Part One: The RFK Jr. Episodes

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)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also 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
twenty twenty election, who I have ripped through a hole
in time and pulled into the future, Cody Javn.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hi. Hello everybody. Hey, thank you so much for the
comment of production, and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Tody. Hello, Yeah, yeah, welcome to the 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,
twenty twenty was pretty bad. I keep going back before
the more people died still in twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah, I was. I've actually been working on an update
to that song, and I'm like going back and forth, like, well,
the worst year ever will get maybe it'll be a
bit better than last time, but then it wouldn't be
the worst you're ever? Yeah yeah, yeah, but uh, you
know there's still time. It might not be pandemic bad,
but you know, if Donald Trump becomes the president again, that.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's that could be worse. That could be worse. You know,
that could be worse. Yeah, I mean it's it's I
have mixed feelings, you know, as we go through this
horse race, Cody, because it feels like, you know, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
That's that's tough.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
I know justice is a little wonky, it's a little unbalanced.
You know, we can't always get full pure justice that
we want. Sometimes we have to make our own sacrifices.
So you're gonna have to sacrifice your self order to
see me.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah. So yeah, that's more or less what I learned
from one of the Batman movies. Cody, what do you
think of will in fight it to get other? Because
all we do is in fight as.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, just not al We're just not going to get
along together.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
It's just it's just too accurate. Everyone will be unhappy together.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Before the You want everybody to get pumped before the chorus.
But if everyone's but then we go or not or not?

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I think everyone knows that's a lie.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
I think I was wearing this shirt when we recorded
that song. Oh that's fun. It's the time capsule.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
It's a time capsule.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Remember when it was worse in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
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 Ammunitionally, life has really changed for me now, Cody,
when it comes to the election, you know, we can
sit here, you and I and jawbone about old Joe R.

(02:58):
Biden or old Donald, old Jay Trump, whatever his middle
name is.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
I forget John.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
I believe John. Okay, cool, great, great great.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
I need that Donald John president, I believe is the name.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
I don't think there's very much either of us can
say that that will matter here, right, even though people
on the internet keep coming into like any comment you
make about the election going, oh so you want Trump
to win or whatever, Like nobody who listens to us
like matter. The entire election is going to come down
to like one hundred thousand people in five to seven
swing states. Right, Yeah, so let's talk about a guy

(03:33):
who actually could influence the election. The most popular third
party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly
twenty five years something like that. Yeah, Bobby F. Kennedy Junior,
RS Junior. Yes, currently polling it n percent a lot

(03:54):
of places. It depends on where you go, But like
I think nationally that's broadly accurate. I also think that
there's a lot of flex in those numbers. You know,
you're talking pulling nine or ten percent in like three
plus plus or minus three four percent, you know, error rates.
So could he very well could wind up not being
influential at all, but he could siphon away enough votes

(04:16):
to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the elections.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Kind of a toss I don't really know.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Yeah, it's kind of a toss up. I think most
of what I've seen has led me to expect he's
probably takes more votes away from Trump. But I also
think so that's yeah, nothing conclusive.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
It's really hard to say that, right any Yeah, Yeah,
but that's what it's. That's what it seems like for sure.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Either way, he definitely could be the decider of the election.
It's not impossible. Given again how kind of narrow things
are probably going to 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

(04:58):
Fair published the first one, have come out in the
last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he's sexually
assaulted women, and he has had kind of a unique
response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe he might
hear more about this, yeah, because he apologizes, like how

(05:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
I mean, he said even when he's he'll mentioned that
even when he started running, he's like, yeah, I got
a lot of skeletons in my closet.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, Yeah, he's done a lot of bad stuff. He
was essentially like, I didn't need that dog, But I
didn't need that yeah what she did. What I have
read now every piece of writing I can find on
our FK Junior, 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.

(05:57):
I have 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

(06:17):
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. Well, 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,

(06:40):
that's that's really the story.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, you're creating a royal family from scratch basically.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
And yeah, yeah, and with none of the royal families.
I don't think I don't get these these sins 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 and work outside of the family set up. The
whole country is kind of a supporting right for the
royal family, and so usually there's limits on how far

(07:08):
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 we're gonna talk about that this week, Cody. But
first I wanted to ask, how do you feel about
Bobby Kennedy? You know, how do you feel about the
Actually I scratched that, how do you feel about the Kennedys.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
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

(07:46):
and about him specifically. It 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 for.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, you land kind of about where Bernie Sanders is
did with one one, one giant exception. Anyway, let's move
on to ending the cold open and moving on to
the hot open, and we're back. That was a Bernie
Sanders shot the president joke. I don't actually know.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
I was like, I was like, wait what you oh right.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's been a long enough time the last
one of those, you know, that's that's the bit on
this show. Anyway, let's talk about the Kennedy So I'm
going to start this the first kind of half of
this episode maybe is actually going to be an overview
of like how the Kennedys became the Kennedys, because and
this is not you know, there are there's there are

(08:50):
so many people who are like Kennedy historians and Kennedy
fan experts. I'm not going to pretend that this is
a comprehensive history of the family. And I'm actually not
going to 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 story

(09:13):
is important for how it sets up the way in
which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers in
like coageous 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. Why you're tapping

(09:33):
Martin Luther King junior. And it's not because those aren't important.
It's because like that doesn't factor in as much to
like what RFK Junior 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 eighteen forties. Unlike most of the refugees

(09:56):
who fled there in that time, twenty six 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 eighty 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

(10:16):
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 going to inherit anything. Yeah, the American dream.
He never returns to the old Country or sees his
family again, but he does meet a hot lady on

(10:37):
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, you know, 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,

(10:58):
Patrick Joseph 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 colera, just instating
all right, got it done, got it done, made sure
that baby made it out of the birth canal, and
then drop the fuck dead. Yeah, yeah, dedicated, he knew, Yeah,

(11:21):
exactly exactly. He's like one of those mosquito. He's like
a salmon returning to yeah. Yeah, yeah, Samon 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

(11:41):
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 because 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

(12:03):
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 well being.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
It's a lot of pressure. Google Gaga, I'm just a
y fucking baby. What do you want me to do? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (12:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
On like being the one guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, God,
what a complex.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, that's not great right out of the gate. The
thing that the Kennedys have been doing since before they
had any money is putting such a so much pressure
on their young men that the kind of only way
for them to grow up is completely deranged.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
That sometimes makes a guy who's really good at making
money or being the present.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
But it can Yeah, can help that a lot.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, like, yeah, putting immense pressure and then dying, Yeah,
and then dying immediately.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
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 his
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 twenty two and he sees

(13:22):
a damaged old saloon building for sale on Haymarket Street.
He gets loans from his sisters and his mom, and
soon he has got 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 when you're the way politics works in
this time, Right, the city is largely run by Democrats

(13:44):
who are not Irish and who do not want Irish
people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant
upon them for votes. Right, So Irish folks are restricted
in what jobs they can hold in the local power
structure there, 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

(14:05):
the mid eighteen hundreds, higher elected offices are pretty closed
to Irish immigrants. And you know, once Patrick Joseph buis
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

(14:26):
of power structure, right, because like that that's where a
lot of dealing happens. That's social business.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
Socially you're paying bribes right as a business owner, right
to 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

(14:55):
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 plate part of

(15:16):
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 you know how
we get and change policy. It's the party is almost
like a social club that guarantees me some kind of
stability in exchange for my vote, right, and in exchange
for some all my money sometimes. Right. The Democratic Party
is generally described as a machine, and it is corrupt

(15:38):
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 eighteen hundreds. The way this system works,

(15:58):
you might say, is a lot better than the way
the last system you, yeah, worked, right.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
He was beneficial. Let's bind this and yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
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 eighteen eighty four
he was elected to the Democratic Club of his ward,
and in eighteen eighty six he and a group of
allies took power in the ward and elected Patrick Joseph

(16:28):
to the State Senate. This is better than Irish people
who had been able to do in the generation previously, right,
But it's kind of going to be the top of
where he's able to reach to, Like, there's this isiing
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,

(16:49):
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. You know,
he's not rich the way there're going to be a
generation later. But the Kennedy's are very comfortable at this
point in time, and Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the
greasy poll of Democratic Party politics state legislator is as

(17:10):
high as he's going to rise. But you know 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 upity Irish kid. But PJ succeeds
in building an army of loyal goons at the local level.
In eighteen ninety eight, he launched an ambitious attempt to

(17:31):
oust his rival, Martin Lomasney for control of the city
democratic nominating process. And 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

(17:52):
for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession
and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in ahearse that's.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Wild, right, Yeah, the by gone days. Honestly, gotta try something.
Doesn't seem than.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
How it shit's working now, you know, maybe we could
have a little bit more slapstick elements.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
Comedy of errors in their politics.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, it's worth it's worth a try, Cody. That's That's
where I'm gonna land now. This Collier in 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 it there's often multiple stories about what happens

(18:43):
with the Kennedy's, and it usually believes the most salacious version.
Right that said, there's also it includes just a lot
of interviews with Kennedy's who were in and arout like
members of the family. And so you even with these
things that are when they're very when they're sources, people
will question our issues with you can't just discard them
because sometimes like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave

(19:04):
his side of events, right, and like 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
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, yeah, you want the the you want the clicks.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah exactly. Like that's what we're doing here, right, We're
all getting clicks from the Kennedy. It's the Kennedy industrial Complex.
Gobble up your salacious crumbs. Yeah yeah, Wow, what a
great Star Wars reference cody for you somewhere. George Lucas
just got like a little trigger of dopamine into the
bath for him, continued editing his cut of Redtails three,

(19:43):
which no one but him and his two friends. Yeah,
of course I'll watch. I would watch any of the
movies that that George Lucas is producing for no one
but him and his friends. It's crazy man branch. Yeah,
let's let's do. Let's do. Let's do a mission impossible

(20:06):
to break into the George Lucas ranch.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, watches terrible movies.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, well, this is just 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 movies.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Some frame just like it.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
He built his own AI and recreated Jared leto independently
generational terror. So Patrick Joseph's story mostly isn't interesting to
us other than that he wound up topping out kind
of the highest level of power available to an Irish
immigrant son at this stage. He probably probably fair to
say he pushes how high someone like like no can do. Yeah, yeah,

(20:50):
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 eighteen eighty eight, 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

(21:12):
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

(21:33):
sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph and honestly, those are
the two most Irish names I can conceive of.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, if I had to rank them, she's right.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, but I'm not going to do the accent. But
hearing I hear both of those names and an Irish
accent in my head.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
One half the other. Yeah, really not really moving the
needle munch there.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, ah, yeah, nobody's gonna think Joseph Patrick's and irishman
not a very c but yeah, yeah, I don't really
know how much that worked for you. Horowitzen Collier, right.
She was proud of the status in the community that
Pj's political activity brought, you know where that for proper people,
the Bostonians had moved away from the Irish is of

(22:13):
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 one hundred and twenty eight guys.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
Oh yeah, Oh that's gold.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
That's the good stuff. That's just the good stuff. That's
that good Old timy got one and twenty.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
I go out and participated in democracy as many Again.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
I feel kind of similarly about democracy these days that
I do towards sports, where it's like, can't just let
them take all the all the crazy drugs they want.
Let's see who can be the best at drugs. Yeah,
let everybody cheats. Who's the best at cheating? Just go
for it? Why not give them all knives?

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Fuck it? Yeah, with the knife party now.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Yeah, nobody wants to get inside the Knife Party convention.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Dangerous place, it wasn't there's two knives, Yeah, too many knives.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
That's not that far off from the fact that at
the r n C and the soft zone around it,
guns are legal, but hard sighted water bottles are not,
nor are soup cans.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Or tennis balls.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
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?

Speaker 2 (23:49):
That makes no sense?

Speaker 1 (23:51):
You just explain what. Yeah, 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 going to be a fun convention. Yeah,
speaking of bombs, these products are the bomb. We are back,

(24:14):
my friends. We had returned to the podcast where we
talk about Bobby Kennedy, but first we're going to talk
about Young Joe Kennedy. Mighty Joe Kennedy Young. We can
infer that he grew. 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 the heart.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Exactly the people. The people are clamoring for more Mighty
Joe Young references.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
That's right, that's right, Thank god, we're going to give
it to him. This is going to be what saves
content from AI. Honestly, there's not enough Mighty Joe Young
and everyone's online discussions for the AI to make a
good joke about it. They don't even know what it was,
you know, to get AI to talk about Hoody and

(25:00):
the Blowfish. What's it gonna do. There's like three comments
about that shit on the modern Internet anyway, Sorry Hoody,
not sorry to the Blowfish.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
No, no, no, they know what they did.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
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 it's
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, Yeah, Yeah, It's not

(25:32):
like a lot for his time. It's not a weird
amount for his time, but it's not a nun right,
it's not a zero involvement in organized.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Crime at least plus one.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
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 has cared for nurses and maids and
butlers and cooks as a little kid, as a baby,
as a young man, his dad perch is a sixty
foot yacht that they have like a guy whose job

(26:04):
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 uniformed delivery driver for
a fancy hat company. He did other old timey jobs too.
Joe Kennedy has all of the old timey jobs. He

(26:25):
sells candy on the street. Well, he works as a newsboy,
and he's this is my favorite. He has a part
time job is what's called a sabbath goy, which goy
is a term for gentile for like create like a
Jewish term for or I think Kiddish 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

(26:47):
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, which is
my favorite kind of religion.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
Oh, just like Hier Kennedy.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, hired to Kennedy. There's 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.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
You, Maybe it's you.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
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 help
get you get him on drugs.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
Look 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,
a little bit of hand herowin, you know, or close it.
Either way, do something different, do something different to their

(28:07):
minds is the important part. 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 have wound up a very different person. Because
in addition to trying to start all these small businesses,
he directs plays in the family yard, and he like

(28:29):
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 the yeah, which is
interesting and for an idea. One of his productions features
him in an Uncle Sam costume reading essays with titles

(28:50):
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 that boy Childhood.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
It's like it's like a theater kid, but like with
like real sinister yeah, like just this like an adult
and a child just like, yeah, I'm gonna write play
like you're not.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
Like this one's imagination. Yeah, yes, yes.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
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. You want the Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
You want to be the center of it. Right, and yeah,
one 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 narciss 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,

(29:47):
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
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.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
He's supposed to do everything. Yeah, odd name it's a
good band name.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Actually good band name, yeah for sure. Yeah, solid band name. Yeah.
I want you to make an ass out of you.
And I don't know, I don't know that that joke existed. Man,
maybe creative, I don't think. Yeah, But it's really kind
of a very strange name. I think it's it's got
to be that there's that like Babylonian joke, the first
record of like an actual structured joke that like the

(30:34):
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, we get that it
was supposed to be a joke. I had this experience.
I watched a nineteen eighty three live stand up performance
with Robin Williams the other night, and I hadn't seen
him live for a while. In the first like ten
minutes or so, because both like the quality of the

(30:56):
video and because like some of the style of stand
up 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 stand up set I've seen in my life.
And I was like, oh no, he was. He is
as good as I remember. There's just some bits in

(31:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Of course, it's amazing stuff. Yeah, that's a moment you're experiencing.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
Yeah, it's a moment. And also like we have lost
the technology to have a man beyond as much cocaine
as nineteen eighty three Robin Williams says, you just can't do. So, 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

(32:03):
Collier in 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

(32:23):
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 dynastic. Right,
he is the patriarch of what the Kennedy's become and why.
I mean, you could say his dad was the one
who starred them in politics, but it's Joe that makes

(32:45):
them their fortune. And it's Joe who you know, is
the guy who makes.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Or does right, Like his dad was like, oh, like yeah,
kind of slowly got involved, was like I want to
do a politics. I want to be the captain of
the world.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yes, right, right, And Joe is whatever else you want
to 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
ay 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 uh,

(33:23):
he's capable. He's incredibly good at everything he puts his
hand to, monstrous things. But he's also just like, no
one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be.
RFK might have wound up that way, if you know,
the thing that happened hadn't happened, But like JFK really isn't,
you know, Like JFK is to a significant extent supported

(33:43):
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 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

(34:08):
the first era in which this is happening, and the
Kennedy's are kind of wealthy. Right, So he grows up
egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own
in 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 succeeds.
I think, because things are going to get a lot

(34:30):
more deranged after this point, right, I don't fully know why,
but that's kind of my read.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, I mean the pressure that we've talked about so
far is one aspect of it. But then like you
just add like, oh, yeah, you're also growing up wealthy
end of story.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, at a certain point, it's like making
copies of clones or whatever. You've just like introduced too
many transcription errors that.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Have gotten a multiple situation.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah, yeah, it's exactly. It's the multiplay. He is actually
inspired by the Kennedy family.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
True.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
So Joe does well enough that with some of his
dad's money, he gets accepted to Harvard, where one classmate
said he quotes 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 this is shocking because he's
going to be one of the most successful bankers of

(35:25):
all time. So I kind of think Harvard might just
suck as a school because he's clearly not bad at this.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
He's also like at that point, like organized so many
different things and like, yeah, been able, like you're saying,
like very capable of the manager, like all the things.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, this might 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 at Kennedy. I think

(36:02):
that's why fitz Gerald comes into the family. Joe becomes
a banker. Long story short, again, this is not we
could actually maybe will 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

(36:23):
corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part
of the political process in the period, right there's.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
No zero before he got some stuff on you, You've got.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
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
twenty five. His goal at this point is to become
a millionaire by age thirty five, which is a sign
of how modest his ambitions were compared to where they

(36:52):
were end up would end up. And for an idea
of that, he dies worth at least like half a
billion dollars, you know, he's extraordinarily well, like half a
billion dollars, and we're talking a while ago. He passes
in like seventy sixty nine something like that, so like
that's a lot more money.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
He became a billionaire.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
Base yeah, yeah, e fact, yeah, for all intents purses.
Right now, there are again persistent allegations that he was
heavily involved in bootlegging and more serious crimes during the
prohibition years. Years. I don't think this is true that
he's like a bootlegger 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

(37:32):
are involved in. His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have
found no hard or even very soft evidence of like
bootlegging and 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.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
I just can't.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, yeah, speaking of not being involved in bootlegging, I
can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging.
No hard evidence, no hard evidence, no proof. You know,
a lot of allegations, all make some of them, but
no proof. Ah, we're back. So most of these allegations

(38:11):
of bootlegging and really serious criminal involvement from Joe don't
crop up until the late sixties, so they're part of
the mythos around the Kennedy assassinations.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
As this article for history dot 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. NASA doesn't believe these stories, mostly
because Richard Nixon, when he was running against JFK in

(38:44):
nineteen sixty hired a team of opposition researchers to investigate
the Kennedy clan. They found all sorts of dirt on
Joe Kennedy, says Nasau, but not that he was a bootlegger.
And I think that's a fair way to listen out.
I was 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

(39:06):
aren't doing some crimes. Right, But he's not running rum
because why would he be, right, what's the Yeah, where
does that get Joe? Yeah, so where he does make
his fortune is as shady as bootlegging. Hollywood, and again,
Hollywood in the twenties is also very organized crime. A
lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as

(39:27):
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,
Like that's that's how a big chunk of this industry
gets its start. Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and

(39:47):
he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now
call b movies. Nasau thinks this is where a huge
amount of his early money comes from, right, And he's
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 and stock options,
and he is really good at manipulating stock prices.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Right, Yeah, we love to do that.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
We love we love to do.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
That's making fake money.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
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, right, 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 nineteen
twenty nine crash coming and he sells off basically everything

(40:34):
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 short in America.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
That's so darkly poetic.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
Yeah, nice work, he can get it. Yeah, you know,
maybe I'll do something like that for this fucking election,
to throw all my money on RFK.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
I mean, where there's some there's there's a way to
bet against America that will make share so much money.

Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, Yeah, there's a certain kind of betting on America
that will always work. The trouble is figuring out in
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

(41:35):
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's influential in politics. He becomes a powerful man, but
he doesn't like get elected places. That's not really how

(41:58):
he makes his way in. And so as he starts
having kids in the early nineteen hundreds, 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
to I want the Kennedys are going to run this
fucking country.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
That's so much like, yeah, like I did better than
my dad, and you're gonna do better than me. Also,
I'm worth five hundred million dollars.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yes, it's the it's the difference because like, the healthy
version of that is like I want my kid to
be like happier than me, to have ID which is
the whole reason why we have civilization. Right, everybody, basically
everybody 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 going to be held

(42:47):
a pack.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
And like do better, you know, in a like a
warp sort of like whatever your personal idea of success is, yeah,
in which case is running everything, running everything right, capital right,
because if you're not the captain, there's not worth.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, why fucking play if you're not the captain.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Right.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
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 border 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.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
He's not charismatic or likable in the way that can
get you elected.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
Yeah, but he's he is a good man to have
doing a lot of nuts and bolt shit right. In
nineteen thirty four, FDR appoints him to be the first
head of the SEC. He is the first Security's inn
Exchange commission guy we have and it's the guy that's
short extended. He wasn't technically doing crimes, but it was legal,
then mother was legal.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Then that's gone so much.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
Post Man's great yeah, he love to say it. His
final reward is a cushy gig as US Ambassador to
Great Britain kind of as at the last you know,
a couple of years, Like it's like thirty eight to forty,
so it's like in that last period, right as a
World War two starts, and the reason why he has
to stop being the US Ambassador to Great Britain is

(44:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Great man, you can't say stuff like that, and you can.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
He thought he was almost able to. Yeah, a couple
of things had broken different, you might have 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.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, that's that party.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
We love when people get disgraced for saying things like that. Yeah,
it's good.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
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 going to be very welcome on the island
much longer. Reading a room might be why he didn't
wasn't good at getting elected.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, seems like maybe he didn't read wind. Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah. So he's his first son, the first of the
Kennedy boys, Joe Junior, was born in nineteen fifteen, 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, and to do that you have to
like make a name for yourself and extend sort of

(45:25):
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 bs to compete
as kids whenever they're like swimming, when they're playing like
football in the yard, when they're doing it, like they're
constantly in competition with each other, and Joe is constantly

(45:45):
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 Two breaks out, this competition extends to wartime service.

(46:06):
The elder Kennedy Boys, which came to include John F.
Kennedy in nineteen seventeen 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 one oh nine story, but his ship goes down.
There's I think a lot of people argue because of

(46:27):
mistakes that he and others made right that like they
fucked up, which is why this happened in the first place.
But he does legitimately help get a lot of the
survivors out, like in a way that is heroic, and
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. Liker.

(46:48):
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

(47:08):
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 twenty missions
you have to fly, and at that point you can stop,
right because it's so dangerous, like once you've redid. Yeah,
But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough.

(47:29):
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.

(47:49):
But you can already see this competition legacy thing is
getting the.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
First kill killed, yes, yes, God, especially like after like
your Dad's like, I don't know the Nazis are aren't
so bad.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
Right, and that maybe that's part of why they have
to go in so hard for like World War Two.
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 there's debate over aspects of this,
but that is what happens. Joe goes down and thus

(48:31):
JFK is going to become the first and so far
only Kennedy president. His brother and I'm YadA YadA ying
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 like
involved in the Lavender scare, but he kind of gets

(48:52):
edged out because Roy Cohne, who like doesn't like him.
He and Roy Cohne kind of are like enemies in it,
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 going to be a congressman after that,

(49:16):
but it's during this brief era where his brother is
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

(49:37):
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's probably going to become president.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
There's not a lot of people who doubt that even
at the time. He is that kind of and he
does his again, he like wiretaps Martin Luther King Junior.
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 going to be president next. The American economy is

(50:11):
like half of the world economy. Of course, people remember
this is a golden age, you know, yeah, I know.
And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like
two years something like that. You know, it's times not
a long period, you know. So and again, but this
is the period that that RFK Junior, our RFK junior,
the subject of these episodes, is going to have his

(50:32):
first memories. And Robert Francis Kennedy Junior was born on
January seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in the Georgetown University Hospital.
His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy
Scackle family, also part of the budding US aristocracy. This
part gets left out a lot in the histories, but

(50:53):
rfk's wife is Ethel Kennedy originally Ethel Skakel, and they're
they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type, you know,
the quiver FLEs like 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 your
trip doctors in power. Ethel and RFK believe that, but

(51:16):
just for themselves, Like not everyone should do this, but
we are going to have all of the children possible
so that we can we can flood the government with
Kennedy's who will take control of the levels of power.
They have eleven 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

(51:38):
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 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 you can be part of the Kennedy greatness by

(52:00):
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, her whole
thing is I'm in a birth an aristocracy all on
my own. RFK Junior from a very young age. The
primary thing everyone knows about him is that he is

(52:22):
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. Meethel claimed that as
a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs hees crawling
in the garden before he is ten. He has a
whole menagerie, a swarm of pets, and some of these

(52:44):
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 Junior Robert F. Kennedy Junior and the
Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I
do not like, tells this story. The two thousand and

(53:05):
eight 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 a poet
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.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Oh that's I mean, this is.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
More like it's hard not to like having do it.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
A Snakes on a play just like liking animals A lot.
I dig that he posted a video the other day
of just like I found this weird lizard, and he
explained what it was and like what it did, and
he just seems to That's.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
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 you know, months of
his life with native tribes and the Amazon and shit.
Like he again, it's not weird that he got a worm.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
In his brain.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
Oh yeah, No, a lot of his life in the
wild eating bush.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Meat, yeah, and dougs and dogs.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Yeah for sure. Yeah, probably where he.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
Got that brain worm. Very very unsurprising that they had
a worm part of his brain, Yeah, allegedly.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah. There are some mysteries about RFK Junior. That's not
one of salves 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, but I will make
again he starts he's making snakes on a plane. Comparisons
the RFK Junior book. I've got part of why I

(54:41):
like it is it it's published before he's a political figure.
It comes out in twenty fifteen, so it is not
tainted by everything that's happening now, right, 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. Talk about
that later, and like you can even see some of

(55:03):
like the bullshit where he's like probably female passengers screamed
and jumped up onto their seating. Well know what said that?
You just you just want it to be more like
snakes on the plane than maybe it was.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Right, Yeah, and that passage like did ping me. I
was like, wait, yes, yeah it should. He's basic.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Yah, 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 ship that we get from it that we
don't get anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
Yeah, I mean it's the first part of the story
is true. Great, thanks for telling me that. He right,
he probably did. Look, he's not I don't think Oppenheimer
makes shit up.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
I think he's just.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Like, yeah, this says your suject right.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Right right, So yeah. While modern quiverful families have shitloaded
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 r. FK
Junior is eight, everyone knows RFK is going to be
the president when John has done in office, and you know,

(56:04):
no one's really sure about Teddy, but it seems like,
you know, he's probably gonna winde up. And obviously Teddy
Kennedy is an incredibly successful politician. If a certain thing
that we'll talk about later hadn't happened, he might have
been the president. It is not unrealistic in this period
where RFK Junior is making his earliest memories, to expect
the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in

(56:25):
a row. It's not wild at that point to think
we might have twenty four straight years Kennedy's 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 Junior
and his generation of Kennedy's because everyone knows if they're
not going to be president, they'll probably be in Congress.

(56:47):
Some of them might be judges, you know, someone 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 grow up under
an insane microscope, the degree of and it's a pressure
that was completely absent from Joe Kennedy and from JFK
and RFK. Right, they have the pressure off you need
to be president, but there's not the amount of spotlight.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
All the public perception pressure. It's just like within the family,
you have your dad telling you got to do this,
and now the world is saying and you're going to.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah, And all of you are going to we're all
expecting that yes. And I want to quote now from
the book The Kennedys by Collier in 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 goked back at the tourists who
peeked through the hedges at Hayannas. They scooped up sand

(57:43):
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 Kennedy shop? For a quarter? Apiece asked
what it meant to be a Kennedy. Bobby's son David
had once replied and means that we're exactly the same
as if everybody else, except better. Things are going well

(58:07):
with these kids.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
Yeah, people should be raised.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah, I'm going to continue that quote. They competed with
other children in swim meets and sailing contests, succeeding so
well that Haannisport 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

(58:34):
the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his
or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age
orability 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

(58:57):
to recapture the achieved greatness that had once belonged to
the family. As Chris Lawford said later, we were all,
every one of us raised to be president.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
So that's great.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
That's cool.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Good way to raise kids.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
And they all turned out normal.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Yeah, and they all turned out normal. Speaking of normal,
one story RFK Junior 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.

(59:32):
And this picture is going to be one of the
few artifacts to tie RFK Junior 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,
winds up better than all of the kids.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Yeah, considering salamander wise.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
Yes, salamander wise, that's a very sick salamander. Lots of
salamander kids like you gotta wind up? What's even there
for a salamander? After the White House found and I
don't know how you move up for that salamander. You
know it was a fountain. I guess maybe they became
salamander artists. You know, there's a bunch of salamanders living
in fucking Dimes Square in New York right now with podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Who knows, oh how the salamander has fallen.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
A great upside from the kind of 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 it
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.

(01:00:49):
You know, RFK Junior, because he likes animals, gets regular
safaris to Africa, and he is on safari when JFK
is gunned down by Merenard Montgomery sand there's one cold
November day. This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an
understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt. Within quote,
Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and

(01:01:10):
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 din of Bobby's own Hickory Hill like a

(01:01:32):
state in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco.
She's such a taking an endured dangered turtle.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Hog with him.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
How he's like eight or nine. Kennedy dies to be
to be importing in dangered turtles.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
Sergeant like uncle.

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Like what sergeant Shrever is his name? Yeah? Yeah, this
is this is fucking what's her name? I forget her?
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

(01:02:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
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 she is both a major purveyor of the Camelot
myths and people will say Jackie Kennedy kind of creates it.

(01:02:44):
But she also kind of bounces from being in the
family after this, which, like, I don't blame her again,
it seems like it's the healthiest thing for you get
your family. It seems like a boundary setting to me. Yeah,
I thinkio NASAs might just have had a really good
head on her shoulders. But this does mean that now

(01:03:05):
the entire weight of the family's dreams are on R.
FK and Ethel Kennedy. You know, with the most glorious
Kennedy out of the picture, the family legacy suddenly feels
in doubt too. There's suddenly a questioned like, are we
going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of
the presidency? Are we all going to go on to
be the people who run this country? Right? And in

(01:03:26):
short order, the older Kennedys have to because Robert Kennedy
kind of reorganizes the family, you know, in order to hey,
we still have we still got a lot of Kennedy's
in the game. There's Teddy you know, fifty of us
right right, Yeah, we got plenty. We can take a
few more bulletsy in. Yeah, so they you know, the

(01:03:47):
older Kennedy's also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations.
Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from Saint Luke,
to whom much is given, much will be required, and
Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
This with great America has been very good.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
To the Kennedy's, we all owe the country a debt
of gratitude and public service. Right, this is a no
less obliged thing. Right. We're the people who've benefited most
from the 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 as opposed to like,
well we should run things.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
We should have the power to give back well.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
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 will you got to 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 urfk.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Guilt even though other people killed.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
Yeah, yep, yep, that is what's coming. In a second,
so our FK junior 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

(01:05:06):
an all white school. Huh, that's kind of bad. I mean,
that's yeah, classic fair fair. I don't think the media
is wrong to point that out, and the Kennedy's 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

(01:05:27):
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 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

(01:05:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Shit staying problems. Yeah, exactly right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:58):
For being problems. Now RFK, because of what's about to happen,
gets kind of sainted, and Ethel is going to be
like 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

(01:06:20):
of this is that they're always away, right, They are
campaigning constantly. RFK has his congressional campaigns, He's going to
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,

(01:06:40):
loves having Cody so many affairs like there's the like honestly,
if there was an Olympics and how many people you
could cheat on your wife with. RFK is like a
solid contender. You know he could have he could yeah,
he could have won the gold Yeah, fucking so, you know,
while they're doing this, and I don't actually know this

(01:07:02):
may have been that, 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 underslike, that's what is. I'm the wife
of a powerful woman and I get these benefits from it,
and are a powerful man and I get all these
benefits from it. But he is going to fuck around constantly.
We will we will just never talk about it. I'll

(01:07:24):
be angry about it forever. But oh, we never talk
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
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

(01:07:49):
the failings he has as a living person. You know,
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 check
book and he kind of indulges his son, Bobby Kennedy

(01:08:12):
Bobby Junior's passions by paying for them. Right, That's how
RFK kind of raises RFK juniors. Whatever you're into, I've
got I've got plenty of money. I have no time
for you, but I have money. And as a result,
r FK Junior gets into falconry as an eleven year old.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Sure, sure, why not?

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
Why not give a falcon.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
He'll be fine.

Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
I do love all of the fucking yeats references to
RFK Junior. We do have a falconer. You know, we've
got a falconer in this election. Can the falcon hear him?
I don't know. Gyre seems to be widening horowitzon Collier
right quote. His father had commissioned naturalists from the Bronx
Zoo to make him a walk interrarium for his thirteenth birthday.

(01:08:56):
He had encouraged the interest in falconry, although admitting to
his son that he was just sturbed by the implications
of feeding pigeons to the predators. The two of them
worked out a compromise the 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 boy's range of interests, Bobby Senior had
once remarked that Bobby Junior was just like the President. Unfortunately,

(01:09:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:09:35):
They enjoyed being famous and powerful at private school, RFK
Junior reinforced his reputation as the poster child for what
we now call EIGHTYHD. One classmate later noted, he could
climb straight up the wall like ten 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

(01:09:57):
no fear. He climbed up that wall like he was man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
That's that's good for him. Yeah, is like literally the
great power, great responsibility quote from earlier. Yeah, it's just
that's he's just he's a spider man.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
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 our FKG. Yeah, like it's he really literally running No.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
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 uh exotic turtle. Like,
if you're breaking the rules, you're not gonna want to
follow the rules.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
So I don't even know if you call it breaking
the rules. There's note even a concept in his head
that there are rules for him exactly, you know, right right, Yeah,
his mom wanted him to join the football team at
the at the Fancy of Millbrook at this point, private
school that he's at. But r f K Junior is
not a great football guy. He is actually not like

(01:11:00):
a jock character like he would imagine you think a
boy like Clone High their JFK. They have him portrayed
as like the football captain brotheran JFK had that public
personality at least. RFK Junior 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

(01:11:21):
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 here convertible, would arrive to pick
up Bobby and his brother Joe, and then someone would

(01:11:42):
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 litter because of all
of the wild animals yeah, right, yeah. But then on

(01:12:06):
June fifth, nineteen sixty eight, 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 Sir Hans Sirhan, who's
officially the gunman, had rather done it. I have my
own theories about a certain mister Sanders, but we don't
need to get into that today, right, I will say

(01:12:27):
RFK Junior subscribes to these theories. He does not believe
it's last I checked. He doesn't think that Sir Hans
Sirhan is who killed his dad, right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
Oh yeah, no, he's very Yeah, he's got.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
And like like like with any Kennedy I kind of
feel about Kennedy conspiracy theories the way I do. With
this election. People will say, like, oh, so and so
is definitely gonna win or definitely not. It's impossible. No,
neither of them has less than a thirty percent chance
of winning. And like every Kennedy conspiracy theory, twenty percent chances, right,
twenty percent chance it wasn't, sir. I'll give it. I'll
give it that, you know, it's not my odds on bet,

(01:12:59):
but there's a lot of shady ship that went down,
and I'm not I'm not, you know, gonta rule anything
out entirely here, But that doesn't really matter. It does
matter that RFK Junior 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 going to be the same. And

(01:13:19):
we're going to talk about all of that. Cody in
part Dukes ah mm hm, Cody, Hi, Shody pluggable Yo.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Yody, Yeah, I got some plugs to plug. Check out
Some More News. It's on YouTube, uh and we've got
a Patreon dot com slash Some More News. Even More
News is a podcast we also do. Sometimes you do
a podcast called way Less News because who wants to
talk about the news?

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Absolutely no one anymore Nobody.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Check in. My band's called the Hot Shapes. We've got
an album called Laverne. It's on band camp and SoundCloud.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
You should have called him The Assumptions. Cody, Uh, I M.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
Now I might start another band called the Assumptions.

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
Who knows it's an RFK Deep or Joe Kennedy Deep Cut.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah yeah, check all that stuff out.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
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,
you know, knock on wood, Cody, knock on every.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
Band that lost a member that in the supergroup that
is like anti vax supergroup. I'll replace whomever or the other, you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Know what, you know what, I think we finally need
to merge the surviving members of Lincoln Park with all
of the non crazy members of the Mighty Mighty boss Tones.
Is that going to make good music? There's not a
chance in hell. Absolutely not need animal in any way.
But I want to hear that album.

Speaker 2 (01:14:42):
You know, it's called Novelty Music and I love.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
It anyway, Go to Hell. I Love You. Behind the
Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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