A WORLD NOT QUITE POST-KENNEDY

By LANCE MORROW

Think what a monster he might have been--what a corrupt, misshapen brat might have emerged from these 35 years of glamour, political power, tragedy, money, fame and relentless, drooling hype. A grotesque egotist might have been the best-case scenario.

Instead, the John Kennedy Jr. who walks across the Manhattan restaurant (not one head rising in recognition) turns out to be modest, well informed in an insider's way, well read over an unusual range of subjects, focused, funny and 20 or 30 I.Q. points brighter than the tabloids think he is. This night some months ago, we met to discuss work that Kennedy had been doing for years, without publicity: helping New York City health-care workers who do the most menial work get more education and thereby build careers in the field.

It's possible, of course, that John Kennedy Jr. suffers a little from Woody Allen disease (a coquettish tendency to place oneself in optimum paparazzi zones and then act surprised when the flash goes off). Kennedy also has something of his mother's gift for the sly Cheshire's disappearance before your eyes. Some primitives have believed that every photograph taken of a man peels off a layer of his soul. If that were so, nothing would be left of John Kennedy Jr. without his mother's trick of metaphysically absenting herself from the frame--a way of ghost dancing with both gawkers and the jackals of the press.

It is a commentary on celebrity and politics that John Kennedy's wedding easily outsplashed anything going on in the unequal struggle for John's father's job in the White House. The presidential campaign had become a strange and drearily frustrating non-event. In a postideological age, the titanic and defining issues of foreign policy are gone, and the domestic issues involve either the mere mechanics of budget priorities (how much for police, how much for schools?) or the gaseous nebulas of "values."

Once upon a time, the presidency--with all the political, diplomatic, military and moral drama that surrounded it--was America's great entertainment. It seems less so now. Maybe in becoming postideological, America has become almost postpresidential as well. At one time the presidency was like King Lear (great stakes, global importances, thunder, cosmic forces contending). But Lear left the stage at the end of the cold war. The old white male patriarchy has gone to the dog track. We live in the squabbling-siblings era of Goneril and Regan (cut the defense budget, the old man doesn't need that many knights anyway). Bob Dole is merely the Duke of Kent, forlornly running on the Lear Restoration ticket.

What royal houses we have are mostly ceremonial--useful as diverting celebrities. They hold court in the tabloids. Charles and Diana have done their miserable best to entertain. The American House of Kennedy still spins off second-generation sibling stars who do their best to be more than ornamental. The nation, therefore, is not yet entirely post-Kennedy. Ted Kennedy remains an imposing presence in the Senate and in the Democratic Party. Bobby Kennedy Jr. does useful environmental work. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. Caroline writes books. Joe Kennedy and Ted's son Patrick have promising political careers ahead. But John's magazine, George, the journal of political glitz, may be a perfect expression of his dilemma--a sort of glamorous disconnect from his father's age, when politics meant more.