Diabolical Lies - March 22, 2026


How 'Love Story'—and the Kennedys—Fooled America


Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

174.96

Word count

8,558

Sentence count

509


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.440 Today's episode was brought to you by Ryan Murphy, Camelot, the glitching Nintendo 64
00:00:06.400 controller used by the worm that puppeteers RFK Jr.'s brain and makes him send nudes to
00:00:11.080 Olivia Nuzzi, hashtag quiet luxury, Lee Harvey Oswald, the so-called Kennedy curse, Taylor
00:00:18.040 Swift narrowly avoiding CBK's fate despite her damnedest attempts at dating a Kennedy,
00:00:22.720 and our country's weird fucking relationship with the closest thing we have to a dynastic
00:00:27.640 royal family.
00:00:29.200 Hell yeah. I'm so excited.
00:00:31.000 Caro, you're a coastal elite from Massachusetts,
00:00:33.060 so this is a question that I've been dying to ask you.
00:00:36.980 What did you know about the Kennedys growing up?
00:00:40.620 I know that they've killed many people, most of which were women,
00:00:43.780 but I feel like in Massachusetts, you're either like an Affleck fan or a Kennedy fan.
00:00:49.560 And I am very much, unfortunately, forevermore an Affleck fan.
00:00:53.720 So yeah, I feel like people either worship the Kennedys in Massachusetts
00:00:56.740 or find them unbearable.
00:00:58.060 And I am definitely in the latter category.
00:01:00.520 I have been workshopping this theory
00:01:02.080 that adults who are Kennedy stans
00:01:05.300 are kind of like the-
00:01:06.380 Like Disney adults?
00:01:07.680 Yes!
00:01:08.580 Oh my God, you wrecked my mind.
00:01:10.560 Caroline, that was the exact reference I was going to make.
00:01:14.080 How did you do that?
00:01:15.340 Because I live in Massachusetts.
00:01:16.660 It's equally shameful.
00:01:18.020 And it's just as corporatized, 100%.
00:01:20.120 So there's this almost like fairytale make-believe quality
00:01:23.320 to people who stan the Kennedys.
00:01:26.320 So today I'm going to do a Diabolical Lies first.
00:01:29.060 And Caro, I'm actually going to set the tone for this conversation
00:01:32.080 by playing a clip from one of our own episodes.
00:01:36.140 Oh my God, I love it.
00:01:37.680 Wow, we've been around for one year
00:01:39.000 and we're already circling back on our own thoughts.
00:01:42.440 Incredible.
00:01:43.380 So this is something that you said at the end of our Epstein Megasode.
00:01:49.000 I'm going to play it for you.
00:01:50.540 we have this almost necrophilic obsession with reviving the reputations of disgraced
00:01:57.740 predatory men and elevating them into this like deity status and we do it because to admit the
00:02:03.980 real truth here would require us to see that at the base of our society if you are a woman who
00:02:10.000 is hurt by a man no one will do anything about it i love how self-referential this is am i the
00:02:18.240 expert we're quoting god i'm smart fire okay so then i began watching fx's new show love story
00:02:27.820 about jfk jr and carolyn beset around the same time that we were wrapping up that episode which
00:02:34.600 meant i perceived it through a very eerie unintentional lens so you watched this show
00:02:41.600 what did you think about it what did i think about it um how much did you watch i watched
00:02:47.660 just under four episodes okay so i watched three to four episodes perfect what did i think um
00:02:53.680 i think a lot of money went into this show very obviously it's very slick i like was filling my
00:03:01.340 notes app with all these little notes about like the show itself and the narrative form and i think
00:03:06.840 we'll probably get into it at some point but i think like the the banner thing is that it was
00:03:10.940 really impossible for me to take it seriously because of just the bare minimum that i know
00:03:17.180 about the Kennedys. Like, it was just kind of absurd to me. Carolyn Bessette is a very
00:03:22.060 interesting character that they really warped in this show. First and foremost, I think that
00:03:26.380 she has always been a style icon and always had this, like, very iconic legacy as, like,
00:03:31.760 a New York It girl. But all of that was defined by her relative silence. Like, it was by her
00:03:36.880 looks and by her fashion. And so creating a persona for her was really, like, to me,
00:03:42.860 I was like, this kind of ruins it. So it wasn't for me.
00:03:45.620 Okay, I love that you brought that up. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about
00:03:50.660 who was Carolyn Bessette.
00:03:52.960 Thank God.
00:03:53.660 Why do we care about her today? I did not know much about the Kennedys before beginning this
00:03:58.840 research, and something that I noticed right away was going to be a challenge for me was that
00:04:04.080 because of their role in American culture, the sheer amount of hagiography and myth-making that
00:04:09.860 surrounds them actually makes it very difficult to pull together what feels like a reasonably
00:04:14.520 accurate picture. I thought this was going to be like a light episode and Katie was like,
00:04:20.100 buckle up, we're going to be recording for seven hours. I was like, I have 36 pages single spaced.
00:04:27.920 The other thing that makes it tough is that they were in the tabloids all the time. So it's
00:04:32.580 genuinely difficult to know where the game of telephone for particularly sensational tidbits
00:04:38.620 about them even began. And when I was looking into this, I was like, was JFK like the most
00:04:44.140 profiled president? And it turns out that Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt have more books
00:04:50.100 written about them as presidents. But the Kennedy family is unique in that the fascination extends
00:04:55.940 far beyond the president himself. Nearly every member of the Kennedy family has had multiple
00:05:01.800 books written about them. And so there's this real narrative fascination with this family that is
00:05:06.700 pretty singular in American culture. This is really famously like the Camelot presidency,
00:05:14.840 literally named after the myth of King Arthur and his court.
00:05:19.480 One of the many hot takes that I will throw out errantly without thinking during this
00:05:22.740 conversation today. Love. Perfect.
00:05:24.720 Is that I feel like America is so used to having geriatric men at the wheel that we forget that
00:05:29.880 it's nice to have someone to look at. And I'm like, guys, you could have a lot of JFKs,
00:05:33.980 let alone women. I mean, don't even worry about electing a woman. Like, you could have a young
00:05:38.620 man. You could have a man who's under 50, like they do in other countries.
00:05:42.940 America deserves a 40-year-old hottie, for sure.
00:05:46.640 I agree.
00:05:48.020 So something about the show's storyline and the cultural response to it that I was observing
00:05:52.380 online and in popular media more broadly, despite not really knowing that much about
00:05:58.540 the Kennedys, still struck me as a little bit odd. There's a 2023 episode of Know Your Enemy
00:06:03.600 that I listened to shortly after watching it
00:06:05.840 called The Kennedy Imprisonment
00:06:07.800 that summarized it really nicely.
00:06:09.300 One of the hosts said basically,
00:06:11.320 what we permit in the Kennedys
00:06:13.160 and what we admire about them
00:06:15.380 can tell us a lot about our uniquely American pathologies.
00:06:20.180 So that is what I am interested in discussing today.
00:06:22.920 I am not interested in talking about
00:06:25.200 the Kennedys' legislative history
00:06:27.120 while they were in office,
00:06:28.420 the foreign policy implications of JFK's presidency,
00:06:31.400 the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs or any of that. You can find much better history
00:06:36.060 podcasts for that. And more importantly, I am also not interested in analyzing whether the
00:06:40.980 Kennedys are, quote, good people or bad people, because I think, per the theme that has sort of
00:06:46.600 been unintentionally woven throughout our recent episodes, reducing a conversation to whether this
00:06:52.460 person was good or bad, I think obscures a much richer interpretation of the cultural meaning of
00:06:58.600 this family and what it means that today, in the year of our communist chairman, Mom
00:07:04.680 Donnie, 2026, that a show about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy specifically has taken such hold of
00:07:12.260 the zeitgeist.
00:07:13.160 So to start, Caro, I want to ask, what do you know about the Kennedy curse?
00:07:18.800 What do I know about the Kennedy curse?
00:07:20.660 Generally speaking, many of them have died.
00:07:24.020 JFK was killed.
00:07:25.840 Obviously, you have this couple dying in the plane crash.
00:07:28.180 you have Bobby Kennedy getting assassinated, and I think some of their children have died as well,
00:07:33.480 right? Yeah, yeah. So one thing you'll probably know about the Kennedys, even if you don't pay
00:07:37.640 attention to them, is that their family is supposedly cursed, that an inordinate amount
00:07:43.500 of tragedy has befallen them. So even if you don't know the ins and outs of those tragedies,
00:07:48.080 you're probably at least conceptually aware of the narrative of their unique and enduring
00:07:52.800 suffering at the hands of fate. It's part of the Kennedy mythos, this erotic combination of glamour
00:07:59.740 and tragedy. So yes, you have JFK being assassinated. His brother Robert Kennedy
00:08:04.340 was later assassinated. JFK's sister died in a plane crash in France. Ted Kennedy was in a plane
00:08:10.360 crash, but he survived. JFK Jr. obviously died in a plane crash. So this is the primary thematic
00:08:16.940 undertone, even if it is not explicit, of this popular show love story, the glamour and the
00:08:24.340 tragedy of the Kennedy curse. So we should probably start by quantifying what I mean when I say the
00:08:29.440 show is popular. After only the first five episodes were released, reports were coming out that it had
00:08:35.360 already been streamed more than 25 million hours, and that was still with four episodes to go. So
00:08:41.820 for comparison's sake, the last television show we covered, Heated Rivalry, was reportedly streamed
00:08:46.400 about 10 million hours in the United States. Oh, wow. Heterosexuality strikes again.
00:08:52.940 That's the tragedy. The tragedy of heterosexuality is liking that show more than heated rivalry.
00:08:58.500 Fucking educate yourselves. My God. Don't complain about AI coming to steal art if you are watching
00:09:06.160 that show more than heated rivalry. Okay, I'm finished. Carry on.
00:09:09.280 dude we just got back from a ski trip and my my brother-in-law david got all the wives
00:09:16.880 sweatshirts that say i'm coming to the cottage and then got a bunch of hockey jerseys that are
00:09:22.600 hollander and rosanov and all of our like oh my god all of our nieces and nephews ages like three
00:09:27.760 to seven we're putting on the hockey jerseys being like what am i what is this one we're like don't
00:09:33.960 We'll tell you when you're older.
00:09:35.080 They're like, am I a top or a bottom?
00:09:38.860 So the finale of Love Story comes out this Thursday.
00:09:42.040 There's one episode left,
00:09:43.020 so we don't yet know how they are going to end the show.
00:09:47.040 And it's actually not the only Kennedy-centric show on streaming.
00:09:50.960 There appears to be another Kennedy family drama in the works.
00:09:53.760 Netflix is making a show called Kennedy,
00:09:56.040 an eight-episode historical drama
00:09:58.000 focused on the, quote, political dynasty's origins
00:10:01.760 and based on Frederick Lovegall's JFK coming of age in the American century
00:10:06.660 with Michael Fassbender cast as Joe Kennedy Sr.
00:10:11.280 So that's going to be really interesting.
00:10:13.300 But here is one headline from Curbed that I am going to have you read from.
00:10:19.480 It really does kind of make you feel a little conspiratorial
00:10:22.120 that like right as the Kennedy name is swerving conservative
00:10:24.780 that all of a sudden there's this focus on it.
00:10:27.540 Kennedy cosplay is eating the city by Cleo Chang for a curb there were 10 people here already this
00:10:34.860 morning says Dean a doorman who works across from 20 Northmore Street it's around 11 a.m. on one of
00:10:41.140 the first warm days and months on one of the loveliest blocks in Tribeca as we stand there
00:10:46.260 together staring uneventfully at the co-op where John F. Kennedy Jr. bought a loft in 1994
00:10:51.380 they come with their cameras and they're all dressed like that woman lol what do you mean like
00:10:56.740 a white tee and jeans. Okay, the whole point of Carolyn Bessette is that she wore incredibly
00:11:01.780 simple outfits. She was Calvin Klein, but she was so skinny and blonde and hot that she looked good
00:11:07.340 in outfits. Okay, whatever, carry on, carry on, carry on. You're getting ahead of the, you're
00:11:11.600 getting ahead of the outline. Sorry. Stick to the quote. Dean means, of course, Carolyn Bessette
00:11:16.360 Kennedy, who lived there with Kennedy until their deaths in 1999. There had always been a few Kennedy
00:11:21.660 acolytes hanging around the block, Dean says, but that number has ballooned since Ryan Murphy's
00:11:26.680 love story premiered in February. Most of the people making the pilgrimage are women in their
00:11:31.520 thirties and forties, he adds, and the attention on the address now rivals the street's other
00:11:35.500 attraction, the Ghostbusters Firehouse. I would be on Cornelia Street as a faithful Swiftie.
00:11:41.160 I spot and subsequently profile a pair of women holding iced coffees as headband-seeking types.
00:11:46.720 Indeed, they are. I'm obsessed with history in general and the Kennedys and all of that.
00:11:51.660 Says Jennifer Spillane, dark-haired and wearing a green quilted coat.
00:11:56.040 Carolyn is iconic.
00:11:58.280 Spillane and her friend, both born in the 90s, both living in New York,
00:12:02.200 stopped in to look at headbands during a shopping—
00:12:04.400 Oh my God, this is too much for me.
00:12:06.100 Stopped—this is like harder for me than a Manosphere episode.
00:12:08.360 Stopped in to look at headbands during a shopping excursion.
00:12:11.340 I'm learning so much more, especially about her as a person,
00:12:14.840 Spillane says of the show's influence.
00:12:16.720 What?
00:12:17.580 I loved how private she was.
00:12:19.400 That's sort of her brand.
00:12:20.460 I'm doing, okay. Open the schools. I'm doing a deep dive on Pinterest and TikTok and all that.
00:12:28.180 Oh my God.
00:12:29.740 Thoughts?
00:12:31.360 What are we doing?
00:12:33.280 So this blurb nods to the trickle-down consumer fashion effect of all of this.
00:12:39.280 So the real Carolyn Bessette owned a camel-colored Prada coat.
00:12:44.180 It was recently sold at auction for $192,000.
00:12:49.920 Wow.
00:12:50.620 C.O. Bigelow, the store that repeatedly sells Carolyn Bessette's tortoiseshell headband,
00:12:55.640 sold the most accessories in its 188-year history since the show came out.
00:13:00.460 For the record, when that was reported, I don't even think the actress who plays Carolyn
00:13:04.300 had even worn the headband in the show yet.
00:13:07.100 But the revival of interest in her sparked the resharing of paparazzi images online
00:13:12.820 that show her wearing this headband.
00:13:15.640 I actually found out about the show
00:13:17.280 because I kept getting served influencer videos
00:13:20.940 of, quote, CBK-inspired looks.
00:13:24.900 Or like, ooh, the Carolyn Bessette effect.
00:13:27.060 And I was like, who is this woman
00:13:28.940 that everyone is suddenly obsessed with?
00:13:30.900 Have you seen any of those videos?
00:13:32.220 Have they, like, shown up for you?
00:13:33.520 I have.
00:13:34.160 And I do think, like, I think she had very classic style.
00:13:38.100 Like, she was a beautiful, stylish woman.
00:13:39.920 The idea of, like, teaching someone how to,
00:13:43.040 I'm like, dude, white t-shirt, jeans, trench, headband.
00:13:46.880 The whole point of women like that and their allure
00:13:49.460 is that they wear something
00:13:50.620 that would never actually look good on you
00:13:52.840 and it looks put together on them.
00:13:54.720 And that's, it's the Kendall Jenner.
00:13:56.580 Kendall Jenner is like the Carolyn Bessette of our time
00:13:59.040 where she will wear things that are like unbelievably simple
00:14:02.080 and yet somehow, hint,
00:14:04.600 because they're 5'11 and a size zero,
00:14:06.740 it looks unbelievably fashionable on them.
00:14:08.780 But I just find it really funny
00:14:09.860 that there's like a cottage industry
00:14:11.880 sprouting up on what is inarguably an incredibly simple look to achieve.
00:14:17.060 So we're going to watch a couple videos that are representative of different strains of this type
00:14:24.500 of video. And then I'm just going to have you describe them. So this is video number one.
00:14:28.980 Why am I so heated? This is ridiculous. This is like a light conversation. I need to chill out
00:14:33.060 and drink my kombucha. I feel like this is always what happens. I bring you a topic on a silver
00:14:38.400 platter. And I'm like, for your digestion, ma'am. For your fury. And you're like, I'm furious.
00:14:46.600 Okay, this is the first video and I want you to just kind of watch it and then give us some
00:14:50.720 thoughts. The Taylor Swift overture. Okay. Thoughts on video number one. Genre number one.
00:15:04.580 Okay, so it was basically like a montage of, I guess, a clip of them from 1994,
00:15:09.160 very cutely like playing with each other and roughhousing like bear cubs in the park with their German shepherd.
00:15:15.800 Okay, I've now changed my tune.
00:15:17.580 I'm like, is everyone really lonely?
00:15:21.000 Watch this one romantic edit.
00:15:23.480 I've changed my mind.
00:15:24.720 No, I'm just like, I'm watching it and I'm just like, is everyone obsessed with this because people are just lonely?
00:15:31.100 Again, they were a cute couple.
00:15:32.940 Totally.
00:15:33.340 When they weren't beating the shit out of each other in public.
00:15:36.200 Very cute.
00:15:37.140 Yeah, it's not like that remarkable to me, that video.
00:15:41.020 It's just like a couple flirting and playing with each other.
00:15:43.760 Yeah.
00:15:44.280 Okay, so that's like genre number one that I noticed
00:15:46.640 is people basically making like romantic fan edits
00:15:49.780 of the couple with paparazzi footage.
00:15:53.240 Okay, we're going to now watch video number two.
00:15:56.160 This is a different genre of Kennedy Bissett video.
00:16:00.780 Dolly, I could not agree with you more.
00:16:02.520 carolyn beset kennedy would have bullied any clean girl or trad wife look up her quotes to kate spade
00:16:10.480 she was relentless she would absolutely hate everything that the clean girls and the trad
00:16:17.360 wives stand for and you know who else would have hated that entire image john f kennedy jr he hated
00:16:25.520 them bitches he wanted somebody that was feisty and would challenge him duh these girls just don't
00:16:32.500 get it i can't stop thinking about the disney adult thing now and then just so we know like
00:16:37.540 that was a tiktok video responding to a comment where someone said she assuming caroline would
00:16:42.480 never have been like a pilates and matcha girl yeah essentially yeah which so okay this is this
00:16:48.880 is the second genre which is basically retcon like all like revisionist history of like jfk
00:16:55.700 jr wanted a feisty queen carolyn wasn't this carolyn would have loved this carolyn would have
00:17:01.060 hated that. Basically, like, speculation about who these people were, what they wanted, the fact
00:17:06.180 that JFK Jr., there was something about Carolyn that was very alluring to him. It's something that
00:17:11.560 I found, again, off-putting in the show. And I should also say, if people like the show, that's
00:17:15.420 fine. I'm not trying to yuck your yum. I watched, like, 40 hours of reality TV in the last week.
00:17:19.840 But something that I noticed immediately in the show was how this was narrativized, where it was
00:17:25.660 like, he doesn't like clingy girls. He wants an independent woman. And they treat his ex-girlfriend
00:17:30.700 like trash. And I think she has since given a public statement, putting aside like the gross
00:17:35.400 sexism of it all. It's very tired. It's very cliche to make it like one thin, beautiful blonde
00:17:40.900 is clingy and doesn't understand his complexity and doesn't have any interests of her own.
00:17:46.720 And the other blonde is a cool girl who, again, it's the gone girl of it all. It's like she'll
00:17:52.100 give blowjobs and she's a size zero. She never complains and she'll drink a beer and watch a
00:17:56.220 football with you watch football with you watch a football it was immediately pitting these two
00:18:01.940 things and so I find it interesting that people on TikTok are again clearly taking from the show
00:18:07.240 this narrative because once again Carolyn Bessette was famously a cipher she was incredibly private
00:18:13.320 and so they're taking this very cliche narrative very sexist narrative and applying it to her
00:18:18.700 legacy which i find to be pretty uh off-putting perfect segue this is the third and final video
00:18:27.120 that we are going to watch genre number three oh my god it's very exciting wonderful evening
00:18:34.620 what was your highlight the entire evening was spectacular there's no highlight
00:18:39.140 that's cool honey don't worry about it i think it's sort of fabulous i hope they're all sitting
00:18:46.380 with me look at the birdie how do you define being generous well you're all here tonight
00:18:54.800 thank you for photographers please don't get so close to me
00:19:05.540 okay that was a tiktok video where the caption just said every
00:19:15.960 known video of CBK talking. And it was all of 40 seconds long. Okay. So there was an article in
00:19:24.640 the Wall Street Journal called Gen Z is crazy for the Kennedys that I'm going to have you read an
00:19:31.160 excerpt from. Perhaps the more compelling story is Gen Z's sudden obsession with the couple.
00:19:37.120 Love story has concocted its own kind of cultural fervor. Social media feeds are flooding with
00:19:42.740 grainy paparazzi shots of the real-life couple walking the streets of New York City.
00:19:46.960 Fans are now flocking to the downtown eatery, where their first date takes place in the show.
00:19:51.720 Some are trying to emulate Bessette's minimalist style and shiny golden hair,
00:19:55.900 dubbing the shade Bessette Blonde. Okay, how many times can we rename the same color of blonde over
00:20:01.540 the decades? Any story about the Kennedy dynasty could generate this kind of frenzy, yet this one
00:20:07.020 seems particularly attractive to a generation that never experienced the Camelot era or the 1990s.
00:20:12.740 The series showcases a downtown New York scene filled with yellow taxi cabs, not Ubers.
00:20:18.340 Young people smoke cigarettes indoors, and newsstands sell actual newspapers.
00:20:23.440 These years were also the last gasp before the internet.
00:20:27.000 Bessette had no social media presence or brand partnerships as many celebrity girlfriends do today.
00:20:32.380 Even as she swatted wild paparazzi on every street corner,
00:20:35.340 she possessed an air of mystique compared with today's celebrities.
00:20:38.600 Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me.
00:20:40.060 I think I feel nostalgic to that time period, and I was technically alive for some of it, so I understand that.
00:20:46.660 I agree. I think that there was an alternate universe in which this episode kind of took a more, like, internet, personal branding, we should all know less about each other turn.
00:20:59.080 That's not the direction we're going in today, but I do think that this explanation makes sense.
00:21:03.860 There was a JFK Jr. lookalike competition in New York City, and I'm actually kind of obsessed with the pictures from it.
00:21:09.880 Someone organized this lookalike competition, but it overlapped with a March for Liberation rally that was, quote, celebrating the U.S. and Israel's recent attack on Iran.
00:21:21.760 Oh, my God.
00:21:22.720 So all the pictures from this event are like these absolute jokers dressed up in that dumb little like backwards hat, like hewing against a background of people like waving Iranian flags and like holding up pictures of Donald Trump.
00:21:37.700 And I'm like, I don't know what this means, but it is perfect.
00:21:42.400 So I want you to read this representative sampling of recent beset related headlines for me.
00:21:51.460 Carolyn Kennedy's rumored, parenthetical, preferred lipstick.
00:21:56.340 My $17 perfume was supposedly a favorite of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
00:22:01.380 The first images from Ryan Murphy's newest series caused a stir among the CBK style worshippers.
00:22:08.320 A definitive guide to what Carolyn Bessette Kennedy wore.
00:22:11.980 These Carolyn Bessette Kennedy costumes don't fit the bill.
00:22:15.840 You could own a piece from Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's wardrobe.
00:22:19.880 Carolyn Bessette Kennedy walked so the row could run.
00:22:22.900 Yep.
00:22:23.240 How right was I with Kendall Jenner?
00:22:24.800 God.
00:22:25.480 All right.
00:22:25.980 And we've even got an Evie magazine piece.
00:22:29.640 Of course we do.
00:22:31.460 Please read.
00:22:32.500 Every piece you need to dress like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in 2026.
00:22:37.620 Love Story on FX currently has the internet in a chokehold.
00:22:40.800 And honestly, same.
00:22:43.440 It's actually funny though, because when you read the article, the girl's like,
00:22:46.100 So I actually, like, haven't watched it, but I do like her outfit.
00:22:50.780 Incredible. No notes.
00:22:52.700 There's even been a little bit of an afterglow for Sarah Pidgeon,
00:22:55.840 the actress who plays Carolyn in the series,
00:22:57.960 where, like, she's benefiting now from the association
00:23:00.920 with this cultural object of fascination.
00:23:03.560 She is getting her very own road campaign.
00:23:07.180 Living my dream.
00:23:10.100 Fuck.
00:23:10.960 She's getting peptide lip balms for life?
00:23:14.620 Fuck me.
00:23:15.480 If you ever want your own, all you need to do is become affiliated with a dead Kennedy
00:23:19.180 brother.
00:23:19.960 But after you watched the show, you sent me a text and you were like, this show is the
00:23:24.000 entertainment equivalent of this meeting should have been an email.
00:23:27.360 I think what we've been circling is it's not very good, which makes its cultural chokehold
00:23:32.840 even more complicated.
00:23:34.920 And I think what I eventually came around to is it is exceedingly popular, not in spite
00:23:40.520 of the fact that it's soulless, but because it's soulless.
00:23:43.540 It doesn't have anything new to say about these people or how their myth of their relationship connects to our concept of celebrity or what it means when a political family becomes a pop culture phenomenon.
00:23:55.140 So I'm going to have you read an excerpt from a Vulture review of the show by Nicholas Kwa.
00:24:01.100 This is a vision of a relationship as a hermetically sealed unit, a dollhouse of beautiful people.
00:24:07.300 Wow. This version of John and Carolyn are nothing much beyond their relationship to each other,
00:24:12.700 which could itself be the point if the show knew what to do with it. How does a relationship like
00:24:17.580 this actually work? Why are they in love? How does their story connect to modern celebrity and the
00:24:22.660 machinery of public attention? We live, after all, in the era of Meghan Markle. Yeah, good point.
00:24:28.360 Different but contiguous with the story of Carolyn Bessette. What makes this relationship special?
00:24:33.900 In its inability to explore any of these questions with Verve,
00:24:37.060 Love Story arrives at an indirect answer.
00:24:39.320 Perhaps it isn't.
00:24:40.600 By the final stretch, we've spent so much time watching them fight, reconcile,
00:24:44.440 fall back in love, miss each other, marry, and fight again,
00:24:47.260 that the whole exercise begins to feel like being cornered at a dinner party
00:24:50.620 with someone recounting the minutiae of their relationship.
00:24:53.600 The repetition dulls whatever voltage the pairing once carried.
00:24:57.080 In flattening the rhythms of Kennedy and Bissett's life together
00:24:59.580 into a cycle of domestic discord,
00:25:01.220 Love Story takes a relationship long freighted with myth, glamour, and cultural obsession and renders it strangely ordinary.
00:25:08.420 Yeah, on that note, really quickly, something I noticed about this show is that it falls into a trap that I think a lot of elementary writing and elementary fiction does, which it basically imagines famous people to behave in private as we expect them to behave in person.
00:25:27.040 So, like, all of their conversations with one another are like, you were born for this responsibility, John. You will rise to the occasion. And it's like, this isn't how people actually speak in private. And I think it's a great example of why Succession is such a brilliant show. If you pay attention to the dialogue, they have these people who are larger than life and richer than life, but speaking in private the way that people do.
00:25:47.500 and I just noticed that it itched at me
00:25:49.420 all throughout this thing
00:25:50.420 that they're imagining the Kennedy's interior lives
00:25:52.760 but their interior lives are basically like a press kit
00:25:55.360 for how they would speak publicly.
00:25:56.940 It was just like very grating for me.
00:25:59.400 Totally.
00:25:59.900 So another thing that we've been circling here
00:26:01.580 that I want to zoom in on now
00:26:03.280 is that we watched a video of somebody saying
00:26:06.400 what Carolyn was really like.
00:26:09.020 This is very common.
00:26:10.620 Some people will insist that she was actually
00:26:12.560 a man-hating, chain-smoking, cocaine enthusiast
00:26:15.960 or that she would have loved this
00:26:17.420 or hated that. It's also common in these videos to emphasize her individuality, that it was her
00:26:23.160 unique personal style that set her apart, and individuality is not replicable. So you've kind
00:26:30.720 of already hinted at this. How would you describe her style? I'm not even saying this to be mean.
00:26:37.220 It's like as basic as it comes. Again, she worked at Calvin Klein. Her personal style was simple.
00:26:43.180 there were no branded looks on it. It was boilerplate Calvin Klein. It was like khakis
00:26:48.140 and whites, blue jeans, simple long blonde hair, not a ton of makeup, but makeup. Like she wasn't
00:26:54.920 shirking or avoiding femininity. It was just straight down the middle, New England blonde.
00:27:00.860 It was actually very similar to something I've talked to you about in the past of
00:27:03.340 the kind of lanky Puritan vibe, which is not surprising to me that the Kennedys went for it
00:27:10.200 because that was their style, right?
00:27:11.800 They have their compound in hyannis.
00:27:13.620 That's their fucking vibe.
00:27:15.100 Lanky Puritan court.
00:27:17.200 Right, right.
00:27:18.020 Like, plays tennis and then gets the niçoise after.
00:27:20.860 So, like, what do we make of that, right?
00:27:22.700 We're being told that, like, this woman, she's so alluring,
00:27:26.320 and there's so much mystery, and she's so unique,
00:27:28.560 and she's such an individual.
00:27:30.260 And then you, like, really look at her, and you're like,
00:27:32.160 well, what is unique about this?
00:27:34.660 There's a lot of conjecture about Carolyn Kennedy
00:27:37.000 because she never gave interviews.
00:27:38.680 She is described as being brilliant and beautiful and charismatic.
00:27:42.500 She's indifferent to her own celebrity.
00:27:45.100 She's a party girl.
00:27:46.420 Elsewhere, she's described as being domineering and abusive and volatile.
00:27:50.900 You almost always are going to see words like mystique and mystery.
00:27:55.940 You hear the same facts about her every single time in every single write-up.
00:27:59.720 That she was raised in Greenwich.
00:28:01.340 That she went to BU.
00:28:02.620 That she became a sales associate at Calvin Klein and then ascended in the ranks quickly.
00:28:06.420 you will often read as this little part of her lore that she was voted most beautiful person
00:28:11.640 in high school. And the subtext of all of this commentary and all of this conjecture that appears
00:28:19.020 to be asking the question, what made her so unique, is what made her so unique that America's
00:28:26.600 most eligible bachelor selected her of all women to be his wife? That is the question that is really
00:28:33.300 being asked and answered here. So I want you to read a cover story for me from New York Magazine
00:28:38.780 from October 1996. Oh, lit. None of the snippets meted out about Bissette Kennedy as she will now
00:28:47.020 be known. Her degree from Boston University, her childhood in Greenwich with mother and orthopedist
00:28:52.520 stepfather appeared to provide the key to understanding exactly why she of all women
00:28:57.740 should have been the one to relieve John Kennedy of his bachelor status. Indeed, not even the
00:29:03.400 bikini-thonged bottom seems an adequate explanation. For that, it is necessary to turn to less
00:29:09.140 official sources, in whose descriptions Bissette begins to sound oddly familiar.
00:29:14.180 She is one of those mysterious creatures that understands on some deep level mystical femininity,
00:29:20.220 says new media proselytizer John Perry Barlow, a longtime friend of Kennedy's who went to the
00:29:25.460 wedding. She knows how to handle men like practically nobody I've ever met. She knows
00:29:30.720 where all the levers are, and she is very deft in her operation of them. She's a lot like the woman
00:29:35.500 who would have been her mother-in-law. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, a woman who never saw the
00:29:41.000 need to hyphenate, once told Gore Vidal, as he relates in his memoir, Pelimpsest, that her aim
00:29:46.520 in life was to be attractive to men. It would be inappropriate these days to admit to such an
00:29:51.280 ambition, even to Gore Vidal. And Bissette Kennedy's stellar career at Calvin Klein,
00:29:55.880 her rapid ascent from salesgirl to muse, is probably testament to her desire to impress
00:30:00.500 Calvin the designer rather than Calvin the man. Even so, it seems likely that Carolyn would agree
00:30:05.860 with Jackie that attracting men and staying attractive for them is a worthwhile skill.
00:30:10.680 If this were not an age in which an unmarried woman must have a serious job in order to have
00:30:14.680 an identity, Carolyn Bissette Kennedy might well have had a career as a beauty, the kind of woman
00:30:19.780 whose energies, wit, and charm are dedicated to creating an aura of alluring femininity.
00:30:25.020 She is certainly a challenge, says someone who has worked with her. It would be hard for any
00:30:29.420 woman to stay mysterious for this guy, who basically can order it up. If there is anything
00:30:33.740 she's up to, it is that task, never seeming easy. Bassett, described by an acquaintance as
00:30:40.020 hypnotically attractive, appears to be almost a case study from the currently popular how-to
00:30:44.940 The Rules, a post-feminist, unabashedly retrograde series of guidelines for husband
00:30:49.920 catching, whose chapter headings include such injunctions as, be honest but mysterious,
00:30:55.500 don't talk to a man first and don't ask him to dance, and be a creature unlike any other.
00:31:01.760 They're like, do not be human. The authors, Ellen Fine and Sherry Snyder, declare that,
00:31:07.400 quote, if you follow the rules, you can rest assured that your husband will treat you like
00:31:10.960 a queen, even when he's angry with you. Why? Because he spent so much time trying to get you.
00:31:16.980 You have become so precious to him that he doesn't take you for granted. Says an observer,
00:31:22.080 I think Bissette made Kennedy think she really wasn't interested, which was very smart.
00:31:26.240 She can also flirt as much as he can. She's not shy. She's not afraid of attracting men.
00:31:31.160 You notice that every time they got in a fight, she was very smart and would tootle off with
00:31:35.020 somebody else or insinuate that she was cunning in that way. So we have a few threads here.
00:31:40.960 She is alternately charming and manipulative.
00:31:45.320 She really played her cards right.
00:31:47.500 Like, there's just something about Carolyn.
00:31:49.680 And again, why?
00:31:51.120 How do we know this?
00:31:52.380 Well, because America's most hard-to-pin-down man chose her.
00:31:57.180 In that way, you're right, she becomes a cipher.
00:31:59.900 She becomes a blueprint for how a woman should look and behave if she wants the ultimate prize to be chosen by a powerful, rich, and hard-doing man.
00:32:08.940 But the video that was every known clip of CBK talking was 40 seconds long.
00:32:16.240 So, like, was she mysterious and restrained, or do we just literally know nothing about her?
00:32:21.600 Right.
00:32:22.240 So, can you imagine if someone tried to make the same video for us and be like,
00:32:26.420 oh, man, we only have 5,000 hours of Katie and Caro talking.
00:32:31.720 If only we knew more of their opinions.
00:32:34.420 Oh, my God.
00:32:35.460 it's funny because again like when i read that article my instinct is to wonder whether that is
00:32:41.760 any more accurate than this one or if it's just an ongoing reflection of our cultural outlook
00:32:45.500 because that one is also giving like yeah she entrapped him or like she knows how you know
00:32:50.260 which is very of the moment it's very interesting and it really does make me think about this
00:32:55.660 ongoing obsession with gen z starting to swing conservative and their obsession with like
00:33:00.820 heterosexuality and marriage and traditional gender norms. Because again, like, yeah, there is
00:33:06.220 nothing unique about it. There is a core truth here, which is that the fact that you're seeing
00:33:14.340 kind of glowing coverage of her and how to emulate Carolyn Bessette in everything from your typical
00:33:22.000 the cut style piece to Evie magazine means that when you are somebody that the public knows
00:33:30.400 nothing about, we can really project whatever we want onto you. And that there are these kind of
00:33:35.860 custodians of the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy myth who feel that they can, like, divine these little
00:33:42.340 clues about who she really was or how she interacted with JFK Jr. And the thing that's so
00:33:48.700 noteworthy about it to me is that it's really based on nothing. She never gave long-form
00:33:53.660 interviews. She did not speak to the press at all with the exception of saying, don't get so close
00:33:58.160 to me. We have hearsay about what she was like from her friends, but the cultural obsession
00:34:02.120 that we are seeing flair right now with this woman and her style and her personality and how
00:34:07.360 she scored JFK Jr. is essentially fiction that is just inferred from like three data points.
00:34:13.240 And even the hearsay, I would say, even those articles, totally arbitrary. Like,
00:34:17.200 you don't know who they spoke to. You don't know if that's an accurate representation of her. You
00:34:20.500 don't know if those people loved her or were jealous or knew her very well or knew her when
00:34:25.400 she was a kid. All of that stuff is picked and chosen in order to fit the narrative of the story,
00:34:31.360 and so it's important to not entirely trust it. And so the question that I'm interested in is,
00:34:36.220 why is that what we want her to be? Why is that the role that we want her to fill today? And
00:34:43.060 there's a real parallel here, I think, with JFK himself that I started to see as I got deeper into
00:34:48.100 this research, which was that JFK didn't even serve a full term before he was assassinated.
00:34:53.480 He was only president for two years and 10 months.
00:34:56.800 So when you're a famous person who dies young, you are culturally frozen in time at your
00:35:03.440 peak in a way that can really turn you into a legend.
00:35:06.700 And what the Kennedys are very good at, as we will see today, is narrative management,
00:35:12.220 is shaping that legend very actively.
00:35:15.460 So we've talked a little bit about the cultural fascination with Carolyn.
00:35:18.300 Now let's talk about how the courtship is portrayed in the show, because I think that
00:35:22.840 is really driving the fascination with Carolyn. I am going to have you read a very short excerpt
00:35:29.140 from a 1999 Vanity Fair article about Carolyn called The Private Princess.
00:35:34.680 More likely, they met through their mutual friend, Kelly Cline, and there was little fairy tale about
00:35:39.960 it. A proponent of post-feminist courtship, Carolyn was a rules girl who would never have
00:35:45.620 been caught reading the actual book. When John held back, Carolyn would remind him about underwear
00:35:50.800 model and future Baywatch star Michael Bergen, who is still on her back burner, Carolyn could
00:35:55.640 also give John hell. Jesus. Okay, are you familiar with the rules? Yeah, because of If Books Could
00:36:01.480 Kill. We kind of got a little preview of it in the New York Magazine profile. How to be aloof,
00:36:06.480 how to be mysterious enough to get a man to become obsessed with you, right? And this idea is like,
00:36:11.980 the way that you win, really, is to end up in this relationship with this person who
00:36:16.040 you've basically tricked into liking you if all goes according to plan. And I think what I noticed
00:36:22.680 about the show is that the narrative is very intentional in laying out something like a
00:36:27.700 step-by-step guide to maintaining the interest of America's most eligible bachelor. We're supposed
00:36:32.820 to interpret their story as romantic, as a love story. And part of what's just true about
00:36:39.380 fictionalized stories like this is that because we don't really know anything about these people,
00:36:43.400 What the story chooses to emphasize or focus on is very intentional.
00:36:47.040 This is not a documentary.
00:36:48.520 It is telling a particular version of this story that the producers believe will be most palatable to its audience.
00:36:54.220 And obviously, they were correct.
00:36:55.620 So, like, in the first several episodes, we spend a lot of time watching how Carolyn got JFK Jr.
00:37:02.540 There are countless shots of her, like, playing coy or hard to get or, like, not giving him her phone number and being like, well, you know where I work.
00:37:09.660 And then she turns around and we can see her face.
00:37:13.000 And she's, like, freaking out.
00:37:14.800 Like, she walks away and she's mouthing, like, oh, my God.
00:37:17.500 The story that we're being told is consistent with the idea
00:37:20.060 that she was very intentionally scheming
00:37:22.300 to trick this man into loving her.
00:37:26.480 So I want to take a second to kind of pull apart
00:37:29.560 what the show is telling us,
00:37:32.060 these characters of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
00:37:35.680 How would you describe them as people in this show?
00:37:40.160 It's just so funny, because as you're describing this,
00:37:42.260 It kind of has me rolling that you're describing this completely accurately and that the title of this show is Love Story. Like, it's so toxic.
00:37:49.980 Right?
00:37:50.440 It's so fucking toxic. All right, what are their descriptions? He is a nothing burger pancake. He has no opinions about anything. His only real conflict is, like, representing the family, but he doesn't have—he is a complete projection of hot guy.
00:38:05.560 it's like he's playing basketball he's working out he flunked the bar but like we're almost
00:38:11.460 supposed to take that as like oh what a hottie adversity he actually as far as i watched has no
00:38:18.020 discernible personality he's like framed as kind of the rational victim with his crazy ex which
00:38:24.780 again you know how i feel about that and then she is actually pretty snarky and bitchy more than i
00:38:31.180 thought they would make her like she really can't stand her job at Calvin Klein until she starts
00:38:36.100 like basically calling the shots they have this frame where like she finds Kate Moss which I
00:38:41.560 thought was pretty funny I was like okay she kind of has the attitude of like the early 2000s rom
00:38:47.640 coms of like plucky journalist in early New York City and is like kind of sarcastic even though I
00:38:54.740 mean no one can beat Kate Hudson at that but she seems very disaffected and they go out of their
00:39:00.320 way in the first few episodes for her to basically be like, I came from nothing. I didn't have a
00:39:05.400 trust. Like I'm working out here on my own. She definitely is supposed to be very edgy
00:39:10.000 and like scrapping her way up Calvin Klein, very savvy. And he's like the perfect hunk who says
00:39:17.500 nothing, but somehow we feel everything. Yeah. JFK Jr. Himbo. Yeah. He's such a himbo. He's
00:39:23.500 charismatic. He's hot, but he's a little bumbling. He fails the bar exam twice. He doesn't really
00:39:29.480 seem all that invested in his magazine. I forgot the magazine. Sophie's like,
00:39:34.700 I just want it to be about the news. I care about the news. I'm like, I don't think you've ever read
00:39:41.480 the news. He's forgetful. He's well-meaning, but he's ultimately like not all that competent or
00:39:48.300 talented. He's harmless and she's wily. Yeah, you get the sense that like, were this not JFK's son,
00:39:54.600 he would just be some guy, right? Right. Let's talk about that magazine for a second.
00:39:59.480 He had a magazine called George in which he wanted to, much like you and I, Caroline, quote, combine wonky analysis with pop cultural savvy.
00:40:11.700 Which has a bigger circulation, George or Diabolical Lies?
00:40:16.600 Honestly, I bet Diabolical Lies.
00:40:18.320 But there is kind of a sort of irony to this, I think, that this was a magazine that was trying
00:40:23.840 to combine politics with pop culture when the Kennedy family itself is largely what transformed
00:40:28.660 politics into pop culture. The so-called Camelot period and the melding of the pageantry and the
00:40:36.300 artifice of Hollywood with governance, that was a really big shift in American political culture
00:40:42.720 that the Kennedys really ushered into our country. Like, the jump from John F. Kennedy and the
00:40:47.980 Camelot period to Donald Trump, that is a straight line with like Reagan bisecting it.
00:40:53.240 Well, that's the great irony too, is that this whole narrative is like
00:40:56.120 the royal family, right? The Kennedys are like the royal family. Again and again in the show,
00:41:00.900 it's like, you just have to accept your fate. Like you have a responsibility to the people,
00:41:05.140 like literally describing him like he's a prince, like it's a monarchy. And they orchestrated every
00:41:10.380 last fucking step of that, them being private. Bullshit. They were like the most publicly
00:41:15.760 photographed and like a presenting family in American history. So contrast that with Carolyn.
00:41:23.760 She is, to an extent in this show, narrativized as the woman behind some of Calvin Klein's most
00:41:29.140 famous choices, discovering Kate Moss, starting the trend of women wearing men's dress shirts.
00:41:35.740 She like shows up in a button down and he's like, what is that? Oh my God, I need to take your photo.
00:41:41.220 She's scrappy.
00:41:42.380 She's talented, right?
00:41:44.060 And so far today, we've asked the question,
00:41:45.900 who is Carolyn and why do we, the public,
00:41:48.420 want her to be this particular image of a woman?
00:41:51.960 Why are we kind of coding this as aspirational?
00:41:55.120 But I'm going to have you read from a book called Ask Not
00:41:57.540 by Maureen Callahan that kind of flips that on its head a little bit.
00:42:03.340 But who was he, really?
00:42:05.100 Oh, hell yeah, Maureen.
00:42:07.000 John Kennedy was a middle-aged man with no real accomplishments.
00:42:12.140 Carolyn had worked her way up from a sales associate in a Boston mall
00:42:15.680 to Calvin Klein's most trusted advisor
00:42:17.940 and something of an informal brand ambassador within the span of a few years.
00:42:22.180 She is, by all accounts, the more impressive and promising person in this relationship.
00:42:27.860 And yet her primary value in the storyline is her proximity to JFK Jr.
00:42:33.060 that, like, she could, you know, capture his fancy.
00:42:37.240 So we know that they get married.
00:42:38.860 We see this in episode six.
00:42:40.040 You didn't see it in episode six
00:42:41.300 because you didn't watch episode six.
00:42:42.900 I only watch episode six
00:42:44.400 where there are cottages in Michigan.
00:42:46.400 Sorry, I refuse.
00:42:48.160 I refuse.
00:42:48.440 This does have a cottage.
00:42:49.860 What's really funny, actually,
00:42:52.260 I read so many write-ups on the wedding
00:42:55.700 that were, like, contemporaneous
00:42:57.520 to when it actually happened.
00:42:59.000 And depending on who you asked,
00:43:00.460 it was either, like, a complete fucking train wreck
00:43:02.720 or the most romantic evening that anyone had ever attended.
00:43:07.220 And I think that even that kind of shows you
00:43:09.580 just how unreliable the narration is of this couple,
00:43:13.520 that depending on the one of the 40 people that were there,
00:43:16.200 it was either like a complete mess
00:43:18.520 or this otherworldly magical event.
00:43:22.840 What was the mess? I'm curious.
00:43:24.740 It honestly kind of goes with like the themes
00:43:26.520 that we've been discussing.
00:43:27.680 They wanted to get married somewhere super private.
00:43:30.020 So they got married in this island
00:43:31.160 And the little church that they got married in was, like, this chapel that I believe was built by slave labor that JFK Jr. didn't have, like, basically, like, opened up first.
00:43:46.220 Like, the windows were sealed shut, and so they didn't, like, air it out or anything ahead of time.
00:43:52.440 And it was extremely hot because it was, like, Georgia in the summer, so it was very humid in there.
00:43:57.200 Her dress didn't fit properly.
00:43:59.160 She was, like, two hours late to the wedding.
00:44:00.880 So everyone that was there was just, like, sitting in this sweltering little chapel with all the doors sealed shut for hours just waiting for her to get there.
00:44:10.760 When your family is already a little bit cursed, as it was by then, you don't get married in a slave chapel.
00:44:16.220 Be a little bit more smart about this.
00:44:19.600 Okay, so they're married now.
00:44:21.960 I'm going to have you read an excerpt from a—resituating ourselves in the plot.
00:44:26.360 Now they're married.
00:44:27.040 I'm going to have you read an excerpt from a 2014 piece called Secrets and Lies by Edward Klein.
00:44:57.040 intelligence. The media played the marriage as a Cinderella story, casting Carolyn as the
00:45:02.180 commoner who had found true love with Prince Charming. But it turned out to be a doomed fairy
00:45:06.360 tale. A nightmare of escalating domestic violence. Oh, suspicions of infidelity and drugs. A union
00:45:13.120 that seemed destined to end in one kind of disaster or another. This also is very Meghan
00:45:18.320 Markle-coded with how the press covered Prince Harry choosing her, and also really how the press
00:45:23.760 covered Prince William choosing Kate Middleton, who was wealthy, but not royal. This reminds me
00:45:28.440 of the Epstein thing where I'm like, dude, the circle gets the square. We can figure this out.
00:45:32.520 These men date hot women until they find one they get along with. That's what's happening here.
00:45:38.720 It's not rocket science. They date tons of gorgeous women.
00:45:44.000 And spoiler, many of them continue dating after they get married to these women.
00:45:49.240 Right, right, right. The prerequisite is being a 10. You have to be a 10. And then, of course,
00:45:54.360 some of these women are smart. Some of them are funny. You all have, you know, your various
00:45:57.300 attributes. And whoever clicks, clicks. I feel like we're always like, why her? I'm like, well,
00:46:01.960 she was gorgeous. That is the prerequisite. Beauty is always the common denominator. And yet we never
00:46:08.400 lead with that because we think it's sexist to call these women beautiful and not acknowledge
00:46:13.220 their other attributes. But it's like, no, we're not talking about them. We're talking about why
00:46:16.760 these men choose to date them. And you have to acknowledge that these men are immediately
00:46:21.580 isolating out based off of beauty and then selecting from there.
00:46:26.560 Your beauty is definitely the reason that I selected you as my co-host.
00:46:30.920 I mean, you do want to fuck me.
00:46:33.000 Number one, 10, beauty. Number two, shrewd heart intelligence.
00:46:38.940 Number three, style.
00:46:40.980 Number three, unique style.
00:46:42.940 I was just about to say, you guys, I'm wearing my skiing socks, my patterned skiing socks, and my fat jeans today, so.
00:46:51.680 I did have a dream last night that Caro and I signed a lease together, and like only after we signed the lease were we like, wait, what are we going to do with our husbands?
00:47:00.660 So we're like, it's fine, we'll figure it, they'll figure something out.
00:47:03.600 Okay. So, a 1999 CBS News story called JFK Jr.'s Marriage on the Rocks? was published shortly after they died and cited, quote,
00:47:17.660 members of Kennedy's close-knit circle of friends and associates of Carolyn, including two who have signed sworn affidavits,
00:47:25.480 saying that Carolyn suspected JFK Jr. was having affairs,
00:47:30.000 that they had not slept together in the 18 months prior to their deaths,
00:47:33.940 and that they were actually living separately at this time.
00:47:36.820 And again, we don't know if any of this is true,
00:47:38.600 but if the narrative goes that her whole strategy
00:47:43.720 was playing hard to get and being ungettable,
00:47:46.560 that's the bag here that I think women often don't learn.
00:47:49.440 It's like, you know why that's not a good strategy?
00:47:52.120 Is when you finally do get got,
00:47:54.540 he gets bored because all these books hinge on that and then they end at marriage and it's like
00:48:00.000 if your whole relationship with your partner is based off of being unattainable to them then when
00:48:05.160 they catch you they will not know what to do with you it's not about building a relationship i don't
00:48:10.320 think we have any way of knowing what of this is true and what of it is false yeah but it does not
00:48:15.740 i will just say having read at this point a thousand pages of kennedy man history it does
00:48:22.560 not strain credulity to me that this relationship was not going well.
00:48:26.620 Yeah, seriously.
00:48:27.980 Or that he was cheating on her, or even that she was cheating on him.
00:48:31.180 We're recording this the day before episode eight airs, so it's possible there will be
00:48:35.440 hints of infidelity in episode eight, but like up through seven, we don't have anything
00:48:39.160 of that nature.
00:48:40.300 Okay.
00:48:40.840 Even though we don't know how the show ends, we do know how their story ends with a plane
00:48:44.320 crash, and we are going to circle back to that plane crash in more depth.
00:48:48.700 But in the meantime, who are the Kennedys?
00:48:53.080 Who indeed?
00:48:54.160 Dun, dun, dun.