While watching Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s landmark interview with Oprah Winfrey, Carole Radziwill couldn’t help but see parallels between what the Duchess of Sussex went through when she married into the royal family, and the experiences of a member of her own extended family: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
“I just watched the M&H sit down. Wow,” she tweeted on Monday. “I love how people say Meghan knew what she was getting into…people said the same thing about Carolyn Bessette when she married into the Kennedy family. You could never know. Meghan said it right the perception is nothing like the reality.” (Radziwill is connected to the Kennedy family through her late husband Anthony Radziwill—a first cousin of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and the son of Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s younger sister.)
Indeed, the Kennedys are often said to be the closest thing America has had to royalty, and Bessette-Kennedy was famously besieged by paparazzi after being linked to JFK Jr., and struggled with the pressure of the spotlight.
In her conversation with Oprah, Meghan freely admitted that she had been naive about what she was getting herself into. Even aside from the intense media scrutiny she would face, the Duchess didn’t realize how much the family stood on occasion even when in private—which required her, to her surprise, to curtsy to the Queen…
