In the ten months since his confirmation as United States Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has regularly made headlines. Last month, he instructed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to abandon its official position that vaccines do not cause autism.
An article published this month intricately chronicles the radical transformation of the CDC from “a fun place to work” in early January to a dark, empty shell marked by “a lot of crying”, multiple sackings and high-profile resignations.
One of the latter was the September dismissal of the agency’s director, Dr Susan Monarez, after she refused Kennedy’s order to fire CDC vaccine experts “without cause” – sparking the resignations of the chief medical officer and the vaccine director. In protest, hundreds of staff rallied, holding signs that read “SCIENCE NOT CONSPIRACIES” and “YOU ARE HEROES”.
This article, which spotlights “the agony and absurdity” of working for Kennedy, was published in New York magazine, where Olivia Nuzzi served as Washington correspondent. That is, until she lost her job over her “digital affair” with the politician – an entanglement that began in November 2023, when she profiled him during his presidential campaign.
Review: American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi (Avid Reader Press)
American Canto, Nuzzi’s much-hyped chronicle of the affair, bombed in its first week – selling only 1,165 hardcover copies and drawing scathing reviews. The book’s release, delayed to avoid clashing with the launch of a memoir by Kennedy’s wife, actor Cheryl Hines, has been labelled a debacle of epic proportions by a publishing insider.
Nuzzi, who briefly reinvented herself as West Coast editor at Vanity Fair, lost her latest high-profile job, just days after the book’s release, when Vanity Fair let her contract expire, citing “the best interest of the magazine”. (It didn’t help that Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé and former political reporter Ryan Lizza accused her of having an affair with South Carolina governor and congressman Mark Sanford, another presidential candidate Nuzzi covered.)
In the book, Nuzzi downplays her role as Kennedy’s adviser. But she also recounts various moments where she offered him guidance, from suggesting which tie to wear on camera, to alerting him to the bear in Central Park controversy and suggesting he get ahead of it.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Michelle Goldberg points out that it is this kind of ugly and audacious behaviour that is the problem – as is not reporting information “that, if true, would have been of great public interest before [Kennedy’s] Senate confirmation hearings to become the secretary of health and human services”.
Nuzzi, by her own account, is remarkably generous to the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist – a man she describes, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, as a pathological liar – one who “orchestrated a narrative in which [she] was not just reduced to [her] sexuality but into a hyper-sexualised honeypot”.
But, bizarrely, she appears unable to grasp what a serious breach of journalistic ethics her relationship with Kennedy was – whether intimate or not.
Though she characterises the affair as “a monumental fuckup”, she also blames her downfall – including her departure from New York magazine – on a public harassment campaign led by Lizza, claiming the magazine “had been spooked into participating in […] a siege of hyper-domestic terror.”
Lizza, the scorned lover who broke up with Nuzzi after her relationship with Kennedy was exposed, is part of this sorry saga, now posting his serialised, paywalled version of the story on Substack, timed with American Canto’s release. (Incidentally, Lizza was fired from The New Yorker in 2017, following allegations of improper sexual conduct).
Nuzzi’s assertion that she had “never been interested in politics, exactly” but rather “characters” – since “there were lots of them in politics” – also reads as a strategy to absolve her. Her infatuation with Trump – “the greatest character of all” – began when she first interviewed him at age 21.
“In truth I consider news to be a burden and I would almost always rather someone else break it,” she writes. And later, “I do not think of myself as a reporter, really.”
Muddled, maudlin and dishonest
Reading American Canto raises two unanswerable questions: who is this book for, and more pressingly, what is it?
Part memoir, part political analysis, Canto is too muddled – and too maudlin – to succeed as either. The prose lurches between tell-nothing celebrity gossip and strained Didion-esque commentary on love and loss.
Nuzzi roots her memoir in her upbringing in Middletown, New Jersey, as the child of a sometimes abusive alcoholic mother with “a borderline personality gaze” and a father she longs for “enough to cry out for him like a child”. Both have since died. That father was unable to protect her, Nuzzi claims, and he liked “crazy women”.
From the outset, Nuzzi insists on honesty.
[This] is a book about life in America as I have lived and observed it, and about the nature of reality, and about character; [Trump’s] and my own […] It is also a book about love, because everything is about love, and love of country.
But Canto, for all its professed transparency, is not honest. Nuzzi admits as much – when it suits her. Or when her lies are exposed.
“Reflexively and repeatedly, I denied the allegation,” she writes, when confronted by her boss about rumours of her affair with Kennedy. “The man for whom I worked did not believe me. Still, I lied.”
When a work trip to Mar-a-Lago overlaps with one planned by Kennedy – who reportedly thought “it would be fun” to visit at the same time – Nuzzi again is drawn to dishonesty. “I lied for him,” she writes. “It would not be the last time.”
Even when nothing is at stake, Nuzzi chooses deception.
Waiting in Yuma County, Arizona, for the “Take Our Border Back” trucker convoy in 2024 – a travelling protest against illegal immigration – she meets three men who claim to be the whistleblowers from the right-wing conspiracy propaganda film, 2,000 Mules. “They asked me if I had seen the film,” writes Nuzzi, “and I lied and I said that I had because I did not want to listen to them explain the film to me.”
Deception, it seems, is reflexive – and not just for Nuzzi. When news of her affair with RFK Jr breaks, she recalls his rage at her refusal to claim “it was a deepfake”.
Of Trump she writes: “He was an insistent liar, not a good one. We were even.”
She seems to suggest her own ethical quandaries are a symptom of her environment, writing of the politically polarised Trump era:
The angel and the devil on my shoulders now sounded alike. It became impossible to say who believed what, whose beliefs were real, whether such a thing as realness could be verified and whether it even mattered. Verified by whom? There existed no agreed-upon neutral arbiter of facts.
And: “The closer you get to a black hole, the more you fall apart.”
A pretentious, gushing mess
A 320-page slog, Canto – despite its title – has no discernible structure. Devoid of chapters or section breaks, the book is a haphazard collection of stray facts, mixed metaphors, and stream-of-consciousness musings.
These range from Nuzzi’s random thoughts on Britney Spears (“I loved her then and love her now”) to drones she believes are watching her (“a distant unsolved memory”), manta rays (“angels of the sea”), the North American and Farallon tectonic plates (presumably a metaphor for her and Kennedy), and the self-immolation of 37-year-old conspiracy theorist Max Azzarello in 2024 (“his flesh in the air […] I tasted him […] I spoke him out loud”).
Interview transcripts, excerpts of Nuzzi’s own journalism, and court documents appear without warning – including a 1,500-word report on the 2022 assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, dropped in without context.
The book leans heavily on quotes from academics and artists – some 30 in total – and most of them male: philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, psychologist Carl Jung, songwriter Leonard Cohen, artist Edvard Munch (The Scream) and composer Bernard Herrmann (who wrote the score for Psycho).
She admiringly quotes right-wing psychology professor Jordan Peterson, expounding on “cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see”. He’s referring, as Nuzzi explains, “to the reflection of sunlight through the plastic facets of an Evian bottle”.
Nuzzi’s astrological analysis is particularly painful. She describes America as “a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler”, and gushes over her celestial alignment with Kennedy:
We had been born under the same kind of moon, the January waxing gibbous in Capricorn, 97 percent illumination, thirty-nine years apart.
“Do you think this means we’re compatible?” he asked.
‘I mean to subdue and tame you’
For a book touted as a juicy tell-all, Canto tells remarkably little.
RFK Jr himself is never named – referred to only as “the Politician”.
“The MAGA General” ousted from the White House seems to be Steve Bannon. “The Failed Candidate” sounds like Kari Lake. “The South African tech billionaire” is obvious. And Lizza, her ex-fiancé, is “the man [she] did not marry”.
The monikers – and there are many – are ostensibly designed to elevate the work’s pseudo-literary tone. They don’t. After a while, they simply grate, especially as they allow Nuzzi to construct a world where everyone is a caricature and accountability evaporates.
That the only people named directly are Trump and Olivia (or “Livvybaby”, as Kennedy reportedly calls her) underscores the self-aggrandisement.
When Kennedy finally enters – at the book’s midpoint – he is described with an almost hallucinatory quality. We learn of his psychedelic trips, his friendship with a pair of ravens named Lenore and Charley, and his penchant for bad poetry. “I am a river,” he purportedly writes to Nuzzi. “You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you.”
Nuzzi falls for it. Or, more accurately, she seems to want us to believe she fell for it, so we feel sorry for her. At the same time, she over-intellectualises the relationship, so we under-scrutinise her choices.
She writes, without irony: “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”
In the next scene, she says: “He told me that he wanted me to have his baby.”
When Kennedy jokes about his brain worm, Nuzzi does not find the gag funny. “I loved his brain,” she laments. “I hated the idea of an intruder therein.”
“Baby, don’t worry,” he soothes her.
Funny and self-aware about failure
Canto is neither funny nor self-aware, but Nuzzi herself can be both.
On Instagram, following the book’s flopped release, the author shared a list of bullets titled Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry.
Your agent texts you, unprompted and with no elaboration, “I love you.”
Monica Lewinsky reaches out to check on your mental health.
Many people use the phrase “self-care” when addressing you.
“This post is a best seller,” one user comments. Another adds: “This post may end up doing better than the book.”
The sharpest line in Canto offers a glimpse of the writer Nuzzi is when she turns her attention to power and politics without the self-seriousness that weighs down the book and the self-indulgence that overwhelms it.
A politician’s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.
Despite its ambitious title, American Canto is myopic. Instead of grafting her trauma onto the ills of Trump’s America, as she professes to, Nuzzi dwells in cool detachment. Driving around Malibu in her white Mustang, she distances herself, as another media elite, from everyone else.
“I do not wish to be understood,” she says.
Instead of interrogating her ethical lapses and penning an honest, clear-eyed account of her errors of judgement – and of the industry’s abuses of investigative power – she detours and digresses, sidestepping responsibility for her professional transgressions.
Rather than making herself vulnerable, she presents herself as a victim – in her words, “a viral allegory of hubris”, a female Icarus, punished for her ambitions rather than her actions.
Her inability to see, as Lizza does, that this is “not really a scandal about sex, but a scandal about journalistic ethics” raises serious questions about her political insight and her future as a political observer.
“The Politician had been, briefly, my subject,” Nuzzi insists. “He had not been my source.”
What Nuzzi fails to recognise is that by withholding the truth of her relationship with Kennedy while writing about his character, she broke the cardinal rule of her craft. She lied to her readers.
Kate Cantrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
