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Celebrity chased him at Morgenthau's office as well. "The first few days he was in the office we had people approaching us saying that a picture of him at his desk would be worth $10,000," says Michael Cherkasky, then the chief of the investigative-units division. "You would be in the elevator with John and have police officers ask him for his autograph." John worked on small cases at first--embezzlement, low-level corruption--before moving on: organized crime and racketeering, and eventually the street-crime trial division. He was an assiduous worker. "He was different, obviously--he lived in a different world that we didn't understand," Cherkasky says. "But his ability to be upbeat and prompt, to never ask for anything special or expect it, was a commentary on who he was and how he was raised." He argued six trials, and won convictions in all six.
His political strengths started showing up at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, where he introduced his uncle Ted and invoked his father's name. "So many of you came into public service because of him," he said in prime time. "In a very real sense, because of you, he is still with us." The boy who mentioned his dad exactly once in elementary school had come a long way.
But back home, Kennedy's heart wasn't in the D.A.'s office, and he was getting tired of faking it. In 1993, he left and began thinking about doing something big--another kind of public service, but one that would take a form he had grown all too familiar with: magazine journalism. He and a friend, public relations man Michael Berman, talked about creating a political magazine that would be glossy and entertaining but also empowering--one that would inspire alienated people to get involved in politics, and help give them the tools to do so. The magazine would also treat politics as spectacle and cultural barometer.
Kennedy and Berman worked their way through the New York media circuit, exploiting the desire of media heavies to meet J.F.K. Jr., picking the brains of people who knew magazines. One of their sessions took place in the offices of Ed Kosner, then editor of Esquire. "It was very vague," Kosner says. "He asked a lot of questions. I couldn't tell from that conversation what the magazine was going to be about. He just came over to schmooze, and he was great at it."
As Kennedy and Berman honed their idea for the magazine, the French media company Hachette Filipacchi became keen to sign up Kennedy. But executives there had a different idea about what the magazine would be--none of that altruistic grass-roots empowerment stuff, no hard edges at all, and lots of Kennedy. George, as the magazine was called, owed its early success to Hachette's great job of marketing its editor.
Kennedy was a natural at the road shows, the care and feeding of advertisers, but as editor he learned on the job, and that wasn't easy on anybody. He and Berman, the magazine's president, had lurid battles about its direction; and Kennedy's violent temper would break loose; sometimes he would chase Berman down the hall screaming. One time they locked themselves in Kennedy's office. Staff members heard banging sounds. When Berman emerged, one of his shirt sleeves was missing.