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May 25, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
52:02
Quest For Peace with Aaron Good

RFK Jr discusses an historical and modern day quest for peace in this episode with Aaron Good.

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Time Text
Robert Kennedy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Happy to be here.
So I have a preface here for this question that I think is worth it, so I hope that you'll agree.
And it deals with the question of peace, so I'm just going to go with it now.
On November 29th, 1963, your father and your aunt, Jackie Kennedy, sent a secret message to the Soviets through William Walton.
The Soviet Georgi Bolshakov had been a back channel to the Kremlin for JFK. William Walton told Bolshakov that Robert and Jackie Kennedy knew that the Soviets were not behind the guns in Dallas and that it was a domestic right-wing conspiracy.
They also warned that LBJ would not continue JFK's policies because he was too close to big business and so the quest for peace would have to wait until Robert Kennedy could get to the White House.
Of course, we know what happened, or today we know enough of what happened, but I have to ask, is it finally time to resume the quest for peace?
I would say yes for that.
What does it say that...
This is not something that politicians say anymore.
When Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008, he said, we better get used to the idea that war is always going to be with us.
But your uncle had a different vision.
He said, we can't think that way.
It's self-defeating to think that peace is impossible.
So how do you plan to go against these trends of recent decades, and it's many decades now, where peace is not even on the table?
How do you plan to make this happen?
My uncle took office in January of 1961, and I was at his inauguration three days before he took office on January 17th.
The outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, gave a speech that is probably one of the most today, in retrospect, one of the most important speeches in American history.
Where he warned Americans against the emergence of a military industrial complex that would devour our democracy, that would turn us into an imperial state abroad and a surveillance state at home, and that would corrode our democratic institutions.
And my uncle, two months after he came into office in March of 1961, He had been meeting for two months with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his CIA advisors, including Alan Dulles, Charles Cabal, and Richard Bissell, who were trying to get him to support the Bay of Pigs invasion by 2030.
Cuban refugees who had armed themselves and trained, were trained by the CIA in Guatemala and Texas and Louisiana and camps in Florida.
And they wanted to return to their homeland and depose Fidel Castro.
And my uncle said he did not want to have the US military support that because it was an independent country and it would be inconsistent with American values.
To begin a preemptive war against somebody who had not done anything to the United States that was warlike, that should provoke a war.
And no matter how much distaste we had for Castro's choices in governing his country, those decisions were up to Cuba and the Cuban people that were not the province of the United States.
And he refused to give the U.S. military support.
They ended up, they wanted amphibious vehicles and transportation, ships from the U.S. military to bring the Cuban Brigade to the Bay of Pigs.
And instead, they went to the corporations, they went to United Fruit, and the CIA got the United Fruit Company to transport, which of course had huge interest in the sugar plantations in Cuba, to transport the ships.
But my uncle was skeptical.
He was We're reluctant to give any U.S. support.
And Dulles and Louis Lemitzer and Cabell and Richard Bissell said, we've armed these people.
We can't.
There's nothing else we can do with them.
They'd actually be dangerous if we kept them in the United States.
And he said, you know, my uncle's attitude was the French had supported us during the U.S. Revolution, and that we could give support to revolutionary groups in other countries, but we couldn't fight the war for them, and we shouldn't do anything that looked like a U.S. invasion.
And they lied to him, and they said that as soon as those As the Bay of Pigs Brigade landed, the Cuban people, Castro was so unpopular, the Cuban people were going to rise up and throw him out of office.
They just needed a spark to light this nascent revolution.
They knew at the time that was a lie.
And they knew that Castro was actually immensely popular in Cuba at that time.
And my father later found this out because he sent two aides down who spent weekends over a year negotiating with Castro over the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.
And they ended up going to baseball games with him and traveling around the country.
And they told me, John Nolan, who's one of those two, told me that when they walked into a stadium and the people saw Castro, they would spontaneously rob the prize and give him a prolonged standing ovation.
And that it was clearly not orchestrated.
It was people were fervent in that belief, but also he had a very well organized military and he had an intelligence service that was as good as any in the world.
And so Dulles and the other CIA doyans knew they were lying to my uncle.
And what they believed is that if they landed the brigade on the shore, and it was clear that they were about to be defeated, that my uncle would send in the Essex, which was the U.S. aircraft carrier, and give them air cover, and then the U.S. would be committed to getting rid of Castro.
And my uncle later said this.
He said they believed that a young president would collapse and send in the Essex and the military, and they misjudged me.
During the height of that fight, when it was clear that the Cuban refugees, the brigade was losing disastrously, he came out of his office and he said to one of his aides, I want to take the CIA, shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
And he understood from that moment on.
My grandfather, he looked at that as a catastrophe for his administration.
And in fact, he said to his father, you know, I think I should resign.
And his father said, it's the best thing that could happen to you because you...
My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, who...
He was very skeptical of the military his entire life.
He said, it's good that you learned who these guys were at the outset, and now you know.
And my uncle had fought in the war, World War II. He was a war hero, and he understood the brutality and the savagery of war.
And he said to one of his best friends, Ben Bradley, who was the publisher of the Washington Post, that the primary job of a president was to keep the country out of war.
And when Bradley asked him, he said that because Bradley had asked him, what do you want on your gravestone?
And my uncle said to him, he kept the peace.
That's what he wanted his legacy to be.
And he succeeded, despite tremendous pressure from his military advisors, from his intelligence apparatus, he succeeded in keeping the country out of war.
He was pressured to send 250,000 combat troops to Vietnam.
He refused steadfastly, despite, you know, Maxwell Taylor and Avril Haram and all of his senior advisors, Dulles, etc., who said, you've got to send them in, you've got to send 250,000 troops, or the South Vietnamese government is going to collapse.
He refused to do it.
He ultimately sent 16,000 military advisors, mainly Green Berets, who were forbidden.
Under the rules of engagement, from engaging in combat.
Now, a lot of them did engage in combat, but two weeks before he died, and incidentally, 16,000 troops is fewer troops than he sent to get one black man, James Meredith, into Ole Miss, into the University of Mississippi.
He sent more troops there, federal troops there, than he did to Vietnam.
And two weeks before he died, he signed a national security order ordering all those troops home.
He had asked his aide that morning how many Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and his aide said 75, and he showed him the list of names, and my uncle said, that's too much.
I want them all home.
And he signed an order that ordered them all home by the end of 1965, with the first thousand coming home the following month by December.
And then, of course, he was killed on November 22nd.
And then...
Johnson almost immediately reprimanded that order.
And then the following year, during the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, which was, you know, essentially just a made-up event that was used to justify the American entrance to the war, he did send 250,000.
Ultimately, half a million troops went over there, Americans, and 57,000 died.
We killed at least a million Vietnamese.
But after that, it was an American war.
It was exactly what my uncle had tried to avoid.
My father in 68 ran against that war.
I think they understood exactly what Johnson, what Eisenhower warned, that if you allowed the military, if you allowed our country to persuade our people that we should be the policemen of the world, that the military-industrial complex would crush the middle class in this country with expenditures and basically turn America into a surveillance state, turn us against our democratic aspirations.
Indeed, it's exactly what happened.
And, you know, we know the rest.
We know 9-11 and the Iraq War, which was, you know, just made up the same way the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
There was no justification for us.
Making the first preemptive war in American history, going after somebody who had done nothing to our country, who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, nothing to do with 9-11, but they just wanted to go, you know, it was an oil war, and for all the reasons the neocons wanted a war.
We spent $8.1 trillion in that war and its aftermath, which was the war in Yemen and Afghanistan and Syria, etc.
We left Iraq worse off than we found it.
We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
Iraq today is an incoherent nation where You know, that just is a battle between Sunni and Shia death squads.
We pushed Iran, we pushed Iraq into the, basically turned it into a proxy for Iran, which exactly was what we had been trying to prevent, you know, during 40 years of diplomacy and military commitments.
And we created ISIS. We drove 2 million refugees into Europe.
We destabilized all the democracies in Europe.
It probably, you know, was one of the things that led to Brexit.
So all of the blowback from these wars, nobody ever accounts for.
And, you know, one of the biggest blowbacks, besides all the people that we've killed, you know, the millions and millions of people unnecessarily, is that we've got it.
The expense of doing that has gutted the American middle class in this country.
And we're now turning into, let's say, almost like a colonial model where there's a These huge concentrations of wealth at the top and then a widespread poverty below.
And everybody knows, any social scientist or political scientist will tell you, you cannot have that kind of configuration and continue to have a functioning democracy.
So we're destroying our democracy.
We're destroying our middle class.
That's what Eisenhower, exactly what he had warned was going to happen.
Yes, and I'd say it goes back further than Eisenhower, because under FDR, which I think the New Deal administration was the most progressive in U.S. history, but under FDR, the Council on Foreign Relations...
Yes, under the State Department, imprimatur, but using Rockefeller Foundation money, so, you know, standard oil money, they carried out the War and Peace Studies Project, and this was planning to enter World War II and to win because the U.S. is the biggest industrial power.
And then to become basically the manager of global capitalism and to go for global hegemony.
This gets sold to the public by the Council on Foreign Relations media magnate.
Council on Foreign Relations is basically Wall Street's think tank.
But they're going to pitch this American empire idea with Henry Luce of Fortune and Time and Life magazine and his famous American Century essay.
You had Henry Wallace who opposed this and said that it should be a century of the common man and the Soviets should adapt or learn from our political liberties and that the U.S. could learn from the Soviets when it comes to full employment and education and health care for the whole population.
But Henry Wallace gets swept away and replaced as vice president through a coup, essentially led by an oil man.
And the U.S. goes on to pursue empire after World War II.
And the Cold War is, you know, I would argue that it was in many ways a pretext for these plans because if you don't have a Cold War, it's hard to imagine how you justify doing all these things.
I see Henry Wallace in a way similar to your uncle and your father in that they tried to fight U.S. Steel, U.S. Steel Wall Street, really, the biggest corporation at the time, the military brass, the CIA, the mafia.
But all these groups are basically on the same side and part of the U.S. empire in different ways.
So, to me, they seem to have overcome people like Wallace and like your father and uncle, and they seem to collectively represent the heart of our U.S. capitalist system.
Can U.S. democracy really overcome and transcend imperial capitalism, if I can use that phrase?
Wow.
I would differ with you over some of that interesting take on history, because I know a lot of what you're saying is true, but there are other circumstances.
I would not blame World War II on Standard Oil and the Rockefellers.
I blame it on Adolf Hitler and Anita Mussolini.
And you can go back before that and say that World War I was a conspiracy of bankers and industrialists.
And I think that that's...
To clarify...
World War I laid the groundwork for the rise of it.
Once Hitler was out there, I don't see any choice except to try to stop him.
I'm not saying that World War II was organized that way.
I'm saying that in the U.S., these forces were assessing the situation and looking at what the U.S. should do and going for a bigger role for the U.S. in the world.
Of course, those groups are programmed to take advantage of crises and turn them into opportunities for imposing control and to de-democratize America.
But, you know, I think, you know, Henry Wallace was, and I love Henry Wallace.
I love to read his writings.
He was not a popular, very, very popular political figure at that time.
He wasn't as adept at politics as FDR was, but FDR shared a lot of his idealism.
The Atlantic Charter, it was really a manifestation of that kind of wonderful side of FDR where he basically dragooned Churchill into agreeing to release the British colonies in Africa and elsewhere in exchange for the U.S. entrance to the war.
So he leveraged our assistance in the war for the cause of nationalism in the developing world.
So we didn't lose everything with Henry Wallace.
We had a president who I think did not want our country to become an imperial.
He was very different than his cousin Teddy Roosevelt who was the champion of kind of the imperial America.
And my uncle You know, was part of that FDR tradition.
My uncle hadn't been rescued when his ship, his boat on the PT-109 was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer in the middle of the night in the blackest race off the Solomon Island.
He swam six miles to an island with his crew members and, you know, they were hiding out on the island.
They could watch the Japanese patrol boats looking for them.
They would have been in prison camps or been killed if they had been caught.
And the two Solomon Islanders landed on that island.
And my uncle to get to collect coconuts.
And they were in a canoe, a dugout.
And my uncle carved...
His coordinates and, you know, a note that said JPK, you know, Captain Kennedy with us, I think it was eight crew members or nine crew members, and he put the coordinates down, and those two Solomon Islanders risked their own lives to bring that coconut and a big pile of coconuts in their boat 30 miles across the ocean to the British base to give it to the British commander, and he My uncle's life was saved.
And I think, you know, that was part of his, the background of assumptions that he brought to office, that it was a colonized population of, you know, individuals acting out of great courage who had saved his own life.
And that those kind of people ought to be able to govern themselves.
And when he took control of his Subcommittee on African Affairs in the United States Senate, he fought harder than anybody to get the European colonial powers out of Africa and out of the Mideast.
I've run into so many people who bear my uncle's name and people in the Arab countries who remember this famous speech he gave in 1956, where all the liberals in our country condemned him.
Adlai Stevenson condemned him because he said, Europeans need to get out.
The Arabs should be running Arabia and the Africans should be running Africa.
It shouldn't be the European nations.
At that time, the European nations were limping along and the only thing keeping them alive was the colonies that they could strip mine for their resources.
And people in the United States, including the Republicans and Democrats, said we've got to bolster the European countries and continue to allow them to exploit their colonial possessions.
And my uncle said no.
That's not the world that America should be fighting for.
We were a colonial country.
We should respect their aspirations also to be free, and we should support them, even if it puts us at odds with the Europeans.
I'll tell you a story.
When I was a little kid, my father came home with a film Oh, Africa Speaks.
I think when I was six or seven years old, my uncle was still in Hawaii.
I was seven years old.
And we had a little, you know, we had a screen in our basement that was kind of a portable movie screen.
And he had a 60 millimeter movie and he showed it to us.
And I just became obsessed with Africa at that time.
And I read every book that I could.
I read all the Tarzan books.
I read the Blue Nile, the White Nile, everything I could.
All the picture books I could get on Africa, I got.
And then in 19, I guess that was probably 59 or something.
In 60, the summer of 1960, there was an African leader who came to our house in Iannisport.
His name was Tom Mboya.
And he had been part of the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 50s.
And the Mau Mau was a very violent revolution, anti-colonial revolution, that kind of portrayed with horror for its savagery in the Western press.
And he had been one of the people with Jomo Kenyatta, who was one of the Kenyan leaders.
And Boyer was unusual because he had gone to Oxford for a year.
He was the only Kenyan at that time who had any kind of college education.
And the Mau Mau succeeded ultimately in the British.
Agreed in 59 to hand Kenya back to the Kenyan people.
But they said, look, we're going to give you five years and we're going to transition out and you need to get yourself ready to govern yourself.
And the boy at that time looked around and said, we don't have anybody who can govern this country.
We don't have a single college graduate that is Black African.
And so he sent letters.
And by the way, Tamaboy was from a little tribe, one of the smallest tribes in Kenya called Luau, which are these fish-eating tribes from up near Lake Victoria.
And they're known as kind of being super smart and peacemakers.
Jomo Kenyatta was Kikuyu, which was the largest tribe in Kenya.
And Mboya had sent letters to 200 American colleges asking them each to give a scholarship to one Kenyan student.
And he would pick the 200 students, the best students in Kenya.
And he got 200 American colleges to agree, including Harvard.
And in the summer of 1960, they were supposed to come that autumn.
Remember, this was during the election.
He realized that he had the scholarships, but he didn't have money to transport the students to the United States.
So he flew to the United States and he went to the State Department.
I asked the State Department for help transporting these African students over.
Well, at that time, Dick Nixon was vice president, was effectively running the State Department, and when the Secretary of State consulted him, he said, you better not do it, because I'm trying to win the Southern states, and I need to ruin Southern whites, and if we bring 200 Africans over here, it's going to make people nervous about me.
And so Mboya then was really panicked, and he called up Martin Luther King, who he knew, and he said, where else can I get this money?
I need $100,000.
And Martin Luther King said, you should call the Kennedys, you should call John Kennedy, because he's on that African subcommittee, and he really cares about African nationalism.
And King was at that time being financed by Harry Belafonte, you know, the famous Calypso singer, and who was very close to my family.
And King knew that, you know, King knew my family, but he wasn't like a close personal friend, which Belafonte was.
So he said to Amboya, I'm going to get Harry Belafonte to take you up to meet John Kennedy.
And so Belafonte and Amboya came to our house in the summer of 1960, and I got to meet Tom Amboya.
I was very excited to meet this A real African leader, and he was the Shiki, and it was very cool for me.
And then in 64, after my uncle died, and my uncle, John Kennedy, fell in love with Mboya, and he gave him $200,000.
And he said, on the condition that Mboya not tell anybody where he got them, because my uncle was also worried about winning the South.
And Nixon found out that Jack had given a boy the money and he then branded it publicly.
Oh, this is the Kennedy Air left.
He's bringing Africans over, you know, to the United States when probably he thought we should be sending, you know, blacks back to Africa, you know, at that point.
So...
In 64, my uncle died in 63.
In 64, my uncle Sard Schreiber, who had started the PE score under JFK and was still running it under LBJ, took me and my cousin Bobby Schreiber, who was my best friend and the same age as me, to Africa for about three weeks.
And we spent a lot of time with Tom and Boyer.
And then in June of 68, my father was killed.
And my mother had at that point 10 kids with another one on the way.
And she needed to get us, the older ones, out of the house for this summer so that she could get some control over her life and figure out, you know, what she was going to do.
And so she said, my brother David went out to work for Cesar Chavez for the summer out in Delano.
My sister Kathleen went to work for the Inuit Indians in Alaska.
And my brother Joe went with Everest climber Jim Whitaker and one of my father's best friends to be a guide on Mount Rainier.
And I was sent to Africa for the summer.
And I spent a lot of that summer with Tama Boya.
And then I came home in August.
The following September, Momboya, who was next in line to run Kenya after Kenyatta, you know, passed, he was assassinated.
Oh, he was murdered probably by Daniel Aramoy, who eventually replaced Kenyatta.
Scroll forward to 2004.
I was living with Larry David in Martha's Vineyard.
Larry later introduced me to my wife, Cheryl Hines.
But at that point, we were living together in Martha's Vineyard, and I was asked by the Democratic Convention in 2004.
It was in Boston, and the DNC asked me to come and deliver one of the keynote addresses on the environment.
So Larry said he'd fly up with me, and we flew up in his plane.
And I gave my speech.
But when we were in the green room, we met this young Illinois senator who had just been elected.
I had never heard of him.
He had a funny name.
And he was going to do a speech after me.
And he went, and it was Barack Obama, of course, and he went and did this speech that just blew the roof off the convention and teed him up for his run four years later.
Made everybody in the Democratic Party fall in love with him.
But we spent a lot of time with him at the convention that day.
We had floor passes, so it was really fun.
We got to go out on the floor into all of the green rooms, etc.
But we talked a lot to Obama, and he said that he was going to Martha's Vineyard that night, so we agreed to eat dinner with him.
He was going down to raise money and Oaks Bluffs.
And we had dinner with him.
And so I sat next to him at dinner.
You know, I had never heard of him, never didn't know anything about him.
And I started asking him about his background.
And he said that his father had been Kenyan.
And I said to him, what tribe was, do you know what tribe he was from?
And he said, yeah, he was Luau.
And I said, oh, have you ever heard of Tom Mboya?
And he said to me, Tom Mboya is the reason I'm over in this country because his father was the first student brought over on the Kennedy Airlift.
That was, you know, just sort of an amazing experience that came out of my uncle's just love and affinity for nationalism in Africa and for nationalist movements everywhere.
Right, and I don't think that this is just the grist for the mill of historical nostalgia.
These issues are actually very, extremely relevant to today, because my assessment of your father and your uncle is that they...
Yeah, I think.
I think that even the people that were political enemies of the Kennedys still wanted the idea out there that the US was promoting prosperity in the third world and such because they needed people to believe that.
But I think they were going for something like really what Kwame Nkrumah called neocolonialism.
I think that he understood this pretty well.
He wrote the book on it.
And then after he wrote the book on neocolonialism, they deposed him in what seems to be a CIA-backed coup, 1964, one of many coups that follow the removal of John Kennedy as president.
It's really something when you look at the timing, Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana.
But today, 9 million people a year die in the global south from poverty and malnutrition and starvation and lack of access to medical care.
The U.S. crushes systems that try to provide these things today.
So how can the U.S. role in the world change to get back to supporting countries?
Yeah, I mean, I think what we have now, what we've had since World War II, which was unintentional to FDR, people like my uncle, is a kind of soft colonialism, you know, that spares the occupying nation, the colonial difficulties of actually managing local economies and, you know, putting local leaderships and, you know, military...
Protection in place and just but allows us an opening to exploit the resources of that nation through a systems of military support for, you know, tin horned dictators and then these deals with local oligarchs where, you know, they get included and, you know, they get some to skim off some of the big money deals when the U.S. multinationals come in and liquidate all of their, you know, the nation's assets for cash.
And it's this kind of corrupt bargain.
But you mentioned Nekrumah.
My uncle, Nekrumah was an avowed Marxist.
And my uncle had a talk with him one time where he said, my uncle said to him, you know, we don't care if you're Marxist or Leninist or whatever you are as A base for Soviet expansion, you should make your own choice about what you need to do with your country.
That's up to you.
It's not up to the United States.
And if you avoid being that, you know, base for Soviet expansion, you know, we're going to have a friendly relationship with you.
The CIA ultimately, yeah, the CIA has been involved in something like 80 coups between 1947 and 1997.
About a third of the nations in the world And that's how it enforces this system of soft colonialism.
You mentioned Indonesia.
Sakarna, Akhmet Sakarna, who was the liberator of Indonesia, the CIA tried to kill him.
As I recall, they shot down one of the CIA planes and captured one of them.
So they couldn't deny it.
And he became one of these, he became kind of one of the most vocal Critics of the United States.
And my uncle was talking to, I think it was a reporter one day who was asking, what are we going to do about Sikarno?
My uncle was saying, we're not going to do anything about Sikarno.
And he said, and by the way, everybody tags Sikarno with being anti-American, but I'd be anti-American too if the CIA tried to kill me.
Sikarno read that interview and And was so grateful to my uncle that he contacted him and asked him to come to Indonesia.
And my uncle actually really wanted to come to Indonesia.
And he said, we're going to have the biggest celebration in the history of our islands if you come here.
But my father did make two trips there, one during the Kennedy administration.
And then another one afterwards, really LBJ did something very nice when my father was totally shattered after my uncle's murder.
LBJ sent him on a diplomatic mission to avert a war between the Netherlands and Indonesia.
And my father successfully did that.
He negotiated a peace between Sigarno and the government of the Netherlands.
But his first trip over there during the Kennedy administration, My mother went with him, and they spent a couple days at Sukarnov's palace.
And they told him that I was interested in Komodo dragons, which I was obsessed with at that time.
And he sent back two Komodo dragons, which came to my house, but then they could have eaten any of us, but we sent them to the National Zoo.
He also gave my father a tiger, stuffed tiger, that he had shot on the island of Sumatra, Sumatran tiger, that I've had since I was a little kid.
My father gave it to me when he came home.
I was shot by a Sugarno.
Yeah, I'm very familiar with that Sukarno tale, and I've actually done hours and hours of material on Sukarno in Indonesia, and specifically the JFK policies.
Sukarno said to someone...
That he believes that he thought that Kennedy was killed because he was trying to stop the Konfrontasi, the Malaysian crisis that they had.
I wouldn't say that that's an accurate assessment, but I think from his perspective, he knew that Indonesia was a prize at that moment.
Yeah, everybody wanted the Congo and everybody wanted Indonesia.
And your father or your uncle with that Solomon Islands story, I wonder if that had a...
There's a book by an Australian historian named Greg Polgrain where he says he talked to Dag Hammarskjold's right-hand man who revealed that...
Dag Hammerskold was being used by JFK as a stalking horse, basically, to allow for the UN to manage West Papuan independence.
But when Dag Hammerskold gets killed, they can't do that.
And because of Cold War calculations, JFK has to abandon that.
And so West Papua gets absorbed by Indonesia.
But there was so much at stake there.
And it's like it takes decades to learn even what was really going on.
The two guys who rescued my uncle when he was elected president, he sent a message to the Solomon Island.
It was a protectorate of Great Britain at that time.
He said he wanted them to come to his inauguration.
He also, incidentally, he brought the admiral, who was the captain of the battleship, he was sent by then an admiral, that it cut his ship in two and sunk him.
And he invited that guy who I met at his inauguration.
We were very excited to meet him because he was the guy who sank Uncle Jack's ship.
But he also was really excited about having the two Solomon Islanders who had saved his life come to his inauguration.
But the British governor of the Solomon Islands was embarrassed because these guys didn't own shoes and they could not speak English.
So he picked two Solomon Islanders who were more presentable, who were more civilized, and he sent them instead, thinking that would fool my uncle or assuage him or something.
And my uncle was so angry at them at that point.
But years later, maybe about 10 years ago, my little brother, Max, went to the Solomon Islands with, I think it's Robert Pellett, But anyway, he went there with him to find the PT-109 and they did a diving expedition and they went down with deep water submersibles and they found an engine block that they thought was the remains of PT-109.
But at that point, my brother ran into the two Solomon Islanders, and one of them was wearing a t-shirt that said, I saved JFK. And when he saw Max, he just burst into tears, and he kissed him all over, and he was just weeping and weeping, and just this very, very kind of emotional reunion.
It was really beautiful.
Yeah, that's amazing.
I think that your uncle had an understanding of war that you don't find in people of that era, because he was there not as an officer, so he was actually involved in the combat.
And people criticize JFK for policies of the US.
And it's not as though all the imperial chicanery stopped under his watch at all by any means.
I mean, you have things like Operation Mongoose and, you know, even propping up the South Vietnamese government, whose legitimacy was very dubious in the first place.
But there was an attempt to avoid war.
And as you say, you listed in the beginning, every time that there was a question of hot war, he avoided it.
Laos, Berlin, Vietnam, Vietnam, really multiple times, Cuba, multiple times.
This, I do think, is worth looking at and thinking about.
But now in 2023, and we have enough history to understand the parties, the political parties in the U.S. I was growing up in Indiana, and my mom was a Democratic congressional staffer.
I worked for the Democrats in 2004, and I was on the Obama campaign staff in 2008.
I went to the inauguration and the staff ball even.
But when Obama ended up carrying out many of the George Bush policies and ended up saying we should look forward and not back when it came to crimes like torture and illegal war, it really disillusioned me.
And oddly enough, or interestingly enough, at Oliver Stone's recommendation, I read the book JFK and the Unspeakable, and this radicalized me more, Not because of, I thought that one person is really the key to understanding U.S. history, but it's that all that it revealed about the history before and what followed was really illuminating.
So this really radicalized me.
I watched the Democratic Party orchestrate two primaries that were farcical, I thought, in which they just destroyed Bernie Sanders to ensure that you would get a more corporate and pro-empire candidate.
So how do you respond to those who say that reforming the Democrats and the Democratic Party is just not feasible?
It's almost like, I don't want to say reforming the mafia from the inside, but it's a difficult thing to even imagine how it could be done.
How do you think that it can be done?
Well, I mean, the only way it's going to be done is, I mean, if I get in there, and if I can somehow get through, you know, run all those traps and get in there, that's one of the few organizations that you reform from the top down, because it's corrupt from the top down.
The Democratic Party is not corrupt.
It's the, you know, it's the party organization.
And, you know, the president has the ability as leader of the party to change that.
If Bernie Sanders had gotten in there, you know, Bernie Sanders could have won.
And he may have won last time that he dropped out.
In kind of a weird way, you know, if Bernie Sanders had won and he had become president, the DNC would no longer be that corrupt organization that is now.
There's a guy here that I'm going to quote who I don't normally have an affinity for, but I think it may be relevant.
And that is Winston Churchill, who said that Americans will always do the right thing when they've exhausted every other option.
And to me, I think that that is relevant because it's to you and to this particular moment, because the empire is The U.S. ran the empire and a lot of people made ridiculous amounts of money.
It's the richest empire in world history, the most powerful empire in world history.
And it, oddly enough, doesn't even call itself an empire.
But all empires go the way of all empires.
And is there more of an opportunity now?
because we actually can't keep doing what we've been doing.
And so which direction do we go?
I see this as either the U.S. becomes more authoritarian and kind of delegitimizes its whole mythology of freedom and liberty and so on, or the U.S. takes an honest look at itself and maybe an honest look at its history and then tries to reform its institutions.
But do you feel that this creates an opportunity, the fact that it actually can't go on, that we seem to be headed for a...
There's a catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine that has American fingerprints all over it.
I mean, I know that the Putin invasion of Ukraine is a dubious legality, but the sovereignty of Ukraine after 2014 is also debatable, and international law is not really...
able to deal with these sorts of issues where there's threats on a border of a great power like this.
How do all these things that are happening now and the rise of China giving countries another place to turn rather than American, you know, the IMF and so on, there's going to be even more of this, more trade conducted outside of the dollar.
How does the strength or weakness of the U.S. empire impact your calculations here?
Well, I think the empire has collapsed, you know, thanks to the neocons and thanks to And the end of every empire, You know, David Kennedy, or Paul Kennedy, who wrote, was the Yale historian in a relationship to me or to my family.
But he, you know, wrote the definitive book on the decline and fall of empires.
And he looked at all the empires in the last 500 years, and every one of them collapsed for the same reason, which is the overextension of the military, which hollowed out the economies at home.
You know, we are at the end of the cycle with the U.S. empire, and the side of that is the Saudi Arabian defection to make an independent peace, a separate peace with Iran, with the orchestrated by the Chinese.
And Saudi Arabia was the keystone to our entire defense strategy.
You know, we were going to create the Shia Crescent with Saudi, the Emirates, Omar, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan, all the way up to Syria, had this kind of serious Shia Crescent that would contain Iranian expansion in the region.
And then the Saudis just walked away from it.
They took away the keystone.
You know, we've spent $1.1 billion a year for the past decade.
If you include the Homeland Security at home, because we can spend about $8.4 billion on our military, but we also then, the Homeland Security costs us, if you add that together, it's $1.1 trillion a year.
We wouldn't need that Homeland Security if we weren't bombing Iran and stationing troops in Mecca and bombing Iraq, etc.
That's what it's cost us.
The middle class has shouldered that burden.
While we spent 8.1 trillion bombing ports and roads and universities and hospitals all over the Mideast and, you know, Iraq and Syria, etc., the Chinese have spent the same amount, about 8 trillion, building roads and bridges and ports and projecting economic power rather than military power.
And it's been a much better strategy.
And now, you know, the Chinese are eating our lunch.
You know, Brazil, as you point out, has left the U.S. currency and is now making deals with Chinese currency.
Saudi Arabia is doing the same thing.
Many other countries.
And that's going to cost us the end of the U.S. dollar, the dominant currency, will cost us $750 billion a year.
So, you know, three quarters of a trillion.
And we just can't sustain these military commitments anymore.
We've spent $113 billion we've committed to Ukraine for a war that was utterly unnecessary, that we pressured the Ukrainian government, Zelensky, into prosecuting a war that everybody wanted to settle.
The Russians wanted to settle it.
Zelensky ran on a peace platform.
He wanted to settle it.
But we, the neocons in our country and the ultra-right in his country, basically forced him into this war that has now destroyed Ukraine and killed 300,000 Ukrainians, a flower of Ukrainian youth.
And it's for no reason other than the geopolitical ambitions of the neocons and crushing Ukraine between these anvils of superpowers as a pawn.
In a geopolitical scheme.
But it's now over.
And the question is, how do we transition out of that?
Are we going to do it in a way that leaves us a chance to rebuild our nation at home?
And that's what I'm going to do as president.
I'm going to bring the troops home.
I'm going to close most of those 800 bases that we have abroad.
We're going to do what my grandfather said that we should do, which is to make Fortress America, arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders, make ourselves too expensive to invade, and then build an economy, rebuild our middle class, robust middle class at home, and project economic power robust middle class at home, and project economic power abroad.
Not withdraw from the international scene, but to project moral authority and economic power and generosity and kindness and economic financial partnerships the way that the Chinese are doing and compete with the Chinese, but on a financial basis, not on a military basis. but on a financial basis, not on a military basis.
And we can do that.
We can beat the Chinese if we're fighting with the thing that we do best, which is business.
I personally have been going through some family tragedies myself, and I know that you've had the Kennedy family has famously suffered some tragedies, and yet you're here running for president.
I am, in my own small way, worked and tried to use academic work to improve the world and respond to try to enlighten people or understand things myself about how we got to this part, this point in history.
How do you, as a human being, function and continue to try to go on and fight for something better for the world against very powerful forces knowing that The chances of success are not, you know, success is not guaranteed and enormous, you know, challenges are ahead.
What do you do to keep, to steel yourself so that you are able to persevere under adversity and, you know, sometimes very heartbreaking conditions?
How do you, what do you, what would you say to people about going on and just the, how to persist in the face of all of this?
I never get invested in outcomes.
I can't control the outcomes.
Those are in God's hands.
I can only control my behavior.
I can control the little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes.
And I have to get up every morning and basically say, reporting for duty, sir, and then go out into the trenches and fight the battles.
And it's irrelevant for me whether I win or lose.
Of course, I'm going to be strategic and be smart about it and try to win.
But ultimately, I try not to ever have expectations or get invested in outcomes.
If you don't get invested in outcomes, you'll never get disappointed.
If you don't have expectations, you will not experience disappointment.
And that, you know, makes me, I think, resilient.
Because no matter what people do or say, it's irrelevant to me, I know what I have to do.
I have to get up and do what I'm supposed to do so I can look myself in the mirror.
I can look my children in the eye and say, I've tried my best to leave this world a better place, to make our country a country...
That you can be proud of and to give you communities that are sources of dignity and enrichment and prosperity and good health for you.
And, you know, I was in the environmental movement for most of my life.
I saw a lot of people get crushed by disappointments.
If you're an environmentalist, every loss is permanent.
Every victory is temporary.
And, you know, you see a lot of things that you love, a lot of sacred places, species being eradicated that can never be reclaimed.
And people get crushed by that and they burn out.
And I made a decision really early on that I wasn't going to let that happen to me, that I was going to make myself resilient by not investing in the outcomes.
I think my uncle, President Kennedy, had the same idea about projecting economic power abroad rather than military power.
He believed that America should be an exemplary nation, we should be a moral authority, that we should use our wealth to try to build middle class and democracy in other countries around the world, not by bullying, because people wanted American leadership all over the world, but they didn't want bullying, and they knew the difference.
And my uncle wanted the vision that people, children, and communities abroad in Africa and South America and Asia, their vision of an American should not be somebody in a military uniform with a gun in a bag.
And a bandolero, it should be a Peace Corps volunteer.
And he created the Kennedy Milk Program to bring nutrition to hundreds of millions of children who are undernourished around the world.
He created USAID, which at that point was an idealistic organization before the CIA took it over as a front.
It was created to rebuild or to build middle classes in these countries that were highly stratified.
And he created the Alliance for Progress to do that in Latin America.
And because of that, you know, and I pointed this out in my speech in Boston, there are more roads named after John Kennedy, more boulevards, more hospitals, more schools, universities than any other United States president.
I've met over my lifetime hundreds of children, adults now, from Kenya, from Nigeria, from South Africa, from all over the world, whose name is Kennedy.
You know, that is good for our national security.
That's the best answer to our national security.
Have people, you know, actually love our country and, you know, fear it or resent it.
I want to restore that vision of America, America that has moral authority, that has love and respect around the world.
You know, I'm pretty confident that I can do that.
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