THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Take the celebrity heir to a political fortune, trying both to embrace and to evade the family legacy, and you have George, the first political magazine produced...
...The country's first mass-market political journal...
...Vanity Fair, however, placed its political pieces in a general mixture of style, business, and arts, into which such politics-as-style essays fit nicely...
...The second was that, while Kennedy hoped to inspire the public, the years 1995 to 1999 were short on inspiring causes and long on scandal and farce...
...Even her transformation from the shy wife of Ronald Reagan's press secretary to the leader of a powerful special-interest group is hardly discussed...
...She never addresses the possibility that some citizens might want guns for self-defense, although she does declare— after calling for every sort of gun-ownership restriction—that "law-abiding citizens should be able to buy and keep firearms...
...Brady, America's most prominent anti-gun activist, gives ample details about her husband's medical care, her own battle with cancer, and even her experiences rearing a learning-disabled child...
...It was a magazine of half measures, and half measures just weren't enough...
...The first was that too many political heavyweights did not lend themselves to movie-star treatments, which meant that George ended up running far too many silly features about young staffers...
...But when it comes to firearms, she's almost silent...
...To this end, editors were picked, not from political journals, but from magazines like Mademoiselle and Mirabella—picked, as it were, for their general ignorance, so that nothing the editors commissioned would ever be over anyone's head...
...So if he covered politicians as if they were film stars, people would want to read about them...
...Kennedy began with the best of intentions...
...Describing the treatment of her husband Jim's injuries (sustained in the course of John Hinckley's attempt on Ronald Reagan's life), Brady mixes deeply personal detail with genuinely inspiring stories about her family's efforts to stay together...
...Clinton's impeachment was great entertainment, but the son of one of our more libidinous presidents had no stomach for tweaking the thong-snappers, and George missed its opportunity...
...It would be a political magazine for people turned off by political magazines," Blow informs us...
...Despite all this, A Good Fight is an interesting read...
...Blow and Kennedy seemed to have thought they were breaking new ground in the publishing world, although, as a matter of fact, they were not...
...George's effort to stretch the idea over the breadth of an entire magazine strained the connection between power and culture (which is what also did in Capital Style, a Washington-based George-like effort that likewise lived and died during the Clinton years...
...George was never a political magazine, but a celebrity magazine that focused on politics, and its best pieces—and it did run some good ones—were identical to those in Vanity Fair...
...Almost at once, two things went wrong...
...Add the reminiscences of the magazine's star-struck editor, and you have Richard Blow's American Son, an account of working with John F Kennedy Jr...
...The Standard Reader Books in Brief Take the celebrity heir to a political fortune, trying both to embrace and to evade the family legacy, and you have George, the first political magazine produced wholly by and for people who do not like politics very much...
...His thought was, apparently, that people are less interested in politicians than film stars...
...during the last four years of his truncated life, a tell-little book that tells more than Blow imagines about the blind spots and flaws of the slick-magazine culture and why it was that George finally had to fail...
...Noemie Emery It's rare that a memoir leaves as many unanswered questions as Sarah Brady's A Good Fight...
...Along the way, she takes pot-shots at gun "extremists" (a word she uses at least 30 times) and insists, without evidence, that 95 percent of Americans support her agenda...
...George in the end was too much like John Kennedy himself: hedging its bets, refusing to commit, neither despising nor embracing but waffling in ambivalence about power...
...Eli Lehrer...
...Perhaps she means it, but it's hard to believe...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 41
