Part 2 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Deep Dive, on The JFK Assassination, Growing up Kennedy, His Marriage
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Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show. I hope you and your family had a great Thanksgiving. Today, we are bringing you part two of my lengthy conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It took place back in March of 2022 when he was deplatformed from nearly everywhere and

In this part of the discussion, we get into COVID, tech censorship, his wife, Cheryl Hines, the assassination of his father and his uncle, growing up a Kennedy, and so much more. I actually think, personally, I enjoyed this half even more than the first half. I think you will too. You get to know him in a very different way. Please take a listen, enjoy it, and we'll see you again live on Monday.

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XX-XY Athletics. It is the only athletic brand that actually knows what a woman is. Go to thetruthfits.com and don't forget the code MK20. What do you think about the censorship you've endured? Oh, I mean, to me, Megan, that's the most disturbing feature of this, you know, this kind of bewildering, um,

response to COVID that we've seen. First of all, I want to say this, that I'm accused of promoting vaccine misinformation, but nobody, not Instagram, not the White House, not anybody else has actually identified a statement that I've made that is incorrect.

um there were no statements on instagram i didn't even say that you know the virus came from wuhan i just said it should be investigated because it would be weird if the guy who was financing those experiments and may have created the virus is now running the pandemic response and so these questions should be asked i didn't say it would happen because i couldn't at that point

I have not made any inaccurate statements as far as I know. If I did make one and it was identified, I would immediately apologize from what you brought. Instagram and Facebook acknowledges that it uses the term vaccine misinformation as a euphemism for any statement or assertion that departs from government proclamations, whether they're factually true or not. So my crime was...

criticizing government policies, it was not passing actual misinformation. And that's a problem for our government. Adams and Madison and Jefferson said we put freedom of speech in the First Amendment because all the other rights are dependent on that right. And if a government can

can silence criticism it has a license to commit any atrocity and that's why it's like you know when i was young i supported the aclu and others who were supporting the right of nazis

to march in Skokie, Illinois, not because I was repulsed by their ideology and by their statements and horrified by them. But at the same time, we need to be able to be willing to die

to protect their right to say those things. And that's what they understood, our ancestors in the American Revolution. And that's what generations of writers, of politicians, of respected leaders have warned against any government that tries to limit speech. And now it's very strange living in this world where it's become okay. In my political party, I saw...

a Gallup poll recently, it was either Gallup or Rasmussen, that said that something like 70% of Democrats support government restricting speech. And, you know, it's almost inexplicable to me that we could be in that place right now. I believe my political party was

the party that would go to the mat to protect people's right to say what they want. And that's so critical for our democracy. And it also is critical of public health. Listen, I may be wrong about the things that I talk about, but why can't we debate them? Why can't we hear these discussions about masks?

I've sued agencies for 40 years for failing to go through a regulatory process to have an environmental impact statement where it explains, which has to explain the scientific basis for new regulations or actions, show the studies, and then do a cost-benefit analysis. None of that happened. It was, you know, we just suspended democracy. We suspended due process. And once they got rid of

freedom of speech. They went after all the others. They closed a million churches, all the churches in this country for a year with no public hearing, no discussion of the science, no offering of a single scientific study to justify it. They shut down a million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, a direct violation of our constitution.

They got rid of the Seventh Amendment jury trials against any company that says that they're involved in providing a countermeasure. If there's a vaccine company and you get injured, you have no rights to compensation, no matter how grievous your injury, no matter how reckless their conduct, no matter how negligent their conduct, you cannot sue that company. And then, you know, they got rid of...

The prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance that we now have to give our private information and our private medical records to people to get into a bar or to get on an airplane or whatever. And, you know, there is no pandemic exception in the U.S. Constitution.

And by the way, it's not because they didn't know about pandemics, because there was a smallpox epidemic during the revolution that paralyzed Washington's Army of New England for a couple of months. And there was another malaria epidemic that happened to the Army of Virginia. So they knew very well what epidemics could do. And yet they did not say that this document is suspended. These rights are suspended whenever there is an epidemic.

And the disturbing part of this response was that it did not seem to be a public health response at all. It was a militarized and monetized response. We did things the opposite of what you would do if you wanted to stop a pandemic. And ask yourself, and I would ask any of my fellow Democrats who are supporting Tony Fauci, his record

is the worst record of any country in the world, arguably. We had 4.2% of the global population here in the United States. And I think we had something like 17% or 18% of the global COVID deaths. The death rate in America was in the top 10 in the world. So we had 2,800 people per million population die.

The African nations had an average of about 200. Nigeria had 15 people per million population in these countries, which Tony Fauci and Bill Gates at the beginning of the pandemic said Africa is going to get wiped out. We need to get them all vaccines. Nigeria has a vaccination rate of 1.5 for one vaccine, 1.5%.

And they had a COVID death rate that was about one fifteen hundredth of our COVID death rate. Wow. You know, there's reasons, Megan, for there's there's reasons for that are non-medical. One is that African countries have younger populations and COVID was a disease that killed elderly people. But that doesn't explain it anywhere near.

these huge disproportions. One of the things that could explain it is that Nigeria has the highest malaria burden in the world. Oh, 27% of malaria cases globally come from that country. Oh, everybody in the country is on hydroxychloroquine. It also has the highest burden of river blindness. A large part of the population is on ivermectin. Is that what explains...

this incredible record against COVID? Well, we don't know. But shouldn't we be asking that question? Isn't that the first thing Tony Fauci should be doing is saying, why is there this huge delta between COVID death rates in all these different countries? And the countries that did worse are the ones that focus on the vaccines. The countries that

And the fact it's not just Fauci, as you as you well know, big tech has been completely supportive of this shutdown. You can't even just hearing you talk about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin sends just a little piece of my spine up like, oh, Lord, this is, you know, YouTube. This is where they're going to jump in and try to censor us. Nothing should be censored here. This is a discussion about whether they work. Should we have discussions about more discussions about about that fact?

But that's what they've done to us because they'll take away your platform, as you well know. You can't even talk about it. They've jumped in on the silencing of discussion and they're the ones who control the public information highway. So it's really damaging. I'm in news. And to this day, I don't know what the truth is on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. And even talking about it makes even me feel like it's insane. It's un-American.

That's right. And, you know, I completely acknowledge that. I can be wrong about anything. Let's have the debate. Let's have the discussion. You know, our democracy is based on the free flow of information with good people.

notions and good ideas and good arguments triumphing in the marketplace of ideas, and none of that stuff is happening. And as you point out, we need to ask ourselves, qui bono, who is benefiting from this? Clearly, the pharmaceutical companies, but also the big tech platforms are. And this has been a war against the poor. If you look at Black neighborhoods, Compton, Harlem,

had two or three times the death rates as Bel Air or Greenwich. And, you know, you had the schools closed in those neighborhoods. According to the Brown University study, children lost 22 IQ points during young children during the pandemic. And, you know, and the mental illness went off the roof. I think 51 percent of black children had suicidal ideation.

You had the police going to those neighborhoods and closed down the basketball courts. And who benefited from all of this? It was the internet platforms. It was Jeff Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, et cetera. There was a transfer of wealth, the biggest in history, arguably.

$3.8 trillion from the global poor and from working people to this new class of oligarch billionaires. And the same people who were benefiting were the ones who now control our communications, the Facebook, all these platforms. And they were using their control

to suppress and to censor any criticism of the government lockdowns that were making them even richer. And there's something really wrong with that. And the government was allied with him and telling them what to censor and what not. We have correspondence between Zuckerberg and Tony Fauci telling him about censoring people like me.

Oh, it's not, you know, and I, again, I, there's nothing I'd like more than to debate Tony Fauci or any of these people. Oh, I'd buy a ticket to that. What? I would buy a ticket to that. Listen.

Listen, it's not just suppression. That's what's scary. It's also demonization, ostracization. It's smearing, right? And we've seen in the Fauci papers that have been collected by places like The Intercept, that's his MO. They intentionally smeared several scientists and so on who weren't following the Fauci line. They've definitely smeared you and some of the doctors that you just mentioned and tried to create this, you know, they're freaks. They're

They're disinformationists. You know, that's that's by design. They don't want people listening to you. And I I wonder I was thinking about it because, you know, the the freedom rally that you went to that was anti mandate and anti mandate, too. I am pro vaccine for the for the record. You probably gathered that. Oh, my. Yeah, but I really am. Yeah.

But I like the I liked I love the anti mandate rally and those who organized and I thought it was great. So you got in trouble when you were there. You I mean, I got your overall point. People get upset when you compare anything to the Holocaust. But you were basically saying, I don't know, have in front of me just so so I don't get it wrong. But it was, um,

Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide. Well, all hell rained down on you. I mean, when the Auschwitz Memorial is responding to you on Twitter, you know you've stepped in it.

They came out and said it's a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay. So those people don't like you, and some of them don't like you for political reasons. But what did you make of your wife, Cheryl Hines? By the way, I did not realize you were married to the wonderful Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

She came out, she gave it to you too. She gave it to you right between the eyes and said, we should not be comparing the Holocaust to anything or anyone. His opinions are not a reflection of my own. And his reference to Anne Frank was reprehensible and insensitive. So I know you said you were sorry for that comment. Well, what did you make of it?

Yeah, well, let me get to my wife in a minute and just make a couple of comments on that. Number one, I regret making that analogy. Number two, I was not comparing COVID policies to the Holocaust. I never mentioned the Holocaust. I was making a point, I was comparing a number of

totalitarian regimes left-wing and right-wing so on that same i think earlier in that sentence or later i talked about the communist regime of east germany and that all of these totalitarian regimes have similar features and similar intentions which is to control every aspect of human behavior and my point is that none of them have been able to do that history that

That today, however, because of these new technologies, technologies like 5G, which allows mass harvest of data and very, very intense surveillance,

Satellite, 415,000 satellite, low altitude satellites that are going to be able to look at every square inch of the earth, everyday facial recognition systems. We now have these AI systems that can look through walls and see people where they're hiding in buildings.

We have vaccine passports, which is a way of social control, digital currencies. We saw what they did to the truckers in Canada, where they closed their bank accounts and denied the money.

There's all these new instrumentalities that make the rising, the emergence of totalitarianism, what I call turnkey totalitarianism, where they're putting in place all of these instrumentalities now, or they are getting put in place. Let me use the passive voice.

And it's going to give people who have those kind of ambitions a level of control over every aspect of our lives and makes dissent and resistance almost impossible. That's the point I was going to make. I made a big mistake by making any reference to Nazi Germany.

because of the sensitivities and because I know that what I say is going to be distorted by people who want it silenced. And that, you know, I need to understand that. And I need to be careful in what I say because there are people who have sensitivities about that epic in history.

that are legitimate, that are, you know, that are horrific. And, you know, I apologize because I don't want to hurt anybody. I have no, you know, desire to hurt anybody. I would say this, that I do think that we need to find ways to be able to talk about our history. Because if we can't talk about, you know, the history of the rise of the Third Reich,

did not begin with death camps. Death camps didn't come until 1941. There was a whole system of totalitarian controls that were put in place, and there were alchemies of demagoguery that were used that are common to all totalitarian systems. Over that 12-year period in which certain groups of people, and particularly Jews and Poles and Gypsies or Roma people, etc.,

were systematically dehumanized and robbed of their rights. And it was a 12 year process. And we need to, at some time, we need to figure out ways

be able to talk about that process without offending people. That's what Gina Carano got fired from ABC for, from Disney, for trying to talk about that. It's a very tricky area and I should have known better to stay the hell away from it because it's just, there's no winning for me. People cannot hear my words. They're going to hear...

from their feelings and their hearts and they're entitled to those feelings. Yes. But you know, when your spouse is on the side of the other people, you know, you've done wrong, right? Because your spouse is rooting for you. I want to say this. I, you know, I encourage Cheryl to publish that statement. In fact, I asked her to do a statement that was much tougher than that. Really? Which, yes, because

And I'm glad she didn't. I'm very glad she didn't. But I actually gave her language that was much, much tougher than that because she needed to distance herself from me. My job as her husband is to protect her. And the arrows and the bullets that were being slung at me were hitting her. She was, you know, getting tremendous blowback.

from her friends, from her industry, from others. And it was a terrible experience for me. And she, you know, by the way, what she said, she believed. So she wasn't saying something, you know, she is, she does not accept

all of the things that, you know, I believe about what's happening with the vaccines and the medical department. Yeah, you don't speak for her. Yeah, I got it. Yeah. I don't need to convert her. And I don't need her to, you know, to be, I don't want her to. She started reading my book. She read all my other books.

And she started reading that book and she got on Fauci and she had just made her depressed to read that, you know, she has an idealism and, and a, um, and just a gentle heart and to read, you know, about these injuries to children and to read the government officials that are charged with protecting our health or compromised and corrupted. It just, it, it was, um,

It was it was making her soul with her. And I said to her, you got you. You don't have to read that book and you should stop reading it because let me just tell you something about about Cheryl. She she is literally the best human being that I've ever met. And when I, you know, I met her as Larry David and Larry bought her with my friend.

And Larry brought her in 2002 to go skiing at a ski event I did up in Banff in British Columbia. She was married then and I was married then. And then she came back in 2011 and both of us were separated. And I, you know, I got a crush on her on that weekend. So I knew I wanted to date her and I went, but I also,

knew that you know i went to basically to ask larry's permission because larry has a lot of roles that you know are not written down anywhere but a lot of men understand them and

One of them was, I know that even though it was his TV wife, I needed to get square with him before I... Might have been crossing a boundary. I got it. Exactly. So I met him at the Carlisle Hotel around 11 o'clock at night. I went up to his room.

and sat down with him. It was like asking her parents to date, although he's my age. And I said, what do you think of that? And he said, she is the best person, human being I've ever met. And he said, she's the only person in this industry that is universally beloved.

She doesn't have a single enemy and she has a level of professionalism. She's never late for an appointment. She always knows her line. She does what she's supposed to do. And she's really, you know, Cheryl came from total poverty and she was born in North Florida. Her father lived in a trailer in Frostbrook, Florida. Cheryl slept in the same bed with her mother until she left high school.

She came out, she paid for her own way through college. She put her way through waitressing and working as a joke teller on a telephone line. And then she came out here in a Toyota Tertzau with 100,000 miles on it and worked for 15 years as a bartender and as a personal assistant.

before she finally got a break, which, you know, she was working at the ground lanes and doing improv, but she didn't get a break in the industry until she got that job at Curb Your Enthusiasm, where they were looking for somebody who was an unknown actress. And, you know, then her career took off. She directs films, and she has an incredible career that she put together single-handedly. And the idea that my activities...

The jeopardizing this thing that this incredible person put together was just like, I felt like my job is to protect her and I was doing the opposite of my job. So my heart was breaking.

And I was, you know, I would have taken any blow to make sure that she could distance herself from, you know. Yes. My grandpa, you know, my parents were all really good friends with leading figures at the time who had been terrible enemies of my grandfather.

And my grandfather used to always say, I don't want my enemies to be my children's enemies. They can pick their own fights, but they don't need to fight mine. And I don't want them to. And I feel that way about my family too. I, you know, I chose this life. I chose this, you know, crusade. They need to figure out their own way. My children and other members of my family have other things to do. They're all doing valuable stuff. And I'm not insisting that they

Read my book. This issue is so hard to learn. You know, I've been litigating it. I've written book after book about it. Coming up, Robert talks about his uncle and his father's battles with the FBI and the CIA. And I also ask him if he still considers himself a Democrat after all the backlash he's taken from his side.

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Learn more about the benefits at ai.meta.com slash open. Now, trust me, I'm a lawyer and a journalist, and it took me a lot just to come up with, you know, like, where am I going to challenge him? What, you know, what are some sort of points? Megan, I want to tell you, you know, how impressed I am because you're very brave to have me on because you saw what they did to Joe Rogan for having him.

for having Dr. Malone on. And I'm the only worst person, Dr. Malone. So, you know, they try to destroy Joe Rogan, who's got 40 million followers. And Joe Rogan wouldn't put me on. Joe Rogan wanted to put me on. He won't put me on. And he has good reason for it because they will, you know, what you face if you allow me to talk is, and you've pushed back at me appropriately, you and I,

You've made good points on this show. You're tough and you're smart, but you also have a lot of courage to even allow me to talk. I've never been allowed to talk like this on a major platform except Tucker Carlson. Yep. Yep. A friend of mine too. And thank you for saying that.

I was really looking forward to it. I have to say, the more they try to suppress someone like you or Dr. Malone, the more I want to do it. I've always been that person, and I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled you're here, and I should tell the audience, of course, nothing was off limits. You're not that guy, but you were like, I'll stay as long as you want. We can talk about anything because you're not afraid of pushback, unlike these censors.

who only want to air one-sided story. I've said this before, you know, as a lawyer, and I know as a lawyer of 10 years before I got into journalism, if you go into a courtroom and you only present one side, you're going to win. It's very easy to win when you only have the one side talking. You can persuade...

even the least gullible of jurors to come over to your side. But that's what they're doing. They're just shutting down one side and then declaring it a victory. And they haven't won the hearts and minds. That's why there's so many skeptics still out there. And that's why your book is in its 12th printing, even though no one will give it any promo. It's not going to be reviewed by the Times and celebrated in the magazines and all over the newspapers. But the people have a way to

The Times and the Washington Post did a big profile piece on me. And neither of them even mentioned the name of the book. Oh, my gosh. That's how, like, radioactive it is. So let me ask you this. Did everything die down for Cheryl? Like, everything was fine with her and her industry and show and all that after that? I think so. And I'm...

You know, I hope so. She was nervous about me doing this show. I can tell you that. She's going to like it when, after she listens to it, she's going to approve. I'll just tell you another thing. Cause I brought her so much heartache on that other thing that I, I want to say this about her that, you know, you mentioned my, my wife that I've been through a real tragedy with in my former marriage. And, and,

I have six kids and then a stepchild with Cheryl. Anybody that listens to this can imagine how tough that was for them. And Cheryl coming into my life and becoming a friend, my kids adore her.

And she has these extraordinary values. She has just a natural gift for understanding what you should do in any situation. She has more wisdom than I know of in any person. The word wisdom means a knowledge of God's will. And she has this acute sense of what's right and wrong in every situation and

He shared that with my children and just been a loving, loving friend to all of them. And, you know, my kids are all in credit are flourishing now and they're healthy and they're, they're all doing well in careers and school and athletics, et cetera. And a lot of that is because of the strength and the stability that she brought to my life. So now that I wanted to explain that because I,

That, you know, is why I would do anything to spare her that kind of pain.

Well, I mean, we'll have to rain down hell on anybody who tries to mess with her for her husband's opinions. You're well-researched. You're a lawyer. You've devoted your life to this. Of course you have strong opinions. You know, I was thinking about it, though, because you talk about I'm brave for having you on. You're brave for staying on this after so much public shaming, you know, on all the fronts that we've discussed. And to me, in studying up on you and your family before the interview, I guess I thought to myself I shouldn't be surprised because...

One thing I knew even going into it, but then was confirmed by everything I've read you say about your family is you're risk takers and not by accident. I mean, it's probably in your DNA as well, but it was encouraged right from an early age. You write about how your dad may be too much. So, you know, you'd get threats to the family. And of course, given the way he died, of course, we all look at it differently now. But even prior to that, there'd be death threats. There'd be something. And

You know, he was like, we're fine. You know, we don't need security and we're going to take risks and we're Kennedys. And even the day, was it...

You tell me, I'm trying to remember the story, but it was, there was a death threat and, or maybe it was when JFK was, was shot, but he didn't want you to leave school because he wanted you to be a good little soldier and not panic the other children. During that Cuban missile crisis. Oh, Cuban missile crisis. Okay. Yes.

Joe and I were kind of the older boys and we were home and the US Marshals came by and they wanted to take our whole family down to these, to this, you know, underground city that they have down in the Blue Ridge Mountains where they have literally they've hollowed out the Blue Ridge and they have

They have a whole city there for the government to hide in when the bombs were raining down during nuclear winter. And so we were very, very excited. We wanted to see the joint and to go there. But my father called us and he got us, the two of us, on the phone on different lines. And he said...

If you children leave, people are going to recognize that in Washington and it's going to cause people to panic. And you need to go, you need to go to school. You need to show that, you know, everything has come.

and be good soldiers. He also said that if there is a nuclear war, it will be better to be dead than to be alive. Now, I did not go along with that. I felt like I would thrive in that situation and I really wanted to see the place, but we did what he asked us to do. The story, this is from your book, American Value, is another thing that the audience should buy. But

One of my favorite stories from that book is, of course, your father was attorney general under President Jack Kennedy. And you write about how when you were little, there was a red button on his desk that would go directly to the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who is just a crazed guy. I mean, the stories about him in your book are great, too. And you had some fun when you were a little one with that red button. It was enjoyable for you. Do you remember this story from your book?

My father had a unique relationship with Hoover. Hoover hated my father. And after my uncle died, he never spoke to him again. And he reported directly to Johnson, even though my father continued as attorney general. My father was an ostensible boss, but he had never reported to an attorney general in history. He had always had direct access to the president of the United States. And he hated that my father made him go through him. Not only that, my father put a red button

The FBI was in an adjoining building. They were actually linked by a bridge and they were linked by a tunnel, which we used to go through. We would go to the shooting range, the FBI shooting range, and sometimes we'd go to Hoover's office. He caught me in his office one day trying to catch the goldfish in his fish tank. He was very angry. You're lucky you still have your hand. Yeah, my father...

had a button on the desk that he could summon Hoover. And one day we were in there and we were, me and two of my siblings were mischievously pressing that button. And he came up very angry, which he should have been. It's amazing to think of you doing that. The other, maybe not unrelated story was of the red phone that

President Kennedy had installed so he could reach the Soviets immediately. And he had one, of course, in the Oval Office, but he had another one at your house where you were raised in just outside of D.C. in Virginia, which was sort of like a satellite White House for him. And this is crazy. Apparently, it's still there. Like your brother owns the house. Like we could go see it. Yeah.

There was one in the Cape, which is in my brother's, now my brother's house, which for one year was the summer White House.

And the wires are still going through the door. But what happened was- Could you call now? Could you pick that up and just have a direct conversation? I don't even know if they use landlines in the Kremlin anymore. I have no idea how it works, but nobody's tried it for years. Very useful. But my uncle had this very interesting relationship, which people don't know about, with Khrushchev because-

My uncle didn't trust his CIA. He, in fact, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was early in his presidency, two months into his presidency, he realized the CIA had lied to him, that they wanted to precipitate a nuclear war and that they...

had lied to him about the prospects and they knew that the invasion was going to fail. And they believed that he would be forced into sending in the S, the aircraft carrier and, you know, and bombing Castro and doing a U S invasion. My uncle was absolutely against doing that. And, and,

When he came out of the meeting the next morning, he said to his aides, I want to take the CIA and shatter them into a million pieces and scatter them to the wind. He had this very hostile relationship with the agency. And my book, American Values, is about this hostile relationship between the Kennedys and the CIA. It actually began 10 years before when my grandfather picked a fight

with Dulles. He was on a commission that recommended the abolition of the clandestine services because they were causing trouble and blowback all over the world. My book is about the six-year battle between my family and the CIA. And

Well, my uncle had this very hostile relationship with his Joint Chiefs and with the CIA. He had been a soldier himself. He didn't trust the army, for starters, the army brass. And he, you know, he was mistrustful of them and he believed they wanted to make them go to war. And he said the primary job of every, every president of the United States, the number one job is to keep the nation out of war. That's what he said.

What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children. Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women.

Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time. And he wanted on his gravestone, he wanted, when he was asked what would be the epithet, he said he kept the peace. That should be what was printed on his gravestone. So he began writing Khrushchev directly after the summit in Vienna failed.

And they exchanged these 26 handwritten letters back and forth from each other that are incredibly intimate and caring and, you know, show this extreme, both of the leaders were surrounded by,

by war hawks who considered nuclear war not just inevitable but also advisable, preferable. And both of them were struggling against their own military industrial complexes to keep their nations out of war. And they developed this very close relationship with each other where they talked with this intimate details about their families, their children, about us in these letters. And they were smuggled

Between them, a KGB spy whose name was Georgie Bolshekoy, who developed a very strong relationship with my father, a friendship with my father and mother. And we loved him as a kid. We knew he was a spy. He was this compact little but very strong Russian who could do the Cossack dancing and he could climb the ropes in our backyard.

And one of the three times that my father got mad at my mom in her life was when she made him do a push-up contest against Georgie Polshikoy. He struggled these letters in the New York Times, folding in between the two men.

And at the same time, and that prompted my uncle to put in a direct line to Grusha so that he could and run his State Department and run the spies and run the Pentagon and the two men could talk directly. And those phones were in three places in McLean, where I live in Hyannis Fort, at the Summer White House where we all play.

And in the White House. And, you know, it was extraordinary. It would be like Biden having a direct line to Putin and being able to talk to each other rather than talk through these

you know, official apparatus, which oftentimes has agendas that are contrary to the best interests of our country. I mean, I only wish we felt that was the case with Putin now, right? It seems like it's him and not his complex, given the amount of his power over there. But yeah, your uncle, I love how you just call him your uncle, the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. He

He came by those positions, honestly, because I read in your book, you write that your grandpa, his dad, Joe Kennedy, that his pre-war sentiment, this before World War II, was that America should avoid foreign entanglements. And you write, but World War II had thrust leadership upon us. But you say Jack Kennedy was determined ultimately that our role as an exemplary nation should be just that, leadership,

By example, we should perfect our union and model democracy for the nations of the world, not force it upon them. Boy, oh boy, I've been wondering when I read these words, what do you think your uncle would make of what's happening right now with Ukraine and what we should do about it?

Well, I don't ever speak for my uncle, you know, in terms of what he would do on specific policies. And I think that, you know, other members of my family, in respect to all of us, also avoid doing that. But, you know, what I listen, Megan, what I think is that we went to the war in Iraq and Iraq.

2002, 2003. And it turned out to be, and it was this hysteria that Saddam Hussein was a monster. We had to get him, et cetera. But there was no real explanation about what the U.S. interest in it was. And

He had nothing to do with 9-11, although we were made to think he did. He had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks, although we were made to think he did. And there was no, there was a uniformity, kind of a propaganda wall that infected all of the news organizations, what we used to call the yellow press. And I think it's really important when we have national policies like this,

that we look at the nuance and that we allow other voices on TV and on the radio and in our newspapers. And the Ukraine is an extremely complex geopolitically and historically and in ways that Americans today are missing completely.

And the people that we are pretending that we are now saying we need to help are, you know, we know about these very extremist views that are in the Azov battalion, et cetera, that we need to understand. And I just think that we should not rush into something without debate, without a real debate,

without blocking out alternative voices and about really understanding what the U.S. objectives are and what's best for the world. Yeah. Coming up, Kennedy on how he tries to raise strong-minded, tough, resilient kids. Well, and people should listen to you because you've been advising important people like presidents for a long time. We pulled a picture of you sitting next to President Kennedy on the airplane. And...

You tell me what this little boy in these cute little gray shorts is telling the president of the United States. What's going on? That picture on the airplane is coming back from the convention in Los Angeles in 1960. And, you know, he had just been named the Democratic candidate. He wasn't yet president. He was not yet president. He was still the United States senator.

And if you read, is there an inscription on the bottom of it? There is. I'm trying to read it here. To me, it's saying a president gets his advice from many sources. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's so great. You were adorable, by the way. Do you remember when he won the presidency? Because you're young. Yeah. You remember that moment? Of course.

Of course, that was, you know, I mean, we all worked in the campaign. I was out in Los Angeles for the convention. My parents were really good about involving us in everything. And, you know, we had sit down dinners every night with all the kids and we talked about politics. They talked about current events. We had from when we were really little, we had to read the papers every day, write down three current events every day in our journal. I like that.

And we had to then give talks on the weekends at dinner. Each one of us did a short talk on political or did a poem or something. All 11 of you? Well, you know, the family grew slowly. They didn't have 11 kids all at once. You're like, come on, keep it quick. There were seven of us.

And some of them were young, but the older kids were expected to, you know, do these things. And the younger ones gradually didn't. You know, the thing about my mother and I talk about it.

this kind of very tense relationship that I particularly had with my mother for the first couple of decades of my life. But she was, and then afterwards I was able to see, you know, what an incredible human being she'd been and how, particularly when I had my own kids, you know, and try to make them sit down at the table every night and say their prayers and,

you know, high level conversations and arrive on time and have their, you know, their hands clean and all that stuff. And she did that every night with all of us and we did it. And then we, we all said the rosary every night. We read the Bible every single night. We went to church every day in the summer and on Sundays in the winter as well.

And, you know, if I try to do that to my kids, they ridicule me. So I really have a tremendous respect for many, many gifts that she gave me. But, you know, one of those was just a very rich experience of growing up in a household that had that kind of, you know,

That kind of laughter and fun, but also the discipline. Of course, everyone was a Democrat. Now we know that, you know, the things that we've been discussing that have been so disturbing over the past couple of years have been perpetrated on us almost universally by Democrats. And you noted it yourself. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you, are you still a Democrat?

Yeah, I'm still a Democrat because I think of the Democratic Party as a party that believes in free speech, that, you know, believes in the highest ideals of our country. But I and that is, you know, a party that is much more reluctant to go to war, that opposes the corporate domination of our country.

country and that oppose environmental pollution. And those are issues that both parties, people of both parties can share. I want to say this, Megan, that I think it is one of the intentions of people who are pushing totalitarianism is to encourage tribalism and division.

And if you look at the strategies for shattering indigenous societies that the intelligence agencies have developed over many years, one of the key strategies is to divide people, divide them by race, by political party, by religion, whatever.

And so, you know, what I really try to do is I try to be a bridge to try to find the common values that we have. We have a level of polarization now in this country that is dangerous. If you see that documentary, Social Dilemma,

It's very frightening because we are being manipulated to away from each other, to close the door on each other, to burn the bridges and to create two Americas. It's the most dangerous polarization that we've had since the United States Civil War. And one of the frightening things in that

What they show in that show is that these, Facebook and the other companies have developed algorithms that are designed to keep your eyeballs on that site for as long as possible. They're out of control of those algorithms. They set them in motion and then they do things and learn things that nobody really knows how they were working.

But it turns out that the way that you keep people's eyeballs on the site is by reinforcing their worldview, by telling them things that they already believe in. So if I live in this house and there's a Republican next door and we make an identical inquiry on Google or whatever, we get two different answers. My answer will be,

reinforce my worldview, his answer is going to reinforce his. And the division, the abyss between us gets deeper and deeper. And this is a real problem for society. And we have to figure out ways to build bridges with each other. So I don't talk so much about my political party anymore. I believe in all the values I've ever believed in. I'm fighting for all the values and for the vision of our country.

that I always believe in, but I am happy to talk to Republicans, work with them, to battle in the foxholes and the trenches side by side with them and Democrats and everybody. And I don't ever ask anybody their political party. I think, and I used to, you know, so I'm not saying that it's not part of my

you know, of what, but I think right now, purposefully, I really, I think it's so critical that we are talking to people that we disagree with and put aside all these tribal divisions, which are destroying this country. I love what you said. I agree. I agree with it wholeheartedly and I'm trying to live it professionally and personally and then, and then I'm living it.

um but forgive me for the follow-up but do you think you could vote for a republican presidential candidate in 2024 or do you plan on voting for joe biden my father always said vote for the person not the party no i you know i'm not gonna talk about who i vote for what i vote for but i'm not going to you know i really think it's critical that we um

Coming up, Robert and why he believes his father's shooter and the man convicted of his father's murder, Sirhan Sirhan, should be free.

When you talk about division and how bad it is now, of course, I've got to ask you, as a man who lost his dad to an assassination in the tumultuous 60s, Martin Luther King was killed same year. President Kennedy also assassinated same decade. People often look back at the 60s and say, you don't know what division is. Like what we're suffering right now as a country is nothing like what we went through back then. And I realize you were just a boy, but

How do you compare those two eras in terms of the country's division? Let me tell you just a way of answering that question, an anecdote from my own life, which was one of the most poignant experiences that I had with my father. And it took place and I had many, many wonderful experiences as I detail in that book.

But this took place in the days after he died. And he was, of course, killed here in Los Angeles. And I was here holding his hand when he died. We flew him back to New York, where he was senator.

And we waked them at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It was a huge crowd of people. And it was multicolored people, you know, every color, packing the sidewalks eight to ten deep for, you know, the entire upper man. And we put them on a train and we took that train down from Penn Station to Union Station in Washington, D.C. There were two million people lining the train tracks.

The train trip that's usually two and a half hours took seven hours because the trains could not move because there were so many people on the tracks. They were a cross-section of the American public. There were Black people, whites. The train stations in Newark, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore were just jammed with people.

with Black Americans singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and holding candles as we came through. My father's casket was in the caboose, and, you know, I was riding at the end of the train or sometime in the different cars, and there were every religion. There were rabbis, there were priests, there were nuns, there were men in military uniform, there were hippies in tie-dyed t-shirts, there were Boy Scouts. I remember...

a group of about seven or eight nuns standing in the middle of a baseball field in Delaware in the back of a yellow pickup truck. And there was just this incredible array. It was a cross-section of the American experience. It was all the crowds that I had seen in all these political campaigns with my dad and my uncle since I was a little boy. It was a complete mixture of the American diaspora

And four years later, most of the crowd was white because our population was. And they were holding signs, American flags, pray for us, Bobby, goodbye, Bobby, you know, holding the babies up. We got to Penn Station and Union Station in Washington. President Johnson met us.

We took my father up the hill to Arlington. We passed the mall. And at that time, the Poor People's Campaign, which had been organized, conceived by my father, organized by Martin Luther King and Marian Wright Edelman, and it was thousands of poor men from all over the country. They're trying to create a political movement for poor people living in tents and shanties. And they all came to the sidewalk.

they bowed their head and they held their hats against their chests as we went up the hill to Arlington to bury my father next to his brother. And four years later, I was in college and I was looking at demographic data from the 1972 campaigns. That was 1968. Mike Ad was killed in the middle of that campaign. Four years later,

The vast majority of those white voters between Baltimore and or between Wilmington and Washington, who had supported my father strongly, four years later, the vast majority of them were voting not for George McGovern, who was aligned with my father on most issues, but for George Wallace, who was diametrically opposed. He was a racist, segregationist, you know, the worst kind.

And it occurred to me then, so that same people that voted for my father were now voting for a guy who believed absolutely the opposite. It occurred to me then, and it struck me many times since, that every nation, like every human being, has a darker side and a lighter side, and that the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our bigotry, to our hatred, to our selfishness,

to misogyny, to xenophobia, and to our greed and anger. And that is much more difficult to do what my father was trying to do, which is to try to make us feel like part of a community. And we are all on a heroic mission

to perfect the Republic, to make this nation an exemplary nation, to make this nation a model for all the other nations of what human beings can accomplish from all the races and colors and creeds that are gathered here. When we work together to elevate what's best about us,

and to create something that is a model democracy for the rest of the world. And my father was able to get people to see the hero inside of themselves. He believed that each one of us had a hero inside of us and that his job was to bring that hero out and get us to transcend narrow self-interest, act on behalf of community and to

to resist the seduction of the notion that we can advance ourselves as a people by leaving our poor brothers and sisters behind. That we had to go forward together, we had to lift up each other and all be part of this American experience. What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence,

the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or in the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together. We are a great country and a selfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running in over the period of life. And, you know, so that's the answer, I think.

to your question that, you know, we need to start appealing to the best side of all Americans and that and stop looking at their race, their religion, their political party affiliation or anything else and just say, what do we need to do to make this country, you know, the best, the exemplary nation that it ought to be? That was so moving hearing you talk about him.

It takes me back to I was born long enough ago that news about the Kennedys and the way they saw the world and presidential speeches and speeches by Bobby Kennedy were still in the news. And they played them often. And they were still, you know, your dad, your uncle, still symbols of the Democratic Party and what it meant to be a Democrat.

It's changed so much now, as has the Republican Party. But as you were talking, my producers put on the screen a black and white picture of your dad, of Jack Kennedy, and of your uncle Ted Kennedy together. They were younger. They were strong, robust, good-looking guys, brothers standing together, getting into politics, trying to help the country advance. And it reminded me of

The way you wrote about growing up, just all the cousins was like 29. I think you just said 70, but it's like 29 cousins, something like that running around. Well, I had another, you know, my mother had a huge family too. So there were 20. Oh, Ronnie Skakels. Yeah. Okay. Yes. But like growing up Kennedy, you know, they, they referred to Jackie and Jack as Camelot, but you guys had some of that too. And, and,

Like, I just wonder, they didn't let you play inside if the sun was shining. You had to be outside and you had to be playing games and you had to be with each other. And it was sort of this seemed like a communal living in a way. That too seems to be withering, right? Like our connectedness to one another, be it family, friends.

friends, in part thanks to technology. Can you take me back just for a minute so I can feel that too, of what it was like to be connected and be outdoors and not be glued to a phone and be taking risks and being going on boats and be playing football, all of it. Yeah, well, that was a pretty good description on that. But we were raised community with all my other cousins. In fact, we all lived in the same town, the seaside village, Hyannisport, which is a magical, magical place and still is.

My kids go up there every summer and they have over 100 cousins who are their age and they adore. At that point, we would migrate from one family house because my grandparents had nine children. One of them, Joe, died during the war, kicked out in an air crash after the war. Rosemary was intellectually disabled.

all the remaining kids, the remaining six kids, all had houses essentially next to each other or very close to each other in Hyannisport.

Most of them had large families and we would migrate every night we would eat in a different house. So, you know, on Thursdays, we'd eat at Shriver's house. On Tuesdays, we'd eat at Smith's. On Wednesdays, we'd eat at John Kennedy's house. On Saturdays, we'd eat at Ted Kennedy's. On Sundays, we'd eat at our house for Robert Kennedy's.

And there was lots of competition between the family. You know, there was people who were engaged in every kind of competition. We had a, my grandfather had hired an Olympic swimming coach who was, who was an Olympian named Sandy Eiler. He taught us all sports, you know, he taught us boxing and, and,

and swimming and we had sailing and tennis lessons and all that kind of stuff. And we were always competing. Oh, you know, but it was a healthy kind of competition, I think. And it was outside. And I think we weren't allowed inside during the daytime, even if there was a rain or something, we were told you can't come in. You got it. And there was no TV.

And you got to figure out a way to, you know, do something outside. So, and it wasn't, we weren't tempted to go inside. Everybody wanted to be outside. I really am frightened for my kids generally. And I raised my kids as much as I could outdoors. So that I think they, you know, they love that. And, you know, I have a kid that just returned from two weeks ago.

whitewater kayaking in Patagonia and he's on his way up to run the itinerant and all my kids but the I really am frightened and concerned about this generation because I think they're you know the technology the cell phones the TikTok the Instagram and the kind of self-loathing

that accompanies a lot of those addictions is if they have to overcome stuff that we never had to overcome in the life that, you know, I think that the socialization of these children today, it's an addiction. You know, these devices are designed to addict people and they're addicting themselves to something that is not

apparently healthy for any reason. And it concerns me a lot, but I don't know what to do with it. I do, Megan, I think that the Democrats have a really, who are advocating censorship, the concern they have, the underlying concern is a legitimate concern. You have, because of the power of the social media,

these inflammatory and violent and dishonest characterizations kind of have a way of amplifying on the internet the way they wouldn't do with conventional newspapers or news sources. And the algorithms that they use to keep us on the site also have the side effect of

or the fallout of polarizing opinion and making opinion, I think, more extreme and raising passions in a way. And I think as a society, we have to figure out how to deal with that. We have to figure out some fix. But I do not believe the fix is censorship. I agree. You can censor certain things. You can censor pedophilia.

You can censor incitements to violence. When you get outside of those and a couple of other narrow categories that, you know, censorship is not legitimate for any reason. That's right.

It's really offensive if you think about the fact that these same companies who are silencing your view, right? They deem your view disinformation or too controversial for YouTube, whatever it is. Those are the same companies that spend their days making money off of manipulating us and making us hate one another. It's almost like they claim the moral high ground, you know, with absolutely no solid footing on which to stand. Yeah. And, you know, they're making money and they're tied in with the intelligence agencies and

We're tied in with big pharma. Google owns three vaccine companies. Facebook, Zuckerberg has a billion dollar investment in vaccines. And they are all making money on it. They have partnerships with the big pharmaceutical companies.

They're inseparable and it's a really dangerous conglomerate because the, you know, we, there's no, it's not paranoid to say the intelligence agencies are deeply, deeply embedded in these companies. And you have the, you know, you have military application, you have huge government contracts, you have deals with the pharmaceutical companies and you've created this, this government corporate cartel.

That controls all of our communications. And so, and it's really, really dangerous. It really makes you want to disconnect and just go live in the woods. Just go play outside like a Kennedy and don't, don't look at any devices. Just to round back to you guys outside and playing and all that, um, have to ask you, you write in the book, uh,

Uh, we built tree houses in the Magnolia. We played for hours in the hayloft, making forts from hay bales. We invented our own games, mostly involving some element of risk, like tag on the roof, where we leapt from atop the barn to the tack room, tool sheds, and horse trailers roofs, or onto a neighboring white pine.

It reminds me of a quote that I read from your grandmother, the matriarch of the Kennedy clan, Rose, where, you know, you never know whether these are real or not. But what was attributed to her was better a broken bone than a broken spirit. And I love that. It seems to capture her overall attitude, if not her actual words. But can I ask you about that? Because it's not without its downsides, right? And I'm thinking in particular of JFK Jr.,

More with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. next. You know, a lot of us treasured him and Caroline Bessette and his wife and, you know, just thought, oh, my God, why? Right. Like, why do you have to do it? Why do you have to fly the plane? Why do you have to go up in the bad weather? And a lot of people talked about that. Like, is it a is it a blessing or a curse to be a Kennedy, to have this penchant for risk and this?

outdoorsman attitude and, you know, a lot of people felt better about leading a more sedentary life with fewer risks in it. How do you make sense of it all having suffered such loss? People shouldn't listen to me as a parent. The older I get, the less I know about parenting. So I'm, I am not going to give people advice on parenting. I mean, I can share kind of my experience, strength and hope, which is that, um,

You know, my approach to parenting has been to really lay it fair, to try to be a good example, to try to encourage my kids' interest in history and values and

But also to understand that as much as I love them, that God loves them more and that he's, they're his children and that, you know, my role is not to control them, but to encourage them and,

You know, most of my kids went through periods of revolt against me, which I welcome. I think children, you know, need to divorce their parents. They need to develop their own sense of self. They need to develop confidence and they need to be, you know, I like when my kids argue with me. I have a couple of kids who,

I have one kid in particular who does not, he's not completely bought into any of my vaccine, you know, baloney or whatever. So he, and he argues with me all the time. And I love that. I love that, you know, they can make up their own minds that it's really important that we develop in our country, a generation of children who understand the importance of critical thinking.

and who understand that fear can disable our capacity for critical thinking. And we have to resist that.

Franklin Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself because fear destroys capacity for critical thinking. And we need to be armored against propaganda. We need to be armored against the orchestrated fear because if we, and so it's important to have brave children. It's important to instill courage.

and risk taking if we want to continue to have a democracy. There was a generation of Americans in 1789 or 1776 who understood that there's a lot worse things than death, there's a lot worse things than dying, and living as a slave is one of them. And that's why they gave their lives, they gave their fortunes, they in some cases lost their families

in order to give us the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. And, you know, we have lived off their courage for a couple of hundred years. And now it's time that we have to, you know, renew that commitment to courage again. Yes.

Yes, there's a new kind of risk-taking. Today's day and age requires a new kind of risk-taking. You may not be getting in the cockpit of an airplane, but just to speak your opinion in today's day and age requires some measure of courage. Yeah, I think so. I mean, my father always, you know, my father really admired, as I say in my book,

physical courage and he was surrounded by people like Jim Whitaker, his best friends, Jim Whitaker, who was the first American on Mount Everest. John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the Earth. Sam, all these football players, Rosie Greer, Rafer Johnson, people who had demonstrated threat and a lot of war heroes, like Gerald Tremblay and many others.

They were all in our house all the time. And my father had this tremendous admiration for physical courage, but he always said that moral courage is an even rarer commodity. And ultimately, that was the reason that my uncle wrote that book, Profiles in Courage, the one that won the Pulitzer Prize, was to illustrate a dozen stories of

of American politicians who had sacrificed their careers and in some cases their lives for a principle, to stand on a principle that they knew was going to cost them. And you know, I was raised in a milieu where we were taught that it was a great privilege to be able to be part of some great controversy

And that the best thing that could happen to us is if we could give our lives and our energies to something that, you know, was larger than ourselves. Not just courage, but forgiveness was another value. I know it was instilled in you because you're Catholic. And that brings me to Sirhan Sirhan.

the man who killed your dad on June 5th, 1968, outside the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California. He was sentenced to life in prison. And you and my old pal and colleague from Fox News, Douglas Kennedy, your little brother, were the two in your family, the two of your dad's kids.

were, as I understand it, in favor of him getting parole. He was paroled and you supported it, but then your other siblings were on the other side of it and the governor, Newsom, he quashed it. So he's staying in prison. What convinced you to support the parole of the man who killed your dad? Well, number one, even if Sir Anne had killed my father, I would be advocating his parole. And my brother, Douglas...

is agnostic about whether Saran killed my father or not. But he even, he believes like I do, that even if he did kill my father, he should be paroled. And, you know, to me, that is an important personal stand because I think resentments and anger and revenge are impulses that are never met.

they're never good for you. And resentments are like, as they say, like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. It has a corrosive impact on your own soul. So I think, you know, what you, what the better approach to,

to people who hurt you is to pray for them, to forgive them, and then to keep moving. But if you let them live in your head rent-free, then they are in control of you. And only by forgiving them do you escape

their control and their influence. So I would be advocating, even if Sirhan didn't kill my father, Sirhan did not kill my father. He certainly shot at my father. My father, and this is what Thomas Noguchi, who was the coroner, you know, said from the beginning.

Sirhan Sirhan was standing in front of my father. He was standing in front of a steam table. He never got more than less than five feet from my father. There were 77 eyewitnesses in that Ambassador Hotel kitchen. And they all saw what happened, which is Sirhan fired two shots at my father directly.

One of those shots went past my father and hit Paul Schrade, who was a United Auto Workers, a very close friend of my father. He's the man who introduced my father to Cesar Chavez and one of his closest friends. And he today is alive.

and has been advocating for Sirhan for 20 years. And he's the one who made me look at the evidence and read the autopsy report against my will and showed me that Sirhan could not have killed my father. The second shot that Sirhan fired at my father ended up in a door, a door jam, a wooden door jam behind my father and was later removed by the Los Angeles Police Department. Sirhan was then tackled

by six men, including Rosie Guerriere, Rayford Johnson, and a number of others. And his gun hand was pushed away from my father. But they couldn't, he had a superhuman strength, and they could not get the gun out of his hand. And he fired off six more shots and emptied the chamber. And all of those shots hit people, although we have them all accounted for.

Oh, we know what happened to all of Sir Anne's shots. And none of them hit my father. My father was hit by four shots, one that passed harmlessly through his shoulder pad, all of them from behind. They were contact shots, meaning that the barrel of the gun was either touching his flesh or within an inch of his flesh.

or touching his clothing. They were fired by somebody who was standing immediately behind my father. And all of the shots were on an upward trajectory. So the gun was being held against my father's back. And the trigger was pulled four times. The audio of the night records 14 shots or 13 shots fired. So Sir Anne only had eight shots in his gun.

And there were many more shots than that fired, and he never had a chance to reload. The man who killed my father is almost certainly Eugene Dane Caesar, who was a security guard, and he worked at the Lockheed plant. He had a classified position. Lisa Pease, in her book, establishes that he identified himself as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

And he died at the very beginning of the pandemic in the Philippines. And the gun that he had that night was a .22, which he lied about repeatedly. He was when my father died.

My father was shot. He fell onto Caesar and Caesar fell back. So the two men were lying on the ground and then Caesar pushed my father off and got up and he was seen by a dozen people with a gun in his hand and he never denied that he had his gun pulled. He said he had pulled the gun to fire at Sir Henry.

But that gun was not found and it was not turned over to the police. It has since been found and it says they lied repeatedly about what he had done with the gun. So there's a lot more evidence. It's too much to go into here. But if you, you know, people who are curious about it, there are, you know, many, many books about that are written about what happened and

So if the orthodoxy in this case doesn't make any sense, as it does in so many cases. That's fascinating. So that I mean, that leads me to ask you what you think about your uncle's assassination, because that's one of the most speculated about moment in U.S. history. Right. I mean, from.

Oliver Stone, right, to the Warren Commission. They concluded it was Arlen Specter, Senator Arlen Specter. Now, God rest his soul. He he used to I knew him kind of on Capitol Hill and he used to say it's not the single bullet theory. It's a single bullet conclusion. That's what happened. Single bullet. It was Lee Harvey Oswald and only Lee Harvey Oswald. Where do you land on it?

Well, that was the Warren Commission. And the Warren Commission, of course, the key commissioner was Alan Dulles. And Alan Dulles, of course, was the head of the CIA who my uncle had fired after the Bay of Pigs. And we now know that he was...

deliberately, and this is not controversial, this is well established, he was deliberately steering the committee away from many facts that would have implicated the CIA, including the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset beginning in 1958 when he worked as a radar operator at the Atsui Air Force Base in Japan.

which was the CIA base where the, he was a Marine, where the U-2 flights were based out of that were over the Soviet Union. He defected to the Soviet Union. It was a fake defection. It was a dangle. It was orchestrated by James Jesus Angleton and Langley.

who was the head of counterintelligence in Langley, meaning the division of the CIA that looks for Russian spies. And there was a KGB mole in Langley for many years. To this day, it's not identified. And they were trying to track a chase out that mole. And they thought that when Lee Harvey Oswald defected,

Angleton believed that the KGB would wonder who he was and would ask the mole to check his file. And they had a trigger system on his file in Langley that would identify anybody who touched it. They weren't able to do it. And Oswald came back without any punishment, without even being debriefed by the State Department. He simply made a very, very high-profile defection to Russia. He married a daughter of a KGB colonel.

And then just walked into the State Department and said, I want to go home. They bought his ticket. They gave him $600. He was met at the airport in Dallas by a guy called George March, who was also working for the agency. And you talk about the Warren Commission findings, but the United States Congress assassination committee is investigating and the Senate investigating.

did a new investigation five years after the Warren Commission, and they came to the opposite conclusion that it was indeed a conspiracy. They didn't know whether the conspirators

who actually murdered my uncle were mafia or with the CIA. There was a split within the committee. You know, the Warren Commission is, was working on very little knowledge that was heavily orchestrated and the subsequent investigations. And now we have millions of documents that, you know, that suggest a strong involvement by the agency.

Coming up, he said nothing was off limits, so I went there and asked him point blank about the rumors about his father, his uncle, and Marilyn Monroe. I mean, how does that... Sorry to go Oprah on you, but how does that make you feel? You believe the CIA was responsible for the assassination of two men who were so dear to you. When you ask me how does it make me feel, how does it make me feel...

It's hard for me to separate my feelings from the, you know, from the kind of, from the larger issue about what the implications are for our country and for our democracy. That these are murders that, you know, whether I'm right or wrong about them, we should be able to talk about them. We should be able to reason. We shouldn't be again, shut down and censored. The people ought to be able to have a congenial understanding.

conversation about these and if the original verdicts do not make any sense and let's have an investigation what happened because our country took a turn when my uncle was killed you know when i was a boy when i was on my sixth birthday or seventh birthday dwight eisenhower met january 17 1961

made what I would consider the most important speech in American history, where he warned our country against the rise of the military-industrial complex and the subversion of democracy through its ascendancy of this corrupt cartel of intelligence agencies, the military agencies, military contractors, and other people who are attached to the military-industrial complex.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. My uncle took office two days later.

It was a farewell speech for Eisenhower. And he said, this is the most important issue, the enemy within. It's not the people from outside our country, but people within. And he talked also about the health agencies and the health cartel, but very, very explicitly and presciently. And my uncle spent three years of his presidency battling the military industrial complex. And in the end, if...

The conclusions of that subsequent committee, the Health Assassinations Committee, are correct. And it was members of that cartel that killed him. And if that's true, we should be trying to resolve that still. Because at that point, so what happened when he died? Two months before he had died, he had signed a national security order

ordering all of our troops out of Vietnam, ending the Vietnam War. The first 1,000 troops there were 1,100 troops, 11,000 troops, and the first 1,000 would be out by December. The remainders would all be out within 12 months, by the end of 1965, or by the beginning of 1965. As soon as he died,

With Lyndon Johnson, by the way, my uncle's been fighting for three years, his own military intelligence apparatus, who wanted to send a quarter million troops into Vietnam and make it our war. And he said, no, there's the Vietnamese war. They have to win it or lose it. We can help them. We can give them advisors. We can give them helicopters. But we are not going to fight the war for them. Sounds familiar. And Johnson came in.

And immediately he sent, we had the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. He sent a quarter million troops in there. And it became the American War. And then after Johnson, my father ran specifically against the war, specifically against the military industrial complex. He won California and

That meant he was almost certainly going to win the convention. And he had already beat Nixon once. He beat Nixon. He was his brother's campaign manager in 60. He beat Humphrey, who was his only other opponent, real opponent. Eugene McCarthy was not a serious candidate. He'd already beaten Humphrey in 1960. And he'd already beaten Nixon in 1960. So he had a clear path to the White House.

when he was murdered and he was specifically running against Vietnam War and against the military industrial complex. As soon as he was killed, Nixon comes in and sends a half a million troops over there and then fights until 1963. When my uncle left office,

75 American special forces advisors had been killed in Vietnam. By the time Nixon left, 56,000 American troops and millions of Vietnamese had died in that conflict. And the military industrial complex had to get more and more powerful. And you look at the rest of American history, and it's a battle between this dwindling impulse for a democracy

and the growing power of this cartel. And I think, you know, the murders of my uncle and my father were key parts in that turn that we made in the road and that part of unraveling that, restoring the path to democracy and the control over these

These dangerous, dangerous forces, you know, probably ought to begin with a real investigation of both of those murders, a real investigation for the first time in history. Indeed. Indeed. What could it hurt? What would be the reason not to? On the subject of everything's okay to talk about, so forgive me because this is, I realize, impolitic. Can we spend one minute on Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn Monroe.

Happy birthday to you. There's not much I can tell you about Marilyn Monroe. I mean, I met her when I was... The rumors are that she had an affair with your dad, that she had an affair with your uncle, and even possibly that your dad was somehow there the night she died out in California. Those are rumors that have been time and again proven completely untrue. There's two days. My father's schedule...

Every minute of his day is known. People know where he was every moment of the day. And it happens that the day that they say that my father, you know, that these people who are selling books saying these things, the day that they say my father was with her, he was with us at a camping trip in Oregon and in Northern California. And it would have been impossible for him to be here. That was the day that she died.

Oh, all the days that people that these authors who are just bogus authors have suggested who are making money by, you know, saying these things. All the days that they claim that my father could have been with Marilyn Monroe are days when we know exactly where he was and he was on opposite sides of the country from Marilyn Monroe.

What do you make of the affair rumors of, you know, between Bobby Kennedy and or Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe? Yeah, I again, all of the rumors about the affair are.

you'd have to find a time where he could have had an affair. And there is no conceivable time when the two people are in the same city. What? There's always a way. When a man wants to have an affair, he can find a way. Come on. I'm talking about my father. We know where he was. You know, the author's

blame to know the days and you'd have to know the day because my father's schedule was known he was on the campaign what about all jack kennedy's affairs like we you know we know he did that even though the new york times wasn't writing about it washington post listen i wasn't around then so i can't answer that question i can't answer the question about my uncle you were talking to him about salamanders on the plane not his love life that makes sense to me talking about his his um

extracurricular. Yeah. There was only so much he was going to share with you on board that Air Force. I get it. Listen, I don't know how to thank you for all this time. Here we are four hours later and you've just been so open and giving on every subject, personal and professional. I really, really enjoyed the exchange and I hope we can have more.

- Thank you very much. Thanks for your courage, Megan. Thank you for your integrity. And I hope they leave this up more than about 10 seconds.

Wow. What an interesting man, right? What a fascinating exchange. Thank you so much for joining us today, for sharing in it with us and both days. And remember, if you missed part one of my interview with RFK Jr., you can find that wherever you get your videos or podcasts for free. I always love to hear what you think of the shows that we do. And I would especially love to hear what you thought of this one.

What were your opinions? Did he persuade you on anything? Were you glad to hear from him? Do you think he's so controversial he needs to be universally banned as he has been? Would love to know your thoughts. Leave me a note. Right now we take him in the Apple Reviews.

basically the long and the short of it is Apple gives us no love. I mean, if you go into Apple podcasts, you will see Michelle Obama promoted and Hillary Clinton's podcast promoted. You will not see the Megan Kelly show promoted, but one way of getting our show to sort of get traction on Apple is the more comments we get, the higher up we go. So, um, it serves two purposes. It helps us fight the man over at Apple and,

And it also helps me understand your thoughts on the program and your guest suggestions and what you liked and what you didn't like. I have read every single comment. There were over 22,500 of them now. And it's a great way for us to connect. Okay. While you're there, do me the favor of subscribing and downloading. Give me a five-star review. Some of the losers are giving like zero or one. Those are the haters who watch MSNBC. So give me five stars, please help me out. And

And leave us a comment on social media if that's easier for you. Or you can just email me at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. Questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. Lots of ways of giving us feedback. Nothing and no one is off limits here on The Megyn Kelly Show. We will keep bringing you the truth. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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