There was never any doubt in my mind that John planned to run for the U.S. Senate sometime in the next decade. But he didn’t want public office to be an automatic birthright. His political heroes–Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, among others–were all dedicated to reaching out to the downtrodden, championing the poor. Once when I asked him what his theme song would be if he were president, John, without hesitation, said, “Bob Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ It’s my anthem.”
If John had one overriding social concern, it was racism. A devotee of the acoustic blues, he once told me about a private pilgrimage he made to the large red-brick Carnegie Library, only blocks from the Sunflower River in Clarksdale, Miss., which houses the Delta Blues Museum. He had been driving to such sacred spots as Muddy Waters’s birthplace and the crossroad junction at Highways 61 and 49 when he stopped in front of the Riverside Hotel, where Bessie Smith died tragically in 1937. “Every time I get depressed, I listen to her,” he said. “And then I get cured by her sadness.” This past April, when I was with him in Washington, we were visiting his uncle Sen. Edward Kennedy at his Hart Building office when John spontaneously decided that he was going to pay former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson a visit at his prison cell in Maryland. Earlier that year Tyson had befriended John, chatting with him at his George office on Broadway in Manhattan. “It’s like Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ song,” John said. “It’s racism that has Mike back in jail, pure and simple.” Without media fanfare, John spent part of the evening with Tyson, and gave him American-history books as gifts.
Because George is a bipartisan magazine, John always kept his liberal instincts in check. By hiring Al D’Amato and Tony Blankley to write for George, John hoped to avoid being seen as favoring the Clinton administration–which he did. Somehow he had to make the magazine, of which I’m a contributing editor, a financial success before he could weigh in on the social issues that concerned him. One time he fantasized about having the Conde Nast empire take George off his back, or having it merge with another recent upstart magazine like Brill’s Content, but then he would shake his head, rub his eyes and declare that his loyal subscribers and unwavering fans deserved more from him than a “rich guy’s out.” It was as if his celebrityhood had him trapped in a Sartrean box with no exit.
But instead of bemoaning his fate, John embraced it with wry nonchalance. He had no patience whatsoever for celebrity prima donnas who whined about being misquoted or unfairly portrayed. To John, journalism was an intoxicating profession. He relished the opportunity to interview people who fascinated him–from Fidel Castro to Carl Sagan. Void of cynicism, John, like his father in his own early days, thought being a reporter was the best way to understand how America actually runs. Just two weeks ago we discussed his possibly editing an anthology of the 100 best journalistic pieces of the century, ranging from the muckraking work of Lincoln Steffens to David Remnick on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
John was passionate about–of all things–transportation. Not only did he earn his pilot’s license in Florida in the spring of last year, and became a world-class kayaker, but he was also fascinated by New Orleans streetcars, Mississippi River steamboats and Albuquerque hot-air balloons. A committed environmentalist, John believed hydrogen fuel cells would replace the internal-combustion engine by the year 2020, that automobiles of tomorrow would be pollution-free. “Someday we’ll be able to actually see Los Angeles,” he joked. This statement was typical of John, who always searched for innovative, new ways to make America better.
Since we’re both Sagittarians, born in 1960, he recently told me about visiting an esteemed astrologist in China who read our chart: for the next 18 months, John was told, we would be “stuck in a rut of indecisiveness.” Then, supposedly in September 2000, we would burst forth to “accomplish important things.” This was encouraging news, I quipped, except that we had a brutal year and a half of purgatory in front of us. “Yeah,” he smiled, “but from then on it’s all blue skies.”
