The New York Times: marriage in the modern age ...

The New York Times is No Friend of Marriage

By Austin Ruse

The New York Times just ran a gauzy thousand word story on the marriage of Robert Kennedy Jr. and actress Cheryl Hines.

They headlined the piece “No Curbs on Their Enthusiasm,” a play on her hit HBO show called “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but meant to convey how wonderful it all was, how they met, fell in love and here they are getting married by a Unitarian Universalist minister at fairy tale Hyannis Port. There is even a picture of Kennedy and Hines in a sailboat, gazing lovingly, and clapboard mansions behind them.

The portrait the Times paints is fantasy.

This is not another column bashing the Kennedys. I have done my share of those. Rather, it is about marriage in the modern age and the New York Times.

The reality of this scene starts with the fact that Kennedy and Hines began their affair when both of them were still married. The Times almost lovingly reports that producer Larry David first introduced them at a ski resort in Canada, then a year later at another ski resort and the following year at yet another one. Sometime over this two to three year span, they simply fell in love.

The Times refers to Kennedy as a widower, which indeed he was. His second wife hung herself only two years ago in the family barn after an 18-year marriage filled with infidelity. But she was no innocent either. After all, she began her affair with Kennedy when he was still married to his first wife. In fact, they got married only a month after he divorced his first wife, and she gave birth to their first child three months after that.

Before she hung herself she made public a diary of his from 2001 in which he talked about, among other things, his children, his dislike of Jesse Jackson and 37 sexual affairs with other women. He coded the conquests in his diary with intercourse scored as a ten. There were 16 of those in a twelve-month period.

The Times did not report any of that in their fairy-tale love story. Neither did they report that after she hung herself, the Kennedy apparatus set out to destroy her reputation, calling her a psycho and a drunk who ran over the family dog.

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