Reading this weekend that Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were endorsing Barack Obama, I got to thinking about what might have been.
What could JFK Jr. have become if he had lived?
Would he have continued coasting along as a socialite, perhaps founding another magazine or dabbling in philanthropy? Or would he eventually have entered politics, perhaps running for the U.S. Senate from New York and eventually for the presidency?
Today, JFK Jr. would be the same age as Barack Obama. The two men were born only about 8 months apart. Instead of someone who reminds people of John F. Kennedy, could we have had the real deal?
JFK Jr. never showed much academic achievement. He didn’t have a great academic record and it took him three tries to pass the New York bar exam. If he’d entered politics, he might have been a Democratic George W. Bush, a scion of a rich family who wouldn’t have amounted to much without his connections and didn’t want to work very hard (but without W’s scary messianic certainty and faux-hokiness).
But perhaps not.
We’ll never know.
I think John Kennedy made a great start with GEORGE, a magazine that sought to discuss politics in the more accessable language of entertainment. This publication was able to take the sometimes arcane and confusing world of politics and government and make it understandable and relatable to people who would never have picked up one of the headier political journals or even something as mainstream as TIME or NEWSWEEK.
Had he found a way for this magazine to exist apart from the celebrity and mystery that surrounded him personally, THAT would have been a legacy of which to be proud.
There’s no shame in being the average son of two extrordinary people. Sure, he probably got a somewhat easier ride due to his name and his looks, but I’m sure that having his bar exam failures on the front page of the POST was just the tip of the iceberg of how there are negatives to that kind of attention as well.
I doubt that he’d have felt the need to enter politics himself. Though I’m surprised his sister has never done so.
Jeff, I’m really not sure what you mean by the following statement. Can you clarify?
“The two men were born only about 8 months apart. Instead of someone who reminds people of John F. Kennedy, could we have had the real deal?”
Why would the son of John F. Kennedy be more of a “real deal” (aside from having the same name) vis a vis his father and his legacy than Barack Obama might be? Isn’t that, at best, just a sort of royalism or nepotism? It’s possible that JFK Jr. might have been a great politician in his own right, of course, but his pedigree alone wouldn’t, IMO, grant him the automatic mantle of his father (assuming that’s even what he’d have wanted).
Then again, I’m probably just over-analyzing, as I’m prone to do.
No, you’re right. I was just being overly poetic.