Kennedy looked good and got a lot of sex. He was the guy the news media WANTED to be! So...they puffed him up. That is the reason for the myth.
“Let me be the thousandth person to say that Bradlee and Kennedy were, as types, much the same. If Bradlee had been President, he would have been much like Kennedy: without ideology, mindful of style, reliant on expert elders, intelligent but hardly intellectual, long on vision and wit, short on temper and attention span. And Kennedy, who followed the press and its actors obsessively, would have been Bradlee-esque in a newsroom: excited by stories that broke news and balls, bored by “process stories”—what Bradlee calls “room emptiers.”...
...On the night of the West Virginia primary, the Kennedys and the Bradlees went to see a porno movie—“a nasty thing” called “Private Property” and “starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife.” Imagine the uproar today.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/18/last-of-the-red-hots
I was young enough when Kennedy died that I mostly remember being upset that the funeral interfered with the cartoons on Saturday morning.
But why was he mythologized? Because he was the guy the new media wanted to be...
>>But why was he mythologized? Because he was the guy the new media wanted to be
Absolutely fascinating analysis.