FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

RIP Stetson Kennedy (1916-2011)

When we first approached Stetson, he consented to the interview but almost immediately changed his mind on receiving a few back issues of VICE.

As American media largely focused on a hurricane that was basically a prolonged and windy wet fart, they largely neglected the most important story of the weekend: Stetson Kennedy, one of America's greatest cultural treasures—the man who infiltrated and dropped an atom bomb on the KKK—died yesterday at age 94. Somehow we were granted the privilege of his last long-form (or perhaps last, period) interview in our April issue.

When we first approached Stetson, he consented to the interview but almost immediately changed his mind on receiving a few back issues of VICE. "It's pornography, and I don't just mean that because of the naked women," he told me on the phone. Later, I found out that his wife, Sandra, had found the stash we sent him and berated him with various insinuations that he would be undermining his life's work if he played ball with us.

It took another month or so of back-and-forth emails and phone calls with Stetson to assure him that the piece would be flattering and truthful because those were the two qualities most exhibited by him and his answers to Bill Bryson's (the Gainesville guy, not the travel-writer guy) questions. Eventually, Stetson relented. When he received copies of the issue, he emailed to say he loved it and "My wife was so averse to having my name linked to the word VICE, but the end result is most gratifying to her as well."

Since then he's emailed me a half dozen times to send his blessings and request more copies of the issue. Sandra was rightfully protective of her husband, one of those rare and pure beings who gets history's short shrift because he was so correct it hurt. Unfortunately, it might take his death to realize what we've lost and just how right he was. RIP, Nature Boy.