From Critics at Large: Why We Cling to the Kennedy Myth

The Washington Roundtable is off today, and will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy an episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast about the FX series “Love Story,” which drops audiences into the lives of one of the most talked-about couples of the nineties: J.F.K., Jr., and the style icon Carolyn Bessette. The hosts Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz, who are staff writers and critics at The New Yorker , discuss how the show re-creates the look and fashion of the era in granular detail while reducing the relationship itself to a generic fairy tale. “Love Story” ’s focus on style underscores how much the Kennedy legacy lives in aesthetics, which risks obscuring some of the darker chapters of its history. “It does seem like we have ever more efficiently stripped the Kennedys and their image, and their style, from any notions of political power,” Cunningham says. “The look of something and the sort of moral thrust of something are not always one to one working in parallel.” New episodes of “Critics at Large” drop every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts . Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You can listen to From Critics at Large: Why We Cling to the Kennedy Myth online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

From Critics at Large: Why We Cling to the Kennedy Myth is an episode from The New Yorker: Politics and More by The New Yorker.

This episode is 52:01 long.

This episode was published on Mar 20, 2026.

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