Thirty years ago, when New York City’s magazine industry was the epicenter of glamour and power, John F. Kennedy Jr. launched George. It was an era of influential editors who traversed the city in black cars, flew on the Concorde, and shaped careers with colossal budgets. Kennedy, by contrast, was known for riding his bicycle around town.
“They called him a himbo. The New York Post used to tease him all the time,” recalled Nancy Jo Sales, a longtime magazine writer who covered Kennedy for People. She remembers him as kind, gracious, and a dog lover. “He was no dummy. I mean, look who his parents were. His mother was one of the most cultured people ever in American social history. His father was—hello? He was a very smart guy. And what he really loved was journalism. He wanted to make a great magazine.”
Sales added that in the mid-90s, launching a magazine was “the coolest thing to do… the most exciting thing to do, and it was the thing that mattered.”
After years of planning, George debuted in September 1995 with the novel mission of merging politics and celebrity, famously featuring Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington on its first cover. “Magazines were still fat and rich enough to be ambitious,” said Sasha Issenberg, who was a teenage intern at the publication. “John came to this with a big animating idea, not only about what the magazine could look like, but about a bigger shift that was underway in American politics and culture.”
The year 1995 was a turbulent one, marked by the murder of Selena, the Oklahoma City bombing, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and a sarin gas attack in Tokyo. The political and cultural ingredients of today’s chaotic landscape were already simmering. Into this world, Kennedy entered the elite ranks of editors at Vogue, People, and Time, launching George with Hachette Filipacchi, the publisher of Elle and Woman’s Day.
“If you wanted to know what was cool in the ‘90s, you looked at a magazine. Now you probably look at social media. But back then, editors were the ultimate tastemakers,” said Amy Odell, author of “Anna: The Biography.” Icons like Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, and Sassy’s Jane Pratt became celebrities in their own right, wielding immense cultural influence.
“He was a famous person looking for a niche to slot himself into,” said Matt Haber, a veteran print and digital editor. “If he was around today, George would be a multimedia company. He would have a podcast, a show on Netflix… But back then, magazines were still the center of the culture—and if you wanted to make a statement, that’s the way you did it.”
The Years of Excess and Influence
At their peak, magazines were cultural engines. They supplied Hollywood with a stream of content that became films like “Boogie Nights,” “Hustlers,” and even the “Fast and the Furious” and “Top Gun” franchises. They launched the careers of literary stars such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Foster Wallace and created enduring cultural touchstones like the September issue, the Person of the Year, and the New Yorker cartoon.
This influence was powered by immense profits and legendary extravagance. “I was an intern at Entertainment Weekly in 1998, and we got paid a salary, overtime if we stayed past six, and a dinner voucher,” Haber recalled, adding that car service home was also provided.
Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy and former editor of New York magazine, remembered his time at Time: “On Thursday and Friday nights, they’d have a bar. I would say, ‘Oh, I want to go write about the World’s Fair in Seville, Spain.’ ‘Okay, sure. Go.’ I was never, ever turned down.”
Top editors enjoyed even more lavish perks. Condé Nast secured mortgages for key staff, and some contracts included six-figure wardrobe allowances, weekly flower deliveries, and personal drivers. In his history of the company, “Empire of the Elite,” Michael Grynbaum noted that for years, “there simply were no budgets.” For one story, Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown flew photographer Annie Leibovitz 41,000 miles in first class.
“When I worked at InStyle, the whole staff went on an off-site to Antigua,” said Janice Min, former editor of Us Weekly and current head of The Ankler. Fortune magazine once spent $5 million taking its staff to Hawaii.
While George wasn’t at the center of this imperial luxury—its office mates included Road & Track and Car Stereo Review—working for a Kennedy had its own benefits. Editor Gary Ginsberg recalled Kennedy taking the entire staff to a Yankees playoff game, sharing his front-row Knicks tickets, and distributing the piles of designer clothes sent to the office.
The office itself was a “constant circus,” Ginsberg said. “You never knew who you’d run into: Demi Moore, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric.” Kennedy’s fame brought the magazine invaluable buzz, though it also invited skepticism. “It never felt like it was going to necessarily land… because it had that sheen of a vanity project,” Min explained. “It got a disproportionate amount of coverage, probably with a strong hint of schadenfreude from other media that didn’t love the idea of an OG nepo baby staking a claim in the industry.”
Despite the doubts, George launched successfully, with ad sales so strong that the staff struggled to produce enough content to fill the pages. Its ambition, however, sometimes wobbled. For the debut issue, the magazine paid Gore Vidal a reported $25,000 for an essay on George Washington, but when Vidal submitted a piece criticizing the first president, Kennedy chose not to run it.
Still, Kennedy was no dilettante. “John was a great editor,” said writer Lisa DePaulo. “He wasn’t a line editor… He was a visionary editor, which is much more important for a good writer.”
Issenberg agreed, noting that in meetings with seasoned editors, “John would crystallize a story before anybody else did. That was all from instinct, curiosity, being a smart person and a sharp reader—not the result of any formal training.”
The End of an Era
Kennedy died in a plane crash in July 1999. George continued for a time, losing nearly $10 million in 2000 before shuttering in March 2001. “When he died, I kind of knew in my gut that without him, there’s no magazine,” DePaulo said.
In retrospect, the magazine’s mission was both prophetic and fragile. “The magazine could have this—John liked to say—post-partisan worldview,” Issenberg said. “I don’t think that would have survived 9/11, let alone the financial crisis, or the Trump years… the stakes have gotten so high.” Ginsberg added, “We were launching a ‘post-partisan’ magazine at the very time that the country was fracturing.”
DePaulo believes Kennedy was ahead of his time. “Now, the intersection of politics and pop culture is in every publication.”
The end of George heralded the decline of the industry it belonged to. The 2008 recession hit publishers hard, and the rise of the internet dismantled their business model. Salaried contracts for writers became rare, and a host of iconic magazines folded or went digital-only. “I’m sorry to say magazines mean nothing today,” said Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, in 2023.
Today, the influence once wielded by editors is a fraction of what it was. While brands like Vogue and Vanity Fair survive, their power has shifted. Anna Wintour’s cultural dominance is now more tied to the Met Gala than to the pages of her magazine.
“Social media… did something great, which is that it democratized information, and the role of the gatekeeper has completely diminished,” Min observed. That gatekeeping funnel, she noted, was “overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male… reflective of wealthy people who live in Manhattan.”
Kennedy’s vision aimed to break that mold, appealing to women, young people, and Americans outside of coastal hubs. His instincts about the convergence of politics and culture proved spot-on. Donald Trump, who appeared on the cover of George’s March 2000 issue, would later use his celebrity to build a political movement, embodying the very phenomenon Kennedy sought to document.
The world got post-magazine politics, where public scrutiny and influence are available to anyone with a smartphone. “Everybody’s a reporter now,” said Sales. “It’s interesting to see what people come up with… It’s just where we are now.”
