← Critics at Large | The New Yorker
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A
This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
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I'm Alex Schwartz.
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C
And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening and the culture right now and how we got here. Hello.
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B
Hello.
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A
Hey,
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My friends, I would like to invite you to join me on a journey.
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A
Oh, gladly.
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C
Picture this. We're in New York city. It's the 1990s. You guys were actually there on the ground as two New York City natives.
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A
I was very much in the New York of the 1990s.
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C
You were right there.
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A
I can smell the smells.
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C
You can smell the smells. You can, you know, see the sights. What comes to mind?
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B
Rollerblades.
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C
Rollerblades.
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B
Where did they go? A fun way to get around that people were into in the 90s.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Broken windows. Policing Rudy Giuliani.
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B
Okay, one of those things was good, one of them was bad.
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A
Yeah.
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C
How about for me? Because although I didn't grow up in New York in the 90s, I did visit New York in the 90s. The scent of CK1
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everywhere, you could describe it.
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C
Yes. So CK1 for those not in the know. Calvin Klein's unisex fragrance, Light Spring. Like, not cloying, just a little bit sweet, but a little bit tart.
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B
Sounds nice.
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C
Yeah, it was great. I had it myself. A minimalist bottle.
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A
That was a great description of a smell.
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C
Thank you very much, Vincent.
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I felt like I could smell it.
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C
Anyway. What we're describing is the setting of a new show, Love Story, yet another project from producer Ryan Murphy. It's the first installment in a new anthology series that tells the stories of famous couples. And in this case, the couple in question is John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
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A
Sorry, is this a bad time?
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B
What's going on? JFK Jr. Was just here to see Carolyn.
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C
Just wasting time. How old were you when you realized you were the son of a president? I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before. And it's a story of their relationship from the time they met to their tragic end that everybody knows about. They died in a plane crash, of course, off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in 1999. And we're gonna get into what we think about the show for sure. But I think the reactions to it are just as interesting. How would you guys describe the response that you've been seeing?
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A
It's like a rabid, viral sort of meme, like in its dependence on images, people changing the way they dress, looking at sort of like style guides. It's a really interactive and rabid response.
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C
Right. Like a crazy fan response. Right. I believe it's become one of FX's most watched series ever.
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B
Yes. This is a very, very popular show. And I had done everything I could to not pay attention to it. And then I started paying ATT and realized that it was huge and that people also have the response to it, the ownership response. That's not how she looked. That's not how she dressed. That's not how he was. That is how he was. Whatever it is, they're projecting their own very intense feelings about these real people onto the fictional portrayal.
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C
Yeah. And also, you know, Ryan Murphy has kind of beefed with Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy's son. And, you know, there's been a lot of kind of response to the Nine, the depiction of the 90s in the show. A lot is going on. You know, suffice to say, people are still. Still very invested in the Kennedys and in their legacy. My question today is why the Kennedy story shows up in the culture on Repeat, especially as RFKJR's impact on our current politics complicates the Kennedy legacy. And that's something I really would like to talk about today. How do we square our nostalgia for the Kennedy myth with reality? So that's today on critics at large Love story and why we cling to the Kennedy myth. Okay, guys, do you have any particular memories of the JFK Jr. And Carolyn Bessette era? Like, were you aware of their kind of iconic relationship as it was playing out? No.
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B
I had no idea who these people were or that they existed. And the reason for that is that I was a child.
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C
She was simply too young, my friends.
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B
I was just a young innocent. But I will tell you how I did become aware of them, because their tragic deaths were the absolute talk of visiting day. The summer of 1999, all the grownups showed up for visiting day at summer camp. And that is how I became aware of them and of what had happened to them.
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C
I became aware of them only. Only in their death.
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B
Yes.
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C
They had to die for young Alex Schwartz to be made aware of their existence.
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B
Sadly, yes. I was 11. All of a sudden, we had been living in the cocoon of summer camp, and there the real world entered.
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A
Yeah, I was, I don't know, 15 when he died. And I remember him dying, but I do not remember. I did not know about this couple until much, much, much later in my life.
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C
Okay, friends. No, me.
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B
Take us back.
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C
This is where you separate the Men from the boys.
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Tell us about which am I?
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You're the boys.
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You are the boys. I am the man.
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Yay.
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No, I am just, as both my friends sitting with me at this round. This round table know, I, dear listeners, just turned 50 last week.
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B
Woo.
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Happy birthday.
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Thank you. Thank you.
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B
This is a huge moment for us on the pod and for American culture.
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C
It's a big moment for American culture. And I'm coming clean. I know I have the infantile spirit of a young girl, but, yes, it's true, I did turn 50. And culturally, it means, yes, that I was very aware of Jon, Jon and Carolyn Bessette. I was aware of Jon Jon as kind of, you know, the sort of hunky scion. I was aware of the Kennedy clan. I was aware of George magazine as it was happening, the magazine about politics, a sexy magazine about politics that he, you know, put out. And I was aware of Carolyn Bessette through my religious reading of American Vogue and so on, because she was a figure in the culture, a fashion figure, a huge fashion influence in her life as well. She was impeccably turned out like the absolute distillation of a certain moment in style.
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And.
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And so, yes, I totally remember them as a living couple. They looked amazing. And I remember when they died, I wasn't in America. I was in Israel then. And I remember watching it live on the news in Israel, and I kept repeating the words to my then boyfriend, it's the Kennedy curse.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And it was. I mean, when they didn't find that plane and they kept searching, I was like, that's it. They're done again. What is it with his family, et cetera, et cetera. And so I came to Love Story ready to the Ryan Murphy Show. I came to it ready because I remember and I want us to start talking about it. As we've mentioned, executive produced by Ryan Murphy, created by the writer Connor Hines. It stars Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as the fabulously hirsute John F. Kennedy Jr. Give me your kind of opening remarks.
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B
Okay. I don't think this is a good show, and yet I'm very much enjoying watching this not good show.
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A
That's it.
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That's what I think.
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C
Absolutely.
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Do you think that too, Vincent?
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A
That's exactly what I think. Of course it's not good, but it
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would be an affront if it was good.
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A
I mean, how could it be good? But at what it is, which is a sort of extended lookbook and exercise and intensifying nostalgia. It works. I mean, we could say that this is really like Ryan Murphy aesthetics. It's like, am I trying to make it good? No. No. And if you're asking for that, get out of here. It's just like, how does this shirt fall on this person's shoulders is the test of the show.
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C
Who's gonna lay out the scope? Where are we? What is kind of the arc, the
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A
cocoon of it is from when these people meet and in which ways their paths cross. John. John JFK Jr. Is sort of in the middle of this moment in his life where he seems to be, yes, this hunky tabloid fodder, scion of the famous Kennedy family, but also at a crossroads in his life. He's failed the bar twice. You know, he's kind of coming up against ridicule. That makes him question sort of what he's doing and where he is in his life.
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B
So what if he flubbed the bar exam twice?
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Twice. As in parentheticals, America's uncrowned Prince is facing 30 with a steady girlfriend, fabulous looks, even a movie role. But now it's time to hit those law books. If it makes you feel any better, anyone who knows you knows that you don't have a steady girlfriend.
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C
Fuck off.
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A
I can't show my face around the city with these headlines everywhere, but you show your dick to everyone at the gym. Apparently, this is all I'm good for. Well, as your cousin Carolyn Bessette is a rapidly rising figure at Calvin Klein, we see her sort of interjecting her style advice when she's supposed to be, like, the silent assistant. And even though this enrages her boss, it catches the eye of Calvin Klein. And through her sort of ascension within Calvin Klein, she's a salesperson when we meet her, but she's like, you know, everybody can tell she's just got it. She's this really charismatic person. And through that, she's at a party with Calvin. And then she meets JFK Jr and it's off to the races. Do you want to grab a drink?
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C
Oh, technically, I'm working.
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Well, isn't everyone here?
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C
Wow. Quite the shrewd observation coming from the
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bell of the ball, the belle of the ball. I know, like, five people here.
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C
Well, you wouldn't know that from the way everyone's staring at you.
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A
Oh, I think they're all staring at you.
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C
You just keep that in your back pocket, don't you? Just to get back to what you were saying before about kind of the drape of the shirt, the drape of the shirt on the shoulder and, you know, the lifestyle porn of it all. It's really interesting to me that this show is kind of like, entirely convincing as kind of like this visual album, right? This lookbook of, like, this is what it was like to be in New York in the 90s if you were, like, you know, wealthy and, like, young and beautiful, you know, I'm not talking New York in the 90s. There was many things, of course. This is what it felt like to, like, smoke in the office. This is what it looked like when at the Calvin Klein office you were only allowed, like, black paperclips 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 Tribeca. 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, like. But on the level of, like, the love story and the attraction story, apart from kind of the visual attraction.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Not convincing, not convinced.
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B
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, yeah, 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, however, John F. Kennedy Jr. Comes off amazingly in
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C
this show, as does Carolyn Bessette.
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B
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 Bissette dirty.
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C
She's really interesting.
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B
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. I 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.
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C
Yeah, she tended to avoid interviews.
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B
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. That's interesting. Am I the only one with this reading?
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A
Maybe I received it totally opposite.
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B
Oh, interesting. Okay, okay.
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A
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.
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C
I think there is 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. Like, 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, like 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 Ballard called Once Upon a Time, which is kind of a revisionist biography of Carolyn Bessett. 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, in his celebrity, in his riches, you know, all of that. She. 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?
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Probably.
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C
And it would have been nice to see that complication on the screen.
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B
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. Yeah, you've been following the kerfuffle.
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C
Yes.
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B
So Daryl Hannah, actress who dated John Afghanistan Jr is made to look here like the dumbest person alive. Like the most annoying person ever to have been born. Ditz, ditz. Absolute ditz. She is 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?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I. 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 scholar. 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.
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B
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. Of course, I don't know it's gonna 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.
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C
That's a great point.
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B
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. 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. But I do think it participates in that, which definitely diminishes its ability to speak to the story as a whole.
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C
Let's talk a little bit about the response to the show. What have you noticed?
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B
Well, the first response I became aware of predated the show coming out. I 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.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And 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.
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C
The blonde is good.
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B
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. 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.
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C
I think the issue was the attention and the particularity. Right. People were like, okay, 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 she 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.
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B
Ooh.
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C
But also like, kind of like giving props to the show. They got it right. Right.
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A
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.
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C
Yeah.
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A
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 presiding 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, et cetera. Carolyn can't play this game, and she's sort of embarrassed.
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C
Carolyn, what do you think? About what?
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B
Well, Katie was just saying that Clinton is looking into establishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
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C
Any political risks there.
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A
And it's played as like, of all the things Kennedys could be villains about, this is where the Kennedys come off worst. That they care about politics and talk about it at the table. And it's like, no, no, no. You've got this totally backwards. It's like the show is asking, why can't she 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. We barely even know who the president is.
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B
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 school child 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. It's a cruel, pretend engagement with politics.
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C
Right. 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.
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B
Yes.
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C
They care about showing off and earning points.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So I thought that was certainly. That was an interesting.
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A
That was the representation. 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.
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C
In a minute, we close. Read the Kennedys. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right.
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I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers.
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C
Cheers.
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A
I've always been a glass half full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some People who look at the world that way, too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges, their stories are funny and quite candid. So I hope you'll join me each week. And who knows, you might just come away with your own Glass Half Full. Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin From Today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
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C
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.
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B
I recently did engage with American Prince, colon, JFK Jr tagline, the golden boy with a heavy crown.
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C
And the heavy hair.
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B
And the hair.
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C
Sorry to go back to the hair.
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B
No, it actually is very important. I'm not kidding.
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C
It's crazy. Okay, say. Say more about the hair.
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B
The hair. If you have such hair.
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C
It's incredible.
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B
And we're talking about a thing. 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.
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C
How does he do it?
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B
It's genetic luck. It's incredible genetic luck that further. Yes, they may be cursed, but they have this hair.
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C
It's like the. And I'm not trying to be like Lisanal Gaib vibes. Right? Is that the right. You know what I mean? Like the chosen one.
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B
Right. Either you can make objects move with your brain or you have this beautiful head of hair.
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C
Yes.
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B
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.
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C
Like, I felt like we were back to the chest hair.
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B
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. It's the Seinfeld episode, the Contest. One of the greatest episodes of television ever made. Our friends from Seinfeld, George, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer, undertake a pact to not masturbate or refrain from working 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 Jon Jon. John F. Kennedy Jr. What?
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C
He was in my ribbit class.
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A
Really? Did you talk to him?
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C
No, you don't understand.
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B
He was working out in front of me. So listen, after the class is over,
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C
I time my walk to the door
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B
so we'd get there at the exact same moment. And he says to me, quite a workout.
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A
Quite a workout. What did you say?
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B
I said, yeah,
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A
good one.
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B
So then listen, listen. So then I shot. She loses the contest. That's it for her. She cannot. 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.
- [28:37]
C
This is recent.
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B
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.
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A
I bet you're right.
- [28:49]
B
It makes me think they heard Love Story's coming down the pike. How 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.
- [29:12]
C
Yeah, 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 Galela, who died just a few years back. One of his premier subjects, maybe his most famous subjects 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. But the images are so interesting.
- [30:09]
A
Yeah.
- [30:10]
C
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.
- [30:33]
A
Yeah.
- [30:34]
B
So let's talk a little bit about one of the recent texts. Jackie, People like to believe in fairy tales.
- [30:41]
A
You ready?
- [30:42]
C
Of course.
- [30:49]
A
And you?
- [30:51]
B
I believe that the characters we read
- [30:53]
C
about on the page end up being
- [30:54]
B
more real than the men who Stand Beside us. Came out in 2016. It was directed by Pablo the Raine, written by Noah Oppenheim and it stars Natalie Portman in the title role. Nomi, did you like it?
- [31:09]
C
I like, you know, I liked, I liked Natalie Portman's performance. 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 a wall in a box, but you're kind of doing it yourself and you're kind of like theatricalizing this problem but also participating it and making it into this melodrama, like crazy melodrama. So I'm kind of in two minds about it, I guess. Alex, what about you?
- [32:06]
B
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. And 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.
- [33:03]
C
Vincent, what about your Kennedy text or texts? Do you have any?
- [33:07]
A
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? Please, 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 critic 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. 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 Kennedy being so Kennedy, so dapper and sort of cool and debonair under pressure, and Nixon is like, flop sweating, won that election. 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. 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 these coattails of style. I just think it's a great book.
- [36:27]
B
I love that point. And it does remind me, my favorite Kennedy is Joe Kennedy, Father Kennedy, the father, patriarch Kennedy.
- [36:35]
C
When you Say favorite.
- [36:36]
B
He's the one who's most fascinating. And when people.
- [36:40]
C
I'm like, what's your favorite thing to. Anti Semit.
- [36:45]
B
I say favorite in terms of. In terms of fascinating character analysis. Yes, he was a major anti Semite. A flagrant. Flagrant anti Semite. No, the reason I say that is 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, and 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 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. That 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 1960s stuff in popular mind. And that's all about to change thanks to Michael Fassbinder, who's about to play Joe Kennedy for Netflix.
- [38:39]
A
There we go.
- [38:40]
B
Hooray. So that's gonna be my real Kennedy moment. I am very excited for that because that story, that story is the most Father Joe. It's the most fascinating of all.
- [38:49]
C
My husband is Joe Kennedy and he will be.
- [38:53]
B
We don't know exactly when it will come out, but I'm gonna watch it. And I wonder if seeing those origins will provide any counterweight to the glowing myth.
- [39:10]
C
In a minute. What happens when the myth behind this family brushes up against real politics? Critics at Larger in the New Yorker will be right back. If you were caught up in the Barbenheimer frenzy, if you love ranking the Mission Impossible films, if you are just an all around movie fan, I have a podcast for you. Hello, I'm Amy Nicholson. I'm a film critic who writes for the New York Times and I'm also the co host of Unspooled, the ultimate movie podcast. Each week, my co host, Paul Scheer and I unspool famous films to see if they are truly all time classics. From the original 1984 Karate Kid to Children of Men to more recent pictures to Dune, yes to Citizen Kane. We cover it all. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. I didn't REWATCH Oliver Stone's 1991 Kevin Costner starring movie, JFK, but I did watch the trailer.
- [40:17]
A
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 Poimonin. I mean, like a bullet in my head, you dig? Does that help you see my problem a little better?
- [40:32]
C
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, okay, 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 gr. You know, it's like we're always somehow dealing with the Kennedys. Why are we so obsessed?
- [41:07]
B
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.
- [41:24]
C
Oh, I did that too. I love.
- [41:26]
B
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.
- [41:39]
C
More and more so in these 50
- [41:41]
B
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?
- [42:02]
A
Moment.
- [42:02]
B
Where 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. We 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 it can have a very vulturish 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.
- [43:13]
C
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.
- [43:56]
B
Yeah, cutting research funding that can help people cut.
- [43:59]
C
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.
- [44:39]
A
Yeah, they symbolize this really lasting political problem, which is how much stock do you take in charismatic leadership at all? And 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 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. Washington being the first great example. Really famous dude. And then he decided. So it strikes me as an illustration of that suspicion. 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. 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.
- [45:40]
C
I mean, look, even at Trump, right?
- [45:42]
A
Yeah.
- [45:42]
C
If we think about his kind of like bootleg Kennedy clan, 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.
- [46:09]
A
I can't wait for Love Story, the Ivanka and Jared story. It'll be great.
- [46:13]
C
I mean, it's crazy.
- [46:14]
A
What a backdrop.
- [46:15]
B
I felt such a chill run down my spine, such a horrifying chill. I do think you're onto something, Nomi. There a lot of the darknesses of the Kennedy history. I'm thinking of, for instance, Chappaquiddick, 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 wanna 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, 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. This idea of serving the country. Vincent, I know you're gonna be so skeptical of this. You're just like, they've created ruin wherever they've gone. Enough. Yeah. Vincent is not gonna be volunteered. Yeah.
- [47:23]
A
I mean, if you wanna accrue power and not seem to be totally craven, this is the language you use. But please.
- [47:28]
B
I agree, I agree. But what if you do wanna seem totally craven and you wanna 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, but.
- [47:50]
C
And what if it inspires others, even if they are themselves craven? Do you see what I'm saying?
- [47:55]
A
Yes, yes, yes. Totally true. And sometimes it takes people. This is, you know, this is why
- [48:02]
C
it's kind of like the Obamacare, too.
- [48:04]
A
I mean, 100%.
- [48:06]
C
Yeah.
- [48:07]
A
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 a flip can happen arc that ends in
- [48:26]
C
a
- [48:26]
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 as though a cautionary arc, perhaps.
- [48:40]
B
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. Came from the most fucked up world possible and actually turned out okay, considering how fucked up all that was.
- [48:58]
A
Yeah, maybe.
- [48:59]
C
Could have been way worse.
- [49:00]
B
It could have been so much worse.
- [49:02]
A
Yeah.
- [49:02]
C
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.
- [49:29]
B
No, I think in doing that, it's the best piece of PR they could possibly have gotten.
- [49:33]
A
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 gonna have artists visit us and artists are gonna 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 aestheter, 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. Beneath the layer of images, there's also a moral happening, and I should be attending to both things.
- [50:20]
B
You're saying that the aesthetics of something can cover up the truth of the power operating beneath it?
- [50:25]
A
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.
- [50:34]
B
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.
- [50:45]
A
It's an obvious observation that for some reason needs to be repeated over and over again.
- [50:49]
B
Because it's not that obvious, because we all get sucked in by the aesthetics. Vinjen, I feel like your role in general, but definitely right now is to lead Nomi and me back from the brink and say remember.
- [51:00]
A
Remember her.
- [51:01]
C
Remember what? What do we need to remember, Vincent?
- [51:05]
A
No, nothing that. Nothing that I haven't already said.
- [51:09]
B
Vincent's like, ask not what your country
- [51:12]
A
can do for you, etc.
- [51:15]
C
I hereby the Cl. This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from James Yost with music by Alexis Quadrato. 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. Shampers, red carpet, all of it.
- [51:58]
B
We're gonna be quipping.
- [51:59]
A
I can't wait for. We're just gonna be.
- [52:01]
C
It's gonna be a quip fest, you
- [52:02]
A
know, just commenting, rolling around in it.
- [52:04]
B
Quipping, rolling around.
- [52:05]
C
And this is all taking place on newyorker.com.
- [52:20]
B
I'm Jonathan Goldstein.
- [52:21]
A
And on the new season of Heavyweight. And so I pointed the gun at
- [52:26]
B
him and said, this isn't a joke.
- [52:28]
A
A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old and a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago.
- [52:36]
B
How can 151 year old woman fall in love again?
- [52:43]
A
Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
- [52:51]
C
From. Prx.