Kitch Podcast: Memory, Myth, Media mourning and the Kennedys

For the 134th episode of the Journalism History podcast, Researcher Carolyn Kitch discusses her article, “A Death in the American Family: Myth, Memory and National Values in the Media Mourning of John F. Kennedy Jr.”

Transcript 

Carolyn Kitch (00:02): They weren’t prepared to write the story, and yet remarkably, they all wrote it in pretty much the same way, with these- this grand mythic narrative, and I think that’s really remarkable.

Teri Finneman (00:14): Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew, and the ones you were never told. I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.

Nick Hirshon (00:28): And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.

Ken Ward (00:33): And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Teri Finneman (00:37): And together, we are professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available at journalism-history.org/podcast. This episode is sponsored by Taylor & Francis, the publisher of our academic journal, Journalism History.

(00:56) They’re considered American royalty, and have fascinated the public now for generations. The Kennedys not only symbolize American politics, but also are ingrained into culture and memory. 60 years ago this month, the assassination of John Kennedy in Dallas plunged the entire nation into mourning. And nearly 25 years ago, the tragic death of John Kennedy Jr. shocked the country again. In today’s episode, we visit with Carolyn Kitch of Temple University about her article, “A Death in the American Family: Myth, Memory and National Values in the Media Mourning of John F. Kennedy Jr.,” to understand the role of the media in constructing the Kennedy legacy.

(01:41) Carolyn, welcome to the show. Your article examines the coverage of JFK Jr.’s death as a case study in the mythic dimensions and purposes of journalism, and as a defining moment in a larger American story that retains cultural currency even today. It’s interesting to me that the assassination of his father is labeled as one of the biggest moments in journalism history, yet not many of our journalism history colleagues have studied the Kennedys in the media. So why did you want to do that?

Carolyn Kitch (02:11): Well, I should start by saying I’m not sure that the Kennedy story is as culturally powerful or well known today as it was at the end of the 20th century when JFK Jr. died and when I wrote the article. But there, but there still is a cultural appeal of mythic ideas or very grand narratives of destiny and tragedy and fate. And when it was published, my article was in the same time period as JFK Jr’s death itself, and so at the time, it wasn’t a historical study (laughs). It seems historical now. But at the time, it was a study of how national magazines articulated national memory, extending the memory that news media had constructed in 1963 when his father was killed.

And actually one of the first book-length studies, American studies, of journalism’s role in constructing collective memory was Barbie Zelizer’s 1992 book Covering the Body, which was about the JFK assassination and about how journalists then just repeatedly revisited it over time in a way that made them central actors of that story and, and sort of gave them the authority to keep retelling that story. And that book, for those of us who study journalism and memory, that book is a foundational study.

(03:44) At the time, I also was doing another project that involved studying magazine tributes to dead celebrities, and the death of JFK Jr. falls into that category as well.

Teri Finneman (03:55): Your study focuses on news magazines. Before we talk about JFK Jr., let’s talk about Life magazine and the role that it played in creating Kennedy mythology after the assassination.

Carolyn Kitch (04:07): Life magazine played a huge role in creating that mythology. And, you know, we have to understand that, that this, this has been forgotten, but in the 1960s, Life magazine was a hugely influential periodical. It was probab- it was the, I believe, the highest circulation magazine in the United States and maybe the world. It had a weekly circulation of eight million readers. Um, and, and that was paid circulation. So it had a wide reach and it was really influential, and what most people remember is the picture, the image of the little 3-year-old boy, JFK Jr., John John, saluting his father’s casket during the, during the funeral. And that was on television, too, I mean, they’re moving images of this. But what’s remembered is the still imagine, and, and has been republished over and over and over, the still image that initially appeared in Life magazine.

(05:16) And the other thing that was in that same issue of Life, the tribute to the dead president, was an article by T.H. White, who was a journalist and a presidential historian and the author of a book called The Once and Future King that was about King Arthur. And Jackie… And also Camelot had just ended its initial Broadway run when the president was killed. And Jackie said in the interview, Jackie said, “Well, that was his favorite musical, and in fact, you know, this is how I will remember his presidency as a great, a great shining moment in American history.” And … There’s currently a revival of Camelot on Broadway at Lincoln Center, and it reminded me that, you know, even though it has lovely songs that everybody knows, Camelot is a tragedy. Um, and in fact, King Arthur only wishes that his kingdom is an ideal place. He’s betrayed by nearly everybody around him. But Jackie’s comparison of his presidency to Camelot, you know, created this impression, false impression, really, that the early 1960s were a golden time in America, a better America that was tragically lost.

(06:42) And for the next 40 years, journalists repeated this and even quoted the lyrics (laughs) of the song “Camelot” every time they revisited the story of the assassination. They aided that false nostalgia for the early ’60s, not the late ’60s, the early ’60s as an ideal time, which it was for white men … but not so much for women or Black Americans and many other Americans. In a way, the Kennedy mythology created a foundation, even though Kennedy was a Democrat, created a foundation for a lasting idea that America used to be great in the middle of the 20th century, and then its greatness was lost and we need to get it back. And, you know, and as we know, that has become a really toxic narrative six decades after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Teri Finneman (07:36): Yeah, let’s talk about mythology a little bit more. Uh, it would be helpful to define it, which I know you do in your article, so what exactly are myths and why do you think they’re important to study in the context of journalism itself creating and conveying myths to the public?

Carolyn Kitch (07:53): As I’m using the word, I don’t mean that a myth is a lie. I use it to mean sort of a structure, a narrative structure, it’s a powerful narrative that has survived through time, that comes from the broader culture but emerges in journalism as well as other kinds of cultural forms. It’s a useful way of making sense of stuff that doesn’t make sense a senseless event, an unexpected event. Um, and in this case, thanks to T.H. White and Jackie Kennedy, (laughs) we’ve got King Arthur, right, King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.

Or one example, you know, that myth is similar to Don Quixote, the foolish but you know, ideal person tilting at windmills. Some myths come from fairytales that – about danger in the world and who gets rewarded for what kinds of behavior, and there also are mythic characters that survive in lots, like the good mother.

(08:55) Jack – journalism scholar Jack Lule published a book called Daily News, Eternal Stories that explained this and explored it with examples from news. And his point is that we all grow up learning about these kinds of stories and symbols even though we don’t consciously think about it when we recognize them. Journalists don’t usually intend to structure stories based on myth. They do it because they grow up with the stories, these stories, too. You know, they grow up in the same culture. And those kinds of narratives do offer an explanatory framework for news, especially big news and distressing news. That said, the coverage of JFK Jr.’s death in 1999, journalists did explicitly use the word myth.

Teri Finneman (09:49): In July 1999, John Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren died in a plane crash. He was 38 years old. You studied how newsweekly magazines covered this and provide interesting context that they published on Mondays, these magazines, and were about wrapped up with their issues when his plane went missing on a Saturday morning, essentially leading them to have to stop the presses and start over again. So why did you want to study magazine coverage in particular of this incident?

Carolyn Kitch (10:21): Well I, I think what I’m about to say also would apply to television news coverage, but because of that, they had an incredibly short turnaround time, and this was a super unexpected event, like these are young people whose plane went down in bad weather. They weren’t prepared to write this story, and yet remarkably they all wrote it in, in pretty much the same way with this grand mythic narrative. And I think that’s really remarkable.

So those circumstances reinforce how strong the original Camelot narrative and the Kennedy family tragedy narrative was created, begun in 1963, how strong that American cultural memory still was in 1999 in journalism especially. News magazines also were most likely to treat the story this way because all throughout the 20th century, news magazines routinely published cover stories about the meaning of America and the meaning of American life. This was just something that as a genre, they did regularly. Um, but this kind of grand mythic language also was in reporting done by the television networks.

Teri Finneman (11:38): You found three common patterns in how these magazines covered the death of JFK Jr. So let’s discuss each of them. The first is that he served as an echo of his father’s promise, invoking nostalgia for the ideals and lost innocence of the 1960s. So what kind of coverage did they do to illustrate this?

Carolyn Kitch (11:57): Journalists and, and other public figures who wrote essays that appeared in these magazines said this overtly, they called him, they called JFK Jr. the nation’s son. One of them called him, “Our national survivor.” Time called him, and here’s the mythology, right, and this is a quote, “A hero endowed with a legend. When he was 3 years old, a hero sprung up from tragedy.” Again, keep in mind that they’ve got a 24-hour turnaround (laughs) time to write these stories. The implication was that he was destined to do something great, but that opportunity was taken from him and it was taken away from the country. Uh, in fact, you know, JFK Jr. had avoided politics, and it’s interesting that his sister Caroline has never been (laughs) described in those terms and, you know, she lived. With regard to the… She also was a diplomat. She did go into politics.

(12:55) But with regard to this idea of the lost innocence of the early 1960s, you know, it is specifically the early 1960s that were the focus of that nostalgia by the time JFK Jr. died. Uh, and, in other words, at the end of the century, the news magazines described a nostalgia in which the later developments of the ’60s and ’70s, including the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement, the Peace Movement were remembered as bad, were remembered as part of the loss of a self-assured, unified America.

Think about the gender and race implications in that kind of nostalgia. In 1999, that nostalgia was meant for readers, audiences who were, like President Kennedy, young adults in the early 1960s, as well as their children, who were old enough to remember the television coverage of his funeral. They were children, but they remembered their parents were upset, they saw something on television. Think about Mad Men, right, that comparison says a lot about what’s problematic about the Camelot myth.

Teri Finneman (14:13): You also found that magazines framed JFK Jr. as part as – part of a family who stood for the American experience, enduring one tragic sacrifice after another so that American failures might be redeemed. Talk more about what you found here.

Carolyn Kitch (14:28): Yes, this was the strangest part of the story, the idea that the Kennedy family’s history was representative of American history more generally, and therefore stood for everyone, for all of us. They were a very atypical family (laughs). Uh, but the narrative was that they were immigrants, they had witnessed the major events of the 20th century, their sons had served in World War II, and they had suffered a lot of family tragedies. Um of course the Kennedy family wasn’t at all like most families. They were rich and powerful. I think the fact that JFK Jr. died in 1999, at the very end of the century, fueled this particular storyline, because at the same time, the news magazines were invested in publishing a series of special issues and books that were century summaries. And so he died at exactly the moment when they were also reflecting on what the century meant, and so that was woven into the coverage also.

Teri Finneman (15:33): Finally, you found that magazines portrayed JFK Jr. as America itself, and that he was a symbol of hope for the nation. Talk a little bit more about that.

Carolyn Kitch (15:43): That third narrative comes from the other two, the idea that he was an extension of his father’s promise and that the Kennedy family represented American history. So his life was a symbol of hope that had been, again, cruelly cut short. I have another quote here. U.S. News and World Report’s editor said this directly, this is what he wrote, and this is a quote, “America is promised in hope, but here promise was cut short and hope denied.” That’s a very grand statement about an accidental death.

JFK Jr. was the son in this mythological story, and the son is the future. Again, think about his sister (laughs) Caroline. Why was the Kennedy promise denied and cut short with her brother’s death? She was still alive. Also, the hope that JFK Jr. offered was explained in terms of how good-looking he was, and, and the fact that he had just acquired a wife, who seemed as classy as his mother. That wife also died. Carolyn also died on that airplane as did her sister, as you mentioned. So you can, you can tell that the news magazines, along with other national media, were still to a great extent run and written mainly from the point of view of, of men in 1999.

Teri Finneman (17:08): To me, perhaps the most interesting line of your study is this one, and how journalists play an ever larger responsibility for explaining America, as well as the meaning of America to Americans and to others. Expand upon what you mean by that.

Carolyn Kitch (17:23): That line is actually a quote from historian Michael Kammen, who was making the argument that whether or not historians like it, most people learn history from the media. And he made that point in the 1990s when, when media were still mass and their messages flowed in much more of a top-down way than is the case today. You know, today we have a much more fragmented media landscape and many mass media companies, including Time Inc., Time Life, have dissolved. But the point is still true, most people learn history or, or get their ideas about the past from media, even if mainstream news media are no longer central to that process. I will say that mainstream entertainment media are still playing this role, though, and I find it interesting that of all the weekly magazines included in my 1999 study of coverage JFK Jr.’s death, only one of them survives in its original form and is still a weekly, and that’s Peoplemagazine.

Teri Finneman (18:29): When people think about media and the Kennedys, Walter Cronkite is probably top of mind for most, but going through my grandma’s drawers, it was magazines about the Kennedys that she had held onto for decades. So why do you think that was? Or put another way, discuss the important role of magazines in journalism history.

Carolyn Kitch (18:48): Well, let me answer that question first by continuing, continuing with the issue of gender. It’s interesting that your grandmother saved those issues. (laughs) So did my mother. And you know, for many reasons, magazines, including their direct address to readers and their physical durability, at least in the 20th century, magazines become memory objects, especially when there are national tragedies or celebrations. And people save them, you know, and most of that saving, the care-taking of media memory is done by women.

That phenomenon is an irony (laughs) of the very masculine story that was told about the deaths of both JFK and JFK Jr. and about what kind of America was lost in the early 1960s. Uh, more generally, and especially in the 20th century, national magazines did a lot of editorial memory making, and regularly offered, as I said earlier, explanatory articles about American life and the American character. And many readers, I think my mother thought of them this way, many readers saw them as history books, as instruction manuals about how to live an ideal American life.

(20:11) Finally, people save magazines for the same reason that they save other keepsake stuff, to remember who they were and how they felt at the time the particular events happened.

Teri Finneman (20:24): And then, our final question of the show is, why does journalism history matter?

Carolyn Kitch (20:29): Journalism history matters because throughout time, journalists have constructed narratives that define who and what were important in any given era, and therefore what stories should survive into the future. Those constructions happened within the political and cultural context of those past eras, but that’s also true of journalism today. This is a moment in history as well.

So this is the relationship between history and memory, the news narratives that survive into the future contain a lot of factual information about past events, but they also leave a lot out. So what gets lost? What can be recovered? And under what circumstances? And those are questions of memory studies. This relationship is what fascinates me and is, kind of, kind of runs through all of my work. It’s what motivates me to do research that is about both media history and memory studies.

Teri Finneman (21:35): All right. Well, this was an excellent show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Carolyn Kitch (21:39): Thank you for having me.

Teri Finneman (21:41): Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can also follow us on Twitter @jhistoryjournal. Until next time, I’m your host Teri Finneman signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow, “Good night, and good luck.”

Featured photo: President Kennedy Visits with his Children, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy, and Pony Macaroni, White House, West Wing Colonnade, Robert Knudsen White House Photographs, U.S. National Archives