Jack Schlossberg is the one of only two living male descendants of President John F. Kennedy (Tatiana Schlossberg’s son is the other). Jack is 33 years old, and the only son of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. Jack’s sister Tatiana passed away two months ago from acute myeloid leukemia. He has one living sister, Rose Schlossberg. His uncle was JFK Jr. There’s currently a revival in interest for all things JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, all because of Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, which dramatized a loose version of their real romance and marriage. Absolutely no one is saying that Love Story is 100% authentic, but I’m genuinely enjoying the series and I think it’s really well done. Well, Jack Schlossberg disagrees. He’s been bitching about Love Story since it was announced. He’s currently running for Congress, which means he’s being given a national platform to… complain about Love Story.
Jack Schlossberg is continuing to go after Ryan Murphy for the portrayal of his late uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. and wife Carolyn Bessette’s relationship in FX‘s Love Story series.
“If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” Schlossberg said when asked about the show on CBS Sunday Morning. “The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.”
The Kennedy scion stressed that the show, which chronicles John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s romance before the young couple died in a tragic plane crash in 1999, is “fiction” with a “capital F.”
Reiterating some of his earlier criticism of the series, expressed over the summer long before the show premiered last month, Schlossberg also urged Murphy to take action and donate any profits from Love Story‘s success to help preserve President John F. Kennedy’s memory.
“I would hope that Mr. Murphy would donate some of the millions of dollars of profits that he’s making to maybe some of the causes that John championed throughout his life,” Schlossberg said. “Maybe he would donate some of that money to the JFK library to help keep President Kennedy’s memory alive, but he’s not. He’s making money. This is not a documentary.”
When pressed further as to why, when the Kennedy family has been the subject of numerous movies, TV shows and books, he’s taking such issue with Love Story, Schlossberg pointed to recent political events involving both President Trump and his controversial first cousin, once removed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently the secretary of Health and Human Services.
“I think in the last year, two years, three years, partly because of RFK Jr., but also partly because Donald Trump has used JFK as sort of a human punching bag, both by renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, by doing a false reinvestigation into the assassination and dismantling all the programs that he fought for, there’s a lot of misinformation now and iconography being used about the Kennedy family, my family, at a time when we really can’t afford to confuse people,” Schlossberg said. “We really need to take every breath that we have to try to make things better. So, if Ryan Murphy really cares so much about the Kennedy family, my uncle John, maybe he would try to do something about getting Trump out of power.”
Here’s the thing… Jack can feel any way about his family being dramatized and fictionalized and possibly exploited. I get it, and that’s absolutely his right. That was his uncle. I can’t even imagine how devastated Caroline was after John’s death in 1999. Those are very real scars on his family. But… I kind of think Ryan Murphy has every right to make the show, just as people have every right to write books about the Kennedy family. I don’t even find Love Story disrespectful to John and Carolyn’s memory. I get that Jack is upset about how Donald Trump is trying to hijack the Kennedy legacy in various ways, but then… place your anger there. Say “f–k Trump” with your whole chest, don’t make a convoluted argument about how Ryan Murphy needs to donate money to the JFK Library and/or do more to stop Trump. Jack needs to work on these arguments before the election. “Ryan Murphy needs to do more to get Trump out of power!” Girl, you’re running for Congress??
Here’s Jack’s full CBS Sunday Morning interview.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
