The New Yorker Radio Hour - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Isn’t Going Away

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has never held elected office but is related to many people who have, is emerging as a potential threat to Democrats and Republicans in the 2024 Presidential race. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and, then, Senate second, or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,”  he told David Remnick, in July, when he was running as a Democrat. Now, as a third-party Presidential candidate, his numbers have grown in the polls—enough to push votes away from both Biden and Trump in November, especially, it seems, among younger voters. Besides his name, the seventy-year-old environmental lawyer is known as an anti-vaccine activist and a proponent of conspiracy theories. This election season, we’re eager to hear from you. What questions do you have? Let us know at: [e-mail] interview originally aired on July 7, 2023. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When I spoke with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last summer, his candidacy was very much on the fringe of things. He started that campaign running as a Democrat, but then he started to get a lot of attention from Barry Weiss, Joe Rogan, even Steve Bannon. Now, running as an independent, Kennedy is confirmed on the ballot in Oberlin, but then he started to get a lot of attention from Barry Weiss, Joe Rogan, even Steve Rogen, even Steve Bannon. running as an independent, Kennedy is confirmed on the ballot in Oklahoma, Utah, and the swing state of Michigan. At this point, the question isn't so much whether he could be a spoiler, but whose race he might spoil. Right now, roughly 30% of all Democratic voters say they would likely vote for RFK, and the number on the Republican side is around 20%.

Kennedy is best known for conspiracy theories, and there are lots of them. vaccines cause autism. Toxic chemicals might contribute to children becoming transgender. Drugs like Prozac might cause school shootings. Anthony Fauci was behind, and I'm just quoting here, 2020's historic coup d'etat against Western democracy. Most members of the Kennedy family have repudiated him entirely. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has never held or run for public office, any public office. He had a career as a litigator, suing corporations, and that aligned him with a slice of the Democratic left.

And when I spoke with Robert F. Kennedy, I asked him why he thought he was the ideal candidate for arguably the most consequential job on the planet. Well, I don't know that I'm the ideal candidate to replace him. But it seems to me that the country is going in a very bad direction and that nobody else is really stepping up to change in a way that is pretty clear to me that it needs to be changed. I think I'm qualified for the job because to me the fulcrum of the problem is this corrupt collusion between government and corporate power. and the place where the rubber meets the road is in the public agencies and the regulatory agencies. And I've spent my 40-year career litigating against those agencies, and I understand how they work.

I understand how that dynamic occurred, and I understand I think I'm in better shape probably than anybody else in the country to unraveling. there are a lot of lawyers in the country there are a lot of people who are concerned about corporate power and its relationship to government but you're running for president the most complicated and powerful office even on the face of the earth conceivably so it sounds to me like

we'd be well served by hearing more specifics I've spent many many years sewing big polluters in the oil industry, the coal industry, and the chemical industry, but probably about 20% of my cases were against EPA. And in many cases, there were people who were running the key branches of the agency that had more of a loyalty to the industries that they were supposed to regulate and to the American public.

And they had become essentially sock puppets of the industries they're supposed to regulate. I spent 20 years doing agricultural law, suing large food processors and meat factories like Smithfield food, Tyson's food, Purdue, Monsanto. And in your estimation, that experience as a litigator, as a lawyer, makes you qualify to, essentially, run all that's under the purview of the President of the United States to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, to direct foreign policy, to appoint the heads of all the major agencies. You're approaching 70 years old, and you've never been in any kind of a major public

office. How do you reconcile that? I've been around government and studying government since I was a little boy. I went to the 1960 convention. I've been to most of the convention since. I've been, you know, the election with my uncle, Edward Kennedy, I ran the southern states for him in that election. I've been involved in almost every presidential election during the last 60 years.

I began writing about foreign policy when I was 19 years old. My first article was for the Atlantic. And I've written, you know, landmark articles. during that time. But experience in campaigns and being at conventions is not the same as either being involved in the making of policy, either as an executive or as a legislator or as a governor. So are you saying that really that kind of experience

is not necessary to be president? It's the one president that I can think of that hasn't had any experience at that level is Donald Trump. Well, there's nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second or be a governor before you're elected to the presidency of the United States. Or even mayor of a small town, but you haven't done any of it. Do you think that that is irrelevant experience? I think my life experience is absolutely relevant. When Kennedy was running as a Democrat, Donald Trump praised him. Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have praised him too.

Some of his talking points on the campaign trail would certainly appeal to a MAGA audience. He said, for example, that cartels in Mexico are running U.S. immigration policy. But when I raised the subject of Donald Trump, Kennedy changed the subject as quickly as possible. Listen, I think what, you know, I am not a fan of Trump's. I saw his cowardice at the beginning of his administration. when he appointed me to run a vaccine safety commission and then took a million dollars from Pfizer and killed the commission.

Oh, you know, I'm not a friend of President Trump's, but I think we should can criticize people on policy. Why do you think Donald Trump admires you? I think because I'm not suspicious of that? You know what? My job is not to be, is not to drive people apart. My job, I think, what you guys have decided

that you're going to do in the press, which is to create this polarization and to feed the anger and defeat the hatred and to feed the end up to conduct a hominemate tax and the name calling. I don't want to do that. We need to end that

in this country. We need somebody who's going to bridge the gap between Americans. Yes, but you're you're, so polarization is a bad thing. I understand that, but you're also you're a critical. You're a belong to a class of elite journalists

who once were the guardians of the press and the protectors of American values and the American middle class and you now consider those people to be deplorable. I don't consider anybody to be deplorable in this.

That's somebody else's vocabulary. And let's talk about the word elite for a second. You come from a highly privileged background eclipsing mine by some order of magnitude. Isn't it a little rich for you to be calling people elites? Well, when I use the word elite,

I'm talking about the people who are inside the Beltway defending the people, the press figures who are supposed to be speaking truth to power, and instead have become propagandist for the government. and who are and who view their job as quashing dissent and quashing, you know, political criticism of the government that they're supposed to be actually criticizing. Do you really believe this or do you think it plays well? Of course I believe it. Now, I'm finding it curious and maybe even disturbing that some of your early admirers

include Trumpists like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Rogers Stone. Do you welcome that, or do you think maybe, just maybe, someone like that is delighted that a strong opponent will wound Joe Biden and in the long run help Donald Trump? I'm trying to unite the country, David. I'm not going to do what you do, which is to pick out people and say that they're evil, they should be canceled or whatever. I think the kind of tribalism that you're advocating is poisonous to our country.

I think it's toxic. It's created a situation, a polarization, a division in this country. And it's more dangerous than any time since the American Civil War. Isn't there a difference between disagreement on, isn't there a disagreement? And what you're trying to get me to do now is to lash out against other Americans. And what I'm saying is, you know, I don't agree with what those people represent in many parts of their lives. I don't agree with it, and I don't like it. But I'm still going to talk to them.

I'm not going to cancel them. Now, my question wasn't whether Steve Bannon should be canceled, whatever that would mean in this context. I asked whether Kennedy welcomes his support in his own presidential race. But Kennedy might be talking less about Bannon here or Alex. Jones than about himself. If you ask me what about something that Alex Jones did, I will tell you it's what he did with the Sandy Hook is reprehensible. But I'm not going to permanently write him off as a human being.

People are redeemable. I believe in redemption. You know, I got an opportunity for redemption in my own life. And there's plenty of people who had good excuse to write me off. forever. Tell me about that. Tell me about that. I believe in redemption.

Tell me about your own sense of redemption. I think you're probably referring to problems with addiction. Yeah, I mean, I was a heroin addict for 14 years. And I, you know, I'm lucky to believe be alive. And like I said,

you know, people have plenty of reason to write me all forever because of the way I conducted my lives during that 14 year period. What's been the effect, and we all know people who, friends, family, who have suffered from addiction, and it's a lifelong struggle. What's been the effect on your life to this day on it? I think I heard you say recently that you go to nine meetings a week. Yeah, I mean, the recovery program is an important part of my life.

It's an important part of keeping me mentally and physically and spiritually fit. it. So, you know, I focus on all those things, and I, you know, it's, it's important to me. I mean, in my, in many ways that my addiction was a gift because it gave me, it gave me a blueprint. The recovery from the addiction gave me a blueprint about how to live the rest of my life. And, you know, you talk about, you know, you keep wanting to focus on why don't I hate on these this guy more, why don't I hate on this person more? And my program tells me not to do that. I'm not supposed to be doing that.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as an independent. My conversation with him continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last July, I spoke with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And as he's gained traction politically, I wanted to revisit that conversation today. Kennedy sees himself as a singular warrior against collusion between greedy corporations and corrupt government agencies. But he is best known as an anti-vaccine activist.

In Kennedy's case, his obsession with conspiracy, his tendency to see it just about everywhere, might have an explanation rooted in his life story. I don't think it's a great leap of psychoanalysis to suppose that his thinking, his psyche, was likely shaped from early on by unimaginable tragedy as well as enormous privilege. He's certain that the CIA conspired to assassinate his uncle, John F. Kennedy. And he believes that the CIA might have been behind the murder of his father five years later. I don't think anybody who has looked at my uncle's murder seriously believes that the Warren Commission was correct. And, you know, the evidence today is, listen, I'm a trial lawyer.

I've tried hundreds of cases. I can guarantee you looking at this case that I could prove that my uncle's death was caused by the CIA. I have enough evidence right now without any depositions to prove that my uncle's death was the result of a conspiracy and that the CIA was involved not only in the original conspiracy, but in the 60-year cover-up and continues to maintain the cover-up. What was the CIA's motivation? And my uncle's death, well, it depends. I mean, most of the people who were involved, like David Adley-Ly Phillips and Howard A Hunt,

you know, people who, you know, Howard A Hunt gave a confession to it, and they were angry at my uncle. Their initial anger came when he failed to go into the Bay of Pigs, when he failed to invade and provide air cover for the Bay of Pigs, which they consider a betrayal. They had trained those men. Those men were dying on the beach, and they, at that point,

they believed that my uncle was a traitor to the United States. They then were, they got, when my uncle and my father halted the raids on Cuba, by, you know, after they, after the missile crisis, they agreed as part of their agreement with Grusheff during the, missile crisis to hold the raids from Miami by Alpha 66 and the other groups that were going into Cuba to hold them. And my uncle sent the Coast Guard down and the CIA and confiscated the post. The conversation about the assassinations went on for quite some time. And it went into detail about ballistics and second shooters and the like. And of course, there's a huge body of

literature disputing the accepted historical account of those events. But Kennedy endorses other conspiracy theories that are scientifically wrong and politically, humanly dangerous. I'll be very honest with you. I don't want to engage you in the deep detail on the question of vaccinations. And your belief stated in the past that vaccines are responsible for autism to some degree. I have to say, I have a quite severely. autistic child, and while no one would want to know the cause of autism more than I do, I

frankly think, with respect, that you've been slinging around a lot of theories over time that don't have any great credibility among science. And I wonder, among scientists, and I, and do a lot of harm to a lot of people. And I want to ask you this question. Do you not have any second thoughts about this? You said that you would, you seem to be altering your rhetoric about this very recently that you just want to see vaccines tested.

You seem to be shifting on this without quite saying so. I've never shifted on it. I've said from the beginning that I got involved with this issue, that's what I want it. I've always said I'm not anti-vaccine. I want good testing with the vaccines, and I want good science. So, you know,

I don't necessarily believe all the scientists because I can read science myself. You know, you say that scientists don't believe that. Well, you know, the scientists at one point all believe that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission. And when I said, no, they don't prevent transmission because I read the monkey studies in May of 2020. And I saw that the amount of the concentration of the virus, and the nasal pharynx of the vaccinated monkey was identical to the unvaccinated monkeys. And I said these vaccines should be dead in the water. They won't prevent transmission.

And I was deplatformed for spouting conspiracy theories. And because all the scientists said they're going to prevent transmission. So, you know, I don't necessarily believe all the scientists because I can read science myself. That's what I do for a living. I read science critically. That's how I win cases. And I've read the science on autism, and I can tell you if you want to know, you know, where you need, I mean, one thing, David, you got to answer this question. If it didn't come the vaccines, then where is it coming from? Why isn't anybody telling us that?

Guns and school shootings in this country are rampant, and they're a tragedy and at a level like at no other time. recently you've suggested that SSRIs and benzos and other drugs, that's your phrase, might be responsible for America's school shooting problem. Where are you getting that from? You told the times recently that assault rifles clearly make the world more dangerous and we should figure out how to limit the impact. But then you said there's something else happening. why would that something else be of all the many things that have arrived in modern life,

why would they be Benzos, SSRIs, Prozac, and other drugs? Well, you know, this is, you know, after the Columbine shooting, which was one of the first big shootings, there was a lawsuit in which I think five of the Columbine victims sued on the basis of

the SSRI. and those suits were ultimately settled in favor of the plaintiffs. So, you know, this is an issue that people have been looking at for many, many years. And unfortunately, it's really hard to understand what the impact is because we don't have good data. And the reason we don't have good data is because of HIPAA. So for reporters who might be interested in following that trail, it's virtually impossible for them to find out if a shooter was taking pensos or was taking SSRIs. I mean, why, you know, the reason that... So it's not something you have proof of. It's something that you're injecting into the conversation, as it were.

Excuse me. So it's not something you have evidence of, but rather that it's something that you want to bring up as a possibility. Well, I do think that we should figure out why this is happening. Because there's been guns all around. I mean, when I was a kid, there were gun clubs at the schools. And kids were bringing rifles to schools every day. And nobody ever considered that a problem. People weren't going into classrooms and shooting kids, and there's other nations.

I understand that. But I guess what I'm saying is that the presidency of the United States, it's very, very sensitive what comes out of a president's mouth about any issue, whether it's race or the economy, to kind of just inject into the bloodstream into the conversation of the United States that SSRIs and benzos and other drugs might be responsible for the rash of school shootings

in this country, which is so tragic. Isn't that problematic to just say stuff like that without any real evidence? I've said there's a lot of things that should be investigated. We should look at video games. We should look at social media. we should do science on that.

The NIH is supposed to be doing that kind of science. It is a $42 billion a year budget. Why don't we have the answer to those questions? They can penetrate HIPAA. They can figure this out and tell us the truth. Why aren't they doing that? Why aren't they doing that? Well, one reason might be that for almost 20 years,

NRA allies in Congress have blocked federal funding for research on gun violence. But that's just not Kennedy's way of thinking. That's a conspiracy that is just too out in the open, too political, too public. Robert Kennedy Jr. voted for Joe Biden in 2020. And when I asked him why he decided to turn around and challenge him, he pointed first to the war in Ukraine. Like some on the far left and also on the right, he believes that the West and NATO provoked Russia into the invasion in the first place. When I asked him what alternate sources of media he prefers, he immediately mentioned that he reads a blog,

by Douglas McGregor, a retired army colonel who's sympathetic to the Russian government view of the invasion of Ukraine. Liz Cheney and others say that McGregor represents the Putin wing of the GOP. President Biden immediately put the U.S. at the center of a NATO policy of helping to arm and protect Ukraine. If you had been president, would you have done the same, or would you have let Putin act as he had hoped by Iraq? arresting or killing Zelensky and installing a public regime. What would you have done as president if faced with an invasion of Ukraine? I wouldn't be moving. I wouldn't be threatening.

I would do what Putin had asked very reasonably is that we give a pledge not to bring the NATO into the Ukraine. And I don't believe there would have been a war. I'm asking a different question. I'm asking if you had been president, setting aside the long prelude to this conflict, If he had invaded, what would you have done? I don't think if I was present, the invasion would have occurred, because I would have made the assurance that Putin was asking for.

Putin has a legitimate national security interest in keeping the NATO out of Ukraine because he knows that we put Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland as soon as we wrap them into the Ukraine. And, you know, for generations, our deal. diplomats have warned American leadership and warned the neocons who now run the White House that if we move NATO into the Ukraine, it would force the Russians to have a violent response. Force them to have a violence response. I'm not saying that Putin didn't have any options, but the Russian leadership since 1992 were warning us, do not do that.

If you were president now, you would withdraw aid to Ukraine. You would support the end of military funding for the defense of Ukraine to Zelensky. I would end the war. I would negotiate a peace. And what would that peace look like? Well, you never know that until you negotiate. That answer to that question is strategic ambiguity. I intend to be president of the United States.

I'm not going to tell my adversary what my final negotiating position would be. What about the voter? I'm not going to negotiate a treaty. In other words, in Vietnam, when there was a political campaign, your father said exactly what he would have done vis-a-vis the United States in Vietnam. And he had, as did Eugene McCarthy, and he differed with Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson. why is it unreasonable for you to exactly what I would do and I'm telling you what I consider fair which is I consider the terms of the Minsk Accords fair and that's what Russia already offered to sign

my uncle President Kennedy again and again told the country you've got to put your shoes you've got to put yourself into the shoes of your adversary and he did that with crucef he put in a hotline in our home in in Massachusetts and in the White House so that he could pick up the phone and call Moscow because he was scared of provoking a nuclear response. And today, Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do. We are touring with our mcadne here. These leaders ought to be talking to each other and they aren't. And that is not the fault. And that is the fault of our administration. Robert Kennedy, I appreciate your time.

Yeah, thanks, David. Robert F. Kennedy is running for the presidency, and we spoke in July of last year. Now, let's face it, this election cycle is beyond baffling. So we're curious. What are you curious about? What confuses you about the upcoming elections? Because we'd like to find answers to the questions that you're asking. Shoot us an email at New Yorker Radio at WNYC.org. Radio, one word, at WNYC.org.

That's the show for this week. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Pahlia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuperman.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccate. We had additional help this week from Ramele Wood. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.