There they stood, his arm around her waist, boldly dressed as well they might be. She was 30, beautiful and talented, dressed in a leopard-print top and red slit skirt–beloved by her editors, chased by producers, and envied by much of the journalistic world in New York and D.C.
He was 48, sharply cut in a navy tux, bow tie, and a pair of glasses that would have been loud for the 1970s, let alone the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2023. He had worn somber straighter ties as a younger man, before he met her. Now they were characters in their own story, a modern-day Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein as they liked to say.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza’s lives hadn’t yet been upended by that lost son of American aristocracy: Robert Kennedy Jr., 70, the failed presidential candidate, serial adulterer and perennial tormentor of his wives, of whom Cheryl Hines is only the latest. Nuzzi hadn’t met Kennedy for a profile, and started a perilous months-long electronic affair with him in its wake, then failed to disclose it to her employer, New York Magazine; to the public; or to Lizza, her fiancé since 2022.
