| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| They are a disgrace. | ||
| And that's why they're about to lose all across the country two weeks from today. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's rest. | |
| Let's rest. | ||
| Wednesday, the three leading candidates in New York City's 2025 mayor's race, Democratic nominee Zorhan Mamdani, Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, face off for a second time. | ||
| answering questions from moderators as well as New York City voters. | ||
| Hosted by Spectrum News NY1, watch live at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Michael Weiser is a producer and writer for PBS Frontline, their latest work, The Rise of RFK Jr. | ||
| He joining us on the program to talk about it. | ||
| Mr. Weiser, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| What got you interested in the topic? | ||
| Well, there's no question that RFK Jr. is one of the most interesting and powerful people in Washington. | ||
|
unidentified
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And as the new Trump administration was coming in, we were looking for a story to tell. | |
| And our company is really drawn to everybody who I work with. | ||
| We're all drawn to this idea of understanding our times through biography, through understanding how people like RFK Jr. have risen to power, what they represent, what it is that they're tapping into. | ||
| And even though he's somebody who's been in the limelight since literally the day that he was born, we found that the story of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was far more complicated, far more interesting than I think most people understand. | ||
| And I suppose that when people see the Kennedy name, they probably assume a lot of things. | ||
| But when it comes to the story you wanted to tell, what's the central theme if you had to boil it down to that? | ||
| Well, it's interesting that you mention the Kennedy name because he has that from the very beginning. | ||
| And I think that the story that we were telling here was of somebody who, in a lot of ways, his rise to power was obvious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He comes out of the Kennedy family. | |
| He has the same name as his father, the beloved Robert F. Kennedy Sr. | ||
| But in a lot of ways, he's also a very unlikely figure, someone who it seemed incredible that they would rise to become one of the most powerful cabinet members in Donald Trump's administration, somebody whose life was marked by scandal, by ridicule, as he embraced the vaccine skepticism. | ||
|
unidentified
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And yet he's somebody who's managed to rise. | |
| And so in our story, we were trying to understand how do you resolve all of the different ways of understanding who Bobby Kennedy is? | ||
|
unidentified
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How did he rise to power? | |
| What does it tell us about America today? | ||
| How much of Mr. Kennedy's experience as a child with the assassination of his father, his uncle, how much do you think shapes what he eventually becomes? | ||
| I think there's no way to understand his life without understanding that terrible tragedy, which was a national tragedy, but it was also a personal tragedy for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was a young boy when his father, who was running for president at the time, was assassinated. | ||
|
unidentified
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And in that moment, I think two crucial things happen to him. | |
| One is that he's dealing with what any kid who loses their father would have to deal with. | ||
| And in this case, his mom, who's pregnant with their 11th kid, is struggling to help the family. | ||
| He's sent off to boarding school only a few months after his dad is assassinated. | ||
| We talked to one of his classmates in high school who said that the Bobby Kennedy that he knew was a lost soul was the words that he used to describe him. | ||
| And it begins a period of drug use and behavior that his friends told us he indicated that it seemed like he didn't care whether he lived or died. | ||
| And so he's dealing with this tragedy as a human, as a kid, but at the same time, he's dealing with the fact that this is all happening in the limelight, that his father was beloved. | ||
| We spoke to his cousin, Stephen Kennedy Smith, who talked about being on the train that's carrying his dad's body and seeing all of the crowds lined up outside mourning for his dad. | ||
| And from a very early age, RFK Jr. has this idea that there's a mantle that he needs to pick up, that somehow there's an expectation of others and that he puts on himself that he's going to pick up his dad's legacy, that somehow he's going to try to live up to the martyr that his dad was. | ||
| And so I think those two things happening at the same time with his dad's death, not to say anything of his uncle's death, assassination also, really do shape him and set in motion the life story that we explore in the film. | ||
| The film is the rise of RFK Jr. Michael Weiser here to talk about it. | ||
| And if you want to ask him questions, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats and Independents, 2027-8002. | ||
| You can text your questions too at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Mr. Weiser, we're going to show our folks at home a section of the film that starts off that it's that conversation, the initial one between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump shortly after his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. | ||
| We'll show that to you and then we'll talk about that. | ||
| I felt a spiritual urge to call Bobby and put on his radar that this might be the time to call President Trump. | ||
| And Bobby, after some reflection, thought that was a good idea. | ||
| And I worked with Tucker Carlson, who connected Bobby to President Trump as he was leaving the hospital. | ||
|
unidentified
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I just turned my head to show the job. | |
| And something wrapped in the giant, like the world's largest mosquito. | ||
| I think a real relationship between the two men was forged on that first night. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it was. | |
| It was a bullet load. | ||
| You know, what did they call that an AR-15 or something? | ||
| It was a big gun. | ||
| It's pretty tough youngster. | ||
| Bobby asked about his family, having grown up with assassination, his own family. | ||
| He said, this can be very traumatic for your kids and your grandkids. | ||
| How's everybody doing? | ||
| Trump said, I appreciate you asking Bobby. | ||
| You know, everyone's doing okay under the circumstances. | ||
| President Trump then said to Bobby, I'm glad you called, Bobby. | ||
| I've been wanting to talk to you. | ||
|
unidentified
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We should really work together. | |
| I would love you to just, and I think it would be so good for New York and so good for you. | ||
| Mr. Weiser, only a sliver of the film, but there it's the starting point. | ||
| Elaborate on that. | ||
| What's important to know going from that point forward. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's really a crucial moment in everything that would happen after. | |
| That moment of the assassination attempt on former President Trump at the time, candidate Trump, was really a turning point. | ||
| At that point, RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign was really in trouble. | ||
| His pulling was in the single digits, and it looked like there was a chance he wouldn't even be affecting the outcome of the election. | ||
| But in the wake of that assassination attempt, he makes a personal connection with Donald Trump and reaches out. | ||
|
unidentified
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And as we talked about, assassination and political violence were something that he knew personally. | |
| And those people around us told us that that was the reason for the call. | ||
| But on that call, Trump uses that moment to reach out to tell Bobby Kennedy that he thinks that there's a chance for an alliance, that if he can join onto his team, he'll have a chance at having power inside the Trump administration, that he has something to offer him. | ||
|
unidentified
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And clearly, that's something that he begins to think about. | |
| And as we discuss, as those who know him discuss in the film, there was a lively debate inside the RFK Jr. camp about whether to make that alliance with Donald Trump. | ||
| He was warned by close advisors, even members of his own family, that it was a risky thing to do, that they weren't sure if they could trust Donald Trump. | ||
| And some of his advisors told us they weren't sure that they believed that Donald Trump represented the things that RFK Jr. stood for. | ||
| But in the end, he saw a chance to get power in Washington, a chance to move on an agenda that he had been building for decades. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it was a risk he was willing to take. | |
| A viewer off of X asked, in all the interviews that you did, did you have a chance to talk with RFK Jr. himself? | ||
|
unidentified
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We did not. | |
| We were not able to talk to him, but we were able to talk to a lot of people around him. | ||
| We talked to close advisors on the campaign. | ||
| We talked to people who had joined with him early on in the vaccine movement that he had embraced. | ||
| We talked to family members and to friends who had known him from a young age. | ||
| And I think that putting all of those things together revealed an interesting portrait of who he is. | ||
| And we also throughout the film did our best without having an interview with him to hear from him both his own words and things that he had written and also things that he had said along the way. | ||
| So I think by putting all of those things together, you really do get a complete corporate, complete portrait of the complexity of RFK Jr. | ||
| Michael Weiser joining us for this conversation. | ||
| Our first call is from New York Independent Line. | ||
| This is Jeff of PBS Frontlines with PBS Frontlines, Michael Weiser. | ||
| Jeff, good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Weiser, for your documentary. | ||
| I look forward to seeing it tonight. | ||
| I'd like to point out that Mr. Kennedy has been a longtime vaccine skeptic. | ||
| And for example, he recently replaced the expert members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with vaccine skeptics. | ||
| And this is just part and parcel of a dismantling of the entire public health infrastructure that he has orchestrated. | ||
| For example, he canceled $11 billion in funding for state and local public health departments in an already underfunded department long before he came into February into the office. | ||
| He dismantled public health agencies. | ||
| He's forced out the leadership of thousands of workers and scientists. | ||
| And he's destabilizing the entire scientific NIH enterprise by doing so. | ||
| People are leaving the agency. | ||
| They're going elsewhere because they can't depend on the NIH for their jobs. | ||
| And their talent is going to go somewhere else. | ||
| And we can't redo that type of research in a flash when the next president comes and appoints somebody else. | ||
| That information, that knowledge is going to be lost for generations at least. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I just say one more thing, Pedro? | |
| Quickly, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So my point here is to point this out. | ||
| I think people know this, a lot of people know this, but I would like to offer a solution to this kind of problem. | ||
| This will only take a moment, Pedro. | ||
| Bear with me. | ||
| I want to compare this to the consumer financial caller. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| We're going to have to move on only because I think it goes a little further than what we want. | ||
| Mr. Weiser, those are the modern day effects of having Mr. Kennedy in the office. | ||
| What can you add to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of the things that's interesting, we spoke to people on both sides of this. | |
| As I said, we talked to people who were close to him and who were close to him in the vaccine, the skeptical, in the movement, skeptical of vaccines. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they were cheering on what he was doing. | |
| One of his close advisors from the campaign told us that the analogy that he has is that the America's health system is in the ER and you need doctors around who are going to fix things and they needed Bobby Kennedy to be in charge. | ||
| We also spoke to a number of CDC scientists and doctors who told us that they were alarmed by what they were seeing from inside the agency, that when they came in, there was some hope that they might be able to debate the evidence with him. | ||
|
unidentified
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But what they found over the months that they were there was that he was implementing an agenda, in their view, that he had come into office with and that he wasn't open to the science that they wanted to present to them. | |
| And a number of key scientists have left and have raised alarms about what's happening with vaccines and also about the capabilities that the agency has. | ||
| And Mr. Weiser, your film takes a look at a centerpiece when it comes to Mr. Kennedy's viewpoints, centering around an article that took place in Rolling Stone magazine. | ||
| It was published also on Salon. | ||
| How does that fit into the Kennedy philosophy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That article is really an interesting moment. | |
| He had rebuilt his life as an environmental activist and an environmental lawyer. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he sort of, as the story is told, reluctantly gets into the idea that there might be a connection between vaccines and autism. | |
| We spoke to some advocates of that movement who helped to recruit him, who actually moms who had been involved in this cause went up to him after he was speaking about mercury and water and said, you need to take up this cause. | ||
| And he took it up knowing that it was controversial and wrote this article in Rolling Stone and Salon magazine. | ||
|
unidentified
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And over the years after it was published, scientist after scientist objected to what he had written. | |
| There were retractions and changes to the article. | ||
| And eventually the entire article on the Salon website was retracted. | ||
| And what people who knew him told us was that that was a key moment for him doubling down on this issue of vaccines, that rather than backing off and saying there were mistakes in the article, he was determined to prove that there weren't mistakes in the article, that he was right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He would write an entire book. | |
| He would begin to dedicate much of his life to this issue of vaccines. | ||
| Let's go to Jim. | ||
| Jim is in California Democrats line. | ||
| You're next up. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't mean this comment to be insensitive to people with neurological disorders. | |
| I used to work to do videos for a special education publisher, but I think because of RFK Jr.'s condition of dysphonia, I think he would have been much better to do his public service behind the scenes. | ||
| And there's all kinds of ways he could have done that to honor his father, who I had enormous respect for. | ||
| And people don't want to talk about this because it seems to be insensitive. | ||
| But I think what he comes across as putting his ego in front of the message that he's trying to say. | ||
| So, Ben, thank you for doing a show on him. | ||
| I have enormous respect for Frontline. | ||
| Jim, in California, and Mr. Weiser, it was during the interview. | ||
| I think some of the people that you interviewed said something along the lines, and I don't mean it's a negative, a savior complex in a sense, a heroic complex that makes up his DNA, which leads him to do the things he does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| It's interesting because it's something that those who are closest to him identify and also the critics of him identify, which is that he really believes in this cause. | ||
| He believes that he's up against evil forces and that he's in a unique place to battle against them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think part of that comes from that early tragedy, from that sense that his uncle and his dad were martyred. | |
| He writes in his book about this idea that the world is a battle between good and evil, and that if he can have a place in it, that is what he wants. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you do get a sense of almost messianic view of the role that he plays. | |
| He talks repeatedly about praying that he would be in a position of power where he could change these things. | ||
| So I think that that comes from the very early, early days of Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| And as I said, it's something that his admirers point out and they say, this is a guy who's willing to sacrifice his reputation, his relationships with his family, who's willing to be ridiculed for something that he believes. | ||
| And some of the scientists that we talked to said that this is a guy who is not open to contrary evidence, who is so sure of himself that he's not able to engage with the science. | ||
| So it's an aspect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that I think both his critics and admirers identify and understand in different ways. | ||
| It's part of what makes him such an interesting character. | ||
| Another Californian calling in. | ||
| This is Austin, Republican Line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Pedro. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Weiser. | ||
| Yeah, I just wanted to ask Mr. Weiser what he thinks. | ||
| I think it's his relationship, Trump's relationship with RFK is purely transactional, that he's, that he's that RFK is pandering to his base of cuckoos and conspiracy theorists and that he knows that and that. | ||
| So that's just gonna, you know, get his, get his base more riled up, and that's that's. | ||
| I don't think he really believes anything that RFK says. | ||
| He's just interested in riling up his base, Austin in California. | ||
| Mr. Weiser, I think it's interesting we didn't talk to a lot of people about what Donald Trump's motivations are and and certainly that's that's one way of understanding Donald Trump's politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a guy who's who's very adaptable and to the political moment. | |
| But we did talk to a lot of people about the calculation that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| In making that decision to join up with Donald Trump. | ||
| And I think also, in a sense, it was a transactional decision that he, when he found himself at a point where his presidential ambitions were likely to go nowhere, had to make a decision about what was likely to give him the most power in order to be able to do what it was that he wanted to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And those around him had no illusions about who Donald Trump was, what they thought of. | |
| Donald Trump, the skepticism that they had, the fear that he could turn on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when it didn't serve him anymore to be allied with him. | ||
| But they felt that it was a risk that they were willing to take for what they believed in and for the cause that Bobby Kennedy believed in. | ||
| Mr. Razzie, you talked about the wrestling that took place within the RFK Jr. camp to make the decision to join the Trump team. | ||
| Talk about the reaction from the Kennedy family writ large. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For the members of the Kennedy family, it had been, it was not just the decision to endorse Donald Trump. | |
| The divide inside the family, and while some of them may be close personally still, but the political divide between them had dated back to the vaccine movement, dated back to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raising questions about the assassination of his father, going so far as to meet with the man convicted of killing his dad and saying that he should be released. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And inside the family, that was a point of division. | |
| And when he announced that he was going to leave the Democratic Party, it was another point of division. | ||
| And in fact, the family orchestrated a photo op to endorse, show their support for Joe Biden in a very public rebuke of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| And so certainly the endorsement of Donald Trump was something that for a lot of members of the Kennedy family was a break with their tradition, with the family's tradition of being one of the most storied families inside the Democratic Party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that was a split that had been going on for a while. | |
| And those close to Bobby Kennedy say that he understood that that was going to be one of the consequences of the path that he pursued. | ||
| And to some extent, that opposition from the family, from others in the Democratic Party establishment, only drove him further and made him more convinced that he needed to pursue what he was pursuing. | ||
| You may have said this already, but how many of the Kennedy family members did you have a chance to talk to about this film? | ||
| We interviewed Stephen Kennedy Smith, and we also in the film draw on statements from other members of the family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The family is very reluctant to talk internally. | |
| There's almost a code inside the Kennedy family that you don't talk about other members of the Kennedy family. | ||
| So it's something that's very difficult. | ||
| Of course, when Caroline Kennedy, his cousin, came out before the confirmation hearing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to describe her concerns about him, both personal concerns and concerns about him as a leader. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a very public break. | |
| But it takes a lot for the Kennedy family to go out publicly and to talk about somebody else who's in the family, which I think tells you a lot about just how far they see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as having gone. | ||
| Let's hear from David. | ||
| David joins us from Pennsylvania, Republican line with Michael Weiser of PBS Frontline. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning, gentlemen. | ||
| Imagine who would be president of the United States right now if the DNC had allowed a true open primary of which RFK Jr. was trying to get into. | ||
| He had qualified in some states. | ||
| You can continue watching this online at c-span.org. |