By Brian McGrory, Globe Staff Date: FRIDAY, June 4, 1999
For no obvious reason, I used to casually inform people that John F. Kennedy Jr. and I were born on the same day. If that gave anyone cause to relate us, then I took it as the price of vicarious fame.
I bring this up not in the way of confession -- truth is, he's actually a year and five days older than me -- but frustration. For so many years and so many people, this Kennedy represented the sliver of virtue in a family that was irreversibly evolving into a national disgrace. The only son of the late president, he was the most aristocratic and best bred of a new generation of pampered prima donnas, raised by a mother who sheltered her children from the pandering masses and prying press.
He was lovable when he was young, playing under the Oval Office desk in that famous 1962 photograph, saluting at his father's funeral a year later. As a man coming into his own, he seemed as normal as a Kennedy can be, pedaling around Manhattan on his mountain bike, failing the New York Bar exam a pair of times, quaintly declaring, ``I'm clearly not a major legal genius.''
And his 1996 wedding to the breathtakingly beautiful Carolyn Bessette on a remote barrier island off the coast of Georgia before the horde of paparazzi could find their way still stands as a monument to good taste in a culture that prizes publicity over privacy.
So here we are in 1999, and something has gone so terribly wrong. John Kennedy Jr., in the absence of his mother, has turned out to be something of a whore.
He is suddenly everywhere, drinking in his celebrity, prancing from Upper West Side gallery openings to Midtown society balls, implicitly pitching his lightweight magazine, George. It appears as if his clothing stipend has been cut, given the frequency in which he is photographed without a shirt.
The turning point came in August 1997, when he burst the Kennedy code of silence and wrote a magazine essay describing first cousins Joseph and Michael Kennedy as ``poster boys for bad behavior.'' His thoughts were incomprehensible -- ``vapid,'' according to The New York Times.
The essay was odd enough. But on that very same page, you'll recall, Kennedy posed naked, his arms wrapped around his knees in courteous coverage of his privates. Go figure.
Flash ahead past so many bare-chested shots and a few high-profile marital spats to this March, when Kennedy made a late-night pilgrimage to the Montgomery County Detention Center in Maryland to meet with imprisoned boxer Mike Tyson -- a visit that intentionally and absurdly summoned images of his father's civil rights record in the South.
Afterward, on the prison steps, he told the gathered reporters he was a ``friend'' of Tyson's, and suggested the boxer was ``a much different man . . . than his public image would suggest.''
Let's be clear. Tyson is a convicted rapist. He bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear during a 1997 match he was destined to lose. He punched out a motorist involved with him in a fender bender. His isn't an issue of image, but felony.
Last month, Kennedy's antics took a more disgusting turn. He invited Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to the annual White House correspondents dinner, and Flynt showed up -- attired in a satin green dinner jacket with dragons embroidered on his lapels.
If this was intended to be some sort of joke, the punch line was lost on anyone with good sense or decency. Flynt is a hard-core pornographer of the worst kind, a racist without apology. He has been accused of sexually abusing his own children. And as National Journal editor Michael Kelly pointed out, Flynt published unauthorized nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Kennedy's mother, in 1975.
Kennedy fancies himself a journalist. Truth is, he bought himself a magazine editorship with his inherited money and fame, and now dedicates that magazine to glitz. The June cover story, for example: ``How Star Wars Will Change American Politics.''
I called him last week to discuss his upcoming plans. Would he launch a TV show, as has been discussed? Was he influenced by his father, who said that when he left the presidency he wanted to edit a great newspaper? Does he really believe he's gotten to know Tyson since they met?
He didn't return the call. A spokeswoman said he doesn't respond to reporters -- an interesting position for a journalist. So we wait and wonder what he'll do next, what craven embarrassment he'll bring to a profession that really isn't his. Who would have thought: John-John, just another Kennedy, a poster boy for bad behavior.
Brian McGrory's e-mail address is mcgrory at globe.com
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