“Love Story” and Why We Cling to the Kennedy Myth

14:45Naomi Fry:This is what it looked like when at the Calvin Klein office you were only allowed like black paper clips and white orchids. You know, it's just like the heels are just so the pencil skirt is pencil-y, you know, the white button down is crisp and, you know, snatched to the waist, et cetera, et cetera. It really did take me back to those moments of me being like, you know, I don't know, 20 or something and like leafing through American Vogue in my like disgusting apartment, you know, and being like, look at these beautiful people. This is it. This is what it means. Oh, my God. Here they are. They say it's this place called Trebek.

15:28Naomi Fry:You know, it's like all of these things that, like, I didn't know firsthand. And that show is very successful, I think, in doing that. Like, I do feel like an ache when I watch it on that level. Like, remember when? Yeah. But on the level of, like, the love story and the attraction story, apart from kind of the visual attraction.

15:49Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

15:50Naomi Fry:Not convincing. Not convinced. I think something a little weird is happening in the show. And I know that members of the Kennedy family, specifically Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy's son, have spoken up about how this is this very vulture-ish depiction of their relative and kind of hands off. And there's been that whole kerfuffle between Jack Schlossberg saying to Ryan Murphy, you're basically profiting off of someone you didn't know. And Murphy has responded saying some really horrible and terrible. Yeah, it's just like, why? Bad stuff. He said, I thought it was an odd choice to be mad about your relative that you don't really remember, which is like a sick thing to say and beside being not true.

16:34However, John F. Kennedy Jr. comes off amazingly in this show. As does Carolyn Bessette. So I disagree. Oh. I think this show makes JFK Jr. look fantastic. He looks like, first of all, he looks gorgeous and handsome, which he was in life. He looks good-spirited, which by all accounts he was in life. Charming and well-purposed and trying to really figure stuff out. And I do think this show is doing Carolyn Bissett dirty. That's really interesting. I do not like the performance by Sarah Pidgeon, who I otherwise very much like. I really loved her in Stereophonic, the play based on Fleetwood Mac that she was in both off-Broadway and on-Broadway.

17:14I thought she was fabulous in that. I do find there to be something a bit brittle in this performance. And I think it's very hard to get that performance right. So I'm sympathetic to her because we really have this very superficial understanding of Carolyn Bessette since she was transmitted to us exclusively in images. There were no big interviews. Yeah, she tended to avoid interviews. Exactly. So there was nothing really to go on. And I like the parts of her in the show she's seen standing up for herself. Her defining characteristic is extreme wariness. She's the product of a bad divorce. And there just is something a little brittle about her in a way that makes me feel that the show is set up to critique her and to kind of reify the fantasies of JFK Jr.

18:07That's interesting. Am I the only one with this reading?

18:08Alexandra Schwartz:I received it totally opposite. Oh, interesting. Okay, okay. My feeling about JFK Jr. after watching the show, you know, may he rest in peace, was that he sort of was the, to put it in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby, he's like, you know, they were careless people. that yeah he was good natured and yeah he was even well intentioned but at every step he didn't really understand the power of his influence and its effects on other less shiny people I came away with more not that I had a well defined sense of her but with open to having more sympathy for her than I did necessarily for him.

18:56Naomi Fry:I think there's a sympathy towards both of them. I think, in fact, there is too much sympathy towards both of them is my read of it, which is not to say that they were horrible people and it doesn't reveal it. I have no idea what they were actually really like as people, but it doesn't give me a sense of what they actually were like as people. My sense that I get from this depiction is very much an idealized sense. They're kind of both saints in a way. They're not perfect. I think also we should say that one of the books that the series adapts, relies on, is a biography by Elizabeth Baller called Once Upon a Time, which is kind of a revisionist biography of Carolyn Bessette.

19:42Naomi Fry:And the show is very much in line with that so far, at least from what I've seen in kind of like painting her as completely saintly in her lack of interest in JFK Jr.'s prominence and his celebrity and his riches, you know, all of that. In fact, she rejects it wholesale. Like, you know, it was probably more complicated than that, I'll venture to say. You know what I mean? Probably. And it would have been nice to see that complication on the screen. I think there is some Kennedy image rehabilitation going on a bit through this show. And the person who doesn't look good is Daryl Hannah. And I don't know if you guys have been following.

20:25Yeah, you've been following the kerfuffle. Yes. So Daryl Hannah, actress who dated John F. Kennedy Jr., is made to look here like the dumbest person alive. like the most annoying person ever to have been born. Dits. Dits. Absolute dits. She has now, as I'm sure many people have seen, written this very elegantly written op-ed in the New York Times asking, I think, a rather appropriate question, which is, how dare you?

20:52Naomi Fry:Yeah. I mean, yeah. It's ick. But in general, it's kind of like almost like plot over character is kind of what I find with this show, which is like everything is subordinated to the kind of like cleanness of the plot. Like maybe Daryl Hannah wasn't a total dummy. Maybe she actually was a secret Shakespeare star. Whatever. Life has a lot of complications. And all of that needs to be kind of smoothed over in order to kind of provide this kind of like epic love story plot. plot. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a scene at the very start of the show. The show starts on the day when the day of their death.

21:41Of course, I don't know it's going to be that day, but it opens with Carolyn at a beauty parlor, visibly very anxious about the paparazzi getting a picture of her. And as she rushes out of the nail salon and gets into her car and the car pulls away, you see all the paparazzi clustered. And I think the show has a very ambivalent relationship to its own participation in the continued paparazzi spectacle around these two people.

22:05Naomi Fry:That's a great point. I think it holds it close and it also pushes it away and it tries to give you both. It tries to give you both that paparazzi slavering, panting, let's get close, let's get the outfits, let's get them, let's take you inside their famous fight, let's get you there. And to raise an eyebrow at that at the same time and say, but of course, aware fiction. But I do think it participates in that, which definitely diminishes its ability to speak to the story as a whole. Let's talk a little bit about the response to the show. What have you noticed? Well, the first response I became aware of predated the show coming out.

22:39I think it was how I even found out that there was going to be a show, which is that press photos were released of the main actors of Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly. And there was an uproar over the fashion. And there was one picture in particular, I can bring it to mind, where Sarah Pidgeon walking down the street and she's wearing some beat up Converse and this kind of shimmery slip skirt that doesn't look particularly expensive. And she's wearing also what someone memorably in an Instagram comment referred to as a wrinkled vegan leather coat. Just embarrassing for the most stylish person ever.

23:22And so people had this very intimate sense of ownership over these images and this figure. And oh, and the hair, of course, the hair. The hair. The hair is not good. It's the wrong blonde. It's ashy. She had this most amazing golden glow. And I have to say, when you do look at these pictures of this person, I've never seen so much charisma in a person on camera. It's whatever Carolyn Bessette had, it was amazing on camera. And that combined with the general mystery of who she was. Yeah, it's absolute catnip. I get it.

23:53Naomi Fry:I think the issue was the attention and the particularity, right? People were like, OK, the contours of this like camel coat, it's like it looks like Zara. It doesn't look like, you know, Prada. And they seem to have fixed it, you know. and people are like going crazy finding like the original like sunglasses and the original headband that you used to wear which you can still buy apparently and then there's also kind of like more nostalgia induced things of people who used to work at Calvin Klein in the 90s going on TikTok and being like so this is what it was really like but also like kind of like giving

24:33Alexandra Schwartz:props to the show they got it right right I do think though that this fixation on image and images does speak to how the Kennedys continue to be received. It does seem like we have ever more efficiently stripped the Kennedys and their image and their style from any notions of political power. There's a moment in the, it's really telling, I think, there's a moment in the show where Carolyn is at Hyannis Port and Ethel Kennedy is sort of over the table, and they get to the part of dinner where Ethel sort of drills people, testing them about geopolitics and their ideas about domestic, international affairs, etc.

25:17Alexandra Schwartz:Carolyn can't play this game, and she's sort of embarrassed. Carolyn, what do you think? About what? Well, Katie was just saying that Clinton is looking into establishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Any political risks?

25:40Alexandra Schwartz:And it's played as like, of all the things Kennedys could be villains about, this is like where the Kennedys come off worse, that they care about politics and talk about it at the table. And it's like, no, no, no, you got this totally backwards. It's like the show is asking, why can't you just be beautiful and not have to talk about the world? So it's so strange that this moment of high familial embarrassment for her is the moment when it's like the show is trying to remind us that, oh, by the way, these are political figures. The show wants to get rid of it's like politics are an annoyance in this show.

26:13Alexandra Schwartz:We barely even know who the president is. That's interesting. I took that dinner differently. Actually, that's one of my favorite scenes of the show. I took it as this cruel, creepy, performative politics where, of course, you have to just perform as if you're a schoolchild being called on to come up and say, what's 12 times 12? And she doesn't have the exact right answer on the micro question she's just been asked to inform about. And it's a cruel pretend engagement with politics. Right.

26:40Naomi Fry:In a way it paints the Kennedys in a bad way, not just because they're bullies, but also because the way it shows their engagement with politics is that it's purely about power. Yes. They care about showing off and earning points. Yeah. So I thought that was an interesting thing. That was the representation.

27:00Alexandra Schwartz:It just struck me as interesting that the one time politics is discussed at any length. It's to show the sort of villainous character of these people. They don't care about that stuff, but neither does Carolyn and neither does Ryan Murphy.

27:17Naomi Fry:In a minute, we close to read the Kennedys. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

27:36This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, a Democrat and a Republican in Congress on how the immigration crackdown is changing America. They're going to see vast swaths of our workforce disappear. They're going to see our economy contract. Mr. President, you've got to change the way when it comes to immigration. Otherwise, we're not going to have a Republican Party. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Your living space is your sanctuary, and you want it to feel like an expression of you, right? But unless you're working with an unlimited budget, sometimes that's easier said than done.

28:13And that's why I love Wayfair. I don't think there's a room in my house that doesn't have a little something from Wayfair. With their breathtaking selection, shockingly affordable prices, and incredibly easy delivery process, making MySpace feel like me was a snap. Wayfair offers everything you need for your home, yard, or office. Seating, grills, appliances, storage, lighting, rugs, decor, and so much more. And if working at Allen Key isn't your thing, they can handle delivery, installation, and assembly. You just pick what you want and they deal with the rest. With over 20 million five-star reviews, you can shop with confidence.

28:44See real customers, real homes, real feedback before anything hits your cart. Especially in the summer months, my porch is truly my happy place. I like to have my coffee in the cotton weave chair hammock and then read for a bit on the gorgeous wooden porch swing. Both Wayfair finds. Do I sleep in a Wayfair bed frame at night? Actually, I do. And I'm not mad about it. Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

29:13Alexandra Schwartz:Way fair, every style, every home.

29:43They explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch The Run-Through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

30:03Naomi Fry:Okay, you guys, we've been talking about Ryan Murphy's love story. but that is only the most recent example of the Kennedys in pop culture. Let's talk about some other ones. I recently did engage with American Prince, colon, JFK Jr. Tagline, the golden boy with a heavy crown. And the heavy hair. And the hair. Sorry to go back to the hair. No, it actually is very important. I'm not kidding. It's crazy. Okay, say more about the hair. The hair, if you have such hair. It's incredible. And we're talking about a thick helmet of it. It's a pelt. For a white man to have that distinctive crown of hair, it's just—and it's been passed on to Jack Schlossberg, and it just signifies wealth and power without having to do anything.

30:56How does he do it? It's genetic luck. It's incredible genetic luck that further—yes, they may be cursed, but they have this hair.

31:04Naomi Fry:It's like the— And I'm not trying to be anti-bald. Like Lissana Gaib vibes, right? Is that the right? Do you know what I mean? Like the chosen one? Right. Either you can make objects move with your brain or you have this beautiful head of hair. Yes. Not just great head hair, but did you guys know that one issue they had with casting this role was that so many men no longer have chest hair. They have removed it. It's not the trend anymore. Like I felt like we were back to the chest hair. Anyway. This may bring us further back, but I'm bringing this up because two of my, well, my number one favorite is, of course, not about the Kennedys at all.

31:43It's the Seinfeld episode, The Contest, one of the greatest episodes of television ever made. Our friends from Seinfeld, George, Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, undertake a pact to not masturbate. Refrain from jerking off. Right. To refrain. and they want to see who will last the longest, who will be master of his or her domain. And Elaine... Are you king of your castle? Exactly. Elaine attends, Elaine attends, unfortunately for her and her role in this contest, an exercise class in which she is put directly behind John John. John F. Kennedy Jr. What? He was in my Rebix class.

32:26Alexandra Schwartz:Really? Did you talk to him? No, you don't understand.

32:30Naomi Fry:He was working out in front of me. So listen, after the class was over, I timed my walk to the door so we'd get there at the exact same moment. And he says to me, quite a workout.

32:42Alexandra Schwartz:Quite a workout? What did you say? I said, yeah. Good one. She loses the contest. That's it for her. She cannot refrain. So this is all to say, this is still one of my favorite things about the Kennedy family period, definitely about John F. Kennedy Jr. And then I come across American Prince, which I don't know anything about the production history of this thing. CNN made it. I watched it on HBO. This is recent? It was released August 9th of 2025, which makes me think that they heard. I'm about to engage in some rampant speculation based on no research at all. I bet you're right. It makes me think they heard love stories coming down the pike.

33:26How can we get in on this thing? So how they got in on this thing was to make an absolutely beautifully empty three episode documentary about this amazing man that, guys, I watched glued to my computer. Perfect, meaningless documentary. I highly recommend it to absolutely everyone because you get what the hype was about.

33:45Naomi Fry:I mean, it's – but I think with the Kennedys and their representation, I mean, this is kind of what we're circling around. One thing that I think about when I think about kind of like representations of the Kennedys, one of kind of my favorite examples is the paparazzi photographer Ron Gallella who died just a few years back. One of his premier subjects, maybe his most famous subject, was Jackie. and so much so that she got a restraining order against him because he, it's, you know, it's that doubleness, right? It's like he harassed her. He stalked her. Like she was his prey. And there's a series of photographs where you see her running from him in the park.

34:37Naomi Fry:But the images are so interesting. These people are kind of examples of how we are complicit in this kind of like worship fandom that verges and sometimes goes over the line to harassment. And this is, of course, part of the issue that is examined in Love Story as well.

35:07Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about one of the recent texts, Jackie. People like to believe in fairy tales. You ready? Of course.

35:22And you?

35:24Alexandra Schwartz:I believe that the characters we read about on the page end up being more real than the men who stand beside us. came out in 2016. It was directed by Pablo Lorraine, written by Noah Oppenheim, and it stars Natalie Portman in the title role. Nomi, did you like it? I liked Natalie Portman's performance.

35:47Naomi Fry:I thought it was really good. And with Pablo Lorraine in general, you know, he did Spencer, the Princess Diana movie. He did the Maria Callas movie. You know, it's overwrought. It's like, it's interesting. Again, it's interesting to watch, but it's like, again, one of those things where you're like, you're critiquing the fact that we put these women like us as a culture put these women like so many butterflies on, you know, on like a wall in a box. but you're kind of doing it yourself and you're kind of like theatricalizing this like problem but also participating in it and making it into this melodrama, like crazy melodrama.

36:33So I'm kind of in two minds about it, I guess.

36:38Naomi Fry:Alex, what about you? Oh, I think I feel the same way. I think it's an amazing performance by Natalie Portman. I rewatched pieces of it recently and was again struck by her visual, her facial expressiveness. I think she gets the accent spot on. She really gets it down. And Pablo Lorraine's whole deal is this over-the-top melodrama that when already swirling around a story with so much drama, with bloodshed, with her wiping the blood off her face, I thought took it to an extreme so ridiculous that it was, for me, almost unwatchable. But it is around that moment, The structuring device of the movie is the interview that she gave Teddy White with Time Magazine after JFK's assassination where she coins this idea of Camelot.

37:22And she's famously very, very press savvy about how to spin the entire era that's just suddenly ended. And the movie is very interested in her being able to achieve that kind of poise and forethought.

37:36Naomi Fry:Vincent, what about your Kennedy text or texts? Do you have any?

37:41Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, one of my favorites, I guess, is a sort of like, as we also kind of talk about the building of the Kennedy mythos, I think one of my favorite things about the Kennedys is a kind of myth-busting text. It's the Kennedy imprisonment by the writer Gary Wills, who, I mean, I just think he's one of the best writers about America ever. His book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, is just, I mean, it's just one of my favorite books. but the Kennedy imprisonment the subtitle of which is a meditation on power is just that and a lot of the space taken up in the book is about how image and style there's a whole chapter that's just called style contributed to the making of real power there's a passage that I really like is it okay if I read it?

38:32Alexandra Schwartz:of course yeah Yeah. Here's Wills. He says, So glittering did the Kennedy style appear that some accused the president of being all style, no substance. Schlesinger, he's talking about here the historian and social kid, Arthur Schlesinger, who was a friend and confidant of the president, says, Schlesinger answered that such style was itself a political act of substantial import. Now we're quoting Schlesinger. His coolness was itself a new frontier. It meant freedom from the stereotyped response of the past. His personality was the most potent instrument he had to awaken a national desire for something new and better.

39:11Alexandra Schwartz:End quote. This is Wills again. When one man's personality is an administration's most potent tool, then efficient use of resources dictates a cult of that personality. A shrewd administrator must, to achieve his policy goals, maximize the impact of the leader's charm. Must, that is, join in the contriving of images to celebrate the prince. That seems to me so true about the Kennedy thing. The presidential debates of 1960 that brought Kennedy into office against Nixon were the first ones that were ever televised. And the story goes that, you know, Kennedy being so Kennedy, so dapper and sort of cool and debonair under pressure, and Nixon is like flop sweating, won that election.

40:01Alexandra Schwartz:It was a really big part of the accrual of power for Kennedy. So it's almost like, yeah, he had some special qualities, but the larger story is structural, is that at the moment that the American presidency was ready to be kind of celebritized, here someone came along to sort of fill that necessity, fill that need, fill that almost like just technological imperative. and so and the book is all about you know it's got a lot about the total predation of the Kennedys like they're not just careless they're predators in many ways John F. Kennedy's many dalliances acts of awful abuse toward much younger women are cataloged and also his insane belligerence in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis there's a lot to be said about the short Kennedy presidency but all of it riding on this or these coattails of style.

41:00Alexandra Schwartz:I just think it's a great book. I love that point. And it does remind me, my favorite Kennedy is Joe Kennedy, Father Kennedy, The Father. Patriarch Kennedy. When you say favorite. He's the one who's most fascinating. Okay. And when people... I'm like, what's your favorite thing? The anti-Semitism? No, I'm kidding. I say favorite in terms of fascinating character analysis. Yes, he was a major anti-Semite, a flagrant anti-Semite. No, the reason I say that is because Because when people talk, Vincent, you're reminding me, when people talk around about the mythos of the Kennedys, around Camelot, around the continued glamour that extends, that the name keeps carrying generation after generation.

41:41and especially when they talk about the Kennedys as the American royals with the same obsessive interest in their personal lives and projection onto them and a dynasty-like quality, it is the most American story possible where one man decides that he is going to find a way to wield enormous power through trading in Wall Street, through Hollywood and the acquisition of movie companies, through political influence, by getting his own way into political administrations and becoming the first SEC chair and ambassador to England and things like this through just pointing at the first of his nine children and saying, it will be you who wears the crown only to have that child die in World War II, tragically, and to then point at the second one and say, actually, it's you.

42:30That is an American story. It's about crazy grit and drive and a really rapacious will to power that will trot on anyone in its way. And I think because of exactly what you're saying, because of the conjunction of television and image coming in and giving that glorious sheen to the JFK presidency and Jackie also providing the glamour for that, this beautiful young couple, their young children, all these things, we've sort of ignored the pre-1960 stuff in popular mind. And that's all about to change. thanks to Michael Fassbender, who's about to play Joe Kennedy for Netflix.

43:13Alexandra Schwartz:There we go. Hooray! So that's going to be my real Kennedy moment. I am very excited for that because that story, that story is the most... Father Joe. Father Joe. It's the most fascinating of all. Michael Fassbender is Joe Kennedy. And he will be. We don't know exactly when it will come out, but I'm going to watch it. And I wonder if seeing those origins will provide any counterweight to the glowing myth.

43:43Naomi Fry:In a minute, what happens when the myth behind this family brushes up against real politics? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

44:05Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Run-Through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Bellotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mao, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's Head of Editorial Content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie.

44:36Naomi Fry:Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel. The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging and reshaping the future? Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats.

45:11Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jazzy Sefcik. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't works that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on BonAppetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have.

45:46And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes. They are these adorable, maybe four-byte little galettes. So cute. Head to BA.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to BakeClub at BonAppetit.com or find us on the Substack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking!

46:23Naomi Fry:I didn't re-watch Oliver Stone's 1991 Kevin Costner starring movie JFK, but I did watch the trailer.

46:33Alexandra Schwartz:If I answer that question you keep asking, if I give you the name of the big enchilada, you know, then it's Bon Voyage Dino. I mean like Poimanet. I mean like a bullet in my head, you dig? Does that help you see my problem a little better?

46:47Naomi Fry:And the tagline is JFK, the story that won't go away. And of course, in the context of the movie, it's about like, OK, it's actually there was a conspiracy. This is why we need to find out. It'll never end until we like figure out what actually happened. But as I was, you know, watching this trailer and that tagline came up, I was like, yeah, why won't the story go away? It's like from father to son, from son to great. You know, it's like we're always somehow dealing with the Kennedys. Why are we so obsessed? Okay. Well. Tell us, Alex. I was just fondly remembering that I believe I reviewed Oliver Stone's JFK in spite of never having seen it for a self-published newspaper that I produced one issue of during my elementary school years.

47:40Oh, my God. I did that too.

47:41Naomi Fry:Of course. Yeah. Yeah, if you're in this room, you probably did that. All right, so number one is conspiracy. Of course, conspiracy, as we know, from living in the United States of America is a very popular narrative trend here. More and more so. In these 50 states, especially from a family that had a lot to hide. So there's that. There's the element that we haven't touched on yet, really, because we're all of a younger generation, but the collective feeling for the Kennedys brought about by the youth of JFK and Jackie and their kids in the White House, and then, of course, JFK's assassination, the where were you moment.

48:18Where were you when you heard the news that JFK had died? This huge collective shock, collective mourning, a sense of collective loss. And, you know, one thing that really interested me recently around another horrific, very sad and upsetting Kennedy tragedy, the death of Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline's daughter, who wrote so beautifully and amazingly for The New Yorker about her cancer diagnosis in a really beautiful essay that was published just before she died last fall. When I was looking at comments around her obituary, so many people were writing in to say, we have lived through Caroline's experience.

48:57We remember when Caroline was a little girl. I was the age of Caroline when her father died. I remember when her brother died, now her daughter has died. This sense of real sympathy, obviously, can have a very vulture-ish and worse edge. But I think the flip side to that is a real sense of emotional identification, which is an enormous, unspeakable pressure for a person to go through life with. But I think that's part of it, that there is this American family representation for the rest of us.

49:29Naomi Fry:Yeah. Yeah. You know, you mentioned the Tatiana Schlossberg essay that ran in The New Yorker. In the essay, one of the interesting things was she wasn't just talking about, you know, suffering from cancer and the effect of it on her family and being a mother and all of that. But she also spoke about her cousin, RFK Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and how he, while she is suffering this disease, doctors are trying to help her with certain medications, certain, you know, treatments. He is busy decimating treatments for America. Yeah, cutting research funding that could help people.

50:15Naomi Fry:Yes, cutting research funding that can help people in her position. I think it spoke to the Kennedys as kind of like symbolically and literally perhaps the best of us and the worst of us. You know what I mean? Like we are looking to this family still, but also we know we're talking about RFK Jr. The things that have been revealed about this man are pretty bad. And those two sides, our hopes are perhaps outsized, but the behavior is also outsized often.

50:55Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. They symbolize this really lasting political problem, which is, you know, how much stock do you take in charismatic leadership at all? and, you know, whether, what is the upshot of that form of leadership. But I don't know. Especially in America, it seems like we've always been riding this dialect of, like, suspicion but total devotion to charismatic leaders. The founders were like, this president thing might be a bad idea because they can turn into a demagogue. They can turn into a cult of personality. You know, Washington being the first great example is a really famous dude. So it strikes me as like an illustration of that suspicion, you know, like that it's like something deep in human nature really does attach to figures as guarantors of, I don't know, virtue, political stability, et cetera, et cetera.

51:49Alexandra Schwartz:And it is a worry. And the fact that we're still talking about these people seems to me a total ratification of that suspicion.

51:55Naomi Fry:I mean, look even at Trump, right?

51:58Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

51:58Naomi Fry:If we think about his, you know, his kind of like bootleg Kennedy clan, you know, his two sons and daughter trying to create his own crazy version of Camelot or to remake the presidency in his image. It's kind of like a Hall of Mirrors version of what you're talking about, I think.

52:25Alexandra Schwartz:I can't wait for Love's story, the Ivanka and Jared story. It will be great. I mean, it's crazy. What a backdrop. I felt such a chill run down my spine. Such a horrifying chill. I do think you're onto something, Nomi. There are a lot of the darknesses of the Kennedy history I'm thinking of, for instance, Jappaquiddick, come up in the Trump world in terms of the general horrific way that people are treated, women in particular, but not exclusively women, and the sense of dynasty, personal dynasty, we want to have it all, it's all for us. And then the huge piece that's missing, the key piece, and I think a key part of the positive aspect of the Kennedy allure, because I'm not, I'm of course cynical about the projection onto people and the creation of characters out of real human beings, but I think there is this idea of service that the Kennedys do not perfectly embody, but do attempt to embody some of them.

53:30This idea of serving the country, Vincent, I know you're going to be so skeptical of this. You're just like, they've created ruin wherever they've gone enough. Yeah. Vincent is not going to be bought by this.

53:38Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, I mean, if you want to accrue power and not seem to be totally craven, this is the language you use, but please. I agree. I agree. But what if you do want to seem totally craven and you want to accrue power? And there are things that the Kennedys were trying to accomplish outside simply of power. There was the civil rights bill that was going forward that ended up being passed under Lyndon Johnson. There were things that – look, I agree with you. I, of course, agree with you.

54:05Naomi Fry:But – And what if it inspires others, even if they are themselves craven? Do you see what I'm saying?

54:11Alexandra Schwartz:Yes, yes, yes. Totally true. And sometimes it takes people. This is, you know, this is why archetype works. It's kind of like the Obama thing, too. Yeah, 100%. And the danger of that is that we live in exceedingly disillusioning times. It seems to me that if your worldview is dependent on the conduct of certain people, there is a kind of arc that ends in a sort of explosion of social cohesion. You know what I mean? And that does not mean that this very human need will not always be with us. It is, though, a cautionary arc, perhaps. I think you're totally right. And your point is well taken. And this is why, to me, the overriding thing that Love Story does for me is to, again, make me feel that John Kennedy Jr.

55:07came from the most fucked up world possible and actually, like, turned out okay considering how fucked up all that was. Yeah. Maybe. Could have been way worse. It could have been so much worse. Yeah.

55:18Naomi Fry:And I think the question is the idea of like image and lore being a possible distraction from political realities, right? I mean, if we're thinking just about the visual or the cut of the shirt or something, and I'm not saying that love story needs to do more than that, you know, necessarily. No, I think in doing that, it's the best piece of PR they could possibly have gotten.

55:49Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. It's interesting for people who care about art to really pay attention to the Kennedys because they knew this. Their White House was the first one that was so insistent on like, no, we're going to have artists visit us. And artists are going to love us and talk about us. And what does Jackie do when she gets to New York? She gets a job in the publishing industry. I think it should, I mean, all of us care about style in various ways. For me, I think of myself as an esthet or whatever. And this is like, it troubles me. It's a reminder that the surfaces of things and the spirit of things are linked, but not in the way that we always think that they are.

56:29Alexandra Schwartz:Beneath the layer of images, there's also a moral happening, and I should be attending to both things. You're saying that the aesthetics of something can cover up the truth of the power operating beneath it. Yes. Yes. And just like that, the look of something and the sort of moral thrust of something are not always one-to-one working in parallel. You're saying, okay, so that a beautiful pencil skirt and a handsome white men's button-down do not attribute virtue much as we may enjoy the look of them. It's an obvious observation that for some reason needs to be repeated over and over again. Because it's not that obvious because we all get sucked in by the aesthetics.

57:08Vincent, I feel like your role in general, but definitely right now, is to lead no mean me back from the brink and say, remember.

57:16Alexandra Schwartz:Remember.

57:17Naomi Fry:Remember. What do we need to remember, Vincent? No, nothing that I haven't already said. Vincent's like, ask not. What your country can do for you.

57:29Alexandra Schwartz:What your country can do for you.

57:31Naomi Fry:I hereby declare.

57:42Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from James Yost, with music by Alexis Quadrado. We're taking a break next week, but we'll be back in your feeds the week after that. And remember, join us on Oscars night for the Critics at Large live blog. Champers, red carpet, all of it. We're going to be quipping.

58:15Alexandra Schwartz:I can't wait for it. We're just going to be... It's going to be a quip fest. You know, just...

58:18Naomi Fry:Commenting. Rolling around it. Quipping. Rolling around it. That's right. And this is all taking place on NewYorker.com.

58:38Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy-brand with it. Right. We take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

59:06Naomi Fry:We go highbrow. We go lowbrow. We go everything in between.

59:10Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture. Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

59:15Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry. From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights. Great expectations to Desperate Housewives.

59:24Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun.

59:27Naomi Fry:It's Critics Alarge from The New Yorker, every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

59:57Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Who is going to win control of Congress this November? And what is it going to mean for the final two years of Donald Trump's disruptive presidency? I'm Susan Glasser.

1:00:17Naomi Fry:I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. We host the Washington Roundtable on the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. We're following what key races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall. We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.