Him?<\/span><\/p>\n Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s name may not appear in Olivia Nuzzi\u2019s forthcoming memoir, American Canto<\/em>. But the 71-year-old secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is at the burning core of Nuzzi\u2019s return to the public eye this month, after her firing last year<\/a> over a \u201cdigital affair\u201d with the then-presidential candidate while she covered the 2024 campaign for New York<\/em> magazine. The unfolding drama, following the publication of a lavishly photographed New York Times <\/em>profile and Vanity Fair<\/em> excerpt, is expected to grow more fraught when a reported collection of \u201csexually charged<\/a>\u201d text messages appears next month.<\/p>\n American Canto<\/em>, as it appears in Vanity Fair<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> is profoundly unreadable, packed with prose that relies on a reader\u2019s tolerance to witness humiliating forms of self-sabotage. Nuzzi describes outrunning a California wildfire while, for some reason, obsessing over Kennedy as she tries to escape. (She also appears to invite readers into conflating the fire she is fleeing with the devastating Palisades wildfire that destroyed the region two months later.) As much as <\/strong>American Canto<\/em> reads like a diaristic slot machine of half-thoughts and self-absorbed efforts at profundity, it is also startlingly effective in its depiction of a woman deteriorating in the throes of potent desire. Here is how Nuzzi describes \u201cthe Politician.\u201d<\/p>\n I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. \u201cBaby, don\u2019t worry,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a worm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Again, him?<\/p>\n When I asked to help explain Kennedy\u2019s appeal, sexologist and professor Pepper Schwartz put it this way: \u201cI once heard a woman say that she thought Henry Kissinger was sexy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Setting aside for a moment, if you can, his outsized role in destroying the country\u2019s public health system, <\/strong>Kennedy often appears to be as physically distended as Nuzzi\u2019s writing, as if he were perpetually out of breath and heaving from \u201cpicking up roadkill [his] whole life<\/a>.\u201d He works out shirtless in jeans and once attracted a man with thunderous flatulence<\/a> to attend a speaking engagement. His own family calls him a \u201cpredator<\/a>.\u201d How can such ferocious desire be attached to this man?<\/p>\n When I asked for help in explaining his appeal, Pepper Schwartz, a sexologist and professor at the University of Washington, put it this way: \u201cI once heard a woman say that she thought Henry Kissinger was sexy.\u201d Still, men, and especially men in elite circles, have always been able to sell themselves with supposed \u201cintelligence, power, and poetic talent.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that this is a powerful, perhaps charming, well-placed person all weaves together for them to also be found sexy,\u201d Schwartz continued. \u201cThat anybody ever found Henry Kissinger sexy is proof.\u201d<\/p>\n As it happens, <\/span>Kennedy\u2019s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, released her own memoir this month, published by the right-wing powerhouse, Skyhorse. (American Canto<\/em>\u2018s release was reportedly pushed back<\/a> to avoid overlapping book tours with Hines.) <\/strong>Unscripted<\/em> starts ploddingly, with Hines charting her path from modest Florida upbringing to mid-level stardom at Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em>, until she <\/strong>eventually meets Kennedy at a celebrity ski fundraiser. That Hines dedicates nearly all of\u00a0Unscripted<\/em>\u2018s second half to their marriage is perhaps an acknowledgement that Hines also appreciates that the same question looms over her personal life: This guy?<\/em><\/p>\n Unscripted<\/em>, while far more demure in its portrait of a woman in lust, offers hints. Upon bumping into Kennedy for the second time, Hines writes:<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how I missed how blue his eyes are. I felt his magnetic energy. There were so many things I hadn\u2019t noticed before. The instantaneous electric connection swept me along.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Later, after they became engaged:<\/p>\n He brought an unpredictable sense of adventure I had never experienced in my life. I love everything about him, and I knew we were meant to find each other in this lifetime, as odd a couple as we seemed.<\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/p>\n We both brought something to the relationship that the other was lacking. I err on the side of caution and prudence. I need to know how deep the water is before I jump off the cliff. Bobby is the opposite.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Squint and you start to see the contours of Kennedy\u2019s appeal. The essence of his attraction, according to the women who love him, is in the intoxicating cocktail of heady romance and risk he seems to offer\u2014whether it\u2019s nearly getting killed by a yak in Bhutan, as Hines recounts, or feverishly texting about taking metaphorical bullets for one another as Nuzzi tells it. And for a moment, it all seems a bit banal, yet another iteration of the age-old \u201cbad boy\u201d allure.<\/p>\n \u201cHe looked at you like he wanted to devour your soul,\u201d Hines recalls a friend telling her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But uneasiness creeps in when considering Kennedy\u2019s sex appeal against the decades of infidelity allegations\u2014including rumors of once having 43 \u201cmistresses<\/a>\u201c\u2014and extramarital affairs<\/a> that are widely believed to have contributed to his ex-wife\u2019s suicide. Suddenly, an overt carnality takes hold. As Hines recalls a friend telling her at a dinner early in her relationship with Kennedy:<\/p>\n \u201cHe just looked at you like he wanted to devour your soul.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Nuzzi similarly suggests an insatiable appetite.<\/p>\n He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here, an absurd polarity begins to take shape. We have the scion of a powerful political family, seemingly tormented by a maddening hunger. But where Nuzzi and Hines see sex appeal, for much of the country, Kennedy is a reckless conspiracy theorist, whose appetite for danger<\/a> as the nation\u2019s top health official will result in a sicker America. And it\u2019s Kennedy\u2019s family, as his cousin Tatianna Scholssberg writes in a devastating\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0essay<\/a> that revealed her leukemia diagnosis,\u00a0that understands this with the precise agony of a family informed by relentless tragedy. <\/p>\n As I tried to grasp the contours of Kennedy\u2019s appeal, I couldn\u2019t help but think of some of the men whose loser behavior littered Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s latest email release. There\u2019s former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, soliciting a convicted sex offender for advice on matters such as how to get \u201chorizontal<\/a>\u201d with a female economist he had been pursuing; Epstein\u2019s brother asking about \u201cphotos of Trump blowing Bubba<\/a>; the writer Michael Wolff acting as media adviser. These are powerful men whose ingratiation helped a sexual predator thrive with impunity.<\/p>\n Nuzzi and Hines remind me of the men in Epstein\u2019s orbit, attracted to a different kind of \u201cpredator,\u201d roadkill in a \u201cfreezer full of it.\u201d <\/a>Except that the real roadkill are innocent, and Nuzzi and Hines are not victims. As Vanity Fair\u2019<\/em>s new West Coast editor, Nuzzi has chosen to center her salacious affair as she returns to a day job. (Vanity Fair <\/em>has since announced that it was reviewing its ties<\/a> to Nuzzi following allegations by her former fianc\u00e9 Ryan Lizza that she also once slept with yet another former source, who happened to be a powerful older politician, this time the former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.) As for Hines, it is a distinct choice to go on national television<\/a> to support a man\u2019s pernicious anti-vaccine talking points.<\/p>\n \u201cThe very essence of romance is uncertainty,\u201d Hines writes in Unscripted<\/em>, quoting Oscar Wilde at least twice in her memoir to explain her devotion to Kennedy. But in doing so, she conveniently omits the rest of <\/a>Wilde\u2019s thoughts on the matter: \u201cIf I ever marry, I\u2019ll try to forget the fact.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s what Hines is doing, too.<\/p>\n\n
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