America’s love affair with the increasingly weird Kennedys

In life, there are certain inevitabilities. In the United States, those inevitabilities include death, taxes, and hearing about the Kennedys. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making a splash in the 2024 presidential race (and now endorsing Trump), Caroline Kennedy’s son Jack Schlossberg covering said race for Vogue, and rumors of the post-J. Lo Ben Affleck dating Kick Kennedy, it feels as though the media spotlight is circling back once again to America’s royal family. 

For generations of Americans, especially those in the Northeast, a fascination with the Kennedys is nothing new. The ambition and glamour, public service and philanthropic triumphs, tragic deaths and scandals are all part of this family’s legacy, and so many people have watched and lived through each one with them. The American Kennedy obsession was a parasocial relationship before we even had a name for it. What might be harder to explain is that even as younger generations of Americans are further and further removed from the most famous and politically significant Kennedys, there’s still a fascination. 

Why are so many people invested in Jack Schlossberg, perhaps best known for making goofy little lip-sync TikToks, reasserting his family’s legacy? Why, in the case of Kick, are they still rubbing elbows with movie stars and entertainment moguls — or at least being rumored to? And what are we to make of the RFK Jr. of it all: the brain worm and the separate bear and whale carcasses? Is having a parasite in your cranium and playing around with animal bones somehow more or less embarrassing when you’re a Kennedy? What does the family name mean in 2024?

For a better understanding of the Kennedys and this current moment, we turned to Barbara Perry, a Kennedy expert and professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an organization that specializes in presidential scholarship. I got to speak with Perry about why the Kennedys occupy such a special place in the American psyche, what Camelot means to politics, why some people are so desperate to see Schlossberg shed his silly goose era and run for office, and why RFK Jr. is so weird. She had answers for most of these burning questions. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Barbara, I’m here to ask you about Kennedys in the news. RFK Jr. is a Kennedy. Jack Schlossberg is a Kennedy. Taylor Swift dated a Kennedy. Ben Affleck might be dating a Kennedy. The Kennedys are everywhere again.  

Well there’s just so many of them and there’s so many to date. Every American could probably date one, and maybe even marry one at this point! 

That’s the dream, isn’t it? We’re into something like the third generation of, or Kennedy family 3.0, at this point. 

Kennedy 3.0 is a really good way to describe it, but this goes all the way back probably to Jack Schlossberg’s third great-grandfather. President Kennedy’s grandfather, for whom he was named — John Fitzgerald — was the mayor of Boston and was in Congress in the 1890s. President Kennedy was only about three generations removed from abject poverty.

So that would actually put us somewhere at 5.0 or 6.0 today. This is also a family that, for generation after generation, has pursued or been involved in public service. And that’s why many people think of them as “America’s Royal family.”

Being in public service and being in the public eye go hand in hand. Generation after generation of people are drawn to this family. 

I personally know a thing or two about that magnetism — my mother took me to see John F. Kennedy. I was a little thing, a wee thing. My mother was a homemaker, very smart, voted, and kept up with the news, but she hated down-and-dirty politics. And the one and only campaign rally she ever went to was then-Senator John F. Kennedy, at a rally one month before he was elected. She piled my two older brothers and me into the car. She drove from the suburbs, and she didn’t particularly like driving downtown, but she did. We got there early so we could stand right in front of the podium. And I’d say that I can’t remember the speech, but I do remember the crowd and the excitement. 

I believe my mother feels the same as yours. Regardless of her own individual politics or how she feels about the current state of politics in the US, she adores the Kennedys.  

I bring that up because that’s part and parcel of the broad reach of this family, and something I was thinking about before you even called. I can name all sorts of factors that I think draw people to them, but one is, they’re the first completely modern media political family. 

What do you mean? Is it that the Kennedys begin to understand the value of media or that the Kennedys are made for the media?

TV didn’t exist for any [previous] presidential families — the Roosevelts or the Adamses. But it comes on strong for President Kennedy, his young and beautiful wife, and their two beguiling children. 

I always cite this [stat]: When Eisenhower was elected, the first time in ’52, only 20 percent of American homes had television sets. By the time Kennedy was elected eight years later, 80 percent of American homes had a television set. And that’s how people came to know him as this very young, handsome, active president, again, along with his stylish and beautiful wife, who took Washington by storm and then took the world by storm. 

And there’s the fact that his dad, Joe Senior, was a movie mogul. He was a producer of Hollywood movies in the ’20s, and that’s in part how they made their fortune. That’s another thing about this family. They’re a rags-to-riches story. 

Life magazine had also just come on the scene. Teddy Kennedy used to say, “Oh yeah, Life magazine was kind of like our family photo album.” And people reading Life would say, “Oh my gosh, this family has nine children.” The women were beautiful and the boys were handsome, and they were active and sporting and witty and well-educated at Harvard. 

It sounds like a perfect storm: the rise of new media and a family so photogenically perfect and stylish to take advantage of it. It’s the combination of a made-for-television family and the rise of television itself.    

I have to add this as well, but it’s also the horrors of his assassination in 1963.  For this young man dead at 46, his wife 12 years younger becomes a widow, and then these two beautiful little children are now fatherless — I just don’t think anybody who lived through that [wouldn’t be sympathetic]. 

Obviously there were Republicans and people who hated the Kennedys, and still do and hate Jack Kennedy. I’m not saying 100 percent of Americans were upset and grief-struck, but interestingly enough, he had just barely slipped by Richard Nixon in 1960 and I’m not sure he even got 50 percent of the popular vote. But after he died, people were asked if they voted for him and well over 50 percent of Americans said yes, which says to me that they were drawn to him even more in his death. 

It seems like the Kennedys are equal parts a mixture of tragedy and aspiration. You mentioned your mother being drawn to JFK despite not particularly being fond of politics. I think, for a lot of people, the Kennedys made political ambition seem glamorous — which, like you said, is very closely tied to Hollywood. 

There’s this Hollywood theme that runs through the Kennedys, and if you sort of theoretically add that to a much better-looking royal family, it’s sort of like Diana — although she was attractive, most of the others are not. But if you add movies and beauty and charm and charisma and wit and athleticism to all of this, they just are very compelling. 

Plus, like Diana or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, these people flash across the sky like a shooting star and then are taken, usually with some kind of tragedy. It just somehow pulls people even closer to them, or they want to know even more about them, I think. And they’re frozen in time. 

It was Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, who named her husband’s presidency Camelot, and to this day it sticks. That’s got a Hollywood air to it and a Broadway air. If you go and look at the lyrics to the main song from musical Camelot, “Don’t let it be forgotten. Once there was a spot for one brief shining moment known as Camelot.” 

I think your mention of Marilyn, Diana, and James Dean is interesting in that they’re not political figures. Monroe and Dean are tragic Hollywood figures — that whole live fast, die young curse. Diana is and has become more of a pop culture icon than she was a monarch. And those three figures are continuously mythologized and eulogized. 

JFK Jr., I think, is often a part of that same conversation when it comes to American pop culture, since he never ran for office, but died in a plane crash when he was only 38.  

He was going to be the one to restore Camelot. He got the best of the looks of his father and his mother, and he was a handsome devil. He married the Calvin Klein woman [Carolyn Bessette], and they were on their way to the White House. 

Well, that idea of promise seems to be the thing that keeps us all watching or keeps people interested. People are still curious if there’s a Kennedy who sort of absorbs the political fantasy that we project onto this family. I can’t help but think that’s sort of what’s happening with the media attention on Jack Schlossberg. Of course, he seems to play into the joke and sort of subvert his family name by being a silly goose. 

My question to you is, I think what I’m hearing is that you actually find that appealing, that he’s kind of a goofy comedian? 

I’m not sure! But I think it’s not that different from what you said about the Kennedys being the first family with television. He’s sort of the first Kennedy that’s become a social media star. 

I got to meet him two summers ago on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t want to say he was overly serious, but he was mature and kind.

And he seemed to get all the best characteristics of everybody in the family, physically, mentally, and in terms of his personality, he had a nice wit about him. He was charming, charismatic, cute, handsome, just lovely. And I thought, oh, and what a cute girlfriend. And I thought, oh, I hope they get married and they’ll have beautiful children.

Barbara, you are sounding like your mother at the rally!  

Or your mother too! I maintain that I didn’t do anything that would embarrass me or the Miller Center or the JFK Library. 

But I think that it’s probably good for him if he wants a public life because he clearly has been chosen by his mother. He goes on TV with her. They speak on video during the 2020 election — he’s clearly the designated son and restorer of Camelot because he’s the only male heir to John Kennedy. He’s the only grandson of John Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy. 

Plus, as you say, he’s smart, and I guess for a newer generation, he’s got the right stuff, as far as knowing how to use social media and being witty and funny and serious when he needs to be, but approachable when not. 

On the other side of that, can I ask you your thoughts on RFK Jr.? Do you think the obsession with him comes from him representing a weird and bizarre side of the Kennedys — like everything they’re not supposed to be? 

Yes, people are drawn to him I think in large part because he has the same exact name of his father and people still feel sad about that — maybe even more so in some way than Jack because with Bobby, he is, I think, more tied to our current politics and social policy of caring for the poor and minorities, and being anti-war. 

Going back to my mother —  she and my grandmother talked about the President and the family as if they were our family, and my grandparents hung a picture from a magazine of President Kennedy in their living room when he died. So that’s all part and parcel of this, and I think that does still attach in part to Robert Kennedy Jr. 

Is he genuinely weird or just weird for a Kennedy? Like, his scandals aren’t that far removed from the usual scandals — drugs and women — that have followed the Kennedy men around?

I can remember seeing interviews of Robert Kennedy senior, where he’d say, “Oh, my son, Bobby loves animals, and he has falcons.” And that always seemed to me to be rather odd, unless you’re in the Middle Ages in England. Falconry was not a big thing here, and even in the ’60s. 

That home, Hickory Hill, where they lived out in northern Virginia, was a menagerie. They had a Newfoundland that would slobber all over everybody, and they had goats and rabbits and falcons and these raucous touch football games. 

This was written about, but Bobby and Ethel had some big party at their home with a pool, and they started pushing people, fully clothed people, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian who was the White House historian during Kennedy’s presidency. That made the news, and Rose Kennedy was embarrassed, being the Victorian, and she’s writing to the family members to say, please don’t do that, it doesn’t make our family look very good. Your brother is the president of the United States, but even the parents were wild. 

So we shouldn’t be that surprised. 

If he weren’t crazy, people would still be interested in him, and maybe more so! And you can make all these alternative histories about him, but he made all the wrong decisions from the time he was a teenager and started doing heavy drugs. Even with the crazy stuff, up until the bear story and up until Kamala Harris came on the scene as the nominee, he was polling 10 percent in some states. 

The power of being a Kennedy!

They’ve had great, great joys and great ecstasies and great triumphs, and then they’ve had just the worst tragedies. It is fascinating, I must say. Since we don’t have a royal family to watch and follow, we have the Kennedys. And they do keep producing interesting if sometimes bizarre figures.