Behind the Bastards - Part One: The RFK Jr. Episodes

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Robert sits down with Cody Johnston to discuss the origins of the Kennedy Family Curse, and how it trapped RFK Jr on the path to ruin. (4 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call zone media. Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's not about the election, but this week I'm bringing back a special buddy, my good friend from the 2020 election who I have ripped through a hole in time and pulled into the future Cody Johnson Hi, hello everybody. Thank you so much for the kind introduction and welcome to the podcast

Hello, yeah I don't know if it's I wouldn't say it's the worst year ever yet because really as much as everybody's unhappy. I don't know 2020 was pretty bad. I keep going back and forth on that. I feel like a lot more people died still in 2020. Yeah, I actually been working on an update to that song and I'm like going back and forth like, welcome to the worst year ever. Maybe it'll be a bit better than last time,

but then it wouldn't be the worst year ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But ever. But there's still time. It might not be pandemic bad, but if Donald Trump becomes the president again, that's pretty bad. That could be worse. That could be worse. That could be worse.

Yeah, I mean, I have mixed feelings as we go through this horse race, Cody, because it feels like the upside of if Donald Trump gets a second term is you will finally be punished for all of your many crimes. But the downside is that I might be punished for all of my many crimes. That's tough.

That's tough. I know. Justice is a little wonky. It's a little unbalanced. We can't always get full pure justice that we want. Sometimes we have to make our own sacrifices. right you're gonna have to sacrifice your self In order to see me Yeah face down finally so yeah, it's more or less what I learned from one of the Batman movies Cody

What do you think of will? In fight it together Because all we do is invite as We'll just not get along We're just not going to get along together It's just too accurate Everyone will be unhappy together Yeah, before the

You want everyone to get pumped before the chorus But if everyone's like, yeah, they're right But then we go, or not Or not I think I was or not. I think Lie I think I was wearing this shirt when we recorded that song Capsule oh time capsule. I remember when it was worse in a lot of ways Yeah, when I was when I was huddled in my tiny efficiency with all of my beans and ammunition

And now I'm I'm huddled in my house with all of my beans and ammunition. Exactly. Life has really changed for me. Now, Cody, when it comes to the election, we could sit here, you and I, and jawbone about old Joe R. Biden or old Donald J. Trump, whatever his middle name is. I forget. John, I believe.

John, okay, cool, great, great, great, I need that. Donald John President, I believe is the name. I don't think, there's very much either of us can say that will matter here, right? Even though people on the internet keep coming into any comment you make about the election going, oh, so you want Trump to win or whatever, nobody who listens to us.

Like the entire election is gonna come down to like 100,000 people in five to seven swing states, right? Yep. So let's talk about a guy who actually could influence the election, the most popular third party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly 25 years, something like that. Bobby F. Kennedy Jr., RFK Jr.

Yes, currently polling at 9 or 10%. A lot of places. It depends on where you go, but I think nationally that's broadly accurate. I also think that there's a lot of flex in those numbers. You're talking polling 9 or 10% in like three, plus or minus three, 4% error rate. So he very well could wind up not being influential at all,

but he could siphon away enough votes to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the election. It's kind of a toss up there. We don't really know. Yeah, it's kind of a toss up. I think most of what I've seen has led me to expect he probably takes more votes away from Trump, but I also. I think so, and that's.

Yeah, nothing conclusive makes me say that. It's really hard to say, right? Yeah. But that's what it seems like for sure. Either way, he definitely could be the decider of the election. It's not impossible, given again, how kind of narrow things are probably gonna come down in a handful of swing states. It's not impossible that given again, how kind of narrow things are probably gonna come down

in a handful of swing states. It's not impossible that he winds up having a pretty sizable impact. So I figured we should talk about the guy, especially because in kind of a remarkable turn of events, a bunch of articles, I think Vanity Fair published the first one, have come out in the last week, accusing him or publishing allegations

that he sexually assaulted women. last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he sexually assaulted women. And he has had kind of a unique response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe you might hear more about this. Like he has not denied it. Yeah, cause he apologized. He's like, how can I make this right?

When he was reached out to directly by one of the women and his public statements have been Like yeah, you'll probably hear more about this Which is he said even when he's rant he'll mention that even we started running. He's like, yeah I got a lot of skeletons my closet. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a dude who's done a lot of bad stuff He was essentially like I didn't eat that dog, but I didn't eat that yeah, which he did I didn't eat that dog. Yeah, which he did. Which he did, ew.

He ate that dog. I have read now every piece of writing I can find on RFK Jr. I've gone through a biography of the Kennedy family. I have gone through a biography of the Kennedy family specifically after the assassinations of JFK and RFK. I've gone through a biography of Bobby Kennedy and as many articles as I could find on the matter.

And I will tell you two things. Number one, he definitely ate that dog. And number two, I'm actually not surprised that he both is perfectly willing to admit that he sexually assaulted people, genuinely thinks that he feels bad about it. Now I'm not saying he actually does because I think the act of being a Kennedy

might be fundamentally deranging. And primarily what we'll be talking about in these episodes, this is not a list, we're gonna talk about some fucked up shit that Bobby Kennedy did, but mostly what we're talking about is the creation of the Kennedys as a concept is maybe the most profoundly abusive thing

that's ever happened to a group of children. Yeah. Like that's really the story these next two weeks. Yeah, you're creating a royal family from scratch basically. And yeah. And with none of the royal families, I don't think, I don't get these sense from looking at the current members of the House of Windsor

that it's good for you to be a member of the House of Windsor. It seems bad. But there's a support network outside of the family set up. The whole country is kind of a support network for the royal family. And so usually there's limits on how far out they spiral. That didn't exist for the Kennedys.

And that's part of, anyway, it's an interesting story. So we're gonna talk about that this week, Cody. But first I wanted to ask, how do you feel about Bobby Kennedy? How do you feel about the, actually, scratch that. How do you feel about the, actually, I scratched that, how do you feel about the Kennedys? I have no strong opinions in that, like, I'm not a huge Kennedy fan and I, you know,

mixed, I think, I would say, probably, depending on the Kennedy we're talking about. I don't like political, like, dynasties, and, like, that aspect of it, I'm just, like, very much against. and about him specifically seems like he's got a lot of problems and a lot of stances that I disagree with heavily. So I would say I'm generally anti,

but not in a way that I can articulate further. Yeah, you land kind of about where Bernie Sanders did with one giant, you know, giant, giant, giant, giant, But not in a way that I can articulate further. Yeah, you land kind of about where Bernie Sanders did with one giant exception. Anyway, let's move on to ending the cold open and moving on to the hot open. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all new podcast There and Gone. It's a real life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear.

The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why? Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, Dr. Joy here. I invite you to join me every Wednesday on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, a weekly chat about mental health and personal development, where my expert guest and I discuss the unique challenges and triumphs faced by black women through the lens of self-care, pop culture, and building the best version of you. So if you're looking for more ways to incorporate wellness into your life, listen to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

And we're back. That was a Bernie Sanders, shout the president joke. I don't actually know. I was like, wait, what do you, oh, right. Yeah, yeah, it's been a long enough time since the last one of those. I don't know, you know, that's the bit on this show. Anyway, let's talk about the Kennedys.

So I'm gonna start this, the first kind of half of this episode maybe is actually gonna be an overview of like how the Kennedys became the Kennedys. Because, and this is not, you know, there are so many people who are like Kennedy historians and Kennedy fan experts I'm not gonna pretend that this is a comprehensive history of the family and I'm actually not gonna talk much about the bad shit that

Joe Kennedy or JFK or the original RFK did we'll cover some of that Because like there's kind of a lot in the story of how they became a thing and we're focusing mostly on RFK this week So this this story is important for how it sets up the way in which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers and like co-ages members of the Kennedy family, how they were raised, right? So don't come to this being like, wow, Robert didn't really mention, you know,

what Joe Kennedy did to Rosemary Kennedy, the Lombotomy. He didn't talk about RFK wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr. And it's not cause those aren't important, it's because like that doesn't factor in as much to like what RFK Jr. experienced as a kid, right? And so that's kind of the focus with which we're covering the background here, right?

Like many Irish families, the Kennedys first entered the United States during a rough period for Ireland, the late 1840s. Unlike most of the refugees who fled there in that time, 26-year-old Patrick Kennedy was not fleeing starvation and death and depression. He was the son of a pretty comfortable man financially, a big farmer in County Wexford with 80 acres.

So like a guy who's doing pretty well. So Patrick comes because he's not going to inherit this land That's not the way shit works at the time and he wants to strike it rich, right? So his goal is specifically not this is my only chance at survival It's America is my chance to make a name for myself, right? Because I'm not gonna inherit anything American dream. Yeah, the American dream He never returns to the old country or sees his family again, but he does meet a hot lady on the boat over and that's not half bad.

They get married in Boston shortly after arriving. This generation does not make it out of Boston. Like a lot of Irish people in that period, they are kind of trapped there. Patrick gets a job as a cooper in his free time. He gets his wife pregnant. They have four kids, the last of whom is finally a son, Patrick Joseph. Now, Patrick the first, the original Patrick,

having been put on this earth just to make Patrick Joseph, dies immediately after his son is born of cholera. Just instantly. Got it, all right, you did it. Yeah, got it done, got it done. Made sure that baby made it out of the birth canal and then dropped the fuck dead, yeah? Dedicated, right, you did it. Got it done, got it done. Made sure that baby made it out of the birth canal and then dropped the fuck dead, yeah? Dedicated, all right.

Yeah, dedicated, he knew what he was there to do. Singularly focused. Yeah, exactly, exactly. He's like one of those mosquitoes. He's like a salmon returning to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like a salmon returning to Boston to spawn. Yeah, so in total, the first Kennedy family patriarch

only lived nine years and died, never having made any kind of fortune or real impact himself. He is going to be the last Kennedy patriarch to kind of have a quiet unimportant death, right? Within the kind of the context of how the nation sees it. Since Patrick Joseph, the baby is, cause I think he's less than a year old,

I think when his dad dies, was the only male left in the family, the job of making a fortune fell entirely on his shoulders. And his earliest memories were basically that like, everyone is expecting me to figure out how to make something of this family, right? All of his sisters and his mom are obsessively focused on just his health and wellbeing.

It's a lot of pressure. Goo goo ga ga, I'm just a fucking baby. What do you want me to do? Yeah, yeah, right? It's a lot of pressure and it's like, yeah, I can see how this is going to make a man who is narcissistically focused on like, being the one guy.

Yeah. Yeah. God, what a complex, right out of the gate. Right out of the gate the thing that the Kennedy's have been doing since before they had any money is Putting such a so much pressure on their young men that They're the kind of only way for them to grow up is completely deranged Yeah, sometimes makes a guy who's really good at making money or being the president. Tends to, it can help that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, like putting immense pressure and then dying.

Yeah, and then dying immediately. They're so good at that. Yeah, dying tragically young and putting a lot of pressure on their young men. So Patrick Joseph goes to a Catholic school. He helps their mother work in the small shop that the family owned. He takes on odd jobs as a teenager, working hard for his family, Catholic school, he helps their mother work in the small shop that the family owned.

He takes on odd jobs as a teenager, working hard for his family, but never quite able to get ahead. This changed when he was 22 and he sees a damaged old saloon building for sale on Haymarket Street. He gets loans from his sisters and his mom, and soon he's got a business. He's got an actual bar going, and he is very good at running a bar. He is a competent business owner. And he is, because the way politics works in this time,

the city is largely run by Democrats who are not Irish and who do not want Irish people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant upon them for votes. So Irish folks are restricted in what jobs they can hold in the local power structure. As you're probably aware of by stereotypes, they're welcome to become police officers. There's a few local elected offices that they're able to take, but for most of the mid 1800s, higher elected offices are pretty closed to Irish immigrants. And once Patrick Joseph buys his bar, the status quo is starting to change.

And because he's now a business owner and because bars are, you know, a social center in his society, he kind of immediately gets shunted into a part of the kind of power structure, right? Because like that's where a lot of dealing happens. Yeah, social rubricants, all that kind of stuff. Socially, you're paying bribes, right?

As a business owner, right? Like to the police, to everything, like you just kind of wind up involved, right? The actual government at the time is hideously corrupt and incompetent and provides basically no security or like meaningful services to people in the city. And as a result, in this period of time,

it's best to look at the Democratic Party as kind of a mafia, but it's not just a mafia that like takes bribes from people and is hideously corrupted, also is where you get your social services. If you are in the Democratic Party and you are providing them with your vote, they offer you primitive forms of welfare

and a kind of social stability. The Democratic Party is a shadow state in Boston, right? This is the only part of the country that has something like this. But that, you can't think of the party as like what it is now, right? Where it's like, this is how we get and change policy. The party is almost like a social club

that guarantees me some kind of stability in exchange for my vote, right? In exchange for some of my money sometimes, right? The Democratic Party is generally described as a machine and it is corrupt as hell. It runs, a lot of it runs on bribes and strong arm violence, right? There is a violent mafia aspect to political parties

in this period in Boston in particular. But it's also kind of the best, your best, like if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee in the mid 1800s, the best, your best, like if you're, if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee in the mid 1800s, the way this system works, you might say is a lot better than the way the last system you looked up. Oh yeah. Right?

Right? It seems beneficial. Like let's buy into this and. Yeah. Yeah. I have some degree of agency here. Yeah. Patrick Joseph proved an able assistant to some of the more established local men and

his businesses flourished. Soon he had several bars and then he owned part of a hotel and then he owned a liquor importing company. In 1884, he was elected to the Democratic club of his ward and in 1886, he and a group of allies took power in the ward and elected Patrick Joseph to the state Senate. This is better than Irish people had been able to do in the generation previously, right? But it's still kind of gonna be the top of where he's able to reach too.

Like there's- There's a ceiling to like, yeah. Yeah, the old democratic power structure still is able to keep the Irish from getting too much higher than that, right? Now, like a good Irish boy, he marries a girl named Mary from a family that happened to have more money than his family.

And by this point, he's got a bit of money too. He's not rich the way they're going to be a generation later, but the Kennedys are very comfortable at this point in time. And Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the greasy pole of Democratic party politics. State legislator is as high as he's going to rise, but he doesn't take this sitting down.

A lot of his bills, the things he tries to get through in the state legislature gets stymied by this kind of ossified power structure that doesn't like this uppity Irish kid. But PJ succeeds in building an army of loyal goons at the local level. In 1898, he launched an ambitious attempt to oust his rival, Martin Lomasny,

for control of the city Democratic nominating process. It doesn't quite work, but I want to describe how that went by reading a quote from a book called The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Quote, playing by the rules of the day, PJ had his troops put up blockades around the convention site. They kept rivals out until the Mahatma, that's the nickname for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession

and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in a hearse. That's wild. That's right, yeah. The bygone days. Honestly. Gotta try stuff like that. It doesn't seem worse than how shit's working now. You know?

Maybe we could have a little bit more slapstick elements in our politics. Yeah, there's bit more slapstick elements in our politics. Why not? There's a comedy of errors in their politics. Yeah, it's worth a try, Cody. That's where I'm gonna land. Now this Collier and Horowitz book is controversial among Kennedy nerds because it does make claims about,

for example, the next Joe Kennedy's involvement with organized crime that are not really provable. And it generally, it seems to have done what a lot of Kennedy books do, which is there's often multiple stories about what happens with the Kennedys, and it usually believes the most salacious version, right? That said, there's also, it includes just a lot of interviews

with Kennedys who were in and around, like members of the family. And so even with these things that are, when they're sources people will question or have issues with, you can't just discard them because sometimes it's like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave his side of events. So we can't just ignore entirely these books either. But a lot of Kennedy history is tabloid gossip, right?

Because they're the Kennedy's. Yeah, exactly, yeah. You want the clicks. Yeah, exactly. That's what we're doing here, right? We're all getting clicks from the Kennedy's, the Kennedy Industrial Complex. Gobble up your salacious crumbs.

Yeah, yeah, oh wow. What a great Star Wars reference, Cody. It's for you. Somewhere George Lucas just got like a little trigger of dopamine into the back of his brain. That's why I do it for him and his brain chemistry. Continued editing his cut of Red Tails 3, which no one but him and his two friends

will ever be allowed to see. Red Tails 3 Trolls 4. Yeah, of course. I would watch any of the movies that George Lucas is producing for no one but him and his friends in his crazy mansion. Gotta get into that ranch. Yeah, let's do a Mission Impossible

to break into the George Lucas ranch. Watch his terrible movies. Yeah, well, these are just unwatchable. One of them was literally just Morbius. And I know he hasn't seen the original Morbius. He just happened to make the identical movie somehow. Frame for frame, just like he's locked into it. He built his own AI and recreated Jared Leto independently.

Generational talent. It's terrifying. So Patrick Joseph's story mostly isn't interesting to us. Other than that, he wound up topping out at kind of the highest level of power available to an Irish immigrant son at this stage. And he probably, probably fair to say he pushes how high someone in his social status can raise, right?

Well, it seems like he sort of led the way of like, no, no, we can do that, yeah. Yeah, he's not the only person doing that, but certainly one of them, right? Certainly on that edge. He kind of winds up as a ward boss and a moderately wealthy small business owner. And his son, Joseph P. Kennedy was born in 1888,

kind of midway through his dad's journey up the Democratic Party ladder. We can infer that Patrick Joseph and his wife never quite got over the frustration of being locked artificially out of advancing further. Mary Augusta insisted on Joseph Patrick as the name for their son rather than Patrick Joseph,

because there's two stories. One is that she didn't want him to be a junior, right? Thought that might be bad for him in some way. It might be bad for his advancement. There's also claims that she told relatives that she thought that Joseph Patrick sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph. And honestly, those are the two most Irish names

I can conceive of. Yeah, if I had to rank them, she's right. Yeah, but I'm not gonna do the accent, but I hear both of those names and an Irish accent in my head. Yeah, it's kind of six to one, half dozen to the other. It's not really moving the needle much there. Yeah, yeah, nobody's gonna think Joseph moving the needle much there. Yeah, yeah.

Nobody's gonna think Joseph Patrickson is Irishman. Exactly. That's not a very clever trick, but. Yeah, yeah. I don't really know how much that worked for you. Mahorowitz and Collier write, "'She was proud of the status in the community that PJ's political activity brought,

yet aware that for proper people, the Bostonians who'd moved away from the Irish as a fearing contagion, politics had become a faintly disreputable profession. She wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband, whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston, was not. Sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds. For the rest of his life, he remembered one election day

when they were walking down the street and a Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had already voted 128 times. Oh yeah. Oh, that's golden. That's the good stuff. That's just the good stuff. That's that good old timey.

Got 128 bar in me before the evening. Go out and participate in democracy as many times as you can. Again, I feel kind of similarly about democracy these days that I do towards sports where it's like, yeah, just let them take all the crazy drugs they want. Let's see who can be the best at drugs. Yeah, let everybody cheat.

See who's the best at cheating. Just go for it. Give them all knives. Why not? Give them all knives. Fuck it, yeah. We're the knife party now. We just do knife stuff.

Yeah. It goes on. All right. Yeah, nobody wants to get're the knife party now, we just do knife stuff. Yeah, we're the, yeah. What's up? All right. Yeah, nobody wants to get inside the knife party convention, dangerous place. Yeah, it was an open tent, but then they slashed the tent. I don't know, there's no tents. Too many knives.

Yeah, too many fucking knives. That's not that far off from the fact that at the RNC and the soft zone around it, guns are legal, but hard-sided water bottles are not nor our soup cans or tennis balls Backpacks larger than a certain size very funny bag rule I was like I was like that's big enough to be a problem, but small enough to be annoying Why why is that your rule that makes no sense you just explain why, nobody can fit a bomb in a small backpack That's what everyone knows. It's okay everybody. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be a fun convention

Yeah, speaking of bombs these products are the bomb New from double asterisks and I heart podcasts a ten-part true crime podcast series My Heart Podcasts, a 10-part true crime podcast series. Emergency 911. This is a fire in my partner's life. This court is on fire. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me.

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Nobody hears anything, nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes he's innocent,

but in my eyes he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle Listen to there and gone South Street on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Greetings ghouls and girls and welcome to haunting Purgatory's premiere podcast for all things afterlife. I'm your host, Teresa.

We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling. When she was with her imaginary friend, she would turn and look at you and you felt like something else was looking at you too. Some unnerving. The more I looked at it, I realized that the some looked more like a claw, like a demon.

Some even downright terrifying. The things that I saw, heard, felt in that house were purely demonic. But all of them will be totally true. Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you live and get your podcasts. Oh, dilly dilly, we are back, my friends. We have returned to the podcast Oh, dilly dilly, we are back, my friends.

We have returned to the podcast where we talk about Bobby Kennedy. But first we're gonna talk about young Joe Kennedy, mighty Joe Kennedy Young. We can infer that he grew up, I don't know why I did a mighty Joe Young. That's not even a joke. Yeah, you do, you've got it. You know, Cody, it's because we're hooked up.

That's right. The heart. Exactly. The people are clamoring for more Mighty Joe Young references. That's right, that's right, thank God. We're gonna fucking give it to them. Yeah. This is gonna be what saves content from AI.

Yeah. Whatever it takes, honestly. There's not enough Mighty Joe Young in everyone's online discussions for the AI to make a good joke about it. They don't even know what it was, you know? They don't know what it was, too. It's like trying to get an AI to talk about Hootie

and the Blowfish. What's it gonna do? There's like three comments about that shit on the modern internet. Anyway, sorry Hootie. Not sorry to the Blowfish. No, no, no, no. They know what they did.

Yeah. Young Joe Kennedy, we can infer, grew up with a certain level of comfort around the idea of mild to moderate criminality to further his political ends, right? That is the norm in his period of time. And there's a lot of debate over how mobbed up this guy was, but I don't really think any credible sources say

none mobbed up. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's not like a lot for his time. It's not a weird amount for his time, but it's not a none, right? It's not a zero involvement in organized crime. Yeah, at least plus one.

Yeah, yeah, at least a little bit, right? You know, he also grows up wealthy at this point. The family is rich, right? They're not mega rich, which this Kennedy is going to make them mega rich, but they are extremely comfortable. He is cared for nurses and maids and butlers and cooks as a little kid, as a baby, as a young man.

His dad purchases a 60 foot yacht that they have like a guy whose job it is just to pilot the yacht. So they're doing very well. And it's understood that Joe's job is to go where his father could not and establish the name Kennedy as a name to be reckoned with. As a young man, he worked as a uniform to delivery driver

for a fancy hat company. He did other old timey jobs too. Joe Kennedy has all of the old timey jobs. He sells candy on the street. He works as a news boy and he's, this is my favorite. He has a part-time job as what's called a Sabbath goy, which goy is a term for Gentile for like, like a Jewish term for,

or I think Yiddish term for like Gentiles, right, for Christians. And his job was on the Sabbath, he would go to Orthodox Jewish people's homes to like light their stoves and light their candles. Nowadays there's like automated systems for this because there's certain rules about what you shouldn't do, but you can also trick God a little bit

and get away with stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is my favorite kind of religion. Oh yeah, just like work around it. Hire a Kennedy. Yeah, hire a Kennedy. There are some Jewish families whose ancestors had the patriarch of the Kennedy family

lighting their Sabbath candles. And I don't know, kind of cool. Maybe it's you listener, maybe it's cool. Maybe it's you, listener. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's you. Encouraged by his father, he is one of those kids you might describe as a child businessman. Right. He is a kid who has a lot of business ideas and wants to be an entrepreneur.

And I, you know, I'm on record as saying like, that's a real big warning sign. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A kid. We don't need to go off on. Oh, yeah. Yeah a kid We don't need to go off on a huge tangent, but like a kid is like super into politics Yeah, or super into business stuff is like dad. Don't let that happen. You can't know You gotta pause that get him on drugs look that you that I've been long on the record that Schools need to have like a little emergency cabinet where like if a kid Shows too much of an interest in politics, you know, you give them a little bit of acid,

give them a little bit of heroin, you know, something good. Or close it, either way, do something different. Do something different to their mind. Change their mind is the important part. So he also, it's interesting, there's a period of time where he has an artistic bent too. So he also, it's interesting, there's a period of time where he has an artistic bent too. So you do get the sense that like,

maybe if someone had given him drugs at the right time, he might've wound up a very different person. Cause in addition to trying to start all these small businesses, he directs plays in the family yard and he like manages these fairly complex productions where he'll get a bunch of people, he'll play roles, he'll have other people playing roles, and he'll also have people collecting money.

Like he'll be actually running, both running a business, but also he is writing plays and like being in them. Yeah. Which is interesting. And for an idea, one of his productions features him in an Uncle Sam costume, reading essays with titles like Columbia, the Gym of the Ocean.

So it's like, oh shit, that could be like in the background of a Bioshock game, like this boy's childhood. It's like, that's like a theater kid, but like with like real. Sinister. Yeah, like just this like an adult and a child. Yes, yes, yes. I'm going to write play like you're not. Oh, yeah.

It's not like where this imagination. Yeah. Yes, like yeah, I'm gonna write play like you're not Yeah Yes, yes, like the goal seems to be like no you're going you want to you want to do the production of the play You don't want to write plays and be in them Yeah, yeah, and you want to be the center of it, right? And yeah, what does get the feeling obviously children can't be diagnosed as narcissists But we also know enough about Joe Kennedy to say that it's probably fair to say he was a narcissist. Early signs, maybe. Yeah.

So, you know, that's my, I don't like diagnosing people, but really with Joe Kennedy, I feel like you can't really, it's not a stretch, you know? The best example of kind of the kind of person he is becoming might be the little baseball team that young Joe organized, which was named, I don't know why, the reasons are lost the time,

but the name of his baseball team is The Assumptions, and he makes himself the coach, the business manager, and the first baseman. I don't know why The Assumptions. He's supposed to do everything. That's an odd name. It's a good band name, actually. It's a good band name, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, solid band name, yeah. He doesn't want you to make an ass out of you and me. I don't know. I don't know that that joke existed, man. Maybe you created it. No, I don't think he did, but it's really kind of a very strange name. I think it's gotta be, there's that Babylonian joke,

the first record of an actual structured joke that the punchline is something like a dog in a bar and like nobody actually knows what was supposed to be funny about it. But like we get that it was supposed to be a joke. I had this experience, I watched a 1983 live standup performance with Robin Williams the other night

and I hadn't seen him live for a while. In the first like 10 minutes or so, because both like the quality of the video and because like some of the style of standup that he was doing is just people don't do it anymore. I was like, oh, I wonder if he's just not funny anymore. And then he steps into the crowd and starts taking things from people

and it becomes like the funniest standup set I've seen in my life. And I was like, oh no, he was, he is as good as I remembered. There's just some bits in there that haven't aged. You couldn't do a lot of what he did. Like he like starts drinking from somebody's like liquor and like picks up a glass from someone's table

and drinks from it and makes a joke about like, sorry about the cold source. And then just moves on and picks up some lady's jacket from her table. But like everybody's losing their fucking minds the whole time. Of course it's amazing stuff. Yeah, that's a moment you're experiencing. Yeah, yeah, it's a moment and also like we have lost the technology to have a man be on as much cocaine as 1983 Robin Williams. You just can't do it anymore. You can't be contained, no. So yeah, yeah, we're talking about fucking Joe Kennedy here.

He's got the assumptions, his baseball team. He's playing half of the team, it sounds like. And I found this line from the Collier and Horowitz book, particularly enlightening. Some of his teammates complained that they were functioning as second fiddles in a one-man band. Kennedy's sister Margaret, to whom he tossed his glove to put away when he came home from a game, always remembered his response. If you can't be captain, don't play."

And that gives you a lot, right? Both like he comes home from the game, like throws his glove to his sister, just knowing she'll put it away, right? That's kind of says everything about how he's raised. And his attitude, this is good, because Joe Kennedy is the guy who starts the Kennedys as a political dynasty.

Right. Right. He is the patriarch of what the Kennedys become and why. I mean, you could say his dad was the one who started them in politics, but it's Joe that makes them their fortune. And it's Joe who, you know, is the guy who makes or does the drive to do it. Right. Right. Dad was like, oh, like,, like kind of slowly got involved.

He wasn't like, I wanna do a politics. I wanna be the captain of the world. Right, right. And Joe is, whatever else you wanna say about him, an intensely capable man, right? There's no disagreement about that, right? He's also an intensely bad man, in my opinion. Again, he orders later in life a lobotomy,

a lobotomy on his daughter because she's like, likes boys too much, right? That's the gist of what goes down. We've talked about this in the lobotomy episodes, but he's capable. He's incredibly good at everything he puts his hand to. He's capable of monstrous things. Monstrous things, but he's also just like,

no one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be, RFK might've wound up that way if the thing that happened hadn't happened, but like JFK really isn't. JFK is to a significant extent supported by the folks around him. Joe Kennedy is the most capable, I think, of the Kennedys that I have read about. And it's not for nothing that by the time he comes around,

he is our, now we are in our second generation of Kennedy boys who are raised by a crowd of sisters and aunts who make the boy or the boys their primary responsibility, right? And Joe is the first era in which this is happening and the Kennedys are kind of wealthy, right? So he grows up egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own and the family's greatness,

but he is also the last Kennedy that where they're like, there's enough connection to the real world that he's really capable of understanding it or succeed. I think because things are gonna get a lot more deranged after this point, right? I don't fully know why, but that's kind of my read on what's happening here. Yeah, I mean, the pressure that we've talked about so far

is one aspect of it, but then you just add like, oh yeah, you're also growing up wealthy, end of story. Yeah, at a certain point, it's like making copies of clones or whatever. You've just introduced too many transcription errors. Things have gotten deranged, right? Yeah, copy, it's a multiplicity situation. Yeah, yeah, it's like making copies of clones or whatever, you've just like introduced too many transcription errors. Things have gotten deranged, right? Yeah, copy, it's a multiplicity situation. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly.

A multiplicity is actually inspired by the Kennedy family. It's true. So, Joe does well enough that with some of his dad's money, he gets accepted to Harvard, where one classmate said he, quote, sucked up to important people quite ingloriously and without scruple, which sounds about right to me. He is a bad student, shockingly bad

when it comes to technical stuff like finance. And it's shocking because he's going to be one of the most successful bankers of all time. So I kind of think Harvard might just suck as a school. Because he's clearly not bad at this. He's also like, at that point, organized so many different things and been able, like you're saying, very capable of manager, all the things.

This might just speak to the quality of Harvard's education at the time. He's not wildly successful socially either. He's not great with people, but he does manage to catch the eye of the mayor's daughter, the mayor of, I think, Boston's daughter, Rose Fitzgerald, from which I think John gets the F in Kennedy. I think that's why Fitzgerald comes into the family.

Joe becomes a banker, long story short, again, this is not, we could actually, maybe we'll do a whole series of episodes on Joe, but he becomes a banker. He starts as an examiner for the state government with all of the corruption that implies, right? Again, the debate is like how mobbed up was he, but there's no, no involvement in corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part

of the political process in the period, right? There's no zero. Yeah. You got some stuff on you. You got something going on, right? Before long through some complicated and questionable financial maneuvering, he's able to put together the loans and investments

to buy a bank of his own. And Joe Kennedy becomes the nation's youngest bank president at age 25. His goal at this point is to become a millionaire by age 35, which is a sign of how modest his ambitions were compared to where they would end up. And for an idea of that, he dies worth at least like half a billion dollars.

He's extraordinarily wealthy. Half a billion dollars and we're talking a while ago. He passes in like 70, 69, something like that. So that's a lot more money. He became a billionaire basically. Yeah, yeah, in fact, yeah, for all intents and purposes, right? Now there are again persistent allegations

that he was heavily involved in bootlegging and more serious crimes during the prohibition years. I don't think this is true that he's like a bootleggers doing like actual like fucking Capone, you know, kind of shit. I think it is kind of the sorts of corruption that a lot more people are involved in. His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have found

no hard or even very soft evidence of like bootlegging in researching his book, The Patriarch. And I believe David when he's like, I would have loved to have that in my book about him. Like, that's fun. But I just can't. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of not being involved in bootlegging,

I can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging, I can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging. No hard evidence. No hard evidence, no proof. A lot of allegations, I'll make some of them, but no proof. New from Double Asterisk, an I Heart Podcasts, a 10 part true crime podcast series.

Emergency 911. This is a fire in my partner life. This court is on fire. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2016, St. Louis rapper and iconic Ferguson activist Darren Seals was found shot dead. Every day Darren would tell her, they are going to try to kill me. A young man in 2016 was killed on this block. I'm a podcast journalist.

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possible version of yourself. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So most of these allegations of like bootlegging and really serious criminal involvement from Joe don't crop up until the late 60s.

So they're part of the mythos around the Kennedy assassinations, right? As this article for history.com notes, various mafia characters came out of the woodwork to back up the accusations against Kennedy. Al Capone's piano tuner said that he overheard conversations between Scarface and the elder Kennedy. The ex-wife of another Chicago mobster claimed her son used to do business with Kennedy. Nassau doesn't believe these stories, mostly because Richard Nixon, when he was running against JFK in 1960,

hired a team of opposition researchers to investigate the Kennedy clan. They found all sorts of dirt on Joe Kennedy, says Nassau, but not that he was a bootlegger. And I think that's a fair way to list it out. It's like, yeah, he's doing crimes because you have to to be involved in politics and business banking at his level.

There's not people who own banks today who aren't doing some crimes, right? But he's not running rum because why would he be, right? What's the, where does that get Joe? Yeah. So where he does make his fortune is as shady as bootlegging, Hollywood. And again, Hollywood in the 20s

is also very organized crime. A lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as like these were primarily like Jewish gangsters in the East coast who move over to the West coast for a variety of reasons. But like that is the root of a lot of early cinema money. Right? It does come out of crime because like a lot of it's porn, right? It does come out of crime

because like a lot of it's porn, right? Like that's how a big chunk of this industry gets its start. Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now call B movies. Nassau thinks this is where a huge amount of his early money comes from, right? And he's able to make this profitable,

not just because like the movies make money, but because he is one of the first CEOs to demand his pay in stock options, and he is really good at manipulating stock prices, right? Yeah, we love to do that. We love making fake money. And a lot of what he's doing is stuff that is illegal now. We would say like he's insider trading now,

but it's not illegal back then. So like it's shady, but he's really not breaking the law as much as people would think, right? Joe is a guy with a lot of eyes everywhere. And so he sees the 1929 crash coming and he sells off basically everything he's got. And then he shorts the entire US economy basically, like he shorts the stock market and that is

the primary source of the Kennedy fortune, right? He bets all of this money that he's accumulated on the Great Depression happening and Black Tuesday makes him one of the richest men in the country. That is the Kennedy money. They shorted America. That's so darkly poetic. Yeah, nice work if you can get it. Incredible, like yeah.

You know, maybe I'll do something like that for this fucking election. Throw all my money on RFK. I mean, there's a way to bet against America that will make you so much money. Yeah, there's a certain kind of betting on America that will always work. The trouble is figuring out at any given moment what that kind of betting against America is. Joe's always going to be great at making money. This is a thing that he never really loses his head for.

And again, he dies worth half a billion dollars or so. You know, I think it's kind of unclear entirely. And this is where the Kennedy family fortune comes from because no subsequent members of his family are nearly this successful and they don't have to be. But Joe never managed to build up momentum in the area that mattered most to him, which is elected office, right? As we'll talk about, he is influential in politics.

He becomes a powerful man, but he doesn't like get elected places. That's not really how he makes his way in And so as he starts having kids in the early 1900s nine of them He lets the boys know that a lot is expected of them, right? I am having use because like me I want like my dad said with me I want you to go further than I went right I want him I want the Kennedys are gonna run this fucking country. Yeah, that's so much like

Yeah, like I did better than my dad and you're gonna do that with me also. I'm worth 500 million dollars Yes It's the it's the difference cuz like the healthy version of that is like I want my kid to be like happier than me I have a better off you wanted all the which is the whole reason why we have civilization, right? Everybody basic everybody's normal feels that way. But some people feel the toxic version of this, which is my kid had better do better than me, or there's gonna be hell to pay.

And do better in a warp sort of like, whatever your personal idea of success is. Yeah, yeah. In which case it's running everything and having a lot of money. Running everything, right. Yeah, being the captain, right? Because if you're not the captain, then it's not worth being in. Yeah, why fucking play if you're not the captain, right?

He spent his later working life and his period of greatest influence adjacent to elected power in World War one He's on I think it's the war production board or something. He's helping to organize war production, right? So because he's he's good at this kind of stuff, right? He's a good guy to put in that job and he does well at it He's not charismatic or likable in the way they can get you elected. Yeah, but he is a good man to have doing a lot of nuts and bullshit, right? In 1934, FDR appoints him to be the first head of the SEC.

He is the first Securities and Exchange Commission guy we have and it's the guy that shorted the stock market. The guy that wasn't technically doing crimes, but. It was legal then, motherfucker. It was legal then, that's, God, so much poetry in this man's life. It's great, yeah, he loved to say it. His final reward is a cushy gig

as US ambassador to Great Britain, kind of as at the last, you know, couple of, like, it's like 38 to 40, so it's like, in that last period, right as World War II starts. And the reason why he has to stop being the US ambassador to Great Britain is that he kind of wants the Nazis to win. And like during the Battle of Britain,

he makes a statement that democracy is finished in England and maybe finished in the US too. Great man. You can't say stuff like that. I mean, you can. Oh, he thought he was almost able to. Yeah. Couple of things that broke in different.

You might've been able to say that in the US, but you are right. You're not able to say that in the US. And this is kind of, he gets sort of disgraced by this, right? That's good. Yeah, that part's fun. We love when people get disgraced for saying things like that Yeah, that's good

It's not popular to say that to people who are actively getting bombed and who are like Responding to being bombed the way the British did in World War two you're not gonna be very welcome on the island much longer Bad at reading a room might not might be why he didn't wasn't good at getting elected. Yeah, seems like maybe he didn't read the wind. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So his first son, the first of the Kennedy boys, Joe Jr. was born in 1915.

And he's pretty clearly groomed for the presidency, right? I don't know how discreet the plan is to make him president, but he's like, I want you to go as far as possible, right? I don't know how discreet the plan is to make him president. But he's great. Like I want you to go as far as possible, right? And to do that, you have to like make a name for yourself and extend sort of the glory of the family. And also it's not just you. I've got all these other kids. I've got, you know, John F. Kennedy, I've got Robert Kennedy, I've got Ted Kennedy, and all of them are going to be asked to compete as kids whenever they're like swimming when they're playing like

Football in the yard when they're doing like they're constantly in competition with each other and Joe is constantly setting them in competition with each other And they are all raised go as far as you can Do more than I was able to do and you are constantly measuring yourself against your brothers, right? This has very early on some calamitous results for the family because when World War II breaks out this competition extends to wartime service. The elder Kennedy boys, which came to include John F. Kennedy in 1917 and then Robert, didn't just join the military. They had to do the most impressive things they could do in the military.

John becomes a PT boat commander and we're not going to go into the whole PT-109 story, but his ship goes down. I think a lot of people argue because of mistakes that he and others made, right? They fucked up, which is why this happened in the first place, but he does legitimately help get a lot of the survivors out in a way that is heroic. Joe is able to spin this into an act of this whole thing into an act of heroism, right? And it's kind of have to ignore the fact

that there were some fuck-ups along the line, but it works. Like the PR version of this plays, right? Because America is looking for war heroes at that time and they find one in JFK. This spurs Joe, his brother has now become a public war hero and Joe is, you know, by any one stretch of the imagination doing a heroic thing. He is a bomber pilot flying bombing missions,

daylight raids over Western Europe. One of the most insanely things and insanely dangerous things any group of human beings has ever done, right? And he flies the required, there's something like 20 missions you have to fly. And at that point you ever done, right? And he flies the required, there's something like 20 missions you have to fly. And at that point you can stop, right? Because it's so dangerous.

They're like, once you've reached this. You did, yeah. Yeah. But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough. I still have not, you know, like I have to measure myself against JFK. So he keeps doing missions after the point at which he wouldn't have had to continue doing missions and he gets shot down

And killed late in the war and hey that he's a hero in my book Like that had to be done like the like fighting the Nazis and he goes down fighting the Nazis, but you can already see this Competition legacy thing. Yeah, it's getting the first kill. It's going to get the killed. Yes. Yes God especially like after like Your dad's like, I don't know the Nazis aren't aren't so bad and maybe Maybe that's part of why they have to go in so hard for like World War two It was like what he said no,, we don't like this actually.

Dan did not want me flying bombing missions over here. Yeah. But yeah, so again, and you know, there's debate over aspects of this, but that is what happens. Joe goes down and thus JFK is going to become the first and so far only Kennedy president. His brother, and I'm yada yada-ing a lot here, but Robert also gets into politics and is

very successful early on. He is one of Joe McCarthy's guys for a period of time. He is involved in the Lavender scare, but he kind of gets edged out because Roy Cohn, who doesn't like him, he and Roy Cohn kind of are like enemies in an era, but not because RFK is like better about McCarthyism, right? He is pretty invested in McCarthyism. That said, he becomes the attorney general of the country when his brother is the president.

He's gonna be a congressman after that. But it's during this brief era where his brother's the president and he's the attorney general. This era just lasts a couple years, but this is Camelot, right? This is the period of time that people call Camelot. And it's legitimately like a heady time to be a Kennedy. And this is the period of time, this very brief period where JFK is the president, RFK is the attorney general,

and it's very clear to everyone after JFK finishes being the president, Bobby Kennedy is probably gonna become president, right? There's not a lot of people who doubt that even at the time. He is that kind of, and he does his share, again, he like wiretaps Martin Luther King Jr., you know? Like, there's a lot to criticize about this,

but from the perspective of the populace, these are two handsome, young, intelligent, capable men. One of them is the president. His brother's probably gonna be president next. The American economy is like half of the world economy. Of course people remember this as a golden age, you know? Yeah, I know, yeah. And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like two years,

something like that. Right, right. It's not a long period, you know? So, and again, but this is the period that RFK Jr., RRFK Jr., the subject of these episodes is gonna have his first memories. And Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17th, 1954 in the Georgetown University Hospital.

His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy Scackel family, also part of the budding U.S. aristocracy. This part gets left out a lot in the histories, but RFK's wife is Ethel Kennedy, originally Ethel Scackel. And they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type. You know how the quiverfuls believe we need to have as many kids as possible

to create soldiers for the army of God. We're going to gain control of the nation by swarming them with our kids who will take control of the powers of power. Yeah, we're gonna indoctrinate our army of children. Ethel and RFK believe that, but just for themselves. Like not everyone should do this, but we are going to have all of the children possible

so that we can flood the government with Kennedys who will take control of the levels of power. They have 11 kids, you know? Like you're not doing that unless you really have a reason, right? And Ethel is a very driven woman. She's a controversial woman. One depiction of her is she's basically a saint

and the other depiction is she's kind of a monster. It winds up in the middle one way or the other, but she's a very driven person. There's no arguing with that. And like within sort of the context of what can be done in this family, the boys are going to be the ones who hold office, but you can be part of the Kennedy greatness

by creating a bunch of those boys, right? And creating some daughters who are going to help raise and take care of those boys, because the women in the family are focused on the men, right? And yeah, her whole thing is, I'm gonna birth an aristocracy all on my own. RFK Jr., from a very young age, the primary thing everyone knows about him

is that he is always obsessed with animals. He is, he kind of is almost, maybe even a savant with animals. He is really good and with every kind of animal. He loves, he loves everything that's not human beings. Ethel claimed that as a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs he sees crawling in the garden. Before he is 10, he has a whole menagerie, a swarm of pets.

And some of these are normal rich kid pets. He's got a horse, obviously, right? He's a Kennedy. Of course, of course, yeah. But there's also weird stuff. He has pet raccoons, he has pet lizards, he has thousands of crickets to feed the lizards. In the book, RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

and the Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I do not like, tells this story. The 2008 thriller Snakes on a Plane could have been based on an experience Bobby had as a kid when he took a sack of his pet reptiles and aboard a flight from Washington National to LaGuardia in New York,

and all of the slithery, scary things accidentally got loose mid-flight. As female passengers screamed and may have jumped up onto their seats Bobby crawled around and gathered them all up Oh That's I mean, this is More like I'm not like that. It's hard not to like having do it a snakes on a plane It's like a plane. It's like yeah like an animals a lot. I dig that He posted a video the other day. Just like, like in animals a lot. I dig that. He posted a video the other day.

I'm just like, I found this weird lizard and he explained what it was and like what it did. And he's just used to, that's. One thing that I think is absolutely true of him is that not only does he like and raise animals, but he understands a lot about them. He actually spends a lot of his life like on all of these sort of like safaris.

He spends months of his life with like native tribes and the Amazon and shit like he again It's not weird that he got a worm in his brain. Oh, yeah No, a lot of his life in the wild eating bushmeat. Yeah And dogs and dogs. Yeah for sure. Yeah, probably got that brainworm Very unsurprising. Yeah had a worm eat part of his brain, allegedly. Yeah, there are some mysteries about RFK Jr. That's not one of them. No, no, no, no, solved.

Early on, solved early on. Now again, this biography by Oppenheimer, like the one by Collier and Horowitz, there's a lot of good criticisms of what I will make. Again, he's making snakes on a plane comparisons. The RFK Junior book I've got, part of why I like it is it's published before he's a political figure. It comes out in 2015.

So it is not tainted by everything that's happening now. So that is a really useful perspective to have on the man. And it talks to a shitload of people, a lot of primary sources who grew up with him. So you can't ignore it. But Oppenheimer is like super homophobic. We'll talk about that later. And like, you can even see some of like the bullshit where he's like, probably female passengers screamed

and jumped up onto their seats. Well, no one said that. You just want it to be more like snakes on a plane than maybe it was, right? Yeah. And that passage like did ping me. I was like, wait, wait. It should.

He's, it's not a good biography. He's not a good biographer, but you also can't discard it Yeah, yeah that passage like did ping me. I was like wait. Yes. Yeah It's not a good biography He's not a good biographer, but you also can't discard it because there's just a lot of shit that we get from it that we don't Get anywhere. Yeah, I mean if the first part of the story is true great. Thanks for telling me that he Look he's not I don't think Oppenheimer make shit up. I think he's just this editorializing sort of like adding Yeah, this says stuff about you, not about your subject. Right, right, right. So yeah, while modern quiverful families

have shitload of kids in the hope of flooding our democracy, Ethel and Robert did the same thing with the knowledge that their children are definitely going to inherit political power. They are consciously breeding a ruling class. By the time RFK Jr. is eight, everyone knows RFK is going to be the president when John has done in office.

And no one's really sure about Teddy, but it seems like he's probably gonna wind up. And obviously Teddy Kennedy's an incredibly successful politician. If a certain thing that we'll talk about later hadn't happened, he might've been the president. It is not unrealistic in this period where RFK Jr. is making his earliest memories

to expect that the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in a row. It's not wild at that point to think, we might have 24 straight years of Kennedys running the country, you know? That's not a bad prediction to make in this period of time. And as a result, all eyes from the beginning of his life are on RFK Jr. and his generation of Kennedys

because everyone knows if they're not gonna be president, they'll probably be in Congress. Some of them might be judges, some of them might be governors, right? These are the people who are going to run the country. And the whole country knows this. And so all of these Kennedy kids crow up under an insane microscope.

The degree of, and it's a pressure that like was completely absent from Joe Kennedy and from JFK and RFK, right? They have the pressure of you need to be president, but there's not the amount of spotlight. Because JFK becomes the president. There's not the public perception pressure. It's just like within the family,

you have your dad telling you, you gotta do this. And now the world is saying, and you're going to. Yeah, and all of you are going to, we're all expecting that, yes. And I wanna quote now from the book, The Kennedys by Collier and Horowitz. They were as one journalist had remarked, America's children, yet while they had been

in the spotlight all their lives, they had a curious innocence. The important outsiders attached to being a Kennedy amused them. They gawked back at the tourists who peeked through the hedges at Hyannis. They scooped up sand from the public beach and sold it as Kennedy sand for a dollar a bag.

They stood at the fence and answered Kennedy questions. What does Jackie eat for breakfast? Where did the Kennedys shop? For a quarter a piece. Asked what it meant to be a Kennedy, Bobby's son David had once replied, it means that we're exactly the same as everybody else, except better. Yeah, that's what they say and think.

Things are going well with these kids. Cool. More people should be raised like this. Yeah, I'm going to continue that quote. They competed with other children in swim meets and sailing contests, succeeding so well that Hyannis port officials barred them from a certain number of these competitions every season so that other residents could win some ribbons. The competition within their own group was far more intense, far more metaphoric of what

they saw as the challenge of their lives. Each of them was always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age or ability group just above them would slip, always aware above all else that their parents were watching and assessing their performance to see which of them had it. If the Beale Street House

where some of the prior Kennedy generation were born had been an enigma of latency, the compound where this generation gathered every summer was a training ground to recapture the achieved greatness that had once belonged to the family. As Chris Lofford said later, we were all, every one of us raised to be president. Yeah.

So that's great. That's cool. Good way to raise kids. That's good. And they all turned out normal. Yeah, and they all turned out normal. Speaking of normal, one story RFK Jr. is later going to tell of his childhood

is about one of his few visits to the Oval Office during the Camelot period. He brings a salamander in to give to his uncle, the president, as a gift. There's a photo of JFK with the salamander poking it with a presidential pin while Bobby sits nearby. And this picture is gonna be one of the few artifacts to tie RFK Jr. forever with the glorious side

of the Kennedy myth. This is his brief shining moment inside the limelight inhabited by his glorious doomed elders. The salamander, by the way, is later given a home in the White House fountain. So don't worry, it winds up better than all of the kids in this story. Yeah, salamander wise. Yeah, salamander wise. That's a very successful salamander wise, that guy is doing all right. Yeah, salamander wise, that's a very successful salamander. I'm sure you had lots of salamander kids. Like, you gotta wind up, what's even there for a salamander after the White House Founding?

I don't know how you move up for that as a salamander. You know? Maybe that meant the pressure was off of them. Owning the fountain, I guess? Maybe they became salamander artists. There's a bunch of salamanders living in fucking Dime Square, New York right now with podcasts. Who knows?

Oh, how the salamander has fallen. A great upside from having the kind of money so absurd that your house has a name is that you're almost immediately able to indulge in your pettiest interests and obsessions. A normal kid, you find that your kid likes animals, you buy him a picture book, right? They like dinosaurs, you get him a book with dinosaurs, maybe you buy him a model replica of a dinosaur bone or something like that if they're really into it, you know?

RFK Jr., because he likes animals, gets regular safaris to Africa, and he is on safari when JFK is gunned down by Mernard Montgomery Sanders one cold November day. This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt with then. Quote, Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and participated in the capture of a huge leopard tortoise. Because he was a scion of Camelot,

he was permitted to bring it home in a suitcase, unquestioned, as if he were a diplomat. It helped that his escort was his aunt Eunice's husband, Sergeant Shriver, who then headed the JFK-established Peace Corps. Many years later, the turtle, stuffed, was on display, along with a multitude of other Kennedy memorabilia in the den of Bobby's own hickory-hill-like estate in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco. It's just such a... taking an endangered turtle home with him.

How old was he during that time? He's like eight or nine. So my dad in nine, when he was getting to be dies. To be importing endangered turtles in your suitcase? Yes. Cause your sergeant uncle or whatever, like what? Sergeant Shriver is his name, yeah. Yeah.

This is, this is fucking, what's her name? I forget her name. Mary Shriver's? Yeah, Shriver's, a great, grandpa or dad. I think dad probably, just based on age. So the loss of JFK is obviously a crushing blow to Kennedy family morale, but the dream doesn't die with him, right?

He was president for a couple of years, you know, very popular when he gets blown away. What else do you have to say? And then, you know, you've got RFK waiting in the wings. Now, one of the things that does happen here that is kind of devastating to the Kennedy family, Jackie Kennedy had been a pretty influential person in the family and she marries someone else after he dies,

which, you know, I'm not shitting on her for that, right? Like that's a perfectly normal thing to do at a certain point. But she is both a major purveyor of the Camelot myth. Some people will say Jackie Kennedy kind of creates it, but she also kind of bounces from being in the family after this, which like, I don't blame her. Yeah, again.

It seems like it's the healthiest thing for your family, right? Seems like boundary setting to me. Yeah, I think Jackie Onassis might just have had a really good head on her shoulders. But this does mean that now the entire weight of the family's dreams are on RFK and Ethel Kennedy. With the most glorious Kennedy out of the picture,

the family legacy suddenly feels in doubt too. There's suddenly a question like, are we going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of the presidency? Are we all gonna go on to be the people who run this country, right? And in short order, the older Kennedys have to, cause Robert Kennedy kind of reorganizes the family,

in order to, hey, we still have, we still got a lot of Kennedys in the game. There's me and Teddy, this could still work out. There's a reason there are 50 of us. Right, right. Yeah, we still got a lot of Kennedys in the game. There's me and Teddy, you know, this could still work out. There's a reason there are 50 of us. Right, right. Yeah, we got plenty. We can take a few more bullets even, fuck it. Exactly.

Yeah. So they, you know, the older Kennedys also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations. Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from St. Luke, to whom much is given, much will be required. And Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying this. With great power comes great responsibility.

America has been very good to the Kennedys. We all owe the country a debt of gratitude and public service, right? This is a no-bless-oblige thing, right? We're the people who have benefited most from this system. So of course, we owe it the most, which I would love if that meant, well, we should pay a lot more in taxes. No, no, no, no, no, no. As opposed to like, well, we should run things. We should have the most which I would love if that meant well, we should pay a lot more in taxes

No, no, no, no, as opposed to like well, we should run things. We should have the power to give back Well and to be fair, I will say Kennedy's politically have tended to be more on the side of rich people should pay more taxes Right. I will you got it. You do have to give them that but This idea of like because we've benefited we should run things is so Poisonous and it's going to get a lot of them killed, right? It's about to get RFK killed. Even though people have killed. Yeah, yep, yep.

That is what's coming in a second. So RFK Jr. is educated in very elite, expensive private schools. The first Our Lady of Victory was an all white school and this becomes a problem during the Camelot period because JFK is pro integrating schools, which is great, except for people point out, well, your nephew's in an all white school, huh? That's kind of bad. Yeah.

Fair. I don't think the media is wrong to point that out. And the Kennedys move him to an integrated private school run by Quakers. After that point. The principal at Our Lady of Victory would later claim that the whole story about integration being the issue had been created after the fact. That's not why Bobby gets transferred

because Bobby and his brother Joe skipped school so constantly to fuck around in the woods and like had to, couldn't continue to be students there. And I, I'd actually, he might not be lying because that happens several more times. And it's, it's going to happen in the future that like, when he has to get kicked out of a school, another thing gets made as the scapegoat for it, right?

Because like, you can't have a Bobby Kennedy and Joe Kennedy get kicked out of a school for just being dog shit students. For being problems, yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, for being problems. Now, RFK, because of what's about to happen, gets kind of sainted, and Ethel is going to be, for a period of time, the most admired woman in the country

after his death. They get whitewashed a lot. You would not call either of these people good parents. I would call them almost criminally bad parents. Now part of this is that they're always away, right? They are campaigning constantly. RFK has his congressional campaigns. He's gonna have his presidential campaign.

Ethel is constantly campaigning on his behalf. She loves being the wife of a powerful man. She loves hosting these big events and fundraisers and stuff and being out in front. And RFK, in addition to always campaigning, loves having Cody, so many affairs. Like, honestly, if there was an Olympics and how many people you could shit on your wife with,

RFK is like a solid contender, you know? He could have won the gold. Yeah, he could have won the gold. Yeah, yeah, fucking. So, you know, while they're doing this, and I don't actually know, this may have been a thing that in an age like today, we might actually say is closer to non-monogamy. I don't think that he is informing her, but I also, she's not dumb. I think she just, like, that's what it is.

I'm the wife of a powerful woman, I get these benefits from it or a powerful man and I get all these benefits from it, but he is going to fuck around constantly. That's the way it is. We will just never talk about it. I'll be angry about it forever, but we'll never talk about it, right? They are very good at crafting an image for themselves

and at kind of remolding the Kennedy family image to focus around them. And RFK is a great politician. He is extremely good at being in politics, at running for election, at building buzz around himself. And he's so good at it that it kind of papers over a lot of the failings he has as a living person. His kids mostly remember during this period

that he was the most vocal force in trying to weld the family back together after JFK's death. He also does, he's not around as a father. He's not really raising his kids to much of an extent, but he has a checkbook and he kind of indulges his son Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Jr's passions by paying for them, right?

That's how RFK kind of raises RFK juniors. Whatever you're into, I've got plenty of money. I have no time for you, but I have money. And as a result, RFK junior gets into falconry as an 11 year old. Sure, why not? Sure, why not? Why not give him a falcon?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a thick glove, he'll be fine. It's great. I do love all of the fucking Yeats references to RFK jr We do have a falconer, you know, we've got a falconer in this election. Can the Falcon hear him?

I don't know Jair seems to be whitening Horowitz Horowitz and Collier write quote his father had commissioned naturalists from the Bronx Zoo to make him a walk-in terrarium For his 13th birthday He had encouraged the interest in falconry, although admitting to his son that he was disturbed by the implications of feeding pigeons to the predators. The two of them worked out a compromise with a distinctive Kennedy twist. If a pigeon managed to avoid a hawk

on two successive flights, it was retired and never forced to face death again. Struck by the boys' range of interests, Bobby Sr. had once remarked that Bobby Jr. was just like the president. Unfortunately, he was also what some of the adults around the family would politely call rambunctious. This was a kid you could not keep in class

or get to obey the rules at all. Starting in seventh grade, he was sent away to a boarding school along with his brother Joe to stay out of his mom and dad's hair while they enjoyed being famous and powerful. At private school, RFK Jr. reinforced his reputation as the poster child for what we now call ADHD. One classmate later noted,

he could climb straight up the wall like 10 feet and we would just be standing there watching in awe. He was always real skinny and lanky and he could get a real good grip on the bricks and he had absolutely no fear. He climbed up that wall like he was spider-man That's that's good for him. Yeah, that's like literally. Yeah, the great power great responsibility quote from earlier Yeah, it's just yeah, that's he's just he's just spider-man. He's literally literally a spider-man

It is like one of those obviously over medication is a problem But I've never read about a kid who needed ADHD treatment more than RFKG. Like it's, he really, literally running up the walls. No, that's supposed to be a phrase. That's supposed to be just the thing that you say. Also, like if you're, you know, growing up and you're like, oh, I can, I got to take this exotic turtle,

like you've broken the rules, you're not gonna wanna follow the rules, so. I don't even know if you'd call it breaking the rules. There's not even a concept in his head that there are rules for him. Exactly, right. Right, yeah. His mom wanted him to join the football team

at the fancy, I think it's Millbrook at this point, private school that he's at. But RFK Jr. is not a great football guy. He is actually not like a jock character. You would imagine, you think about like Clone High, JFK, they have him portrayed as like the football captain. But then JFK had that public personality at least. RFK Jr. is a weird kid. He is defiantly weird. He dedicates most of his time to playing with his hawk, Morgan Le Fay, who he would take to school for show and tell sessions. During the week, he lived under strict discipline, but occasionally he and his older brother Joe would be allowed to

show off what being a Kennedy meant to their classmates. And I'm going to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here. On weekends, one of the Kennedy's many helpers or Ethel Kennedy herself, usually with two dogs in her convertible, would arrive to pick up Bobby and his brother Joe. And then someone would return them on Sunday evening. She had once invited Bobby's entire class and some of his teachers for a field day at Hickory Hill, where they swam in the pool, toured Bobby's Menagerie of Animals, and watched the surfer film The Endless Summer in the Pool Cabana. As one class member who made the tour recalled, it was a circus out there.

And they mean that literally because of all of the wild animals that he has, right? Yeah. But then on June 5th, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Like his brother, there are going to be decades of debate and conspiracy theories as to whether or not Sirhan Sirhan, who was officially the gunman, had rather done it. I have my own

theories about a certain Mr. Sanders. But we don't need to get into that today, right? I will say RFK Jr. subscribes to these theories. He does not believe, last I checked, he doesn't think that Sirhan Sirhan is who killed his dad, right? Oh yeah, no, he's very, yeah, he's got. And like, like, like with any Kennedy, I kind of feel about Kennedy conspiracy theories the way I do it with this election, people say, oh, so and so is definitely going to win or definitely not it's impossible. No, neither of them has less than a 30% chance of winning.

And like every Kennedy conspiracy theory, 20% chance it's right. 20% chance it wasn't, sir, I'll give it that, you know? It's not my odds on bet, but there's a lot of shady shit that went down and I'm not gonna rule anything out entirely here. But that doesn't really matter. It does matter that RFK Jr subscribes to these theories. And it matters that when RFK dies,

he takes the dream of the Kennedy dynasty with him. And the son who bore his name is never gonna be the same. And we're gonna talk about all of that, Cody. In part, dukes. Wow. Cody. Hi. Shody.

Plugables? Yo, Yody. Yeah, I got some plugs to plug. Check out some more news. It's on YouTube. And we've got a patreon.com out some more news. It's on YouTube, and we've got a Patreon.com slash some more news. Even more news is a podcast we also do.

Sometimes we do a podcast called Way Less News because who wants to talk about the news? Yeah, absolutely no one anymore. Nobody. I check out my bands called The Hot Shapes. We've got an album called Laverne. It's on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Oh, you should have called them The Assumptions, Cody.

I might now. I might start another band called The Assumptions. Who knows? It's an RFK deep, or Joe Kennedy deep cut. Yeah, check all that stuff out. Invite Cody to your band. Look, Mighty Mighty Boss Tones. We know you lost a singer

because he became a COVID denier after that George Floyd album, you know? Invite Cody. Yeah. Wow. Knock on wood, Cody, knock on wood. Every band that lost a member that ended up in the super group that is like the anti-vax super group,

I'll replace whomever in the other band. You know what? You know what? I think we finally need to merge the surviving members of Linkin Park with all of the non-crazy members of the Mighty Mighty Boss Toads. Is that gonna make good music?

There's not a chance in hell. Absolutely not. Not compatible in any way, but I wanna hear that album. It's called novelty music. And you love it? It's called novelty music. Wow. It's a hit.

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