Part Two: The RFK Jr. Episodes

Robert and Cody continue the epic tale of Bobby Kennedy Jr, falconer and rotting animal carcass connoisseur.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh god, yeah, it's Behind the Bastards, the only podcast
that just made you reconsider listening to this podcast, because
that's not an appropriate sound to make for a bunch
of people driving to work gardening with their kids in
the yard. You know, I apologize for that. We're not

(00:25):
going to go back. You can't edit audio, you know,
it's impossible. You know, if if that dream were real,
if you could, by god, we would change this podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Oh my god, if only there's there's so many things
would be different if we could edit audio and video.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
What's exciting, Robert is that we may or may not
release video at some point at an undisclosed time, maybe
maybe not allegedly, who knows.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
So we can edit that.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Finally, the listeners will get to see Cody and I
make faces. Maybe that were.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Maybe maybe include those were really just just some honest reactions.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I really enjoyed Cody's Sayce, that's what I was saying, Yeah, yeah,
or maybe we'll all get to hm. I don't want
to make any of those jokes. Let's move on, Cody,
how are we feeling about Bobby Kennedy? You know, as
we as we roll in depart two right now, he's
not a bad guy, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
My feeling is that he never had a chance.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah right, that is the Bastardrey here is primarily not
because again he is admitted to sexually basically admitted to
sexually assaulting people. So I'm not trying to whitewash rfkguni'or either,
but like, the primary bastard of the story is the
concept of the Kennesty dynasty and what it does.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah, not good, no good, never had a chance, really bad.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Really bad. Just the it's like if you if it's
like scientists in the lab, we're trying to cook up
the worst way to raise people. I just watched the
movie They Cloned Tyrone, which is I don't want to
like spoil it for you, but excellent excellent, really really
really really good movie, and the Kennedys kind of feel

(02:10):
like the reverse of that premise. If instead of, you know,
I don't know how to say, this is going to bed,
but it's like somebody, it's like a bunch of creepy
scientists we're trying to like design a ruling dynasty in
a lab and just completely fucked up at it, you know,
like the experiment did not work.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Or like a more ambitious like dog tooth.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Let's just like raise our kids in the most like
fucked up way possible.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, yeah, I think about like those those like those
fucking nerds who keep winding up in the media. Every
like three months, the news will decide, let's have a
little circus around these, like we have to have as
many kids as possible because we're exceptionally smart people, and yeah,
we've got to. We have a responsibility. And I hit
my kids, but for science reasons, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
And then you ask them for the science reasons and
they're like, I saw a tiger do it once.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
There kids, Man, what else do you when they get sick?
Do you eat your young because I have seen a
cat do that. I have seen it eat its own
kittens because the kitten was ill. Are you doing that?
Are you going to eat your sick kids so that
predators don't smell them? You know, No, you're not doing
that because we don't take parenting advice from tigers.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Data points from tigers. H We're never gonna this is
I mean, I last episode, I kept wanting to like
bring them up because this is just that, or we
got to as many as possible. Our army is being
created by us, and there our children.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
All I hope, and I again, this is the not
to whitewash RFK Junior. But I actually walked away, very
rare for me. But I walked away more sympathetic towards
him than I was, because it's just not again not
that he he doesn't have agency and the bad things
he's done. But my god, how could this story have ended?

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well? Well, yeah, I mean it's the you know, it's
how you create empathy for like villains in stories like well,
if you know their backstory, then you stand how they
got that way. It doesn't excuse their actions at that point,
but yeah, you're like, oh man.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, it honestly makes them scarier. And you know, I
talk about like the sympathetic young Hitler a lot, but
like another young Hitler story is when he was a
young man living independently as like a poor artist in Vienna.
He was kept afloat by his dad's old government pension,
which he gave up which rendered him completely destinut because
his sister had a kid and she needed the money.

(04:28):
More you can you can find in the Hitler story
a truly selfless act because he wasn't always destined to
be fucking Hitler, and you kind of have to accept
that with most of them.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
No one's destined to be.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
There's some five year olds out there torturing cats and stuff.
Maybe those people, right, Maybe, maybe it happens occasionally, but
that's not the story we're talking about today for sure. No,
he loves animals, Yeah, he loves them. He did maybe
kill that endangered turtle, but you know, someone just stopped him.
That was the adults. And at this point Sergeant Schreiver

(05:00):
shouldn't have let him steal it. Endangered turtle.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
Probably shouldn't let him do that. Maybe that was maybe
that was the start, maybe the start of it all.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
It's just like, well, you know, your uncle Jess died.
Sure abduct come.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
On, here you go.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
He's got plenty of them. Yeah, speaking of things Africa,
it's got a lot of probably podcasts cold opens, and
this podcast cold Open is done.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
It's time to warm it up.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Wasn't a great cody.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Band. If you send me that audio file, I will
turn that into a hit. Yeah, he's already a hit.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
You can turn that into a hit. Along with that
clip we found of Rush Limbaugh saying, bust female vaginal walls. Cody,
that's a great one. It's in the Doctor Laura episodes.
You gonna love it, really good stuff, really good.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Actually you love it.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
It's really horrible thing to hear.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
On the day his dad died, Bobby Junior was at
his boarding school, Georgetown Prep, which was run by Jesuits
and had a reputation for being one of those places
you sent rich boys to turn them into responsible members
of the power elite. Bobby was sleeping in his dorm
room when his dad was assassinated and was woken by

(06:20):
one of the one of the fathers or whatever. I
don't know if it's a father, if it's like more
of a monk type deal. But one of the Jesuits
guys comes down and is like, hey, a chartered car
has come for you in the night. I'm not gonna
explain why, but you probably you're a Kennedy at this
point you probably can have say a bad thing happened.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
The pattern is establishing itself.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, So he is taken to the Kennedy compound at
Hickory Hill. The whole experience is obviously his dad got
shot to death. Right, that's traumatic. You know, there's no
way for that not to be traumatic. Bobby and his
siblings are ushered in to see their father before, like
while he's still technically alive. But like, and that's like
a hitty. I don't know, I don't know. I can't

(07:02):
say that's the wrong thing to do, yeah, or a right.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Thing, but like what condition, Like how how responsive is he?
Is That going to be more traumatic?

Speaker 2 (07:11):
But still seeing him at some point where he's technically
alived is that, I don't know, everyone's different. What definitely
does not help is that this whole period, every moment
of this where they're outside the compound and outside of
that hospital room, they're surrounded by press right to an
extent that like even today is probably pretty rare, right, Like,
the sheer degree of attention on them is has to

(07:34):
make this even harder to handle, right than just having
your dad shot to death in public? They are subjected
to a massive public show of mourning at the funeral
of their dad. There's like a hobo march for RFK
because he was such like a so beloved by so
many like poor and struggling people, right like he really is.
And again you can. We can argue, like how fair

(07:55):
is it? There's some bad stuff he did, but like
that that love is real, you know, and that contributes
to how RFK Junior and his siblings are processing all
of this. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's moms kind of collapses after
her husband gets murdered. And I have a lot of
criticisms of Ethyl, but like, again, you got eleven kids
and your husband gets shot to death. Sure, I mean,

(08:19):
like what do you who?

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Like, what are you gonna do? Like it's so easy
to judge how people react to these sort of things, but.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
What's the good reaction? It's not what she did, But
I can't say that like I would have done better
as Ethyl, you know. The big change, the biggest difference
between how the Kennedy family as a unit reacts to
JFK getting shot. I was gonna say JFK getting blown away?
But how many How any more Billy Joel references are
necessary in this episode? Probably one more, but maybe not

(08:46):
that one.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Only one more.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
But there's a big difference between how the family reacts
to JFK getting killed and to RFK getting killed. Because
when JFK gets killed, RFK is there and he is
there to re mold the family around him and make
them feel like we still have a pretty bright future.
We're going to move forward. That's not there after he dies,
right Teddy Kennedy is kind of the family patriarch at

(09:10):
this point, and he tries this is not Teddy will
become a more capable and responsible person. He is not
at this point. So we will talk about and like,
you know, to a little bit of like like how
could he be? Like what what do you do here? Right?
Like you have had to the two patriarchs of the
family and like a two or three like not to

(09:31):
like but like within very shorter it's like a four
year period.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
It's a very short period.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, assassinated right Like.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
And at that point you're like, is are we all
going to get assassinated? Like what's like?

Speaker 2 (09:42):
What is if I'm Teddy? What I'm was like? Should
we keep doing this?

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Should like rich family plan?

Speaker 2 (09:49):
What is this? Seems like this might have been a
really bad plan?

Speaker 3 (09:52):
What are you doing? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (09:54):
One of the Kennedy cousins, who's you know in the
compound of the family later recalled to Horowitson Callier for
there it was so different from Jack's death, there had
been a coming together. Uncle Bobby had seen to that
in a strange way. We'd felt even more like Kennedy's
than ever, proud of what Jack had been, determined that
our time would come again. But once Uncle Bobby died,
there was just this sense of splitting apart. RFK Junior

(10:15):
was only an occasional presence at the Kennedy compound in
Hickory Hill at that point. Ethel kind one of the
ways she reacts to RFK getting killed is she is
kind of permanently angry at her son's like forever and
in a way that's really hard to forgive, and that
must have been devastating to them. The youngest children and

(10:35):
girls were, according to Colerin Horowitz, immune to her temper.
She's not shitty to her girls, she's not shitty to
the little kids, but she is really bad to Joe,
Bobby Junior, and David. Right quote, she told Joe he
must be the man of the house now and allowed
him to sit in his dead father's chair at the
dinner table. But when he hit his younger sister Carrie
for making noise, she gave him the infantile punishment of

(10:58):
having to walk up and down the stairs one hundred
times times. Later, Joe went into the yard and in
a moment of tenderness, took the hands of his younger
brothers and sisters and began to sing the Battle Hymn
of the Republic, their father's favorite song. Meanwhile, Ethel kept
saying to Bobby Junior and David get out of here,
as if the house itself, with all the pictures of
family triumphs, where a sanctuary. They defiled with their presence,

(11:18):
and you've got here is these kids are reacting to
their uncle and dad getting shot. These boys by acting out. Joe,
who's the oldest, is like being kind of a bully.
He hits his younger siblings a lot. You know, he
like tackles let me fire. But like that's not abnormal,
it's not great. It's certain something you got. You want
to deal with that behavior, you don't want to ignore it.
But like you're not a bad person as a twelve

(11:40):
year old boy something like that, because like that is
how you react.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
That's an indicator that he's dealing with something and going
through it. Not that like he needs to be like
the target of your ire and your Yeah, like everything
that your feeling shouldn't be targeted at the at these kids.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
And Ethel's only response is your disgrace the family, Like,
how fucking dare you get the hell out of here?

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Right?

Speaker 2 (12:03):
That is her go to parenting move for the boys.
Bobby Junior also acts out constantly and his particular style
he's less violent, but he seems to think the best
way for him to get attention. And nobody's really got
time to give attention to Bobby Junior, right, he has
like servants and stuff. He gets like technically attention, but
not from the people he needs it from, right, And

(12:25):
he tries to get it by playing pranks.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
And he this is say yeah, it sounds like he
would do yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
He's a pranker, and he does one of these. He
plays a prank at his dad's memorial. So there's a
neighbor and friend of the family, Philip Kirby, who's like
this rich kid who lives nearby. He's part of the
memorial service for RFK and he recalls like before it starts,
the priest gives him a bell to ring during the liturgy,
and the priest says like, I'll touch you in the
shoulder when it's time for you to ring it right
so you don't time it wrong. And Bobby starts tapping

(12:53):
him randomly during the services a bit, so he rings
the bell when there's not supposed to be any kind
of music or noise. And like Kirby, this is like
the biggest funeral and national history at least since JFK.
He is like weeping in tears because he has fucked
this up. And he looks back and he sees RFK
Junior holding in laughter because it's a very little kid

(13:13):
thing to do. It is also on the mean side.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Oh yes, I mean if you're if you're a kid,
you're not going to really be able to Christ.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
You're not a moral actor in the same way.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Right right? But man, that yuy sorry Phillips, Oh man.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
The pranks continued. A week after his dad's funeral, David Kennedy,
the younger of the Kennedy of this generation Kennedy brothers,
has a birthday. This is obviously a fragile time for everybody,
the first birthday for one of Rfk's sons. After his death,
Bobby Junior decides the right thing to do is to
poison everybody, and I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote

(13:51):
from Bihacker for Jerry opp and iimer here Bobby had
spiked everyone's milk with a laxative. Infuriated, his mother demanded,
just leave home, get out of my life.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Choice, and I mean, aren't going well.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
It's very bad behavior to poison your family. You know,
there's certainly a punishment. That's now we can always tell
what kind of parents do get away with poisoning the family.
But get out of my life. What a devastating thing
to say to your child, after your after his data set.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
Yeah, right, at that point, it's like, I mean, just
let me get into politics and wait a few years
and I will, like.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Fucking he is. These boys are all abandonment issues. The
guy like that is that is the Kennedy boys of
this generation. Uh. Soon after, possibly to make up for
the ruined party, ethel flies the kids with Ted Kennedy
because again he's he's around a lot, he's kind of
in the sometimes trying to be a father. He's also
very young. He's a party boy. He is not mature

(14:51):
enough to be responsible, and like, really, it's kind of
unreasonable to expect a man of that is to suddenly
take on the duties of being the head of this
family of kids who aren't yours, who belong to your
murdered brother. That's a lot to ask of Ted. But
he doesn't do a great job at it, right, He
does seem to be trying very hard. Ethel takes them
all on this chartered boat ride. Right, And during this
chartered boat trip, Ethel's moods swung wildly and RFK Junior is,

(15:15):
as usual, pushing boundaries and fucking around with his siblings.
Ethel grew furious at him and David and dragged them
both below decks and beats them with a hair brush.
This is the first time something like this has happened.
I don't think she had been physically violent with them before.
It is a really like searing moment for OURFK Junior

(15:36):
and for David. Yeah, they remember it course. Yeah. And again,
you know, on Ethyl's side of things, it's not good
to do this. I might say that, like, yeah, you
can't expect any kind of perfectly rational behavior from a
woman in the situation, but this has.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
A horrible and beyond the pills.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, yeah, the beating. I think we've crossed the line
from just saying.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
So it wasn't it was the first time? Was it
the last time? Like? Did they become a pattern after that?
I don't think it's just like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
I don't get the impression that she is a present
enough parent for there who have been much many patterns
at all, other than she repeatedly tells them to leave,
get out of here. You're not welcome at home. That
is the big pattern, is her saying, get out of here.
You are no longer welcome at the family compound. You're
no longer welome. Like Bobby's gonna spend time like hiding out,
like camping and hiding and like outbuildings and stuff because

(16:27):
he's not supposed to be there. He spends a lot
of his childhood just like living with other families who
are kind of adjacent to the Kennedys. Yeah, it's it's
messed up, right.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
Not gonna be good.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah yeah. Ethel only expresses more and more frustration with
her kids. After this, She exiles Bobby Junior back to
a private school, this time a new one, a place
called Millbrook. And Millbrook is you're routched to rest of development,
right obviously you did? You know how? Like fucking Buster
is he went to that school Milford. Milford is a

(17:01):
parody of Millbrook, right, it could because this is the
place where like, not just the sons of the rich
and famous are sent, but it's the sons that are
having problems, right, You send them there to get disciplined
and to get like straightened out.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
One teacher described it as quote a place where they're
rich and famous would tuck their children away.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
If you're wondering what that was a reference to, it's
a reference to Millbrook. RFK Junior is just one of
what would become a long line of rich boys with
behavioral problems whose parents didn't want to deal with them
full time. And Millbrook is also located very near the
mansion where Timothy Leary kept all of his acid and
his friends on acid, and drugs are not hard to
come by for Millbrook kids. And it's this unique situation

(17:43):
of people don't really know about drugs. There's like a
vague understanding like maybe of marijuana, but even then that's
not very visible, and like LSD is so fucking new,
and so adults don't really know. They just noticed like, wow,
these kids are behaving really weird, and they don't really
notice that, Like, yeah, Bobby Kennedy is just always fucking
on drugs. Now, Like from this point forward, he is

(18:04):
always on drugs, you know. And it's funny because it
seems like at this point mostly it's pot Oppenheimer, because
he's going to wind up addicted to heroin. Oppenheimer treats
pot like heroin. And his biography of Bobby where he's
like and he was getting every day, And I was like, yeah,
he's fifteen, you know, Like I know a lot like
half of the people I know. I'm not saying you
should You shouldn't do drugs until you're older. Kids, Wait

(18:27):
a little, my opinion.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
You've brain developed and stuff and all that.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
How to say, ninety plus percent of people who smoke
pot when they're sixteen, fifteen, seventeen, Like it's fine, you know, yeah, Okay,
you'll be okay, people generally are. Bobby is not, though
I will say that, But I don't know that I'm
gonna blame the drugs. I think the drugs are more
a symptom of this kid's disastrous early life. Yeah, being

(18:51):
a Kennedy and having just lost his dad. None of
the adults at Millbrook seem to have known how to
handle him, Like, how do we discipline this kid. We're
kind of now marketing a lot on the fact that
a Kennedy goes here. It's kind of a selling point
to other rich families. So like there's no He kind
of comes and goes as he pleases, and he spends
most of his free time getting fucked up or hunting

(19:14):
small animals with his hawk. Morgan le Fay, his primary
hobby is taking acid and going hawking, like hunting with
his hawk.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
So he got to bring his hawk.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
He does get to bring his hawk. His hawk is
with him all the time. It is always in the room.
People who live with him is like roommates at these
boarding schools say that there are just birds shitting everywhere
all the time. Like if you are living with Bobby Kennedy,
there's bird shit everywhere constantly because he is never far
from his fucking bird. It's a weird guy. He loves
his a weird guy. During this period of time, there

(19:47):
is one adult who is a consistent presence in RFK
Junior's life, and it's a guy named Limb Billings. And uh,
we will talk about old Limb, but first Cody, speaking
of Billings. Yeah, get your billings from the companies that
support our podcast by sending them your money.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, I'm getting my money out right now.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, Limb those billings on over to them, you know,
lim them out. Limit to win it. Anyway, We're done.
Who's at.

Speaker 3 (20:20):
Back?

Speaker 2 (20:21):
So? Limb Billings was a former New York ad executive
who had been very deep friends. He's like JFK's oldest
friend and like so close that Joe Kennedy, who is
not like the most emotional man in the world, considers
Limb basically part of the family. Right, he has a
house or he has a room at the Kennedy compound. Right,
He's that close with the family. And he is also gay.

(20:43):
He is in love with JFK. There are a lot
of rumors that swirl around whether or not they had
any kind of physical relationship. I don't actually think there's
any evidence of it. It seems like the kind of
thing that was not uncommon with a lot of particularly
very prominent gay in back then. We're like, I am
in love with this person, and my love take the
form since there's no kind of relationship that's possible, maybe,
you know, obviously they're probably not actually interested in reciprocating

(21:06):
it that way, but I become basically like their closest confidant.
I'm always watching out for them. I'm the guy who is.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
Like, yeah, constant companion, constant buddy, who Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah. There's a movie I like to talk about a lot,
if Dot Dot Dot, which is the first Malcolm McDowell movie,
and the it's.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
A movie that's not the Imaginary Friends movie from the
twisted mind of John Krasinski. New that's called If as well.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
That's also called IF much worse movie. This If is
an absolutely like incredible piece of cinema that everyone should watch.
It is about a British boarding school. It's one of
my favorite films. And McDowell has said later that, like, yeah,
we didn't of the director. I didn't know at the
time that he was gay, but now I can see
that he was. And his way of like kind of

(21:54):
making love to me was the way that he shot
me right when he was filming me. You know, I
think about that one. I think of Limb.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Billings right, Yeah, yeah, well yeah, I just have that
it's like an intense like attraction admiration, but yeah, like
you can't express it in the way you want to,
so you find, yeah, like socially acceptable ways to.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Do exactly exactly, and that's kind of Lim. And Lim
is obviously absolutely shattered by the jfk assassination. Right like
this destroys him as a person. He starts drinking heavily.
He's never a really functional adult right after this point. Now,
depending on who you read, opinions on limb very Jerry Oppenheimer,
who published the twenty fifteen biography of RFK Junior, is

(22:31):
incredibly homophobic, and he I kept waiting for there to
be like some evidence that Lim had abused RFK Junior
had done something really bad, but like he really just
seems to want us to be shocked by the fact
that Lim was gay and see that as inherently sinister.
He also alleges that Lim enabled Bobby's drug use. From
what I have read in other sources, I kind of

(22:52):
think it was the opposite. Lim is never fully functional
after JFK dies. He becomes an alcoholic and when RFK
Junior starts doing drugs, Lim, as the adult in this situation,
doesn't stop him, and he should have, does not attempt
to limit his access to drugs at all, but he
starts doing them, and I don't think he's pushing RFK Junior.
I think he is just like, yeah, sure, why the

(23:12):
fuck not? Right right now? The fact that Lim is
gay and in love with Jack with JFK shouldn't be
totally dismissed though, not because he abused Bobby, but because
I think he may have put added pressure on him
to follow his uncle Jack. There's an allegation that I
think probably does have legs that he is kind of
trying to groom Bobby into being like JFK and kind

(23:33):
of for a sweet reason of he like he wants
his dead best friend back, you know, like it.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
It's a very right right, it's got to exist again.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a very sad story, but not one
that I think. I don't see Lim as like a
villain now. Obviously he's not the best influence to be
the one adult in Bobby's life.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, this seems unhealthy.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah yeah, but it's unhealthy because everyone is just caught
in this fucking poison matrix that is the Kennedy family legacy.
Right in the book after Camelot, Bobby told author Jay
Randy Tara Borelli quote In many ways, Lim was a
father to me, and he was the best friend I
will ever have. I have also read interviews with RFK

(24:21):
Junior's brothers, I think with David, where David was like, yeah,
it's kind of jealous of Bobby because like, none of
us had any male authority figure, any adults, male adults
interested in us after Dad died. Right, he got Lim
and he was the only one right, as opposed to
what Oppendheimer said of him being the sinister for us

(24:42):
that like, well, at least RFK Jr.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Had somebody had some right, whether it's a role model
or just some sort of guardian, some sort of gud
and some sort of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
And as a spoiler, David's story is going to end
a lotch faster and a lot worse than RFK Junior stuff.
So maybe Lim having something kept him from spending out
as much.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
That said, it is beyond arguing that Lim is not
what most people would call a responsible guardian. That said,
any kind of normal childhood for Bobby was completely off
the table at this point. Lim after RFK dies, he's
on safari when JFK dies, and after RFK gets killed,
Lim takes him on us. Sorry, your dad died Safari.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Maybe we'll get you another turtle.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Who knows, Yeah, get you another turtle. I've spent my
time expressing issues with Oppenheimer's biography, but I do think
his description of this trip, this second death Safari, can
FaZe how damned weird it was. With professional thirty five
millimeter cameras, Bobby and Billings documented their African adventure, which
also included a rafting trip in Egypt's Valley of the Kings,
and oddly, a VIP visit to a nightclub to watch

(25:45):
the gyrations of a bevy of belly dancers hosted by
members of the Egyptian Supreme Court, an evening of salacious
interest more to the hormonal adolescent than to his gay,
middle aged saparone. The Safari photos became quite lucrative because,
at that time, in the wake of the latest Kennedy tragedy,
anything a Camelot air did became front page media. Father
aware of the demand building's broker to deal with Life

(26:06):
magazine for an interview about their adventure and for the photos.
The questionable story was put out that young Bobby wanted
to use the money to build a memorial to his father,
in the Serengeti National Park and uh yeah, the pictures
sell for a lot of money. He gets to watch
a what sounds like almost a strip tease put on
by the Egyptian Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
A burlesque sort of situation, just.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
A baffling childhood Yeah. Yeah, if you've met members of
the Egyptian Supreme Court, you have an odd child.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah. It's just like this weird like Western rosie sort
of like cript celebration, yeah, ring like thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
It is very Game of Thrones in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
So when they get back home from this very strange Safari,
Bobby continues doing shitloads of drugs and most consequentially introducing
his brothers to drugs, and he does not limit himself
to just dosing them. One of the people who sold
acid to Bobby was a neighbor kid, John Kelly, who
recalled that Bobby fed doses of acid to his parakeet.

(27:07):
He soon expanded to other drugs, like mescaline, which he
pushed his younger brother David to try. David was scared.
David did not want to experiment with drugs, with psychedelics,
you know, it certainly wasn't ready as soon as Bobby was.
But Bobby basically like bullies him kind of until he
takes a shitload of mescaline. And David is a young
boy too young to be doing shitloads of mescaline who

(27:29):
has lost his dad and is traumatized, and that can
make a trip nocked. He has a bad time of it, right,
and Kelly recalls that Bobby's instinct seems to be to
increase his younger to fuck with his younger brother, right
when so David hallucinates that Bobby's laying like or standing
up against like a bush or something, and there's leaves

(27:49):
pressing against him, and David hallucinates that the leaves are sharp,
and he's like, Bobby, get away, they'll cut you. And
Bobby laughs and he plunges into the leaves and then
pretends he's been impaled and fakes his own yes, and
this prompts David to cry, you're dying just like daddy.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
Oh god, oh boy, Oh no, that's so bad.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Oh Bobby, that's.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Like so bad, like being on that drug. And no,
he thought that was really happening.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
And guess guess which Kennedy is gonna wind up dying
up a drug overdose.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
That's such a fucked up d D David.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, real bad stuff, very bad behavior. Don't do that,
like lean into.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
To pretend that you are especially not just like to
pretend that, Oh my god, it's so fucked up.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Yeah, one of the weird things. You know how America
has kind of processed nine to eleven eventually by making
a shipload of nine to eleven jokes. Bobby and his
generation of Kennedy's processed the assassinations by making a lot
of Dead Kennedy jokes, like more, even more than the
band The Dead Kennedy's death, if actually ever made jokes,
is just the name of the band anyway. The closest

(29:03):
the Kennedy's had to an heir apparent was Ted Kennedy,
who is a senator, who becomes a senator and is
you know somebody do people do still think? You know,
in the wake of rfk's death, Hey, he could be
the president. You know, he's pretty good looking, smart, he's
obviously starting to have success in politics. But within a
year of rfk's demise, Ted is involved in the infamous
chap Equitic incident, which fucking Republicans would not stop talking about,

(29:27):
and it is a pretty bad situation. He is probably drunk,
he drives off of a bridge, he abandons his the
crash afterwards, and he abandons his twenty eight year old passenger,
Mary Joe Kopekney, who drowns. Right, you know, the best
case scenario is that Ted is so drunk that he's
not really aware of what he's doing. I guess some
people will argue it was just an accident. But he

(29:49):
leaves afterwards and he goes to sleep, and it's like,
is bad he does not he does a bad thing.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
He does a bad thing.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
I will say, Yeah, Now this is again like I
don't know how you want to. We're not going to
dissect fucking chap equitdic God. You can find so much
of that if you really want to. What matters to
us today is that it more or less punctures heads
shot at the presidency, right, That is not really going
to be in the concresce.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, yeah, I kind of took them out of that.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Now you could argue, and I think this is the
strongest argument that he is probably the best politician in
terms of technical skill, of any of his generation. Of
the Kennedy's right, some of this is just because he's
alive long enough to really have a full political career.
But he's a very influential man in Congress. He winds
up being kind of like, arguably most influential Democrat in

(30:37):
Congress for a significant period of time. And that's you know,
a lot for a family for most people. But that
is a far cry from the vision Joe Kennedy had
for his family, and even further from the rosy image
of Camelot perpetuated in the public memory. Talk about a
Kennedy curse had been a thing for about as long
as anyone in the family could remember, but once RFK died,

(30:59):
it went from something to and kind of a half
joke sort of deal to something the upcoming generation felt
deep within their bones as destiny. Even Joe Kennedy, the
man whose ambition had started this all, seemed to feel
a sense of woe at what he now saw coming
for his grandchildren. Chris Lawfer, JFK's nephew, later claimed, sometimes

(31:19):
Grandpa would look at us as if he wanted to
say something. His mouth would move sort of convulsively, as
if some words were trying to get out. Then this
cloudy look would come over his eyes and he'd slouched
down into his wheelchair and the attendant would wheel him
off and that in the that biography, Maybe it was
just he you know, he was stroking out, he couldn't come.
Maybe it's that he's maybe he regretted, like, oh, I

(31:40):
may my entire family to calamity.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah, maybe sorry for the pressure I yeah created for you, all.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
Of this, all of these terrible, terrible things. And he does,
he lives.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
It's one of those things like I don't know if
Joe Kennedy made a deal with a devil or some
sort of like House of Usher, asked cosmic evil right
to have his success and then have it all ripped
away when his children die at the last moment of
his life. But that's kind of what happens, right. He
lives long enough to see Chap equittic and then he
fucking drops right after that.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
You know. Yeah, he made some sort of deal and
it led to the curse.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
It led to the curse.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Part of it was you gotta kind of you gotta watch,
you gotta watch some of it. Yeah, you're done.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah he made it. And look he made some good calls,
you know, making Mark Hamill the family Lawyer, great move
House of Usher, good show. Watch it. Oh it's oh
my god, it's an incredible Mark Campbell performance. Yeah, really
really good show. Really good show. Everyone else is playing
essentially like a Poe character, and Mark Hamill is playing
like a Lovecraft protagonist. It's quite good. It's quite interesting,

(32:49):
all right. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. So I
will say, you know, you've got that one picture from
the Collier in Horowitz book, where Grandpa maybe started to
regret some of his decisions. In his biography of RFK Junior,
Oppenheimer also talks to a significant number of people who
are around the family and in the family at this point.
Pet's a darker picture of what Joe mostly tried to

(33:10):
pass on to his grandchildren, his twin family mantras where
Kennedy's don't cry and Kennedy's don't complain, which is whatever
else not going to help you process everything that's happened
to them.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
If Kennedys do die, yeah, you might want those other
two things.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Actually they might need to cry. Maybe some complaints are warranted. Yeah,
but he does live long enough to see his blessings
turn into curses. His three most prominent sons dead because
Joe died a while ago, his remaining son disgraced, and
the vast entitled brood that he had helped create turn
into a dynasty hurdling inefftably towards doom when he finally

(33:46):
passed on November eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Bobby by this
point seemed to show less inclination to follow his dad
into politics and decidedly more of a bent to being
a we might call like a I got mild gangster,
you know, like a like a kind of adorable child gangster,
because he has in this period formed a street gang

(34:09):
focused or into the street game, made up entirely of
Kennedy's and their friends, who are also very rich kids
from this incredibly rich neighborhood with a family compound is located.
They call themselves the Hannas port Terrors, the HPTs as
we'll call them.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
The assumptions, the assumptions.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
So Joe Bobby Kennedy's got a street gang, and initially
it's just his older brother Joe who's seventeen, you know,
he's fifteen, and his brother David who's fourteen, but a
bunch of cousins and neighbors join in and they'll they'll
all dress in black and they'll paint their faces with grease.
And first off, you know what, kudos guys to painting,
to being rich white kids who paint your faces with

(34:48):
grease and aren't doing blackface. You know, they were just
trying to hide in the night.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
And yeah, it's like, well, you know you're who we dodged.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Kennedy Families isn't great at dodging bullets, but they did
dodge that one.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, thank goodness for that. Difference in motivation to Greece.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
God, their motivation is they're doing pettybags. I imagine were
also they might have been, might have been, might have been.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
A little treat for them.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
You know, I can't prove they weren't exactly, I can't.
I can't prove a little justin Trudeau energy wasn't present
there some of them. Sure sco should drop of that
a dollip Sistically, One former member of the hyenasport Terrors
later claimed to the author of the book After Camelot quote,
we'd shoot off firecrackers to flate people's tires, stick potatoes,

(35:34):
and the exhaust pipes of cars, turnover trash cans mess
around with girls, all sorts of mischief. After we did
our bit, Ethel would get called I know, I don't
know what mess around with girls want in this context.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
In the context of like vandalism.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
They could be making out with them, they could be
stealing their underwear, there could be There's a lot of
mess around, with a lot of room for that to
be ugly.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
It's an odd item to include on that list. Yeah,
gang activities.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
If I'm the after Camelot author, I'm immediately be like,
wait a second, Wait a second. Let let's talk about
the messenger.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Let's gettext.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
I'm going to continue to quote from this terror member.
After we did our bit, Ethel, we get tech calls
from everyone in town complaining about it. At first, she
used to say, my kids were home asleep last night.
I don't know what you're talking about. But one night
she waited up and sure enough she caught me, Bobby
and David jumping out of one of the second floor
windows of her home. She chased us all over the
compound in the middle of the night and her nightgown

(36:32):
and bare feet, finally losing us somewhere on the stretch
of beach. Now one of the real through lines in
all these Kennedy kids' stories is that the adults have
very little power in these relationships. And it's not because
they're afraid to discipline their kids. Sometimes when they're around,
they disciplined them very severely. It's it's that they're just
not there right, and they're they're not there in large

(36:56):
from because they have all of these as the Kennedy's,
They've got this constant web of social political business, out fundraisers,
all sorts of shit that they have to do because
of who their family is. And they're also on vacation
a lot. They're traveling, they don't always want their kids around,
and they're able to not have their kids around right.
Half of the brood are away at boarding schools at
any given time, and the kids at boarding schools have

(37:16):
access to money and thus drugs, but not any real
submit supervision. You know, maybe the monk who teaches English
will take an interest in them, but like that's some
random monk. He doesn't have a lot of power in
this relationship, you know.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
And at a certain point, after like a lot of
the reaction from like her specifically, Yeah, I feel like
it's just not going to be effective no matter what
where it's like okay, yeah, you're being this horrible to
your your small children. Yeah, we don't really care for
that approval or have like that sense of like, oh,
we don't want to upset you know the adults.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Right, yeah became now Another constant through line is, as
I mentioned earlier, this sense of gallows humor that pervades
the kids as a result of the cloud of death
that seemed to hang over their family. And I think
the most passage from this period comes from I'm gonna
read a passage from the book After Camelot describing this
one prank had the boys playing in busy Hyanna's port
tourist traffic, only to have one kid fall to the

(38:10):
ground while another smacked the back of a car, making
a loud noise. Then they would all gather around their
fallen chum and shout hysterical sentiments at the drivers, such
as you've just killed another Kennedy's. When panicked people came
to the aid of the young Kennedy sprawled in the
middle of the road, the boys would milk it for

(38:31):
all it was worth by trying to get the boy
to move his legs and then saying it looked as
if he'd been paralyzed. But then the fallen Kennedy would
suddenly stand up and walk away. At that, the other
boys would proclaim, look, it's a Kennedy miracle, and then race,
Oh god, I gotta say that kind of rules.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
That's exactly if you were a kid and the Kennedy
and all that stuff, like, of course you killed another Kennedy.
Such a funny thing.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
It's incredibly funny. It's amazingly funny.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Like horrific thing. Uh the acid trip? What, yeah, Bobby
did horrific.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, that's funny. That's really funny. That's just actually very
good comedy.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
He kills another Kennedy.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
That's I'll go so far as to say it that
might actually even be example of like healthy processing of
all of this. Right, take like you're taking to some extent,
you're taking some ownership of this terrible thing that happened
to your family, right, and maybe that does help a little.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
And you're also taking you you're also like very aware
of like the world's like eyes, and you're.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Kind of taking agency as opposed to just being subjected
to it. You're taking agency on it and like using
it for your own laughter entertainment.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
Kind of see it as the healthiest thing that anyone
has done.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
In this.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Story.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
It's definitely towards the top in this story of healthy reactions.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah, and again, just very good comedy.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
It's a Kennedy miracle. It's Kennedy miracles.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
That's a good line. Back at Millbrook, Bobby cultivated a
by this point probably understandable reputation for being out of
control and very odd. Like any kid, he had folks
who got along with him and people who thought he
was a dick. You can find people being like, yeah,
he was like the bully of the school. You can
find people being like, yeah, he was like kind of
a chill dude. He was a little bit of a

(40:26):
loner and outsider. I'm not I wasn't around right. I'm
just gonna say everyone does agree about one thing, which
is that he was really specifically weird about his hawk
and dead animals.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Yeah. I was gonna say, like, yeah, his dorm smelled
like bird shit. Yep, that was the thing everybody thought.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Boy Cody, it's about to get a lot weirder, But
first it's about to be ads. Oh okay, we're back Cody,
you had a follow up question, what do.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
You mean by his relationship with dead animals?

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Great question, Cody, Great question. So let's go back to
the undeniable reality that I don't know, like a month
or two time flat circle right now. But it became
public knowledge that RFK Junior, serious third party presidential candidate
with like a possibly historic chunk of the votes certainly

(41:21):
looked like that at that point in the election, had
part of his brain eaten by a worm that got
in there, presumably for some weird meat he ate and
then died after eating part of his brain. Right the claim.
That's the claim, and the claim came out during divorce proceedings, right,
And this is part of RFK trying to basically argue

(41:42):
his alimony should be amended in light of his disability.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
And as a result of that aspect of it, I
have seen people doubting was he just lying? You know,
maybe there was no worm. He's bullshitting like and I'm
going to say this, a survey of his childhood makes
me feel, yeah, that brain worm was probably real. Probably
this is the story that we're about to tell that
makes me feel that way. So as an adult, one

(42:05):
of the sources we have on Bobby's life is this
book called The River Keepers, which he co writes, I think,
and it's related to he works for an environmental charity
called the River Keepers, and his book on that includes
a deeply sanitized and kind of short version of his
own backstory. And one of the things he talks about
is his time at Millbrook that he spent with what
he calls an informal falconry program. And this is the

(42:27):
very sanitized version of how that his falconry at Millbrook went.
In the autumn, we captured and trained kestrels, red tails,
and immature passage hawks on their first migration. I've caught
upwards of fifty hawks a day squatting atop a ridge
line on Schinnemunk Mountain in the Hudson Valley. In autumn,
we flew wild redtails, falcons, and ghost shocks and pioneered
many of the game hawking techniques still used by American falconers.

(42:49):
We talked about hawks every spare moment. So maybe that's
all true. It can coexist with what I'm about to
read next. But Jerry Oppenheimer, biographer talks to one of
Bobby's child falcon Rebuddies who describes him very differently and
in a much less camera friendly manner Mill Brooks, and
this is his falcon rebuddy talking years later, millbrooks motto

(43:14):
was non Sibby said, kuntsis Latin for not for oneself,
but for all. Everyone had to participate in required community service,
whether it be working in the school post office, washing dishes,
performing grounds maintenance, or handling the zoo's inhabitants. Bobby had
chosen the latter, But the way he described his falcon
and birding interest in his book was not the way
Beer Regard, who is that's the kid telling the story

(43:36):
who later went on to teach ornithology at the University
of North Carolina, remembered to Beer Regard, who was one
of the leaders of the falconry group at Millbrook, Bobby's
pursuit of the sport was more like a scene out
of a horror movie. Myself and a couple of others
had our hawks, and we'd go out in the countryside
hunting rabbits and squirrels. But one of the reasons why
I didn't spend much time with Bobby was his idea
a falconry next to the school there was a cowpit

(43:58):
where the local dairy farmers threw their dead cows, and
it was full of rats. Bobby would take his hawk
and go hunting rats in the midst of the rotting
cow carcasses, and he's sort of reveled and how off
the wall that was now Beer Regard expressed disgust at
Bobby for wanting to be in such a disgusting environment.
Wanted to go hunt rats in this rotting cow carcass

(44:19):
graveyard rather than going to like a well maintained chunk
of the woods and doing the thing that right right,
and one gets the feeling. I think his discuss comes from.
This is something Bobby did specifically to freak out preppier
rich kids like Beer Regard. Right, you know, he is
also a rich kid, but he is not preppy, and
he wants to kind of freak the normies.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
He's a little freaking.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
He's also no one goes to the rotting corpse pit
because it's a rotting corpse pit, so he can get
high there. He can do drugs, he can take acid,
can He spends a lot of time hunting rats and
taking acid at a like fucking pit of bloated cow carcasses.
That is a big chunk of Bobbby Junior's childhood.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
And that's a little choko Bobby's brain. That's gonna right.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah. One of the kids who visited the pit with Bobby,
maybe because Bobby had drugs and he wanted to score them,
was the son of a Republican horse trainer, Jamie Fanning.
And Jamie Fanning gives us this description of RFK Junior
and his late teens on the cusp of adulthood, and
it is the most incredible description I have read of
a subject. For these episodes, I still to this day

(45:27):
see him standing there in his black necktie that he
wore every day over a blue Oxford Brooks Brothers shirt
and a beat up tweed jacket, and wearing the wildest
bell bottoms that were purple with day glow green stripes
like he was some soul band guy, and in his
funky boots, and there he was hunting rats out of
that pile of dead sheep and cow carcasses. Yeah, I

(45:48):
bets were funky, amazing, amazing paragraph well, oh cows and sheep,
cows and sheep yeah yeah, So debate and the sources
was it just thousands of rotting cow carcasses. By either way,

(46:09):
Bobby loves carcass.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
Apparently he loves being around them, he really does.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
He seems to be comforted by death. I don't know,
and it's Fanning. I think this description from Fanning is
the most accurate of some competing descriptions of child RFK Junior.
Because he's an edgy kid. He has been traumatized by
some seriously dark shit. He has a deranged, unhealthy family life.
He's got infinite money, but only one adult who cares

(46:36):
about him, and that adult is not doing it in
the healthiest way, and he develops this edge. Maybe part
of it is just like surrounding yourself with death, kind
of like in the sense that maybe a goth would
later because there's been so much in your life, but
also some of its freaking out people is maybe the
only way you know to get attention.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Right, yeah, attention and keepeople at a distance and yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and would continue. He was such an
edgy kid that that thing, the cow carcasses thing, as
bizarre as it was to be over there hunting these
rats out of this pile of dead carcasses, was almost
normal for him. It was a pretty dark grim time.
He was miserable and he was angry. It only got
worse with the drugs. And we most of the sources
we have on earlier RFK life are self serving in

(47:19):
some nature, right, everybody's got an agenda. These are the Kennedys.
But I think Fanning has probably got it right. Yeah,
that that is that just feels like a person to me.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Yeah, like an actual like an actual human being who's
dealt with all these things we've talked about, and like
the little the little stories of him growing up and
like you know, like being a little a little fucker
right right, asshole trying to cause trouble and then gets
darker and darker, and he's gonna his humor is gonna
get darker and darker. His like environment, he's going to

(47:53):
want to be Yeah that I don't know. Yeah, and
the brainworm.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
And the brain worm the brain worm doesn't now out heroin?
What else? What else doesn't help Cody is heroin, which
makes it way into his drug rotation. And look, we
can talk about the potential benefits of psychedelics. I don't
know anybody who's like improve their life problems unless though,
unless those problems are just I am dying of horrible
pain with heroin. That's really the one thing that's.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Good, right. You know, there's like, oh, I took mushrooms
and like I saw something today or yesterday of like
eighty percent people take mushrooms like they can quit smoking easily. Yeah,
And it's literally just because they're like, uh stupid. Oh,
like I have the thought of like I shouldn't do that,
and they don't.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Yeah, it has intense potential.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Sure, Yeah, Like oh I took mushrooms, I stopped smoking.
It's like, oh I took heroin, stop smoking because I died?

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, Or like heroin will help you in again one
very It's great as a pain killer, but that's only
useful in certain situations, and.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Bobby, heroin is something you saved to the end.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
It's great as a pain killer, but it works very
well as an emotional pain killer, but not in a
way that helps the problem. Right, if you actually if
you have like you had your leg blown off by
a mind, Yes, a heroin might be the right thing
for you in the moment, right, that's probably real good
to get heroin in there. If you are mourning your
dad and your uncle and the collapse of your family

(49:11):
and all of the pressure you're under, the fact that
your mom doesn't love you. Heroin's probably not gonna.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Help in the spotlight like all the thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Now that said, despite the fact that he is now
Heroin is in the mix, it's pot that's gonna get Bobby.
In his first real trouble, he was arrested for the
first time in Barnsdale, Massachusetts, for marijuana possession at age sixteen. Now,
one of the fun parts of the RFK Junior story
is that he always has this endearingly tense relationship with
the cops. I don't think he likes the police, at

(49:41):
least not as a young man. One story Oppenheimer tells
is a RFK Junior and the Terrors. They're sticking potatoes
into gas pipes one night and they get caught by
a cop and everyone runs away, and the only one
who can't escape is Bobby Shriver, who is his cousin.
Bobby Junior is kind of something in his favor. Even
though he's escaped, goes back to confront the cop to
try and rescue his cousin. You know which to say something,

(50:03):
And here's how Oppenheimer describes it. Seeing that his cousin
was in the clutches of a policeman. Bobby defiantly reappeared
from his hiding place and sauntered up to them. What
have you got in there, the policeman asked, noting that
Bobby had his hand inside his coat. I have a
hawk and he's trained to kill cops. Bobby answered, you're lying,

(50:26):
the policeman said, but Bobby kept advancing towards him until
they were only inches apart, whereupon he pulled the hawk
out and shoved the raptor's beak into the face of
the cop, who jumped back with a hand on his gun.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
I have a hawk. It was trained to kill cops.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
It's really cool.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
You still got some bangers, like despite it all.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
Part of the cop you're lying, you want to find out.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
It's such an only someone who has grown up in
that degree of privilege who would like in that situation
with a cop shove a hawk and near and like
bold power were power to you, buddy, You're the only
guy who's ever been in that situation, and I'm glad
you did it.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
You might you might not be the only guy who's
ever shouted like I got a hawk, Yeah, yeah, but
you're the one who did.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
You're the only one who did and lived. Right, there's
a dead Hawker out there. Wow, what a tale.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Anyway, Bobby's arrest was big news. You know, the media
circus lights up around it, YadA YadA, YadA, and he
and his cousin, He's arrested with Bobby Shreiver for pot possession.
This is different from the Hawk thing. They go before
a juvenile court judge and they get a slap on
the wrist, right, you know, they get a punishment. It's
not all that serious. Really. The worst thing about it

(51:47):
is the media thing around it. And Bobby had actually
been expelled from Millbrook a few weeks earlier because of
his drug use, because the leadership at the school was
really mostly word that he was going to o D
on the property and they were like, you know, what's
not going to be good for this schools continuing to
have people is a fucking dead Kennedy like, get him out.

(52:09):
And after he gets arrested, they start to claim basically
he got kicked out of the school because of that. Right,
you know, they don't want to say we did it
for this reason, right, Nobody really wants to it's best
if it kind of comes down to being part of
the arrest. The family backlash against Bobby is intense and
utterly impotent. At the same time, Ethel told her son,

(52:31):
I'm throwing you out of the family, but no effort
was made to stop Bobby, who is at this point
sixteen years old, from taking six hundred dollars out of
his savings account, buying a used Ford Falcon and driving
across the country with two friends. He sells the car
when they get to Fresno, and he and one friend
continue on hopping trains and living with homeless people until

(52:51):
they wash up in Texas for months. Bobby Kennedy is
completely out of touch with any adult, but occasionally limb Billings,
and Bob would later recall this as one of the
happiest times of his youth quote, I was writing around
with bums. It was good I could be one of
them and not a Kennedy. And like, if you want
an idea of how toxic being a Kennedy is. His

(53:12):
fondest childhood memory is being homeless, Yeah, like willingly homeless.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
Yeah basically yeah, but like yeah, hiding.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
Because we're all we're all equally filthy you know at
this point, you know, we're not bathing, we're not changing
our clothes, like we look the same that they do,
and they just kind of treat me as one of them.
Nobody knows who I am. Yeah, it says a lot.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
I mean about again, didn't have a chance.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Never had a chance. He has a next scent when
he gets back from this road trip train hopping trip
to a less reputable boarding school in the woods that's like,
this is where you send the real problem kids. It's
near Boston. He continues to do drugs while he's there,
and he develops a notable reputation as not a racist.
He is very Oppenheimer quotes, and Oppenheimer quotes is like, wow,
a white guy that black people like, right, But he

(53:58):
does quote several black students at this school who were
like militant activists, like kind of black panther adjacent in
the day, and we're like, yeah, Bobby was actually really cool,
Like we liked hanging out with Bobby, Like he didn't
no issues with Bobby.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Was clearly not a racist person.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Yeah, clearly not racist. So we'll give him that here too.
Bobby Kennedy Junior graduated from this last boarding school in
June of nineteen seventy two. He was now an adult.
You will not be surprised to hear that his grades
were not impressive. His extra curriculars at this point are
basically just drugs and hanging out next to a cavern
of rotting meat with my hawk men. Of this mattered

(54:33):
to the Harvard Admissions board. RFK Junior was a legacy.
His family had money and a with the Kennedy you
never know, they could wind up congressman or president. So
you might as well get that Harvard stank on him, right,
And that's where Bobby's going to spend the mid seventies
studying and getting real into heroin. And we will talk
about that in part three, but for now, for this week, Cody,

(54:57):
we're done with RFK Junior. How are you feeling? Where
are we on? Are we on the boy at this point?

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (55:01):
You know, still some uh mixed in the sense that
like sorry, Bobby, sorry, I get it, Yeah, but you
gotta get it together. Also the rotten meat things, so
like yeah, yeah, I'm just like I'm I'm very curious

(55:22):
about where that thread leads because you don't stop there,
like that's not like probably the most fucked up thing
you're you're going to be doing in relation to dead
animal carcasses. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
I yeah, I'm going to think about the hawk a lot.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
The hawk.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
The hawk is a real like that's a fascinating.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
It's fascinating talk about his train to kill cops.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
That's such a good life. There's some really he definitely
had at one point. Maybe he's lost it now, but
he had at one point some of that Kennedy charisma.
Because that and the whole you've just killed.

Speaker 3 (56:07):
It killed the Kennedy so good. It's a Kennedy miracle.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
It's incredibly funny.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
I've got a hawk and it kills cops.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Yeah all yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
And but you know the other stuff.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Yeah, good luck to him.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
It turns out it doesn't turn out great, Cody.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
Right, well, I can still say good luck.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah, exactly, good luck and good night, Cody Pluggables.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
Hi sure hi hello, Hi. Yes. Check out some more
news on YouTube dot com. It's also a podcast if
you want to listen to it instead of look at
my face. And we've got even more news and other
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listen to it if you don't want to see my face.

(56:55):
Our Patreon dot com slash some more news and with
me as always is a mention of my band, The
Hot Shapes. You can check out on bandcamp and SoundCloud
for all your Hot Shapes needs.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Band Cloud and sound camp, sound camp it yeah, all right, everybody,
well go to hell Yeah, I love you.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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