Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently polling 9-10% nationally, faces sexual assault allegations he addresses with regret rather than denial, potentially reflecting the psychological toll of his abusive family dynasty. Tracing lineage to Irish immigrant Patrick Joseph Kennedy, the narrative details how his son, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., amassed half a billion dollars through bootlegging rumors, stock manipulation, and shorting the economy during the Great Depression. This financial foundation fueled a "Quiverful" strategy producing nine sons, including JFK and RFK, whose intense rivalry culminated in RFK's 1968 assassination, ending the family's presidential dominance while RFK Jr. now pursues a third-party run amidst conspiracy theories regarding his father's death. Ultimately, the episode suggests the Kennedys' rise relied on questionable ethics and familial pressure, casting long shadows over their legacy of political power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Kennedy Family Origins00:10:11
Cool zone media.
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's not about the election.
But this week, I'm bringing back a special buddy, my good friend from the 2020 election, who I have ripped through a hole in time and pulled into the future, Cody Johnson.
Hi.
Hello, everybody.
Hey, thank you so much for the kind introduction and welcome to the podcast.
Cody.
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.
2020 was pretty bad.
I keep going back and forth.
A lot more people died still in 2020.
Yeah, I was actually been working on an update to that song.
And I'm like going back and forth, like, welcome to the worst year ever.
Maybe it'll be a bit better than last time, but then it wouldn't be the worst year ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, there's still time.
It might not be pandemic bad, but, you know, if Donald Trump becomes the president again, that's bad.
That could be worse.
That could be worse.
You know, that could be worse.
Yeah.
I mean, 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.
You know, that's, that's tough.
That's tough.
I know.
Justice is a little wonky.
It's a little unbalanced.
You know, we can't always get full peer justice that we want.
Sometimes we have to make our own sacrifices.
So you're going to have to sacrifice yourself in order to see me face down finally.
So here's my that's more or less what I learned from one of the Batman movies.
Cody, what do you think of we'll invite it together?
Because all we do is invite as we'll just not get along.
We're just not going to get along together.
It's just too true.
It's just too accurate.
Everyone will be unhappy together.
You want everybody to get pumped before the chorus, but if everyone's but then we go, or not.
Or not.
I think so.
Everyone knows that's a lie.
I think I was wearing this shirt when we recorded that song.
Oh, that's fun.
Oh, it's a time capsule.
That's a time capsule.
Do you remember when it was worse in a lot of ways?
Yeah, when I was huddled in my tiny efficiency with all of my beans and ammunition.
And now I'm huddled in my house with all of my beans and ammunition.
Exactly.
Life has really changed for me.
Now, Cody, when it comes to the election, you know, we could sit here, you and I, and jawbone about old Joe R. Biden or old Donald Jay Trump, whatever his middle name is.
John, I believe.
John.
Okay, cool.
Great.
I need that.
Donald John president, I believe.
I don't think there's very much either of us can say that will matter here, right?
Even though people on the internet keep coming into like any comment you make about the election going, oh, so you want Trump to win or whatever.
Like nobody, nobody who listens to us.
Doesn't matter.
The entire election is going to come down to like 100,000 people in five to seven swing states, right?
Yep.
So let's talk about a guy who actually could influence the election.
The most popular third party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly 25 years, something like that.
Yeah.
Bobby F. Kennedy Jr., RFK Jr.
Yes.
Currently polling at 9 or 10% in a lot 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 polling 9% or 10% and like three plus or minus 3, 4%, you know, error rate.
So could he very well wind up not being influential at all, but he could siphon away enough votes to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the election.
That's kind of a toss.
I don't really know.
Yeah, it's kind of a toss-up.
I think most of what I've seen has led me to expect he probably takes more votes away from Trump, but I also think so.
That's yeah, nothing conclusive, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But that's what it's, that's what it seems like for sure.
Either way, he definitely could be the decider of the election.
It's not impossible, given, again, how kind of narrow things are probably 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 Fair published the first one, have come out in the last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he sexually assaulted women.
And he has had kind of a unique response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe you might hear more about this.
I don't know about that.
Maybe he denied it.
Yeah, because he apologized.
He's like, how can I make this right?
When he was reached out to directly by one of the women, and his public statements have been like, yeah, you'll probably hear more about this.
I mean, he said, even when he's ran, he'll mention that even when he started running, he's like, yeah, I got a lot of skeletons in my closet.
Yeah, yeah.
I've got more than dude who's done a lot of bad stuff.
He was essentially like, I didn't eat that dog, but I didn't eat that dog.
Yeah, which he did.
Which he did.
I have read now every piece of writing I can find on RFK Jr.
I've gone through a biography of the Kennedy family.
I have gone through a biography of the Kennedy family specifically after the assassinations of JFK and RFK.
I've gone through a biography of Bobby Kennedy in as many articles as I could find on the matter.
And I will tell you two things.
Number one, he definitely ate that dog.
And number two, I'm actually not surprised that he both is perfectly willing to admit that he sexually assaulted people, genuinely thinks that he feels bad about it.
Now, I'm not saying he actually does because I think the act of being a Kennedy might be fundamentally deranging.
And primarily what we'll be talking about in these episodes, this is not a list.
We're going to 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.
Like, that's really the story these days.
Yeah, you're creating a royal family from scratch, basically.
And with none of the royal families, I don't think I don't get the sense from looking at the current members of the House of Windsor that it's good for you to be a member of the House of Windsor.
It seems bad.
But there's a support network outside of the family set up.
The whole country is kind of a support network for the royal family.
And so usually there's limits on how far out they spiral.
That didn't exist for the Kennedys.
And that's part of, anyway, it's an interesting story.
So we're going to 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, scratch that?
How do you feel about the Kennedys?
I have no strong opinions in that I'm not a huge Kennedy fan.
And I, you know, mixed, I think, I would say probably, depending on the Kennedy we're talking about.
I don't like political like dynasties and like that aspect of it.
I'm just like very much against.
And about him specifically, 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.
Yeah, you land kind of about where Bernie Sanders did with one giant exception.
Anyway, let's move on to ending the cold open and moving on to the hot open.
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That was a Bernie Sanders shot the president joke.
Building Within the System00:14:23
I don't actually know.
I was like, wait, what do you owe, right?
Yeah, yeah, it's been a long enough time to last one of those.
I don't know.
You know, that's the bit on this show.
Anyway, let's talk about the Kennedys.
So I'm 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 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 is important for how it sets up the way in which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers and like co-agist 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 lumbotomy.
He didn't talk about RFK wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr.
And it's not because those aren't important.
It's because like that doesn't factor in as much to like what RFK Jr. experienced as a kid, right?
And so that's kind of the focus with which we're covering the background here, right?
Like many Irish families, the Kennedys first entered the United States during a rough period for Ireland, the late 1840s.
Unlike most of the refugees who fled there in that time, 26-year-old Patrick Kennedy was not fleeing starvation and death and depression.
He was the son of a pretty comfortable man financially, a big farmer in County Wexford with 80 acres.
So like a guy who's doing pretty well.
So Patrick comes because he's not going to inherit this land.
That's not the way shit works at the time.
And he wants to strike it rich, right?
So his goal is specifically not, this is my only chance at survival.
It's America is my chance to make a name for myself, right?
Because I'm not 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 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, Patrick Joseph.
Now, Patrick I, the original Patrick, having been put on this earth just to make Patrick Joseph, dies immediately after his son is born of cholera.
Just instantly.
Got it done.
Got it done.
Made sure that baby made it out of the birth canal and then dropped the fuck dead.
Yeah.
Dedicated.
Yeah.
Dedicated.
He knew what he was there to do.
He was focused.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
He's like one of those mosquitoes.
He's like a salmon returning to.
Yeah.
A salmon returning to Boston to spawn.
Yeah.
So in total, the first Kennedy family patriarch only lived nine years and died, never having made any kind of fortune or real impact himself.
He is going to be the last Kennedy patriarch to kind of have a quiet, unimportant death, right?
Within the kind of the context of how the nation sees it.
Since Patrick Joseph, the baby is, 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 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.
It's a lot of pressure.
Google Gaga.
I'm just a fucking baby.
What do you want me to do?
Yeah, yeah, right.
It's a lot of pressure.
And it's like, yeah, I can see how this is going to make a man who is narcissistically focused on like being the one guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, what a complex.
Yeah, it's not great.
Right out of the gate.
The thing that the Kennedys have been doing since before they had any money is putting so much pressure on their young men that the kind of only way for them to grow up is completely deranged.
And that sometimes makes a guy who's really good at making money or being the president.
It tends to, but it can help out a lot.
Yeah, like yeah, putting immense pressure and then dying.
Yeah, and then dying immediately.
They're so good at that.
Yeah.
Dying tragically young and putting a lot of pressure on their young men.
So Patrick Joseph goes to a Catholic school.
He helps their mother work in the small shop that the family owned.
He takes on odd jobs as a teenager, working hard for his family, but never quite able to get ahead.
This changed when he was 22 and he sees a damaged old saloon building for sale on Haymarket Street.
He gets loans from his sisters and his mom.
And soon he's got a business.
He's got an actual bar going and he is very good at running a bar.
He is a competent business owner.
And he is because when you, the way politics works in this time, right?
The city is largely run by Democrats who are not Irish and who do not want Irish people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant upon them for votes, right?
So Irish folks are restricted in what jobs they can hold in the local power structure.
As you're probably aware of by stereotypes, they're welcome to become police officers.
There's a few local elected offices that they're able to take, but for most of the mid-1800s, higher elected offices are pretty closed to Irish immigrants.
And, you know, once Patrick Joseph buys his bar, the status quo is starting to change.
And because he's now a business owner and because bars are, you know, a social center in his society, he kind of immediately gets shunted into a part of the kind of power structure, right?
Because like that, that's where a lot of dealing happens.
That's a rebuild, all that great stuff.
Yeah.
Socially, you're paying bribes, right?
As a business owner, right?
Like to the police, to everything.
Like you just kind of wind up involved, right?
The actual government at the time is hideously corrupt and incompetent and provides basically no security or like meaningful services to people in the city.
And as a result, in this period of time, it's best to look at the Democratic Party as kind of a mafia.
But it's not just a mafia that like takes bribes from people and is hideously corrupt.
It also is where you get your social services.
If you are in the Democratic Party and you are providing them with your vote, they offer you primitive forms of welfare and a kind of social stability.
The Democratic Party is a shadow state in Boston, right?
This is the only part of the country that has something like this.
But that you can't think of the party as like what it is now, right?
Where it's like, this is, 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 of my money sometimes, right?
The Democratic Party is generally described as a machine and it is corrupt as hell.
It runs a lot of it runs on bribes and strong-armed 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, if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee in the mid-1800s, the way this system works, you might say, is a lot better than the way the last system used, right?
Seems beneficial.
Like, let's buy into this and I have some degree of agency here.
Yeah.
Patrick Joseph proved an able assistant to some of the more established local men and his businesses flourished.
Soon he had several bars and then he owned part of a hotel and then he owned a liquor importing company.
In 1884, he was elected to the Democratic Club of his ward.
And in 1886, he and a group of allies took power in the ward and elected Patrick Joseph to the state senate.
This is better than Irish people had been able to do in the generation previously, right?
But it's kind of going to be the top of where he's able to reach too.
Like there's this feeling to like, yeah.
Yeah.
The old Democratic power structure still is able to keep the Irish from getting too much higher than that, right?
Now, like a good Irish boy, he marries a girl named Mary from a family that happened to have more money than his family.
And by this point, he's got a bit of money too.
You know, he's not rich the way they're going to be a generation later, but the Kennedys are very comfortable at this point in time.
And Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the greasy pole of Democratic Party politics.
State legislator is as high as he's going to rise, but he doesn't take this sitting down.
A lot of his bills, the things he tries to get through in the state legislature, get stymied by this kind of ossified power structure that doesn't like this uppity Irish kid.
But PJ succeeds in building an army of loyal goons at the local level.
In 1898, he launched an ambitious attempt to oust his rival, Martin Lomazny, 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 for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in a hearse.
That's wild.
Yeah, the bygone days.
Honestly, gotta try something worse than how shit's working now.
You know, maybe we could have a little bit more slapstick elements in our politics.
There's a lot of comedy of errors in their politics.
Yeah, it's worth it.
It's worth a try, Cody.
That's that's where I'm gonna land.
Um, now, this Collier in a 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.
Um, and it generally seems to have done what a lot of Kennedy books do, which is it, there's often multiple stories about what happens with the Kennedys, and it usually believes the most salacious version, right?
Um, that said, there's also it includes just a lot of interviews with Kennedys who were in and around like members of the family.
And so, you even with these things that are when they're very sources people will question or have issues with, you can't just discard them because sometimes it's like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave his side of events, right?
And like, so we can't just ignore entirely these books either.
Um, but a lot of Kennedy history is tabloid gossip, right?
Because they're the Kennedys, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, you want the you want the clicks, yeah, exactly.
Like, that's what we're doing here, right?
We're all getting clicks from the Kennedys, the Kennedy industrial complex.
Gobble up your salacious crumbs, yeah, yeah.
Oh, wow, what a great Star Wars reference, Cody.
It's for you somewhere, George Lucas just got like a little trigger of dopamine into the back of his brain for him, yeah, and his brain industry continued editing his cut of Red Tails 3, which no one but him and his two friends will ever be able to do.
Yeah, of course.
I'll watch, I would watch any of the movies that uh George Lucas is producing for no one but him and his friends and his crazy mansion.
Yeah, let's let's do let's do let's do a mission impossible to break into the George Lucas ranch.
Yeah, watches terrible movies.
Yeah, well, these are 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 movie frame for frame, just like he's locked into it.
He built his own AI and recreated Jared Leto independently, generational terrifying.
So, Patrick Joseph's story mostly isn't interesting to us, other than that, he wound up topping out at kind of the highest level of power available to an Irish immigrant son at this stage.
And he probably, probably fair to say, he pushes how high someone seems like he sort of led the way: like, no, now we can do that.
Yeah, yeah, he's not the only person doing that, but certainly one of them, right?
Certainly on that edge.
Uh, he kind of winds up as a ward boss and a moderately wealthy small business owner.
And his son, Joseph P. Kennedy, was born in 1888, kind of midway through his dad's journey up the Democratic Party ladder.
We can infer that Patrick Joseph and his wife never quite got over the frustration of being locked artificially out of advancing further.
Mary Augusta insisted on Joseph Patrick as the name for their son rather than Patrick Joseph because there's two stories.
One is that she didn't want him to be a junior, right?
Thought that might be bad for him in some way, might be bad for his advancement.
There's also claims that she told relatives that she thought that Joseph Patrick sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph.
And honestly, those are the two most Irish names I can conceive of.
Yeah.
If I had to rank them, she's right.
Yeah, but I'm not going to do the accent, but hearing, I hear both of those names and an Irish accent in my head.
Yeah, it's kind of six on one, half doesn't the other.
Yeah.
You're not really moving the needle much there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nobody's going to think Joseph Patrick has an Irish movie like this.
Not a not a very clever trick, but yeah, yeah, I don't really know how much that worked for you.
Um, Mahorowitz and Collier write, she was proud of the status in the community that PJ's political activity brought, yet aware that for proper people, the Bostonians who'd moved away from the Irish as if fearing contagion, politics had become a faintly disreputable profession.
She wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband, whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston, was not.
Sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds.
For the rest of his life, he remembered one election day when they were walking down the street and a Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had already voted 128 times.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's golden.
That's the good stuff.
That's just the good stuff.
That's that good old timey.
Got 128 bar in me before.
Politics as a Disreputable Profession00:03:37
Exactly.
Go out and participate in democracy as many times as you can.
Again, I feel kind of similarly about democracy these days that I do towards sports where it's like, yeah, just let them take all the crazy drugs they want.
Let's see who can be the best at drugs.
Yeah, let everybody cheat.
See who's the best at cheating.
Just go for it.
Give them all knives.
Why not?
Give them all knives.
Fuck it.
Yeah.
We're the knife party now.
We just do knife stuff.
Yeah, nobody wants to get inside the knife party convention.
Dangerous place.
Yeah, it was an open tent, but then they slashed the tent.
I don't know.
There's no tents.
Too many knives.
Yeah, too many fucking knives.
That's not that far off from the fact that at the RNC and the soft zone around it, guns are legal, but hard-sided water bottles are not, nor are soup cans.
Or tennis balls or water bottles.
Or tennis boss.
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 is that your rule?
That makes no sense.
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 going to be good.
It's going to be a fun convention.
Yeah.
Speaking of bombs, these products are the bomb.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Starting the Political Dynasty00:14:46
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president.
You think it goes the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lozla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at like.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
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I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Oh.
We are back, my friends.
We have 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 at the heart.
Exactly.
The people are clamoring for more Mighty Joe Young references.
That's right.
That's right.
Thank God.
We're going to fucking give it to him.
This is going to be what saves content from AI.
Yeah.
Whatever it takes, honestly.
There's not enough Mighty Joe Young in everyone's online discussions for the AI to make a good joke about it.
They don't even know what it was.
You know, I don't know.
There were two.
It's like a title.
They're trying to get an AI to talk about Hootie and the Blowfish.
What's it going to do?
There's like three comments about that shit on the modern internet.
Anyway, sorry, Hootie.
Not sorry to the blowfish.
No, no, no, no.
They know what they did.
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, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not like a lot for his time.
It's not a weird amount for his time, but it's not a none, right?
It's not a zero involvement in organized crime.
At least plus one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At least a little bit, right?
You know, he also grows up wealthy.
At this point, the family is rich, right?
They're not mega-rich, which this Kennedy is going to make them mega-rich, but they are extremely comfortable.
He is cared for nurses and maids and butlers and cooks as a little kid, as a baby, as a young man.
His dad purchases a 60-foot yacht that they have like a guy whose job it is just to pilot the yacht.
So they're doing very well.
And it's understood that Joe's job is to go where his father could not and establish the name Kennedy as a name to be reckoned with.
As a young man, he worked as a 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 sells candy on the street.
He works as a newsboy.
And he's, this is my favorite.
He has a part-time job as what's called a Sabbath goi, which goi is a term for Gentile for like a Jewish term for, or I think Yiddish term for like Gentiles, right, for Christians.
And his job was on the Sabbath, he would go to Orthodox Jewish people's homes to like light their stoves and light their candles.
Nowadays, there's like automated systems for this because there's certain rules about what you shouldn't do, but you can also trick God a little bit and get away with stuff.
Yeah, which is my favorite kind of religion.
Oh, yeah.
Just like work around it.
Hire a Kennedy.
Yeah, hired a Kennedy.
There are some Jewish families whose ancestors had the patriarch of the Kennedy family lighting their Sabbath candles.
And I don't know, kind of cool.
Maybe it's you, listener.
Maybe it's you.
Maybe it's you.
Encouraged by his father, he is one of those kids you might describe as a child businessman, right?
He is a kid who has a lot of business ideas and wants to be an entrepreneur.
And I, you know, I'm on record as saying like, that's a real big warning sign.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
A kid.
We don't need to go off on a huge tangent, but like a kid who's like super into politics.
Yeah.
Or super into business stuff is like, dah, don't let that happen.
You can't get him drugs.
Get him on drugs.
Look, 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 heroin, you know, open their mind a little bit.
Or close it either way.
Or close something different.
Do something different to them.
Change their mind is the important part.
So he also, it's interesting.
There's a period of time where he has an artistic bent too.
So 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 manages these fairly complex productions where he'll get a bunch of people.
He'll play roles.
He'll have other people playing roles.
And he'll also have people collecting money.
Like he'll be actually running, both running a business, but also he is writing plays and like being in them.
Yeah.
Which is interesting.
And for an idea, one of his productions features him in an Uncle Sam costume reading essays with titles like Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean.
So it's like, oh, shit, that could be like in the background of a Bioshock game.
Like that's his voice childhood.
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, yes, I'm going to write play.
Like, you're not.
Like when you're in the middle of this one's the imagination.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Like the goal seems to be like, no, you're going, you want to, you want to do the production of the play.
You don't want to write plays and be in them.
You want the, yeah.
And 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 narcissist, maybe.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's my, I don't like diagnosing people, but really with Joe Kennedy, I feel like it, you can't really, it's not a stretch, you know?
Um, 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 of the time, but the name of his baseball team is The Assumptions.
And he makes himself the coach, the business manager, and the first baseman.
I don't know why The Assumptions.
He's supposed to do everything.
That's an odd name.
It's a good band name, actually.
It's a good band name.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Solid band name.
I don't know.
I don't know that that joke existed, man.
Maybe he created it.
I don't think he did, but it's really kind of a very strange name.
I think it's got to be that there's that like Babylonian joke, the first record of like an actual structured joke that like the punchline is something like a dog at 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 1983 live stand-up performance with Robin Williams the other night, and I hadn't seen him live for a while.
In the first like 10 minutes or so, because both like the quality of the video and because like some of the style of 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 remembered.
There's just some bits in there that haven't aged.
You couldn't do a lot of what he did.
Like he like starts drinking from somebody's like liquor and like picks up a glass from someone's table and drinks from it and makes a joke about like, sorry about the cold source and then just moves on and picks up some lady's jacket from her table.
But like everybody's losing their fucking minds the whole time.
Of course it's amazing stuff.
Yeah.
That's a moment you're experiencing.
Yeah, it's a moment.
And also like we have lost the technology to have a man be on as much cocaine as 1983 Robin Williams.
You just can't contain it.
It can't be contained.
No.
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 Collier and Horowitz book particularly enlightening.
Some of his teammates complained that they were functioning as second fiddles in a one-man band.
Kennedy's sister Margaret, to whom he tossed his glove to put away when he came home from a game, always remembered his response: if you can't be captain, don't play.
And that gives you a lot, right?
Both like he comes home from the game, like throws his glove to his sister, just knowing she'll put it away, right?
That kind of says everything about how he's raised.
Yeah.
And his attitude, this is good, because Joe Kennedy is the guy who starts the Kennedys as a political dynasty, right?
He is the patriarch of what the Kennedys become and why.
I mean, you could say his dad was the one who started them in politics, but it's Joe that makes them their fortune.
And it's Joe who, you know, is the guy who makes or does it go.
He's got the drive to do it right.
Like his dad was like, oh, like, kind of slowly got involved.
Wasn't like, I want to do a politics.
I want to be the captain of the world.
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 a lobotomy on his daughter because she's like, likes boys too much, right?
That's the gist of what goes down.
We've talked about this in the lobotomy episodes, but he's capable.
He's incredibly good at everything he puts his hand to.
He's a full of monstrous things.
Monstrous things, but he's also just like, no one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be.
RFK might have wound up that way if the thing that happened hadn't happened.
But like JFK really isn't, you know, like JFK is to a significant extent supported by the folks around him.
Joe Kennedy is the most capable, I think, of the Kennedys that I have read about.
And it's not for nothing that by the time he comes around, he is our now.
We are in our second generation of Kennedy boys who are raised by a crowd of sisters and aunts who make the boy or the boys their primary responsibility.
Right.
And Joe is the first era in which this is happening and the Kennedys are kind of wealthy.
Right.
So he grows up egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own and the family's greatness.
But he is also the last Kennedy that where they're like, there's enough connection to the real world that he's really capable of understanding it or succeeding.
I think because things are going to get a lot more deranged after this point, right?
I don't fully know why, but that's kind of my reading of it.
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.
Yeah, you've, you've, yeah, at a certain point, it's like making copies of clones or whatever.
You've just like introduced too many transcription errors.
Things have gotten deranged.
It's a multiplicity situation.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's exactly.
It's a multiplicity is actually inspired by the Kennedy family.
It's true.
So Joe does well enough that with some of his dad's money, he gets accepted to Harvard, where one classmate said he, quote, sucked up to important people quite ingloriously and without scruple, which sounds about right to me.
He is a bad student, shockingly bad when it comes to technical stuff like finance.
And this is shocking because he's going to be one of the most successful bankers of all time.
So I kind of think Harvard might just suck as a school because he's clearly not bad at this.
Yeah, he's also like, at that point, like organized so many different things and like been able, like you're saying, like very capable of manager, like all the things.
Yeah.
This might just speak to the quality of Harvard's education at the time.
He's not wildly successful socially either.
He's not great with people, but he does manage to catch the eye of the mayor's daughter, the mayor of, I think, Boston's daughter, Rose Fitzgerald, from which I think John gets the F in Kennedy.
I think that's why Fitzgerald comes into the family.
Joe becomes a banker.
Long story short, again, this is not, we could actually, maybe we'll do a whole series of episodes on Joe, but he becomes a banker.
He starts as an examiner for the state government with all of the corruption that implies, right?
Again, the debate is like how mobbed up was he?
But there's no no involvement in corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part of the political process in the period, right?
There's no zero.
Yeah.
He got some stuff on you.
You got something going on, right?
Before long, through some complicated and questionable financial maneuvering, he's able to put together the loans and investments to buy a bank of his own.
And Joe Kennedy becomes the nation's youngest bank president at age 25.
His goal at this point is to become a millionaire by age 35, which is a sign of how modest his ambitions were compared to where they were in 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 wealthy.
Like half a billion dollars and we're talking a while ago.
He passes in like 70, 69, something like that.
So like that's a lot more money.
Yeah.
He became a billionaire base.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Effect.
Yeah.
For all intents and purposes, right?
Now, there are, again, persistent allegations that he was heavily involved in bootlegging and more serious crimes during the prohibition years.
I don't think this is true, that he's like a 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 are involved in.
His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have found no hard or even very soft evidence of like bootlegging in researching his book, The Patriarch.
And I believe David, when he's like, I would have loved to have that in my book about him, like, that's fun.
Right.
But I just can't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaking of not being involved in bootlegging, I can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging.
No hard evidence.
No hard evidence.
No proof.
You know, a lot of allegations.
I'll make some of them, but no proof.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
Searching for Hard Evidence00:02:12
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Ah, we're back.
So most of these allegations of like bootlegging and really serious criminal involvement from Joe don't crop up until the late 60s.
So they're part of the mythos around the Kennedy assassinations, right?
As this article for history.com notes, various mafia characters came out of the woodwork to back up the accusations against Kennedy.
Al Capone's piano tuner said that he overheard conversations between Scarface and the elder Kennedy.
The ex-wife of another Chicago mobster claimed her son used to do business with Kennedy.
NASA doesn't believe these stories, mostly because Richard Nixon, when he was running against JFK in 1960, hired a team of opposition researchers to investigate the Kennedy Klan.
They found all sorts of dirt on Joe Kennedy, says Nassau, but not that he was a bootlegger.
And I think that's a fair way to list it out.
It's like, yeah, he's doing crimes because you have to to be involved in politics and business banking at his level.
There's not people who own banks today who aren't doing some crimes, right?
But he's not running rum because why would he be?
What's the Joe?
Yeah.
So where he does make his fortune is as shady as bootlegging, Hollywood.
And again, Hollywood in the 20s is also very organized crime.
A lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as like these were primarily like Jewish gangsters in the East Coast who move over to the West Coast for a variety of reasons.
But like that is the root of a lot of early cinema money, right?
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.
Um, Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now call B movies.
NASA thinks this is where a huge amount of his early money comes from, right?
Um, 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 in stock options, and he is really good at manipulating stock prices, right?
Yeah, we love to do that.
We love we love to do that, making fake money, and a lot of what he's doing is stuff that you 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 1929 crash coming and he sells off basically everything he's got, and then he shorts the entire U.S. 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, that is the Kennedy money.
They shorted America.
That's so darkly poetic.
Yeah, nice work if you can get it.
Yeah, you know, maybe I'll do something like that for this fucking election, throw all my money on RFK.
I mean, there's a way to bet against America that will make so much money.
Yeah, yeah, there's a certain kind of betting on America that will always work.
The trouble is figuring out at any given moment what that kind of betting against America is.
Joe's always going to be great at making money.
This is a thing that he never really loses his head for.
And again, he dies worth half a billion dollars or so.
You know, I think it's kind of unclear entirely.
And this is where the Kennedy family fortune comes from because no subsequent members of his family are nearly this successful and they don't have to be.
But Joe never managed to build up momentum in the area that mattered most to him, which is elected office, right?
As we'll talk about, he is influential in politics.
He becomes a powerful man, but he doesn't like get elected places.
That's not really how he makes his way in.
And so, as he starts having kids in the early 1900s, nine of them, he lets the boys know that a lot is expected of them, right?
I am having use because, like me, I want, like my dad said with me, I want you to go further than I went, right?
I want to, I want the Kennedys are going to run this fucking country.
Yeah, that's so much like, yeah, like I did better than my dad, and you're going to do better than me.
Also, I'm worth $500 million.
Yeah, 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 opportunities than I did, all the things, which is the whole reason why we have civilization, right?
Everybody basic, everybody's normal feels that way.
But some people feel the toxic version of this, which is my kid had better do better than me, or there's going to be hell to pay.
And like do better in a, in a, like, a warp sort of like whatever your personal idea of success is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In which case it's running everything and having a lot of people.
Running everything.
Being the capital, right?
Because if you're not the captain, it's not worth it.
Yeah.
Why fucking play if you're not the captain, right?
He spent his later working life and his period of greatest influence adjacent to elected power.
In World War I, he's on, I think it's the war production board or something.
He's helping to organize war production, right?
So because he's good at this kind of stuff, right?
He's a good guy to put in that job and he does well at it.
He's not charismatic or likable in the way that can get you elected.
Yeah, but he is a good man to have doing a lot of nuts and bolts shit, right?
In 1934, FDR appoints him to be the first head of the SEC.
He is the first Securities and Exchange Commission guy we have.
And it's the guy that shorted the guy.
Wasn't technically doing crimes, but it was legal then, motherfucker.
It was legal then.
That's God.
So much poetry.
It's great.
Yeah, you love to say it.
His final reward is a cushy gig as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, kind of as at the last, you know, couple of years.
It's like 38 to 40.
So it's like in that last period right as World War II starts.
And the reason why he has to stop being the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain is that he kind of wants the Nazis to win.
And like during the Battle of Britain, he makes a statement that democracy is finished in England and maybe finished in the U.S. too.
Great man.
You can't say stuff like that.
I mean, you can.
He thought he was, he was almost able to.
A couple of things had broken different.
You might have been able to say that in the U.S., but you are right.
You're not able to say that in the U.S.
And this is kind of, he gets sort of disgraced by this, right?
That's good.
Yeah, that's that part.
We love when people get disgraced for saying things like that.
Yeah.
That's good.
It's not popular to say that to people who are actively getting bombed and who are like responding to being bombed the way the British did in World War II.
You're not going to be very welcome on the island much longer.
Bad at reading a room.
Might be why he wasn't good at getting elected.
Yeah, it seems like maybe he didn't read the wind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So his first son, the first of the Kennedy boys, Joe Jr., was born in 1915.
And he's pretty clearly groomed for the presidency, right?
I don't know how discreet the plan is to make him president, but he's like, I want you to go as far as possible, right?
And to do that, you have to like make a name for yourself and extend sort of the glory of the family.
And also, it's not just you.
I've got all these other kids.
I've got, you know, John F. Kennedy.
I've got Robert Kennedy.
I've got Ted Kennedy.
And all of them are going to be asked to compete as kids, whenever they're like swimming, when they're playing like football in the yard, when they're doing like they're constantly in competition with each other.
And Joe is constantly setting them in competition with each other.
And they are all raised, go as far as you can, do more than I was able to do.
And you are constantly measuring yourself against your brothers, right?
This has very early on some calamitous results for the family because when World War II breaks out, this competition extends to wartime service.
The elder Kennedy boys, which came to include John F. Kennedy in 1917 and then Robert, didn't just join the military.
They had to do the most impressive things they could do in the military.
John becomes a PT boat commander.
And we're not going to go into the whole PT-109 story, but his ship goes down.
There's, I think a lot of people will argue because of 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.
Like the PR, the PR version of this plays, right?
Because America is looking for war heroes at that time, and they find one in JFK.
This spurs Joe.
His brother has now become a public war hero.
And Joe is, you know, by any one stretch of the imagination, doing a heroic thing.
He is a bomber pilot flying bombing missions, daylight raids over Western Europe.
One of the most insanely things and insanely dangerous things any group of human beings has ever done, right?
And he flies the required, there's something like 20 missions you have to fly.
And at that point, you can stop, right?
Because it's so dangerous.
They're like, once you've reached it.
Yeah.
But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough.
I still have not, you know, like I have to measure myself against JFK.
So he keeps doing missions after the point at which he wouldn't have had to continue doing missions.
And he gets shot down and killed late in the war.
And hey, he's a hero in my book.
Like that had to be done, like the like fighting the Nazis and he goes down fighting the Nazis, but you can already see this competition legacy thing is getting killed.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, God.
Especially like after like your dad's like, I don't know, the Nazis aren't so bad.
And maybe like we gotta help.
Right.
And that might, maybe that's part of why they have to go in so hard for like World War II.
Like for what he said, no, actually, we don't like this, actually.
Dan did not want me flying bombing missions over here.
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 JFK is going to become the first and so far only Kennedy president.
His brother, and I'm yada yadaing 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 edged out because Roy Cohn, who like doesn't like him, he and Roy Cohn kind of are like enemies in a, 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.
But it's during this brief era where his brother's the president and he's the attorney general.
This era just lasts a couple years, but this is Camelot, right?
This is the period of time that people call Camelot.
And it's legitimately like a heady time to be a Kennedy.
And this is the period of time, this very brief period where JFK is the president.
RFK is the attorney general.
And it's very clear to everyone after JFK finishes being the president, Bobby Kennedy is probably going to become president, right?
There's not a lot of people who doubt that even at the time.
He is that kind of, and he does his share.
Again, he like wiretaps Martin Luther King Jr., you know, like there's a lot to criticize about this, but from the perspective of the populace, these are two handsome, young, intelligent, capable men.
One of them is the president.
His brother's probably going to be president next.
The American economy is like half of the world economy.
Of course, people remember this as a golden age, you know?
Yeah, I know.
And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like two years, something like that.
It sounds not a long period, you know?
So, and again, but this is the period that RFK Jr., our RFK Jr., the subject of these episodes, is going to have his first memories.
And Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17th, 1954 in the Georgetown University hospital.
His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy Skackle family, also part of the budding U.S. aristocracy.
This part gets left out a lot in the histories, but RFK's wife is Ethel Kennedy, originally Ethel Skackle.
And they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type.
You know, the Quiverfuls believe we need to have as many kids as possible to create soldiers for the army of God.
We're going to gain control of the nation by swarming them with our kids who will take control of our people.
Our army of children.
Ethel and RFK believe that, but just for themselves.
Like, not everyone should do this, but we are going to have all of the children possible so that we can flood the government with Kennedys who will take control of the levels of power.
They have 11 kids, you know?
Like, you're not doing that unless you really have a reason.
Right.
And Ethel is a very driven woman.
She's a controversial woman.
One depiction of her is she's basically a saint.
And the other depiction is she's kind of a monster.
It winds up in the middle one way or the other, but she's a, 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 creating a bunch of those boys, right?
And creating some daughters who are going to help raise and take care of those boys because the women in the family are focused on the men, right?
And yeah, her whole thing is I'm going to birth an aristocracy all on my own.
RFK Jr. from a very young age, the primary thing everyone knows about him is that he is always obsessed with animals.
He is, he kind of is almost maybe even a savant with animals.
He is really good and with every kind of animal.
He loves, he loves everything that's not human beings.
Ethel claimed that as a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs he sees crawling in the garden.
Before he is 10, he has a whole menagerie, a swarm of pets.
And some of these are normal rich kid pets.
He's got a horse, obviously, right?
He's a Kennedy.
RFK Jr. Obsessed with Animals00:15:34
Of course, of course.
Yeah.
But there's also weird stuff.
He has pet raccoons.
He has pet lizards.
He has thousands of crickets to feed the lizards.
In the book RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I do not like, tells this story.
The 2008 thriller Snakes on a Plane could have been based on an experience Bobby had as a kid when he took a sack of his pet reptiles on a board of flight from Washington National to LaGuardia in New York.
And all of the slithery, scary things accidentally got loose mid-flight as female passengers screamed and may have jumped up onto their seats.
Bobby crawled around and gathered them all up.
Oh, that's, I mean, this is more like a bad thing.
It's hard not to like that.
It's hard not to like having doing a snakes on a plane.
Doing a snakes on a plane.
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 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 like native tribes and the Amazon and shit.
Like he, again, it's not weird that he got a worm in his brain.
Oh, yeah.
No, he has spent a lot of his life in the wild eating bushmeat.
Yeah.
And dogs.
And dogs.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Probably where he got that brain worm.
May have been where he got.
It's very, very unsurprising that he had a worm eat part of his brain.
Yeah, allegedly.
Yeah, there are some mysteries about RFK Jr.
That's not one of the things.
No, no, no, no.
Solved.
Early on.
Solved early on.
Now, again, this biography by Oppenheimer, like the one by Collier and Horowitz, there's a lot of good criticisms, but I will make.
Again, he's like making snakes on a plane comparisons.
The RFK Jr. book I've got, part of why I like it is it's published before he's a political figure.
It comes out in 2015.
So it is not tainted by everything that's happening now, 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.
We'll talk about that later.
And like, you can even see some of like the bullshit where he's like, probably female passengers screamed and jumped up onto their seats.
Well, no one said that.
You just, you just want it to be more like snakes on the plane than maybe it was, right?
Yeah.
And that passage like did ping me.
I was like, wait, what?
It should.
It's not a good biography.
He's not a good biographer, but you also can't discard it because there's just a lot of shit that we get from it that we don't get anywhere else.
Yeah, I mean, if the first part of the story is true, great.
Thanks for telling me that he brought a bag of bags of people.
He probably did.
Look, he's not, I don't think Oppenheimer makes shit up.
I think he's just editorializing sort of like ratting and color.
Yeah, this says stuff about you, not about your subjects.
Right, right, right.
So, yeah, while modern quiverful families have shitload of kids in the hope of flooding our democracy, Ethel and Robert did the same thing with the knowledge that their children are definitely going to inherit political power.
They are consciously breeding a ruling class.
By the time RFK Jr. is eight, everyone knows RFK is going to be the president when John is done in office.
And, you know, no one's really sure about Teddy, but it seems like, you know, he's probably going to wind 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 Jr. is making his earliest memories to expect the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in a row.
It's not wild at that point to think we might have 24 straight years of Kennedys running the country, you know?
That's not a bad prediction to make in this period of time.
And as a result, all eyes from the beginning of his life are on RFK Jr. and his generation of Kennedys, because everyone knows if they're not going to be president, they'll probably be in Congress.
Some of them might be judges, you know, some of them might be governors, right?
These are the people who are going to run the country.
And the whole country knows this.
And so all of these Kennedy kids 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 of you need to be president, but there's not the amount of spotlight comes from.
It's not public perception pressure.
It's just like within the family, you have your dad telling you, you got to do this.
And now the world is saying, and you're going to.
Yeah.
And all of you are going to.
We're all expecting this.
Yes.
And I want to quote now from the book, The Kennedys by Collier and Horowitz.
They were, as one journalist had remarked, America's children.
Yet while they had been in the spotlight all their lives, they had a curious innocence.
The important outsiders attached to being a Kennedy amused them.
They gawked back at the tourists who peeked through the hedges at Hyannis.
They scooped up sand from the public beach and sold it as Kennedy sand for a dollar a bag.
They stood at the fence and answered Kennedy questions.
What does Jackie eat for breakfast?
Where do the Kennedys shop for a quarter apiece?
Asked what it meant to be a Kennedy.
Bobby's son David had once replied, It means that we're exactly the same as everybody else, except better.
Things are going well with these kids.
Yeah, more people should be raised like this.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to continue that quote.
They competed with other children in swim meets and sailing contests, succeeding so well that Hyannis port officials barred them from a certain number of these competitions every season so that other residents could win some ribbons.
The competition within their own group was far more intense, far more metaphoric of what they saw as the challenge of their lives.
Each of them was always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age or ability group just above them would slip, always aware, above all else, that their parents were watching and assessing their performance to see which of them had it.
If the Beale Street house, where some of the prior Kennedy generation were born, had been an enigma of latency, the compound where this generation gathered every summer was a training ground to recapture the achieved greatness that had once belonged to the family.
As Chris Lawford said later, we were all, every one of us, raised to be president.
Yeah.
So that's great.
That's cool.
Good way to raise kids.
That's good.
Yeah.
And they all turned out normal.
Yeah.
And they all turned out normal.
Speaking of normal, one story RFK Jr. is later going to tell of his childhood is about one of his few visits to the Oval Office during the Camelot period.
He brings a salamander in to give to his uncle, the president, as a gift.
There's a photo of JFK with the salamander poking it with a presidential pin while Bobby sits nearby.
And this picture is going to be one of the few artifacts to tie RFK Jr. forever with the glorious side of the Kennedy myth.
This is his brief shining moment inside the limelight inhabited by his glorious doomed elders.
The salamander, by the way, is later given a home in the White House fountain.
So don't worry.
It winds up better than all of the kids in this story, right?
Yeah.
Considering salamander-wise, yeah, salamander-wise, that's a very successful salamander.
I'm sure you had lots of salamander kids.
Like you got to wind up, what's even there for a salamander after the White House fountain?
I don't know how you move up for that salamander.
You know, maybe that means the protests are the fountain, I guess.
Maybe they became salamander artists.
You know, there's a bunch of salamanders living in fucking Dimes Square, New York right now with podcasts.
Who knows?
Oh, how the salamander has fallen.
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 out your kid likes animals.
You buy him a picture book, right?
They like dinosaurs.
You get him a book with dinosaurs.
Maybe you buy him a model replica of a dinosaur bone or something like that if they're really into it, you know.
RFK Jr., because he likes animals, gets regular safaris to Africa.
And he is on Safari when JFK is gunned down by Mernar and Montgomery Sanders one cold November day.
This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt with in.
Quote: Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and participated in the capture of a huge leopard tortoise.
Because he was a scion of Camelot, he was permitted to bring it home in a suitcase unquestioned, as if he were a diplomat.
It helped that his escort was his aunt Eunice's husband, Sergeant Shriver, who then headed the JFK-established Peace Corps.
Many years later, the turtle, stuffed, was on display along with a multitude of other Kennedy memorabilia in the den of Bobby's own Hickory Hill-like estate in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco.
She's such a taking an endangered turtle home with him.
How old is he during that time?
He's like eight or nine.
Kennedy dies.
To be importing endangered turtles in your suitcase.
Your sergeant's uncle or whatever.
Like what?
Sergeant Shriver is his name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is fucking, what's her name?
I forget her.
Yeah, Shriver's great grandpa or dad.
I think dad, probably, just based on age.
So the loss of JFK is obviously a crushing blow to Kennedy family morale.
But the dream doesn't die with him, right?
He was president for a couple of years, you know, very popular.
When he gets blown away, what else do you have to say?
And then, you know, you've got RFK waiting in the wings.
Now, one of the things that does happen here that is kind of devastating to the Kennedy family, Jackie Kennedy had been a pretty influential person in the family, and she marries someone else after he dies, which, you know, I'm not shitting on her for that, right?
Like that's a perfectly normal thing to do at a certain point.
But she, she is both a major purveyor of the Camelot myth.
Some people will say Jackie Kennedy kind of creates it, but she also kind of bounces from being in the family after this, which, like, I don't blame her.
Yeah, again, it seems like it's the healthiest thing for you.
Getting your family, right?
Seems like boundary setting to me.
Yeah, I think Jackie Onassis might just have had a really good head on her shoulders.
But this does mean that now the entire weight of the family's dreams are on RFK and Ethel Kennedy, you know?
With the most glorious Kennedy out of the picture, the family legacy suddenly feels in doubt, too.
There's suddenly a question: like, are we going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of the presidency?
Are we all going to go on to be the people who run this country?
Right.
And in 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 Kennedys in the game.
It was me and Teddy, you know, this is so working out.
There are 50 of us.
Right, right.
Yeah, we got plenty.
We can take a few more bullets even.
Yeah.
So they, you know, the older Kennedys also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations.
Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from St. Luke, to whom much is given, much will be required.
And Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying this.
With great power.
America has been very good to the Kennedys.
We all owe the country a debt of gratitude and public service, right?
This is a noblest oblige thing, right?
We're the people who've benefited most from this system.
So of course, we owe it the most, which I would love if that meant, well, we should pay a lot more in taxes as opposed to like, well, we should run things.
We should have positions of power to give back.
Well, and to be fair, I will say Kennedys politically have tended to be more on the side of rich people should pay more taxes, right?
I will, you got to, yeah, you do have to give them that.
But this idea of like, because we've benefited, we should run things is so poisonous.
And it's going to get a lot of them killed, right?
It's about to get RFK killed.
Even the younger people killed.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
That is what's coming in a second.
So RFK Jr. is educated in very elite, expensive private schools.
The first Our Lady of Victory was an all-white school.
And this becomes a problem during the Camelot period because JFK is pro-integrating schools, which is great, except for people point out, well, your nephew's in an all-white school, huh?
That's kind of bad.
I mean, that's classic.
Fair.
I don't think the media is wrong to point that out.
And the Kennedys move him to an integrated private school run by Quakers after that point.
The principal at Our Lady of Victory would later claim that the whole story about integration being the issue had been created after the fact.
That's not why Bobby gets transferred, because Bobby and his brother Joe skipped school so constantly to fuck around in the woods and like had to couldn't continue to be students there.
And I, I'd actually, he might not be lying because that happens several more times.
And it's, it's going to happen in the future that like when he has to get kicked out of a school, another thing gets made as the scapegoat for it, right?
Because like you can't have a Bobby Kennedy and Joe Kennedy get kicked out of a school for just being dog shit.
For being problems.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
For being problems.
Now, RFK, because of what's about to happen, gets kind of sainted.
And Ethel is going to be 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 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, 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 have complemental stuff.
Yeah, he could have won the gold.
Yeah.
Fucking.
So, you know, while they're doing this, and I don't actually know, this may have been, 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 understood, like, that's what it is.
I'm the wife of a powerful woman and I get these benefits from it or a powerful man and I get all these benefits from it, but he is going to fuck around constantly.
We will just never talk about it.
I'll be angry about it forever, but we'll never talk about it, right?
They are very good at crafting an image for themselves and at kind of remolding the Kennedy family image to focus around them.
And RFK is a great politician.
He is extremely good at being in politics, at running for election, at building buzz around himself.
And he's so good at it that it kind of papers over a lot of the failings he has as a living person.
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 checkbook and he kind of indulges his son Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Jr.'s passions by paying for them, right?
That's how RFK kind of raises RFK Jr. is whatever you're into.
I've got, I've got plenty of money.
I have no time for you, but I have money.
Raising a Falconer from Youth00:06:50
And as a result, RFK Jr. gets into falconry as an 11-year-old.
Sure.
Sure.
Why not?
Why not give a falcon?
Yeah.
RFK love.
He'll be fine.
I do love all of the fucking Yeets references to RFK Jr.
We do have a Falconer.
You know, we've got a Falconer in this election.
Can the Falcon hear him?
I don't know.
Jire seems to be widening.
Horowitz and Collier write: quote: His father had commissioned naturalists from the Bronx Zoo to make him a walk-in terrarium for his 13th birthday.
He had encouraged the interest in falconry, although admitting to his son that he was disturbed by the implications of feeding pigeons to the predators.
The two of them worked out a compromise with a distinctive Kennedy twist.
If a pigeon managed to avoid a hawk on two successive flights, it was retired and never forced to face death again.
Struck by the boy's range of interests, Bobby Sr. had once remarked that Bobby Jr. was just like the president.
Unfortunately, he was also what some of the adults around the family would politely call rambunctious.
This was a kid you could not keep in class or get to obey the rules at all.
Starting in seventh grade, he was sent away to a boarding school along with his brother Joe to stay out of his mom and dad's hair while they enjoyed being famous and powerful.
At private school, RFK Jr. reinforced his reputation as the poster child for what we now call ADHD.
One classmate later noted, he could climb straight up the wall, like 10 feet, and we would just be standing there watching in awe.
He was always real skinny and lanky, and he could get a real good grip on the bricks, and he had absolutely no fear.
He climbed up that wall like he was Spider-Man.
That's good for him.
Yeah.
That's the funk is like literally the great power, great responsibility quote from earlier.
It's just, that's, he's just, he's a Spider-Man.
He's literally, literally a Spider-Man.
It is like one of those.
Obviously, over-medication is a problem, but I've never read about a kid who needed ADHD treatment more than RFK Jr.
Like it's it he really literally running up no 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 uh take this uh exotic Turtle hunt.
Like, if you're not breaking the rules, you're not going to want to follow the rules.
So, I don't even know if you'd call it breaking the rules.
There's not even a concept in his head that there are rules for him.
Exactly.
You know, right?
Yeah.
His mom wanted him to join the football team at the fancy, I think it's Middlebrook at this point, private school that he's at.
But RFK Jr. is not a great football guy.
He is actually not like a jock character.
Like you would imagine.
You think about like Clone High, JFK, they have him portrayed as like the football captain.
But then JFK had that public personality at least.
RFK Jr. is a weird kid.
He is defiantly weird.
He dedicates most of his time to playing with his hawk, Morgan LaFay, who he would take to school for show and tell sessions.
During the week, he lived under strict discipline, but occasionally he and his older brother Joe would be allowed to show off what being a Kennedy meant to their classmates.
And I'm going to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here.
On weekends, one of the Kennedys' many helpers, or Ethel Kennedy herself, usually with two dogs in her convertible, would arrive to pick up Bobby and his brother Joe, and then someone would return them on Sunday evening.
She had once invited Bobby's entire class and some of his teachers for a field day at Hickory Hill, where they swam in the pool, toured Bobby's menagerie of animals, and watched the surfer film The Endless Summer in the Pool Cabana.
As one class member who made the tour recalled, it was a circus out there.
And they mean that literally because of all of the wild animals.
Yes, right?
Yeah.
But then on June 5th, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Like his brother, there are going to be decades of debate and conspiracy theories as to whether or not Sirhan Sirhan, who's officially the gunman, had rather done it.
I have my own theories about a certain Mr. Sanders.
But we don't need to get into that today, right?
I will say RFK Jr. subscribes to these theories.
He does not believe, at least last I checked, he doesn't think that Sirhan Sirhan is who killed his dad, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, he's very, yeah.
He's got.
And like, like, like with any Kennedy, I kind of feel about Kennedy conspiracy theories the way I do it with this election.
People say, oh, so-and-so is definitely going to win or definitely not.
It's impossible.
No, neither of them has less than a 30% chance of winning.
And like every Kennedy conspiracy theory, 20% chances, right?
20% chance it wasn't, sir.
I'll give it that, you know?
It's not my odds on bet, but there's a lot of shady shit that went down.
And I'm not, I'm not, you know, gonna rule anything out entirely here.
But that doesn't really matter.
It does matter that RFK Jr. subscribes to these theories.
And it matters that when RFK dies, he takes the dream of the Kennedy dynasty with him.
And the son who bore his name is never going to be the same.
And we're going to talk about all of that, Cody.
In part, Dukes.
Cody.
Hi.
Shody.
Pluggables.
Yo, Yodi.
Yeah, I got some plugs to plug.
Check out some more news.
It's on YouTube.
And we've got a patreon.com/slash some more news.
Even more news is a podcast we also do.
Sometimes we do a podcast called Way Less News because who wants to talk about the news?
Absolutely no one anymore.
Nobody.
Check out my bands called The Hot Shapes.
We've got an album called Laverne.
It's on Bandcamp and SoundCloud.
Oh, you should have called him The Assumptions, Cody.
I might now.
I might start another band called The Assumptions.
Who knows?
It's an RFK deep or a Joe Kennedy deep cut.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Check all that stuff out.
Invite Cody to your band.
Look, Mighty Mighty Boss Tones.
We know you lost a singer because he became a COVID denier after that George Floyd album.
You know, invite Cody.
Wow.
You know, knock on wood, Cody.
Knock on wood.
Every band that lost a member that ended up in the super group that is like the anti-vax super group.
Yeah.
I'll replace whomever in the other group.
You 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 Bostowns.
Is that going to make good music?
There's not a chance in hell.
Absolutely not.
Not compatible in any way, but I want to hear that album.
You know, it's called novelty music.
And it's called novelty music.
It's a hit.
Anyway, go to hell.
I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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The Novelty of Money00:01:47
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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