|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
| AGE OF CELEBRITY | |
 July 27, 1999 
|
||
|
|
|
|
After the death of John Kennedy, Jr., it was finally clear what had happened to America four decades earlier, when his father became president.
During the search for young Kennedy's body, along with those of his wife and sister-in-law, there was otherwise much talk of the Kennedys as our "royal family" and John, Jr. as "prince"; much talk of Camelot in our newspapers and magazines and especially television. The Kennedys, after all, became America's first family of television. |
|||||||||||||||||||
| President Kennedy on television | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Kennedy family seemed to us an old order -- a dynasty. They were, in fact, new money, with a winning populist politics. Unlike the Roosevelts or the Rockefellers, the Kennedys invited us to watch them -- and we did.
It was Jackie, after her husband's assassination, who encouraged a Life magazine writer to name the Kennedy years "Camelot." Last week, Dan Rather, on CBS News, lost his composure reciting the lyrics from the musical, "Camelot"-- such is the stranglehold of myth on journalism.
And we now know the backlot of Camelot was a place of shadows and brambles. |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
| Journalistic goodbyes | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
Last week, journalists and Kennedy courtiers-it was hard to tell the difference -- gathered on programs, including the NewsHour, to eulogize that black-and-white golden age. One Kennedy functionary suggested the assassination of JFK, was possibly the most important event of the century -- hyperbole no one bothered to challenge.
Last week, television showed images we knew by heart -- the hidden years -- the Prince Hellion years when we only caught glimpses of him. He told interviewers that his father was simply his father, his life a real life. But we insisted on reading his life mythically in the pages of People magazine.
He edited a magazine, George, devoted to something called "political lifestyle". To that extent, he submitted to the terrible, blinding life as style-culture that joins journalists and movie stars and politicians in one tragic round.
A journalist at ABC News said that now "the torch passes to Caroline, if she wants it" and over at NBC speculation was that the Kennedy women may become the family's new celebrities. In the end, his sister, Caroline, cast his ashes to the sea where the television cameras and our eyes will never be able to find him. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
During
the Kennedy administration, show business, politics, and journalism
-- the three most important avenues of public life --converged upon
one golden street. Forty years later, it fell to television's Barbara
Walters to tell us, quite gratuitously, after John's plane crashed last
week, that he had been rumored to have once had an affair with Madonna.
During
the first televised presidential debates, when the camera found Richard
Nixon perspiring and pale and JFK looking tanned and relaxed, the physical
difference was everything.
JFK
had a queenly wife with a queenly name -- though the press preferred
to call her "Jackie," a familiarity she rebutted and toyed
with. She was glamorous -- that's all we needed to know. And she had
two beautiful children and a flair for myth-making the equal of Hollywood.
In
truth, the Kennedy years saw the beginning of our disastrous involvement
in Vietnam and saw growing discontent among black Americans.
In
our Age of Celebrity, after all, our interest may change rapidly, but
as long as we stay focused, we are capable of big feelings. Mourning
may be one of the few things we can do well -- whether for Rudolf Valentino
or Judy Garland or Lady Diana.
Nothing
he said, in the end, mattered as much as tiny salute we had seen make
at his father's funeral. It was a salute he had been prompted to make
and one, he said, he couldn't remember making. That salute would doom
him to celebrityhood and make it impossible to avoid our need for him.
All
last week, outside his Tribeca apartment or at Arlington Cemetery where
the graves of his parents are marked by an "eternal flame,"
strangers had opinions about where he should be buried. For wasn't he,
after all, ours?