The Kennedy Family’s Strange 2023 Has Echoes of Classic Camelot

Perhaps the greatest surprise of Jack Schlossberg’s recent social media rant against the concept of restaurants was that it happened at all.

To this point, Schlossberg — the youngest child of current U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, and thus the youngest grandchild of the late President John F. Kennedy — has kept a fairly low profile. Unlike various higher-flying members of his extended family, Schlossberg largely keeps out of the public eye, with his public comment reserved for things like dutifully revealing the Kennedy family’s Profile in Courage Award honorees on “Today.” Which made his direct-to-camera diatribe about how antisocial and unhealthy restaurants are — serving food that we “put inside of our body, which really matters a lot” — a rare thing. And across this writer’s social media feeds, where the video kept burbling up over a slow July 4 weekend, people seemed to be getting a clearer view of where Camelot is now.

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Which sounds hyperbolic! This was just a (sort of…) short video in which Schlossberg, dressed warmly against dusk beach winds while standing in sand dunes, was having some fun, albeit by sharing somewhat disconnected and hard-to-follow thoughts. But there was a special sort of voltage to it, in part because, in the classic way of genetics, Schlossberg is at once the living embodiment of two of the most iconic Americans of the twentieth century. The video’s odd angle of approach to its subject, too — restaurant culture “ruins your whole life,” Schlossberg tells us, with fixed jaw and fiery eyes — recalls the Kennedy family’s recent, splashier, and more consequential entry into viral fame.

Schlossberg’s video is ultimately a scrap of ephemeral content, an introduction to a personality with all of Grandpa’s passion but perhaps a bit less of his perspective, but his mom’s cousin’s current activities in the public eye carry more weight. That’s particularly galling because Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policy positions, in his current campaign for the Democratic nomination for President, seem as carefully thought-through as Schlossberg’s opposition to dining out. Kennedy, an environmental activist and lately an anti-vaccine campaigner, has sought attention both through seat-of-pants improvisations about vaccinations and public health. He was until recently banned from Instagram, a prohibition that was lifted when he entered electoral politics; his presence helps contribute to a looseness around fact that now, thanks to him, pervades the contest on both sides. His run has also been a post-Trump campaign of circuslike spectacle, one whose support is goosed by appearances on podcasts like Joe Rogan’s and one in which his garishly muscled upper body is, by design, part of the story. “There’s nothing junior about presidential candidate RFK Jr.’s pecs,” one CNN tweet had it after Kennedy demonstrated a shirtless workout. (In fairness, CNN also recently published an extensive report taking down Kennedy’s faulty claims about vaccines.)

The culture has come a long distance since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. And one can, if squinting, see semblances of the JFK approach, morphed through the distorting effects of six decades of American madness. The Massachusetts Senator presented himself to the public as a youthful breath of fresh air; in office, his perceived vigor made for a compelling version of politics-as-lifestyle brand. His nephew (who, at 69 years old, is young enough, relative to Presidents Biden and Trump), is running a direct-to-podcast campaign centered around ripping up pieties and rippling musculature. He’s attempting a version of the youth-and-vigor playbook, filtered through the vanity of spending his life as a person whose name precedes him. The Kennedys of Camelot, if one is being maximally generous, presented a vision of a stylish and forward-looking nation. The Kennedy running for President today is presenting a vision of himself, bulked up and ready to say whatever keeps you listening.

Which brings us back to Schlossberg, and his eagerness to unload on camera. It’s not that anything he said was offensive or provably wrong; if it’s surprising that a member of the ultimate leisure-class family beamed in from the beach to tell us to stop dining out, it’s not a bad surprise, exactly. (That it all comes down to What You’re Putting In Your Body is as much a wincing reminder of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s politics as a bracingly honest reminder that maintaining the figure of an influencer, or of a Kennedy, takes a certain rigor.) But toggle through the memories we have of the Kennedys in American life to this point: The promise of various family members, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father and namesake, cut short. The grand-scale personalities on the American scene. And the soaring rhetoric, from Ted Kennedy’s “the dream shall never die” to the 35th President’s demand that Americans ask, first, “what you can do for your country.” Schlossberg and his cousin want, first, not your sacrifice but your attention. And what comes after that we may have to wait until deeper into election season, or beyond, to find out.

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