The recent FX series, “Love Story,” focusing on the relationship between John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette, offers a telling case study in how public narratives are constructed, contested, and ultimately commodified. While framed as an elegy for Gen X, its narrow, romance-centric lens, as critiqued by observers, inadvertently strips away the broader cultural and political context that has historically made the Kennedy saga so compelling.
This isn't merely a critique of a television show's artistic choices; it’s an observation on the persistent, often aggressive, battle for control over a powerful American myth. The Kennedy story, from its Camelot origins to the 'curse' narratives, has always been a battleground. Jacqueline Kennedy's immediate post-assassination myth-making in Life magazine set an early precedent for narrative management. Since then, an array of combatants—tabloids, family confidants, gossips, aesthetes, hagiographers, and critical biographers—have each staked a claim, adding layers of interpretation, often contradictory, to the family’s public identity.
The critical biographers, exemplified by Garry Wills’s “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” have long sought to deconstruct the hagiography, reminding us of the political pragmatism, even ruthlessness, that underpinned the family’s rise. Wills, for instance, highlighted Robert Kennedy’s authorization of J. Edgar Hoover’s wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., a stark counterpoint to the more romanticized versions of Kennedy liberalism. This strain of psychoanalytic history, tracing the family’s trajectory from Joseph Kennedy’s ambition to his sons’ elevation, rarely gains the same cultural traction as the Greek tragedy narrative, which casts the heroes as fated to doom. The public, it seems, prefers the myth to the mechanics.
The series’ source material, Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 biography, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” itself represents a deliberate act of narrative reclamation. Beller’s premise is to correct Bessette’s public image, often depicted by tabloids as a “vixen” or “opportunist.” The book recasts her as an outsider, a Catholic, working-class woman whose mental health was severely impacted by the relentless paparazzi and the pressures of the Kennedy family. This interpretive treatment, likening her experience to that of Princess Diana, underscores a broader trend: the posthumous re-evaluation of public figures, particularly women, through a sympathetic, often corrective, lens. It’s an attempt to restore agency where it was perceived to be lost, but it also risks replacing one simplified narrative with another, equally curated one.
“This wasn’t about growth. It was about expectations.”
The intensity of this narrative ownership extends beyond academic or journalistic circles. A significant, if loosely connected, school of bloggers, mimics, and lay analysts has emerged around Bessette’s public footprint, particularly her minimalist nineties style. These “custodians of the myth” meticulously dissect paparazzi photographs, analyzing the proportion of a camel-colored pencil skirt or the wear on a spazzolato bag, divining intelligence and savvy in every detail. They have even anachronistically recruited Bessette as an avatar for recent trends like “quiet luxury” and “clean-girl aesthetics.” This active, almost devotional, public engagement highlights how cultural figures, even after death, continue to be reinterpreted and leveraged to reflect contemporary anxieties and aspirations. The backlash against the show’s initial styling of the actor playing Bessette—specifically, her hair color—demonstrates the fierce protectiveness these custodians feel over their constructed image.
The show’s tone, described as “pure cosmopolitan sympathy,” struggles to transcend the limitations of its narrow focus. By excising the broader contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking JFK, Ted Kennedy’s post-Chappaquiddick recovery and Senate resurgence—it misses the very elements that connected the Kennedy story to a greater cultural narrative. The re-staging of park squabbles, while perhaps offering a glimpse into personal turmoil, cannot substitute for the rich political and social tapestry that defined the era and the family’s place within it. The show’s portrayal of John, often as a “love junkie” or a “puppy,” and its attempt to paint the Kennedy family not as a patriarchy but as an institution where women ruled, feels like a deliberate interpretive choice aimed at modern sensibilities, rather than a deep engagement with the complexities of power dynamics within the family.
The series also touches on the inherent challenges faced by the second and third generations of political dynasties, whose fitness is often threatened by the very privilege they are born into. John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s struggles with the bar exam, publicly ridiculed, illustrate the immense pressure to live up to an unknowable father’s legacy. The show’s depiction of his mother, Jackie O., dying quietly, and his sister Caroline as an “embodied critique of Kennedy playboy masculinity,” hints at the internal costs of maintaining such a public facade. The political dynasty, as the source notes, is not guaranteed a future; its continuity is a constant negotiation between inherited status and individual agency.
Ultimately, the show’s most enduring element is the portrayal of Bessette, not as a sphinx, but as an “invention,” a vibrant professional woman whose life and career were toxified by relentless public scrutiny. Her refusal to conform to the expected “actress” role, a type historically drawn to Kennedy men, creates a central tension. The show suggests that her marriage, rather than fulfilling her, ultimately wrecked her life, turning her Tribeca loft into a tomb. This narrative arc, focusing on the personal toll of public life, resonates with contemporary concerns about privacy, mental health, and the destructive power of media intrusion. It’s a powerful, if somewhat isolated, observation within a series that otherwise struggles to connect with the deeper implications of its subject matter.
The series concludes with the inevitable, foreshadowed tragedy of the plane crash, placing Diana’s death in a foreboding context, as if on the eve of the Kennedy accident. This compressed timeline and narrative framing serve to heighten the sense of an ordained ending, rather than exploring the nuanced factors that contribute to such events. The show, in its quest for cosmopolitan sympathy and a focused romance, sidesteps the structural questions of power, media, and legacy that truly define the Kennedy story. It’s a missed opportunity to understand what remains after the headlines fade.
