Is John Kennedy Jr.’s ‘George’ making American politics sexy?

Black and white flashback to 1963. With the first lady en route to Greece, President John F. Kennedy seizes the opportunity to invite a Look magazine photographer into the White House to capture his son in action. CLICK. Two-year-old John-John peeking out from under his daddy’s desk in the Oval Office. CLICK. CLICK. John-John making silly faces as he squirms in the presidential chair. Jackie would hit the ceiling if she knew what was going on, the president confessed to the editors. * JFK not only understood the public’s fascination with his handsome young family, he also was determined to exploit it, says biographer Richard Reeves, who recounts the Look photo session in his book, “President Kennedy: Profile of Power.” JFK-the-politician seemed able to hear the cocking of a camera at 100 yards, says Reeves. JFK-the-president would spend hours studying photos of himself before deciding which ones should be released. “He originated the glamorization of the family and children that other presidents had resisted.”

Spin the clock forward. Analog to digital. Rotary dial to cellular grid. “American Bandstand” to MTV. In the three decades that pass, fame becomes the currency of success. Fame legitimizes. Being conspicuous gets confused with being illustrious. It happens even in the dry, gritty world of politics and public policy, where a willfully uninformed TV talk-show host like Larry King becomes a must-stop for presidential candidates, and MTV offers a forum for the leader of the free world to disclose his preference for briefs over boxer shorts.

All of which opens up a neat career opportunity for the premier offspring of America’s celebrity culture, John Kennedy Jr. For the past year, Kennedy has produced a glossy political magazine whimsically named George after the Founding Father. New York-based George is the realization of the 35-year-old Kennedy’s vision to formally marry politics to celebrity, to dollop the gray world of public service with a heavy helping of glam and glitz, to appeal to that same mass thirst that Camelot once quenched.

George turns 1 next month, drumming up enough business from advertisers to support a move from six to 12 issues a year. The verdict within the political-media elite that Kennedy’s father so artfully conquered and manipulated ranges from yawns to ridicule, with only a sprinkling of applause. Even among Washington’s young and hip, enthusiasm is markedly thin. An informal survey elicited responses spanning from, on the right,

Lawyer/activist Laura Ingraham--”Don’t read it. I’ve seen it a couple times”--to, on the left, White House deputy for intergovernmental affairs John Emerson--”Do I read George? I skim George.”

But it’s impossible to ignore George’s commercial strength and reach. With combined subscription and newsstand sales that reach toward the half-million mark, Kenndy’s magazine dwarfs tonier publications such as the New Republic (at 100,000) or its new conservative counterpart, the Weekly Standard (at 60,000).

Part of the dismissal of George--one pundit snidely called it a “net loss of information”--stems from Kennedy’s unquestioning embrace of the celebrity culture. His father viewed Hollywood as a playground, a fantasy-retreat from the serious business of governance--both he and Robert Kennedy assiduously avoided being photographed with stars. (Reeves recalls landing at Los Angeles International Airport in 1966 with Bobby Kennedy, who spotted actor/activist Robert Vaughn waiting for him. Kennedy promptly ordered his advance team to shoulder the Man from U.N.C.L.E. out of the camera’s view.) Neither Kennedy would consider publicly soliciting a star’s views on public policy.

Not so for John Junior. Borrowing from cultural magazines like Vanity Fair and Esquire, he gussies up George’s profiles of political operatives, activists and lawmakers with cover shots of Cindy Crawford’s navel and Demi Moore’s painted breasts. Then he goes on to give celebrities a forum for the more serious stuff. In the regular feature “If I Were President,” which is being leveraged into a “Dateline NBC” segment, we learn that Madonna is sure she’d never want to be president (she’d rather fight the good fight “as an artist”) and that Gloria Estefan doesn’t want the job either (“No matter what you do, someone will be against it”). With those kinds of insights, you can almost hear the collective chortles of disdain for George from across the Potomac.

Senior presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos, whose personal experience with the celebrity culture includes tabloids fixated on his love life and an “appearance” as the unseen object of lust in an NBC “Friends” episode, mostly considers George harmless entertainment that holds the potential to broaden the political audience. “You evangelize where the souls are,” he says. “If you can get people to pay attention through one avenue, maybe they will pay attention to others.”

Still, like others in the political establishment, he worries that turning politics into “another form of entertainment” ultimately furthers the distance between politicians and the public.

Where the cognoscenti see danger, Kennedy sees a ripe business opportunity. He and his young staff are acutely aware of their standing in the Washington establishment, and profess not to care. “I’m not publishing it for them,” Kennedy has been heard to say to associates. He alternately describes his magazine, designed to attract a youthful outside-the-beltway audience, a lifestyle publication with politics at its core, a fan magazine, the Rolling Stone of politics.

“John is a very populist guy,” says a friend. “He has a very sincere and deep streak of that in him. My own feeling is that for so much of his life he’s had elites and intellectuals write about him as stupid--so he empathizes with people who have been locked out in some way.”

But with public cynicism about government at an all-time high, reaching those who are “locked out” takes more than under-clothed starlets, and Kennedy’s corporate chieftains know it. It takes a convergence of celebrity and history, celebrity and national myth.

It takes careful marketing of the little boy peeking out from under the desk of a heroic president murdered three days before his son’s third birthday.

George exploits John Kennedy Jr.’s cult of celebrity at a time when Americans are hungry for icons, not heroes. Through interviews with figures such as George Wallace and Warren Beatty, Kennedy’s travels down the highway of family history are among the best-read features of the magazine. Sprinkled inside the magazine’s pages are subtle nods to the Kennedy dynasty--a table of contents that one month features a photo of his father, another month a shot of his father’s star-crossed paramour, Marilyn Monroe, both only peripherally related to stories in the issue.

There are even wink-wink jokes about Kennedy’s own fame, like his interview with the editor of the National Enquirer. Or the shot of Newt Gingrich on the set of CBS’ “Murphy Brown,” with the explanation that the House Speaker “eschewed the sometime guest role of Murphy’s secretary and played himself.” Kennedy himself played a cameo role just a few episodes back. “It’s almost as if Kennedy thinks his life is what life is all about for most people,” says Clay Felker, director of the Felker Magazine Center at UC Berkeley and founding editor of New York magazine.

But that’s precisely the point. Within established media circles, Kennedy may be an amateur, but his position with the broader public is unassailable. Kennedy stumbled onto that fact himself when he interviewed National Enquirer editor emeritus Iain Calder, who asserted that his tabloid would never print compromising photos of Kennedy, even if they existed. “Our readers consider you a beloved figure,” he said in a manner suggesting condescension, not adulation. “They would have killed us for doing that. You’re the little boy saluting his father.”

By publishing a magazine with John Kennedy’s name on every cover, George’s shrewd French owner, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines Inc., has found a way to package all that public adoration, all those female screams that accompany Kennedy’s appearances at charity events, all those pop-pop-pops of the paparazzi cameras every time he and his girlfriend leave a New York City restaurant.

This is the story of how Hachette bought John Kennedy’s celebrity, like a $20-million bottle of perfume, and used it sparingly and strategically to lure free publicity and build an advertising base for George. It’s the story of Kennedy’s own ambiguous relationship to that celebrity, learned at his mother’s aristocratic side, and his determination to use his fame to build a magazine that will inspire a new generation to talk about politics.

In today’s tabloid culture, a little bit of John Kennedy, like that fine perfume, goes a long way. But to overcome thinning editorial content and an advertising base that, while respectable for a start-up, has shrunk by two-thirds since George’s much-hyped debut, Hachette needs to stage-manage its biggest asset.

For Hachette’s bet to pay off, the company must transform John Kennedy into the Martha Stewart of the political media set.

*

Since george’s debut a year ago, John Kennedy has operated Oz-like from his bland Manhattan office, accessible to his Generation-X staffers but curiously inaccessible to many of his writers and the political world he aspires to interpret for a mass audience. An editor whose own interviews with public figures are a well-publicized staple of George, Kennedy rarely talks to the media himself. When he does, the sessions are tightly controlled, his comments never revealing.

A Times request to interview Kennedy for this story went on a two-month-long Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, beginning when scheduled interviews with Kennedy, president Michael Berman and Hachette chief executive David J. Pecker were abruptly canceled the night before. Spokesman Keith Estabrook offered as explanation a planned move of offices within Hachette’s New York building.

Vague promises of rescheduled appointments followed, but they were always pushed into the future by “travel schedules” and even, at one point, office uproar ensuing from the murder of an editor at another Hachette publication. Many weeks and phone calls went by without a firm response for meetings with Kennedy and Pecker. In the end, Estabrook finally announced that the editor “declines participation. He’s just not interested. The magazine speaks for itself.”

Kennedy’s shyness toward the profession he now claims as his own serves to heighten his mystique. His reclusive mother taught him that: The more she hid from the public’s prying eyes, the more the public sought her out. In John Kennedy, Hachette has a commercial interest in protecting and promoting that mystique.

Suffocating under a mass media fascination with his striking looks and romantic interests, Kennedy clearly wants to be taken more seriously. Estabrook, for example, wouldn’t even entertain an interview request without assurances that this story was not about Kennedy’s love life. The few media forums Kennedy has chosen are typically scripted or staged, or are hosted by such celebrity acts as Larry King and Howard Stern.

Odds are that in a more freewheeling and serious forum, an unscripted Kennedy wouldn’t live up to expectations, only because the expectations for JFK’s son are so high. Those who have counseled or befriended Kennedy describe him as smart but not brilliant; earnest but not kinetic; interested but not charged. Take away the family accouterments, and he’d be one of those cute jocks you went to high school with, the ones who actually read the newspapers and still displayed social graces learned from seventh-grade cotillion.

According to Berman, Kennedy’s reaction to press coverage--both critical and laudatory--is measured. Even after positive responses to the George debut, Berman says, “He was reserved in his excitement. I said, ‘What’s with you?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. One day it’s positive, the next day it’s bad.’ ”

Until the advent of George, Kennedy’s celebrity was free-floating--not particularly useful in his life, except to get movie star dates. Being Jackie O’s son didn’t help him through the prestigious Phillips Academy, where he flunked a year-end exam and was forced to repeat a grade. Being labeled by People magazine as “the sexiest man alive” didn’t help him pass the bar exam, which he failed twice before conquering. Tabloid shots of him with his arms around actress Daryl Hannah didn’t lighten the grind of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, which he left after four years.

While a handful of third-generation Kennedys have become respected public figures, others are better known to the public for their heroin busts, drug and alcohol rehab efforts and rape charges. Amid that, John Kennedy stands out as a remarkably decent fellow--impeccably well-mannered, considerate and without airs. One George contributor recalls his discomfort at Kennedy’s proclivity for addressing him as “sir.” New Republic senior editor Matt Cooper remembers Kennedy’s embarrassment when the lamb he had cooked was overdone--even though it was Cooper’s late arrival that had delayed the dinner meeting.

But Kennedy also inherited his father’s short attention span. His critics see him as a restless dilettante trading on family history; his defenders portray him as earnestly trying to find his own way despite the weight of his family name. His charm is offset by a disorganized style that can be off-putting: personal invitations that go unanswered, phone calls not followed up. “It’s the most disorganized publication I’ve dealt with,” one writer said of George.

Kennedy’s relationship to the tabloid press that haunts his life is a curious one. On one hand, he might be viewed as a normal guy trying to live his life like anyone else in New York City--riding his bike to work, playing football in Central Park, walking his dog on city streets. Yet this man who supposedly relishes his privacy has dated a string of actresses certain to juice the paparazzi. And he provides tabloid photographers with no shortage of opportunities to snap him shirtless--whether in-line skating in Central Park or emerging from the Cape Cod sea.

Earlier this year, when a pair of tabloid photographers caught video footage of Kennedy in a particularly effusive lovers’ spat with his girlfriend, publicist Carolyn Bessette, one had to wonder: Knowing he’s regularly tagged by the tabloids, why didn’t he take his squabble indoors?

Like his mother and his older sister, Caroline, John has developed a strong sideline of public service work, including involvement with a theater troupe that produces charity benefits. But unlike his sister, a successful legal author, John Kennedy has found the ideal career path elusive. After graduating from Brown University in 1983 with a bachelor’s in history, he wandered from work investigating a sunken pirate ship to a city development job to stage acting to law school and the district attorney’s office, with other stops in between.

In the mid-’80s, Kennedy hooked up with a similarly aimless young man, Michael Berman. Berman, the son of a New Jersey real estate developer and a homemaker, had stumbled into a public relations job at a summer stock theater after graduating from Lafayette College. In 1989 he started his own public relations firm, PR, NY.

In the late ‘80s, after a weekend of boating, Kennedy told Berman that he saw money to be made in the marketing of specialty kayaks. “We were having dinner one night,” Berman recalls, “and John said he found this handmade kayak. There’s a million kayaks and nothing like this one. So we formed this company called Random Ventures, and we were going to mass market these custom-made kayaks. After a year of thinking about this--once every four months--we realized that the special thing about handmade kayaks is that they are handmade, and there is no way to mass market them! So that was the end of that business.”

*

President Clinton’s 1992 campaign and election--his sax performance on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” his hip young staff, his visceral bond to the MTV generation--suggested to Kennedy that politics could be exciting, even glamorous. Camelot all over again. He laid out his vision for a new kind of political magazine to Berman, and they revived Random Ventures. Berman, who readily concedes an ignorance of politics, was growing restless in his PR business and eagerly offered to serve as the marketing and business brains.

Berman explains the initial concept this way: “People talk about politics the same way they talk about film or fashion or business. And if you can make those industries exciting, you can certainly make the political world exciting. You stand at a movie theater these days and hear 16-year-old kids talk about last week’s gross and who the original director was supposed to be--that was trade information before the advent of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere. Now, all of a sudden, it’s consumer information. And that’s what this is, too.”

Those who know the pair--Berman as executive publisher turned president, Kennedy as editor-in-chief--describe a partnership that is both tight and explosive. Berman “exercises Svengali-like control over John,” says one person who has worked with them. But others describe a more egalitarian relationship marked by energetic fights and complicated by Berman’s temper and frustration over being constantly overshadowed: Partnering with John Kennedy is like being Dolly Parton’s feet, he once quipped.

Berman himself describes the relationship in terms that are nothing but flattering toward his partner. “He’s very comfortable being a good cop and I’m comfortable being the bad cop,” he says. “I’m a pretty tough manager. I get very proprietary about [my vision for the magazine]. John’s more sharing.”

As their idea evolved, Berman and Kennedy attended a two-day magazine publishing seminar. They hired a consultant to test market the idea. And they knocked on investors’ doors in an attempt to raise $10 million, an experience that was “demoralizing, humiliating and, after a while, boring,” Berman says. Even the Kennedy charisma couldn’t blunt this unsightly fact: Historically, political magazines are not profitable.

Then Hachette stepped into the game. Touting itself as the world’s largest magazine publisher, the Paris-based Hachette Filipacchi Presse has been expanding its presence in the American marketplace with such titles as Elle, Premiere, Family Life, Mirabella, Car and Driver, Home and Metropolitan Home.

It has a reputation for being tight with its wallet, appealing to a mass middle- brow market--and demonstrating no interest in the prestige of big-league journalism. In May, when the top editors of Premiere magazine quit because they felt their editorial integrity was threatened, Hachette chief executive Pecker bluntly told the Washington Post he wasn’t interested in publishing tough reporting. “There are hard-hitting journalistic pieces that have hurt the magazine, because I do not see an increase in readership,” he said. “I’ve seen a decrease in advertising. I don’t see the risk-profit relationship at all.”

Still, Hachette’s recent purchase of Premiere suggested that it was interested in buying into more glamour than its current repertoire afforded. A partnership with Kennedy and Berman brings the company “high visibility. It ties them to a very charismatic figure and gives them a lot more class than the company has traditionally been associated with,” says Anne Russell, editor-in-chief of Folio, a New York-based magazine trade publication.

Hachette had bigger plans than the mid-scale magazine Berman and Kennedy envisioned, bearing a name like “Politicos” or “New Agenda.” Aiming for a glossy lifestyle look, Hachette committed $20 million to launch George, with Kennedy and Berman sharing in any profits, which would likely take at least five years to generate.

Even though this magazine would break new ground, it had to follow some old rules. For one, advertisers in lifestyle magazines want women readers. Answer: Design a magazine that looks more like Elle than the New Republic. Put John Kennedy’s name on the cover--every issue. Nourish the editor’s untouchable celebrity status by limiting his public appearances but serve him up at a press conference launch where the toughest question was likely to be (and was) about his love life.

Next challenge: Advertisers shy away from controversy. No problem. Kennedy intended his magazine to be “post-partisan.” With Washington and state capitals torn asunder by ideological battles, the idea of rising above partisan coverage seemed untimely at best, naive at worst. But in assuring advertisers that George wouldn’t hone to a particular point of view, the gimmick worked.

Kennedy’s approach fit neatly with Hachette’s vision. Berman doesn’t say where the name George came from--only that they both jumped on the idea as a playful and friendly reference to the nation’s Founding Father. Sources close to the magazine, though, say it was Kennedy’s idea to dress up a celebrity in a satirical Washington costume for each issue’s cover, a concept he stood firmly by even as some in the business ridiculed it. As of this month’s issue, however, the editors had dumped the idea.

By early 1995, George had a prototype, a backer with deep pockets and John Kennedy’s name. All that was needed was advertising, lots of it. And that required hype. And hype, of course, meant trooping out John Kennedy. First stop: the most conservative advertisers in the country. “We knew that if we could get Detroit, we’d be OK because they’re cautious advertisers in terms of content and newness,” says Berman.

Detroit was also safe country for Hachette, publisher of the two major auto magazines in the country--both of which rate automobile performance for consumers. Hachette is not a company the auto manufacturers “would want to offend,” notes Russell. “Better to be safe than sorry if they’re in control of the two main car books.”

In April 1995, the Detroit-based Adcraft Club, the largest association of advertisers in the country, gleefully agreed to book Kennedy as a luncheon speaker. This 91-year-old club was accustomed to hearing from big names, including Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Ted Turner.

But the organizers were not prepared for the furor that Kennedy’s appearance created. People lined up dozens deep down a hallway in the Renaissance Center’s Westin Hotel, hoping to buy the few remaining of the 1,900 tickets. Cameras were everywhere and necks strained to get a better look at the young editor. One publisher present described a controlled mob scene in which 24-year-old media planners tried to steal the editor’s silverware. “It was more like something for a rock star,” says Adcraft Club spokesman Bill Jentzen. “None of the speakers before had created the fervent interest that John Kennedy did.”

More interesting, though, was the red-carpet treatment Kennedy received from the auto companies themselves. “The advertising world went nuts for this guy. It was bizarre,” says one major publisher. “I can’t think of anyone else in this country who could have drawn the range of interest that he did. Everyone wanted to see the guy. Everyone. I’ve seen GM and Ford keep the likes of Ted Turner and Si Newhouse waiting. But the people there were waiting on [Kennedy] like he was visiting royalty.”

The strategy worked. GM’s advertising chief, who introduced Kennedy to the Adcraft Club, committed to become George’s largest advertiser. Others followed suit. “He certainly does have access to advertisers and story givers. That’s part of the cachet of George, don’t you think?” says Jamie Jameson, manager of advertising and media relations for Chrysler, of Kennedy.

The debut issue was stuffed with 175 ad pages, unprecedented for a start-up. And the second issue was just as big, because the publishers required a two-issue commitment from advertisers. After that, the ad pages declined steadily, hitting 60 by this month’s issue. (Vanity Fair, in contrast, averaged 117 ad pages last year.) Keith Kelly, senior editor at the trade publication Advertising Age, says George’s numbers are still respectable. “With most new magazines, 50 ad pages is a magic number,” he says. Even with a subject as supposedly dull as politics, George by mid-1996 enjoyed a paid circulation of 180,000 and was selling an additional 300,000 through newsstands, according to Berman. Some in the industry question the sales figures, which--in a practice common to start-ups--won’t be audited for another few months.

According to Berman, George has attracted an upscale audience that is 55% women. “They have delivered more than they promised in terms of reader profile and circulation,” Jameson says.

But other advertisers delivered more mixed reviews. “It needs more tweaking, though as a concept I think it’s still very viable,” says Debbie Menfi, former media director at Deutsch, which has placed ads in George for Tanqueray gin and Louis Vuitton luggage. “It looked very confused at the beginning. It looks less confused now,” she says.

Steve Klein, managing partner at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, whose clients don’t advertise in George, is more skeptical. “I don’t think young people are that interested in politics, and I don’t know how much relevance it has with older demographics,” he says.

*

Amid the publicity surrounding the launch, the new editor-in-chief granted only a handful of interviews. When Washington Post writer Martha Sherrill requested one, she was granted access, provided Berman be included in the interview. But when she showed up for the meeting, Kennedy was accompanied not only by Berman but also by Pecker and a publicist. In her story, Sherrill satirized the group session by regularly referring to Kennedy’s two business associates as “the blurs,” a tweak that sent shards of anger through Hachette’s offices.

“That bitch,” is how Berman describes his initial reaction to the Post story. “I think I felt sorry for David Pecker because he’s a highly respected and much proven chairman of a hugely successful company. I just thought it was hugely unfair to him. I was used to it. I’ve been John’s partner for a year. I was used to it.” Sherrill, who says she meant no ill will, says she was struck by their naivete about the press.

A few months later, though, Kennedy--smitten with a Sherrill profile of another political figure he had read in Esquire--called her up and beseeched her to write for George.

Elsewhere, the media reaction to the magazine’s debut was wildly mixed. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “revolutionary fun. Not to mention zippy.” The Wall Street Journal labeled its editorial content “an afterthought.” The Boston Globe called it “disappointingly vapid”; the Detroit News called it “a political gem.”

“Of course it’s not going to work,” Felker, the New York magazine founding editor, says of George as it closes its first year. “It’s a magazine without a function, with no point of view. Magazines are interpretive vehicles. He’s clearly no editor.”

Defenders of George point out that it is trying to reach a different, less sophisticated audience than the media elite. “I’m for anything that reconnects people,” says Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who also teaches media courses at the University of Texas. “And if putting Charles Barkley on the cover gets a young person who is apolitical and cynical into the magazine, and along the way he reads a profile of [FBI Director] Louis Freeh, so much the better.”

Kennedy produced the first issues in partnership with Eric Etheridge, who was given the title “editor.” At 38, the tall, red-headed Etheridge was the eldest of the George editors, and by far the most experienced. He had worked at The Nation, Harper’s, 7 Days and Rolling Stone before becoming executive editor of the New York Observer in 1994.

Within months it became clear that Kennedy had every intention of being a hands-on editor. Having made the rounds of Washington cognoscenti and having sought advice from industry veterans like Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, Kennedy was brimming with ideas for stories and writers to pursue. He’s also very competitive--”if you ever saw him exercise, you’d know,” says one friend.

Sources say Kennedy and Etheridge came to blows over the direction of the magazine: Kennedy wanted a lighter mix; Etheridge wanted a serious edge. By the fourth issue, Etheridge’s name was off the masthead. Kennedy would go it alone, relying on his skeletal journalistic credentials and largely inexperienced staff.

“The offices look like one of those boiler rooms from a Kennedy campaign in the ‘60s,” says one contributor. “There’s John and all these young acolytes.”

“I didn’t have the sense it was professionally managed. I was dealing with kids. And the business practices are appalling,” says another source, referring to late payments to writers and slow response time.

According to numerous writers for George, Kennedy typically deals with his writers through his staff, saving his personal contacts for passing on compliments or soothing wounds. “Maybe it works on an advertising level for John to be seen as some sort of mystic. But it’s odd on the editorial side,” says Robert Draper, senior editor of Texas Monthly, whose two stories for George were initiated by Kennedy. “He’s like Oz. With the stories of the magnitude I’ve done, in any other magazine I’d be conferring with the editor. I haven’t had any conversations with John.”

Another contributor says Kennedy has good reason to keep some distance from his writers. “I feel sorry for this kid. He’s an anecdote for every writer he changes a comma on.”

His high profile and limited experience also mean an awkward learning stage for Kennedy. Embarrassed by a Newsweek account that described him relying on another editor to question George Wallace and leaving his notebook behind at another interview, Kennedy seems to be taking more care with his Q&A; sessions. He nabbed his solo interview with New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman after personally calling her at home (“How he got the number, I’ll never know,” her spokesman says). And the publicist who arranged Kennedy’s session with Marion Hammer, president of the National Rifle Assn., says he “seemed better prepared than most journalists.”

Kennedy’s second-in-command is a 30-year-old whiz kid from Spin magazine, Elizabeth Mitchell. Senior editors are Richard Blow, 31, formerly editor of the now-defunct Washington-based Regardies magazine, and Gary Ginsberg, a former Clinton appointee to the Justice Department, an attorney by training. While the magazine pays writers competitive rates, it doesn’t offer generous contracts that such magazines as Esquire and Vanity Fair use to tie up the best writers.

The result is a magazine that one contributor characterized as “painfully earnest” and the New Republic called an “old college try at . . . something.” Most of its subjects are treated with kid gloves. The hardest-edged, and most talked about, stories have gone after journalists--the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and New Republic writer Ruth Shalit.

The magazine’s lack of punch may be as much advertising-driven as editorial direction. Chrysler’s Jameson notes that advertisers are reluctant to be associated with publications that “get edgy or sensational.” He adds, “We try not to align ourselves with a particular point of view.” And while there’s no outside evidence that Hachette has interfered with the magazine’s editorial content, the Premiere episode made clear its position.

Belying the lack of experience in the magazine’s ranks, the story ideas are often good but poorly executed. Hip novelist Caleb Carr, asked to write on the volatility of American politics, delivered an essay so cliche ridden that the Washington Post aptly dismissed it as “term-paperish.” Novelist Bret Easton Ellis produced an essay on how young people are “ruining America” that was so thinly researched you had to give the guy credit for getting a magazine to pay him for it. Other times, assigning fiction writers to cover politics has produced creative stories, such as novelist Mark Leyner’s campaign trail ride with former GOP presidential candidate Richard G. Lugar.

Kennedy and his team pride themselves on being outsiders looking in. Associates say Kennedy is turned off by the often incestuous world of Washington power. At this year’s Gridiron dinner--an annual ritual in which the Washington journalism establishment entertains the officials it covers--fellow guests said Kennedy wasn’t amused by the staged antics and slipped off into the lobby bar at one point to watch a basketball game. (Kennedy attended the event as a guest of L.A. Times Chief Washington Correspondent Jack Nelson, who presided over this year’s Gridiron event. Asked about Kennedy’s appearance there, Nelson commented, “He was very gracious. He did not rush off. He stood and talked to the other guests.”) Piercing the holier-than-thou veil of the Washington politico-journalism complex is a worthy pursuit--if it’s an outside perspective that’s informed. With George, that’s often not the case.

A special package on the values debate raging in political circles was dismissive without being informative. Oliver L. North, whose ethics came into question during the Iran-Contra affair, talks about his virtuous wife, and radio shock-jock Howard Stern talks about his virtuous life--all without any apparent sense of irony. Meanwhile, “The Book of Virtues” author William J. Bennett, a recognized figure in the values debate, is ridiculed by writer Joe Queenan as “the laziest man in the United States.”

Kennedy’s insistence on pulling Big Ideas from celebrities--regardless of whether they have anything to say--also opens the magazine to ridicule. In one issue, readers learned that Julia Roberts “traveled to Haiti for UNICEF determined to do good. But once she got there, she found that even when stars try to do good deeds, they can attract the wrong kind of attention.” Poor Julia. In another issue, Demi Moore stumps for her new movie by sharing this trenchant observation, “There’s this idea that if you take your clothes off [in a strip club], somehow you must have loose morals.” George professes to be nonpartisan, though a careful reader of recent issues can detect a liberal slant--in the values package, for example, and elsewhere in its contrasting treatment of liberal and conservative interview subjects. Laura Ingraham, the lawyer/activist, said conservatives like her were scarce, in contrast to the heavy attendance of liberal officials, at the magazine’s big Oscar night bash. One friend quipped, “Laura, this is going to ruin your reputation!”

*

Is John Kennedy’s ambition to inspire or to entertain? A friend of Kennedy’s says he is more interested in the magazine succeeding as a business than earning the respect of “the chattering classes.” But Kennedy has also invoked the rhetoric of public service that imbues his family history, saying that being entertained by the process is the first step toward participating in it, by voting.

If Kennedy ever does disclose his thinking to his newfound colleagues in the media, America might find out that the son of their revered 35th president is simply a nice, normal guy. But normal isn’t special. Normal isn’t mythical. Normal isn’t Camelot. And so, for now, he’ll continue to define himself through the pages of a magazine that sells for $2.95, newsstand price.

When Kennedy called Post writer Sherrill to solicit her work for George, he told her he was enthralled with her Esquire profile of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey; he had told his staff it was exactly the kind of story he wants to see in George. Sherrill was surprised: Her piece was a personality profile, devoid of political content. It was about Bob Kerrey the man, not the politician.

It was exactly the kind of piece John Kennedy doesn’t want written about himself.