John described the concept to his dying mother, Jackie asked, “John, is it going to be the Mad magazine of politics?” Her friends recall her making similar comments. But her concerns ran deeper. “John has never shown the slightest interest in the magazine business before,” she told the author Edward Klein. “And he has no experience in journalism. Why would he want to start the kind of magazine that snoops and pries into people’s private lives?” Mrs. Onassis was understandably sensitive about the prospect that her son would join the ranks of the paparazzi—the same people who had tormented her. But that was never the type of magazine that John planned to publish, as he explained to her on a number of occasions. Nevertheless, she was happy that John had not only found some career focus but also revealed a passion and dedication that was normally reserved for sports.

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  I had never seen John so passionate as when he was talking about George. After all, the concept of creating a magazine that used pop culture to generate interest in politics was both bold and innovative. I knew nothing about the magazine business, but I appreciated the power of John’s charm and knew that he possessed the brains and perseverance to pull off such a daring feat. Over time, however, I came to question some of the assumptions upon which this enterprise rested. Most troubling was their belief that the country stood on the brink of entering a postpartisan age in which ideology no longer mattered. During his campaign, Bill Clinton had fed this notion by abandoning many traditionally Democratic positions, declaring himself a “new Democrat” who remained tough on crime and aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” He managed to win the 1992 election by maintaining the loyalty of the party’s traditional constituencies—labor, African Americans, city dwellers, the poor—while also luring back the rapidly growing white, largely suburban middle class that had abandoned the party in the 1980s.

  John’s position becomes more understandable when viewed in relation to the mistakes of his father. JFK, along with many liberals of his generation, assumed that prosperity had muted ideological differences. “Politics,” Kennedy said with a typical flourish in 1962, needed to avoid “basic clashes of philosophy and ideology” and be directed toward “ways and means of achieving goals.” He could not have been more wrong. Ideological clashes defined the 1960s. The decade witnessed violent battles over race relations, bitter debates over the Vietnam War, and the emergence of a generation of radicalized, militant students who joined groups on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

  There was a window in the mid-1990s when reasonable people could again believe that the nation was headed for an age of peace and prosperity devoid of partisanship and ideology. The end of the Cold War, the great ideological struggle that had defined President Kennedy’s generation, seemed to usher in a new age of liberal democracy—a “new world order,” as President George H. W. Bush declared. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States stood as the world’s sole superpower, prepared to spread its values across the globe. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim “the end of history,” pronouncing, “there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy.” A similar sense of optimism infused thinking about America at home. Technological breakthroughs promised to increase productivity, a global economy dominated by the United States offered the prospect of ever-rising living standards, and the coming-of-age of the baby boom generation, the largest and best educated in history, conjured hopes of unending prosperity. Unburdened by history, and by the threat of global recessions, Americans decided to focus their energy on private pursuits, and politicians clashed more about culture than about the substance of policy.

  We now know that optimism was misplaced. The technology bubble that burst at the end of the decade was a precursor to a global crash less than a decade later. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 underscored the persistence of radical ideologies that threatened the global order. Globalization, it turned out, enriched a few and left many behind, producing a massive wealth gap in America.

  While no one at the time could have anticipated these events, it was possible to see that John had vested too much significance in the 1992 election. Shortly after the Democratic Party reclaimed the White House after twelve years, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the same historian whose ideas shaped John’s thinking about George, asked me to write an essay on the election for a series he was editing on the history of presidential elections. Given all the hype and excitement surrounding Clinton’s victory, I assumed I would find evidence revealing an important shift in voting patterns. I was disappointed. Clinton won with 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race. Businessman Ross Perot, who ran as an independent, did not win a single vote in the Electoral College but did claim almost 19 percent of the popular vote—more than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Some signs of change were apparent. Voters sent six women to the Senate and forty-eight to the House of Representatives. California became the first state to elect two women senators—Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein—and Illinois elected the first African American woman to the upper chamber, Carol Moseley Braun.

  Like Kennedy and Berman, many Democrats hoped and believed Clinton’s victory set the groundwork for a realignment like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s revolution of the 1930s. But much to my surprise, I learned that Clinton’s victory did not, overall, deviate from recent elections. From 1980 to 1992, four separate Democratic nominees won between 40 percent and 45 percent of the popular vote. The Republican range was much wider, swinging from 59 percent in 1984 to 38 percent in 1992. Clinton received the same percentage of the electorate as Hubert Humphrey in 1968. His 43 percent was lower than Dukakis’s 45.6 per
cent in a two-way race in 1988. Only 38 percent of Independents voted for Clinton—the same number who voted for Walter Mondale in 1984. Only 10 percent of Republicans crossed over to vote for him. Voter surveys showed that economic discontent and a desire for change spearheaded the Democratic victory. The election represented a rejection of the Bush presidency, not a new mandate for reform.

  Even as Berman and Kennedy were fine-tuning their nonpartisan pitch, American politics was taking a disturbing lurch to the right. In the 1994 midterm elections, Georgia firebrand congressman Newt Gingrich, who had been pushing Republicans to adopt a highly partisan, take-no-prisoners approach to politics, led his party to take control of the House. That year, not a single Republican incumbent for Congress or governor lost. Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. In Senate races, they won all nine open elections and defeated two sitting Democrats. The day after the election, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama switched to the Republican Party, increasing the GOP’s edge to 53–47. Republicans also scored well in the states, where they controlled the governor’s mansion in eight of the nine most populous states. Democratic gubernatorial stars Mario Cuomo of New York and Ann Richards of Texas went down to defeat. For the first time in history an incumbent House Speaker, Tom Foley of Washington, was defeated.

  The election represented the culmination of a process that began at the end of World War II, when the Democratic Party began inching toward support for civil rights, a process that accelerated once Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the white South voted solidly Republican in presidential elections, it continued to support Democratic candidates on the local and state levels out of habit. But that tradition changed in 1994, heralding a new era of conservative politics. Nineteen of the forty-nine House seats Republicans garnered came from thirteen southern states: the eleven states of the Confederacy along with Kentucky and Oklahoma. Most of the seats came from districts that tended to vote Republican in presidential elections but had continued to elect Democratic congressmen. For the first time since the post–Civil War Reconstruction—the twelve-year period from 1865 to 1877—Republicans controlled most southern governorships, senatorships, and congressional seats. In less than a generation, the Republicans turned the solidly Democratic South into the securely Republican South. Texas, home of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, now had two Republican senators and a Republican governor. Republican members of Congress outnumbered Democrats by 2 to 1 in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.