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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that's not about the election. But this week, I'm bringing back a special buddy, my good friend from the 2020 election who I have ripped through a hole in time and pulled into the future. Cody Johnson!
Hi, hello everybody. Thank you so much for the kind introduction and welcome to the podcast. Shodi. Hello. Yeah. Shodi's here. Welcome to the, I don't know if it's, I wouldn't say it's the worst year ever yet because really as much as everybody's unhappy, I don't know, 2020 was pretty bad. I keep going back and forth on that. I feel like a lot more people died still in 2020. Yeah.
Yeah, I was I actually been working on an update to that song and I'm like going back and forth like, well, I'm the worst year ever. Maybe it'll be a bit better than last time, but then it wouldn't be the worst year ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, there's still time. It might not be pandemic bad, but, you know, if Donald Trump becomes the president again, that that's that could be worse. That could be worse. You know, that could be worse. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's I have mixed feelings, you know, as we go through this horse race, Cody, because it feels like, you know, the upside of if Donald Trump gets a second term is you will finally be punished for all of your many crimes. But the downside is that I might be punished for all of my many crimes. You know, that's that's tough. I know justice is.
is a little wonky. It's a little unbalanced. You know, we can't always get full, pure justice that we want. Sometimes we have to make our own sacrifices. So, right. You're going to have to sacrifice your self in order to see me. Yeah. Yeah. That's more or less what I learned from one of the Batman movies. Cody, what do you think of? We'll invite it together.
Because all we do is invite as well. We'll just not get along. We're just not going to get along together. It's just too accurate. Everyone will be unhappy together. You want everybody to get pumped before the chorus. But then we go, or not.
Or not. I think everyone knows that's a lie. I think I was wearing this shirt when we recorded that song. Oh, that's fun. Oh, it's a time capsule. Oh, it's a time capsule. Oh, man. I remember when it was worse in a lot of ways. Yeah. When I was when I was huddled in my tiny efficiency with all of my beans and ammunition. And now I'm I'm huddled in my house with all of my beans and ammunition. Exactly. Life life has really changed for me.
Now, Cody, when it comes to the election, you know, we could sit here, you and I, and jawbone about old Joe R. Biden or old Donald J. Trump, whatever his middle name is. John, I believe. John. OK, cool. Great, great, great. I need that. Donald John. Donald John President, I believe is the name. I don't think there's very much either of us can say that that will matter here. Right. Even though people on the Internet keep coming into like any comment.
you make about the election going, Oh, so you want Trump to win or whatever? Like nobody, nobody who listens to us, like the entire election is going to come down to like a hundred thousand people in five to seven swing States. Right. Yep. So let's talk about a guy who actually could influence the election. The most popular third party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly 25 years, something like that. Yeah. Bobby,
F. Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. Yes. Currently polling at 9 or 10 percent. A lot of places. It depends on where you go. But like I think nationally, that's broadly accurate. I also think that there's a lot of flex in those numbers. You know, you're talking polling 9 or 10 percent and like three plus or minus three, four percent, you know, error rate. So, yeah.
He very well could wind up not being influential at all, but he could siphon away enough votes to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the election. It's kind of a toss-up. We don't really know. Yeah, it's kind of a toss-up. I think most of what I've seen has led me to expect he probably takes more votes away from Trump, but I also – I think so. Yeah, nothing conclusive makes me say that, right? It's really hard to say in any – yeah.
But that's what it seems like for sure. Either way, he definitely could be the decider of the election. It's not impossible given, again, how kind of narrow things are probably going to come down in a handful of swing states. It's not impossible that he winds up having a pretty sizable impact. So I figured we should talk about the guy, especially because –
In kind of a remarkable turn of events, a bunch of articles, I think Vanity Fair published the first one, have come out in the last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he sexually assaulted women. And he has had –
Kind of a unique response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe you might hear more about this. I don't even know about that. Maybe. Yeah, because he apologizes. Like, how can I make this right? When he was reached out to directly by one of the women and his public statements have been like, yeah, you'll probably hear more about this.
Yeah, I mean, he said even when he's ran, he'll mention that even when he started running, he's like, yeah, I got a lot of skeletons in my closet. Yeah, yeah. I'm the dude who's done a lot of bad stuff. He was essentially like, I didn't eat that dog, but... I didn't eat that dog. Yeah, which he did. Which he did. Ew. Having...
I have read now every piece of writing I can find on RFK Jr. I've gone through a biography of the Kennedy family. I have gone through a biography of the Kennedy family specifically after the assassinations of JFK and RFK. I've gone through a biography of Bobby Kennedy and as many articles as I could find on the matter. And I will tell you two things. Number one, he definitely ate that dog. And number two, I'm actually not surprised that he both is perfectly willing to admit that he sexually assaulted people. Right.
genuinely thinks that he feels bad about it. Now, I'm not saying he actually does, because I think the act of being a Kennedy might be fundamentally deranging. And primarily what we'll be talking about in these episodes, this is not a list. We're going to talk about some fucked up shit that Bobby Kennedy did. But mostly what we're talking about is the creation of the Kennedys as a concept is maybe the most profoundly abusive thing that's ever happened to a group of children.
Yeah. Like that's really the story these next two weeks. Yeah, you're creating a royal family from scratch basically. Yeah. And with none of the royal families, I don't think, I don't get these sense from looking at the current members of the House of Windsor that it's good for you to be a member of the House of Windsor. It seems bad. But there's a support network outside of the family set up. The whole country is kind of a support network for the royal family. And so you
usually there's limits on how far out they spiral. That didn't exist for the Kennedys. And that's part of, anyway, it's an interesting story. So we're going to, we're going to talk about that this week, Cody. But first I wanted to ask, how do you feel about Bobby Kennedy? You know, how do you feel with the, actually, I scratched that. How do you feel about the Kennedys? I have no strong opinions in that, like, I'm not a huge Kennedy fan. And yeah, I'm,
I, you know, mixed, I think I would say probably depending on the Kennedy we're talking about. Um, I don't, uh, like political like dynasties and like that aspect of it. I'm just like very much against and about him specifically. Uh, it seems like he's got a lot of problems and a lot of, uh, stances that I disagree with heavily. Um, so I would say I'm generally anti, uh,
but not in a way that I can articulate for you. You land kind of about where Bernie Sanders does did with one, one, one giant exception. Anyway, let's move on to ending the cold open and moving on to the hot open.
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And we're back. That was a Bernie Sanders shot the president joke. I don't actually know. I was like, wait, what are you? Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. It's been a long enough time since the last one of those. I don't know. You know, that's the bit on this show. Anyway, let's talk about the Kennedys. So I'm going to start this. The first kind of half of this episode maybe is actually going to be an overview of like
how the Kennedys became the Kennedys because, and this is not, you know, there are, there's, there are so many people who are like Kennedy historians and Kennedy fan experts and,
I'm not going to pretend that this is a comprehensive history of the family. And I'm actually not going to talk much about the bad shit that Joe Kennedy or JFK or the original RFK did. We'll cover some of that because like there's kind of a lot in the story of how they became a thing. And we're focusing mostly on RFK this week. So this story is important for how it sets up the way in which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers in like co-ageist ways,
members of the Kennedy family, how they were raised. Right. So don't come to this being like, wow, Robert didn't really mention, you know, what Joe Kennedy did to Rosemary Kennedy, the lumbotomy. He didn't talk about RFK wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr. And it's not because those aren't important. It's because like that doesn't factor in as much to like what RFK Jr. experienced as a kid. Right. And so that's kind of the focus with which we're covering the background here. Right.
Like many Irish families, the Kennedys first entered the United States during a rough period for Ireland, the late 1840s. Unlike most of the refugees who fled there in that time, 26-year-old Patrick Kennedy was not fleeing starvation and death and depression. He was the son of a pretty comfortable man financially, a big farmer in County Wexford with 80 acres. So like a guy who's doing pretty well. So Patrick
comes because he's not going to inherit this land. That's not the way shit works at the time. And he wants to strike it rich, right? So his goal is specifically not, this is my only chance at survival. It's America is my chance to make a name for myself, right? Because I'm not going to inherit anything.
American Dream. Yeah, The American Dream. He never returns to the old country or sees his family again, but he does meet a hot lady on the boat over, and that's not half bad. They get married in Boston shortly after arriving. This generation does not make it out of Boston. Like a lot of Irish people in that period, they are kind of trapped there. Patrick gets a job as a cooper. In his free time, he gets his wife pregnant. They have four kids, the last of whom is finally a son, Patrick Joseph.
Now, Patrick I, the original Patrick, having been put on this earth just to make Patrick Joseph, dies immediately after his son is born of cholera. Just instantly. Got it. All right. You did it. Got it done. Got it done. Made sure that baby made it out of the birth canal and then dropped the fuck dead. Yeah. Yeah.
Dedicated. Yeah. Dedicated. He knew what he was there to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He's like one of those mosquitoes. He's like a salmon returning to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Salmon returning to Boston to spawn. Yeah. So in total, the first Kennedy family patriarch only lived nine years and died, never having made any kind of fortune or real impact himself. He is going to be the last president.
Kennedy patriarch to kind of have a quiet, unimportant death, right? Within the kind of the context of how the nation sees it.
Since Patrick Joseph, the baby, is – because he's less than a year old, I think, when his dad dies, was the only male left in the family, the job of making a fortune fell entirely on his shoulders. And his earliest memories were basically that, like, everyone is expecting me to figure out how to make something of this family, right? All of his sisters and his mom are obsessively focused on just his health and well-being.
It's a lot of pressure. Mm-hmm. Goo goo ga ga. I'm just a fucking baby. What do you want me to do? Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's a lot of pressure. And it's like, yeah, I can see how this is going to make a man who is narcissistically focused on like being the one guy. Yeah. Yeah. God, what a complex. Yeah. It's not great. Yeah.
Right out of the gate. The thing that the Kennedys have been doing since before they had any money is putting such so much pressure on their young men that the kind of only way for them to grow up is completely deranged. Yeah. Sometimes makes a guy who's really good at making money or being the president. Tends to. But it can help that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. Putting immense pressure and then dying. Yeah.
Yeah, and then dying immediately. They're so good at that. Yeah, dying tragically young and putting a lot of pressure on their young men. So Patrick Joseph goes to a Catholic school. He helps their mother work in the small shop that the family owned. He takes on odd jobs as a teenager, working hard for his family, but never quite able to get ahead. This changed when he was 22, and he sees a damaged old saloon building for sale on Haymarket Street.
He gets loans from his sisters and his mom. And soon he has got he's got a business. He's got an actual bar going and he is very good at running a bar. He is a competent business owner. And he is because when you're the way politics works in this time, right, the city is largely run by Democrats who are not Irish and who do not want Irish people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant upon them for votes. Right.
So Irish folks are restricted in what jobs they can hold in the local power structure. As you're probably aware of by stereotypes, they're welcome to become police officers. There's a few local elected offices that they're able to take. But for most of the mid-1800s, higher elected offices are pretty closed to Irish immigrants.
Once Patrick Joseph buys his bar, the status quo is starting to change. Because he's now a business owner and because bars are a social center in his society, he kind of immediately gets shunted into a part of the kind of power structure, right? Because that's where a lot of dealing happens. Yeah, social business, all that kind of stuff. Right.
You're paying bribes as a business owner to the police, to everything. You just kind of wind up involved. The actual government at the time is hideously corrupt and incompetent and provides basically no security or meaningful services to people in the city. As a result, in this period of time, it's best to look at the Democratic Party as kind of a mafia. Yeah.
But it's not just a mafia that like takes bribes from people and is hideously corrupted. Also is where you get your social services. If you are in the Democratic Party and you are providing them with your vote, they offer you primitive forms of welfare and a kind of social stability. The Democratic Party is a shadow state in Boston, right? This is the only part of the country that has something like this. But that you can't think of the party as like what it is now, right? Where it's like, this is, you know, how we get and change policy. It's
The party is almost like a social club that guarantees me some kind of stability in exchange for my vote, right? And in exchange for some of my money sometimes, right?
The Democratic Party is generally described as a machine and it is corrupt as hell. It runs a lot of it runs on bribes and strong arm violence. Right. There is a violent mafia aspect to political parties in this period in Boston in particular. But it's also kind of the best your best. Like if you're if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee in the mid 1800s, the way this system works is.
you might say, is a lot better than the way the last system you lived under worked. Seems beneficial. Like, let's buy into this. Yeah. I have some degree of agency here. Yeah. Patrick Joseph proved an able assistant to some of the more established local men, and his businesses flourished. Soon he had several bars, and then he owned part of a hotel, and then he owned a liquor importing company.
In 1884, he was elected to the Democratic Club of his ward, and in 1886, he and a group of allies took power in the ward and elected Patrick Joseph to the state senate. This is better than Irish people have been able to do in the generation previously, right? But it's kind of going to be the top of where he's able to reach, too. Yeah. There's a ceiling to, like, yeah.
Yeah, the old democratic power structure still is able to keep the Irish from getting too much higher than that, right? Now, like a good Irish boy, he marries a girl named Mary from a family that happened to have more money than his family. And by this point, he's got a bit of money too. You know, he's not rich the way they're going to be a generation later, but the Kennedys are very comfortable at this point in time. And Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the greasy pole of democratic party politics. So,
State legislator is as high as he's going to rise. But, you know, he doesn't take this sitting down. A lot of his bills, the things he tries to get through in the state legislature, get stymied by this kind of ossified power structure that doesn't like this uppity Irish kid.
But P.J. succeeds in building an army of loyal goons at the local level. In 1898, he launched an ambitious attempt to oust his rival, Martin Lomasney, for control of the city Democratic nominating process. And it doesn't quite work, but I want to describe how that went by reading a quote from a book called The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.
Quote, playing by the rules of the day, PJ had his troops put up blockades around the convention site. They kept rivals out until the Mahatma, that's the nickname for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in a hearse. That's wild. Yeah. Oh, the bygone days. Honestly. Gotta try something. It doesn't seem worse than how shit's working now. You know?
Maybe we could have a little bit more slapstick elements in our politics. Why not? There's more comedy of errors in their politics. Yeah. It's worth a try, Cody. That's where I'm going to land.
Now, this Collier and Horowitz book is controversial among Kennedy nerds because it does make claims about, for example, the next Joe Kennedy's involvement with organized crime that are not really provable. And it generally it seems to have done what a lot of Kennedy books do, which is it. There's often multiple stories about what happens with the Kennedys, and it usually believes the most salacious version. Right. Right.
That said, there's also – it includes just a lot of interviews with Kennedys who were in and around like members of the family. And so you – even with these things that are when they're very – when they're sources people will question or have issues with, you can't just discard them because sometimes it's like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave his side of events, right? And like so we can't just ignore entirely these books either. But a lot of Kennedy history is tabloid gossip, right? Because –
They're the candidates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You want the the you want the clicks. Yeah, exactly. Like that's what we're doing here. Right. We're all getting clicks from the Kennedy industrial complex. Gobble up your salacious crumbs. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. What a great Star Wars reference, Cody. It's for you. Somewhere, George Lucas just got like a little trigger of dopamine into the
back of his brain. That's why I do it for him and his brain chemistry. And then Nate continued editing his cut of Red Tails 3, which no one but him and his two friends will ever be allowed to see. Red Tails 3 Trolls 4. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I'd watch it. Yeah, of course. I would watch any of the movies that George Lucas is producing for no one but him and his friends in his crazy mansion. Gotta get into that ranch. Yeah. Let's do a Mission Impossible to break into the George Lucas ranch. Watch his...
Terrible movies. Well, these are just, these are just unwatchable. One of them was literally just Morbius. And I know he hasn't seen the original Morbius. He just happened to make the identical movie somehow. Frame for frame, just like he's locked into it. He built his own AI and recreated Jared Leto independently. Generational talent. It's terrifying.
So Patrick Joseph's story mostly isn't interesting to us. Other than that, he wound up topping out at kind of the highest level of power available to an Irish immigrant son at this stage. And he probably, probably fair to say he pushes the
How high someone in his social status can raise, right? Right, it seemed like he sort of led the way of like, no, now we can do that. Yeah, he's not the only person doing that, but certainly one of them, right? Certainly on that edge. He kind of winds up as a ward boss and a moderately wealthy small business owner. And his son, Joseph P. Kennedy, was born in 1888, kind of midway through his dad's journey up the Democratic Party ladder.
We can infer that Patrick Joseph and his wife never quite got over the frustration of being locked artificially out of advancing further. Mary Augusta insisted on Joseph Patrick as the name for their son rather than Patrick Joseph because...
There's two stories. One is that she didn't want him to be a junior, right? Thought that might be bad for him in some way. It might be bad for his advancement. There's also claims that she told relatives that she thought that Joseph Patrick sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph. And honestly, those are the two most Irish names I can conceive of. Yeah. If I had to rank them, she's right. Yeah.
Yeah, but I'm not going to do the accent, but hearing, I hear both of those names and an Irish accent in my head. Yeah, it's kind of six to one, half dozen to the other. Yeah. You're not really moving the needle much there. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's going to think Joseph Patrick's an Irishman. Yeah, exactly.
Not a very clever trick, but... Yeah. Yeah, I don't really know how much that worked for you. Horowitz and Collier write, she was proud of the status in the community that PJ's political activity brought, yet aware that for proper people, the Bostonians who'd moved away from the Irish as a fearing contagion, politics had become a faintly disreputable profession. She wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband, whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston, was not.
Sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds. For the rest of his life, he remembered one election day when they were walking down the street and a Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had already voted 128 times. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's golden. That's the good stuff. That's just the good stuff. That's that good old timey.
Got 128 more in me before the evening, sir. Go out and participate in democracy as many times as you can. Again, I feel kind of similarly about democracy these days that I do towards sports where it's like, yeah, just let them take all the crazy drugs they want. Let's see who can be the best at drugs. Yeah, let everybody cheat. See who's the best at cheating. Just go for it. Give them all knives. Why not? Give them all knives. Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah.
We're the knife party now. We just do knife stuff. Yeah, nobody wants to get inside the knife party convention. Dangerous place. Yeah, it was an open tent, but then they slashed the tent down. There's no tents. Too many knives. Yeah, too many fucking knives. That's not that far off from the fact that at the RNC and the soft zone around it, guns are legal, but hard-sided water bottles are not, nor are soup cans.
Or tennis balls or water guns. Or tennis balls! Backpacks larger than a certain size. Very funny. Their bag rule, I was like, that's big enough to be a problem, but small enough to be annoying. Why is that your rule? That makes no sense. You just explained why. Yeah, nobody can fit a bomb in a small backpack. That's what everyone knows.
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The people are clamoring for more Mighty Joe Young references. That's right. That's right. Thank God. We're going to fucking give it to them. Yeah. This is going to be what saves content from AI.
Yeah. Well, whatever it takes, honestly. There's not enough Mighty Joe Young in everyone's online discussions for the AI to make a good joke about it. They don't even know what it was, you know? They don't know there were two. It's like trying to get an AI to talk about Hootie and the Blowfish. What's it going to do? There's like three comments about that shit on the modern internet. Anyway, sorry, Hootie. Not sorry to the Blowfish. No, no, no, no. They know what they did. Yeah.
Young Joe Kennedy, we can infer, grew up with a certain level of comfort around the idea of mild to moderate criminality to further his political ends. Right. That is the norm in his period of time. And it's there's a lot of debate over how mobbed up this guy was. But I don't really think any credible sources say none mobbed.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a lot for his time. It's not a weird amount for his time, but it's not a none. Right. It's not a zero involvement in organized crime. Yeah. At least plus one. Yeah. Yeah. At least a little bit. Right. You know.
He also grows up wealthy at this point. The family is rich, right? They're not mega rich, which this Kennedy is going to make them mega rich, but they are extremely comfortable. He has cared for nurses and maids and butlers and cooks as a little kid, as a baby, as a young man. His dad purchases a 60-foot yacht that they have like –
a guy whose job it is just to pilot the yacht. So they're doing very well. And it's understood that Joe's job is to go where his father could not and establish the name Kennedy as a name to be reckoned with.
As a young man, he worked as a uniformed delivery driver for a fancy hat company. He did other old-timey jobs, too. Joe Kennedy has all of the old-timey jobs. He sells candy on the street. He works as a newsboy. And he's, this is my favorite, he has a part-time job as what's called a Sabbath goy, which goy is a term for Gentile, like a Jewish term for, or I think Yiddish term for like
Gentiles, right? For Christians. And his job was on the Sabbath, he would go to Orthodox Jewish people's homes to like light their stoves and light their candles. Nowadays, there's like automated systems for this because there's certain rules about what you shouldn't do, but you can also trick God a little bit and get away with stuff. Yeah. Which is my favorite kind of religion. Oh yeah. Just like work around it. Yeah.
Yeah, hire a Kennedy. There are some Jewish families whose ancestors had the patriarch of the Kennedy family lighting their Sabbath candles. And I don't know, kind of cool. Maybe it's you, listener. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's you. Encouraged by his father, he is one of those kids you might describe as a child businessman, right? He is a kid who has a lot of business ideas and wants to be an entrepreneur. And I'm on record as saying like,
that's a real big warning sign. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A kid...
we don't need to go off on a huge tangent, but like a kid who's like super into politics or super into business stuff is like, ah, don't let that happen. You can't, you gotta pause that. Get him on drugs. Look, I've been long on the record that schools need to have like a little emergency cabinet where like if a kid shows too much of an interest in politics, you know, you give them a little bit of acid, give them a little bit of heroin, you know, something good. Open their mind a little bit. Or
or close it either way. Do something different. Do something different to their mind. Change their mind is the important part. Um, so, uh,
he also, it's interesting, there's a period of time where he has an artistic bent too. So you do get the sense that like maybe if someone had given him drugs at the right time, he might have wound up a very different person. Because in addition to trying to start all these small businesses, he directs plays in the family yard and he like manages these fairly complex productions where he'll get a bunch of people, he'll play roles, he'll have other people playing roles and he'll also have people
collecting money. Like he'll be actually running both running a business, but also he is writing plays and like being in them. Which is interesting. And for an idea, one of his productions features him in an Uncle Sam costume reading essays with titles like Columbia, the Gym of the Ocean.
So it's like, oh shit, that could be like in the background of a Bioshock game. Like that's this boy's childhood. It's like, that's like a theater kid, but like with like real hardcore. Yeah. Like just this, like an adult and a child. Yes. Just like, I'm going to write play. Like you're not. Yeah. It's not like where this one's going. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, yes. Like the goal seems to be like, no, you want to do the production of the play. You don't want to write plays and be in them. Yeah. And you want to be the center of it, right? And yeah, one does get the feeling, obviously children can't be diagnosed as narcissists, but we also know enough about Joe Kennedy to say that it's probably fair to say he was a narcissist. Early signs, maybe. So, you know, that's my...
I don't like diagnosing people, but really with Joe Kennedy, I feel like you can't really, it's not a stretch. The best example of kind of the kind of person he is becoming might be the little baseball team that young Joe organized, which was named, I don't know why, the reasons are lost the time, but the name of his baseball team is the Assumptions. And he makes himself the coach, the business manager, and the first baseman.
I don't know why the assumptions. He's supposed to do everything. That's an odd name. It's a good band name, actually. It's a good band name, yeah, for sure. Solid band name, yeah. He doesn't want you to make an ass out of you and me. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know that that joke existed. Maybe you created it. I don't think you did, but it's really kind of a very strange name. I think it's got to be. There's that like Babylonian joke, the first record of like an actual structured joke that like the punchline is something like a dog in a bar and like nobody actually knows what was supposed to be funny about it. But like we get we get that it was supposed to be a joke.
I had this experience. I watched a 1983 live stand-up performance with Robin Williams the other night, and I hadn't seen him live for a while. And the first like 10 minutes or so, because both like the quality of the video and because like some of the style of stand-up that he was doing is just people don't do it anymore. I was like, oh, I wonder if he's just not funny anymore. And then he steps into the crowd and starts taking –
things from people and it becomes like the funniest stand-up set I've seen in my life and I was like oh no he was he is as good as I remembered there's just some bits in there that haven't aged you couldn't do a lot of what he did like he like starts drinking from somebody's like
liquor and like picks up a glass from someone's table and drinks from it and makes a joke about like, sorry about the cold source. And then just moves on and picks up some lady's jacket from her table. But like everybody's losing their fucking minds the whole time. It's amazing stuff. Yeah. That's a moment you're experiencing. Yeah. It's a moment. And also like we have lost the technology to have a man be on as much cocaine as 1983 Robin Williams. You just can't do it anymore. Yeah.
So yeah, we're talking about fucking Joe Kennedy here. He's got the assumptions, his baseball team. He's playing half of the team, it sounds like. And I found this line from the Collier and Horowitz book particularly enlightening. Some of his teammates complained that they were functioning as second fiddles in a one-man band. Kennedy's sister, Margaret, to whom he tossed his glove to put away when he came home from a game, always remembered his response. If you can't be captain, don't play. Right.
And that gives you a lot, right? Like he comes home from the game, like throws his glove to his sister, just knowing she'll put it away. Right. That's kind of says everything about how he's raised and his attitude. This is good because Joe Kennedy is the guy who starts the Kennedys as a political dictator.
dynasty, right? He is the patriarch of what the Kennedys become and why. I mean, you could say his dad was the one who started them in politics, but it's Joe that makes them their fortune. And it's Joe who, you know, is the guy who makes or does half of the making of JFK. Well, he's got the drive to do it. Right, right. His dad was like, oh, like kind of slowly got involved and wasn't like, I want to do a politics. I want to be the captain of the world. Yeah.
Right, right. And Joe is, whatever else you want to say about him, an intensely capable man, right? There's no disagreement about that, right? He's also an intensely bad man, in my opinion. Again,
He orders later in life a lobotomy, a lobotomy on his daughter because she's like, likes boys too much, right? That's the gist of what goes down. We've talked about this in the lobotomy episodes, but he's capable. He's incredibly good at everything he puts his hand to. Capable of monstrous things. Monstrous things, but he's also just like-
No one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be RFK might have wound up that way if you know the thing that happened hadn't happened but like JFK really isn't you know like JFK is to a significant extent supported by the folks around him and.
Joe Kennedy is the most capable, I think, of the Kennedys that I have read about. And it's not for nothing that by the time he comes around, he is our, now we are in our second generation of Kennedy boys who are raised by a crowd of sisters and aunts who make the boy or the boys their primary responsibility, right? And Joe is the first era in which this is happening and the Kennedys are kind of wealthy, right? Mm-hmm.
So he grows up egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own and the family's greatness. But he is also the last Kennedy that where they're like, there's enough connection to the real world that he's really capable of understanding it or succeed. I think because things are going to get a lot more deranged after this point. Right. I don't fully know why, but that's kind of my read. Yeah. I mean, the pressure that you,
we've talked about so far uh is one aspect of it but then like you just add like oh yeah you're also growing up wealthy end of story you know yeah you've yeah at a certain point it's like making copies of clones or whatever you've just like introduced too many transcription errors things have gotten deranged it's a multiplicity situation yeah yeah it's exactly it's a multiplicity is actually inspired by the kennedy family um it's true so
Joe does well enough that with some of his dad's money, he gets accepted to Harvard, where one classmate said he, quote, sucked up to important people quite ingloriously and without scruple, which sounds about right to me. He is a bad student, shockingly bad when it comes to technical stuff like finance. And this is shocking because he's going to be one of the most successful bankers of all time. So I kind of think Harvard might just suck as a school. Yeah.
Cause he's clearly not bad at this. He's also like at that point, like organized so many different things and like, uh, been able, like you're saying, like very capable of manager, uh, like all, all the things. Um, yeah. Well,
This might just speak to the quality of Harvard's education at the time. He's not wildly successful socially either. He's not great with people, but he does manage to catch the eye of the mayor's daughter, the mayor of, I think, Boston's daughter, Rose Fitzgerald, from which I think John gets the F in Kennedy. I think that's why Fitzgerald comes into the family.
Joe becomes a banker. Long story short, again, this is not, we could actually, maybe we'll do a whole series of episodes on Joe, but he becomes a banker. He starts as an examiner for the state government with all of the corruption that implies, right? Again, the debate is like,
How mobbed up was he? But there's no no involvement in corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part of the political process in the period, right? There's no zero. Yeah. You got some stuff on you. You got something going on, right? Before long, through some complicated and questionable financial maneuvering, he's able to put together the loans and investments to buy a bank of his own. And Joe Kennedy becomes the nation's youngest bank president at age 25.
His goal at this point is to become a millionaire by age 35, which is a sign of how modest his ambitions were compared to where they were and up would end up. And for an idea of that, he dies worth at least like half a billion dollars. You know, he's extraordinarily wealthy, like half a billion dollars. And we're talking a while ago, he passes in like 70, 69, something like that. So like, that's a lot more money. Yeah. He became a billionaire basically. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, yeah. For all, for all intents and purposes. Right now,
Now, there are, again, persistent allegations that he was heavily involved in bootlegging and more serious crimes during the prohibition years. I don't think this is true, that he's like a bootlegger doing like actual like fucking Capone kind of shit. I think it is kind of the sorts of corruption that a lot more people are involved in. His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have found no hard or even very soft evidence of like bootlegging in researching his book, The Patriarch. And I believe David when he's like, I would have loved to have done that.
I'd love to have that in my book about him. Like, that's fun. Right. But I just can't. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of not being involved in bootlegging, I can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging. No hard evidence. No hard evidence. No proof. You know, a lot of allegations. I'll make some of them, but but no proof.
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We're back. So most of these allegations of like bootlegging and really serious criminal involvement from Joe don't crop up until the late 60s. So they're part of the mythos around the Kennedy assassinations, right? As this article for history.com notes, various mafia characters came out of the woodwork to back up the accusations against Kennedy. Al Capone's piano tuner said that he overheard conversations between Scarface and the elder Kennedy.
The ex-wife of another Chicago mobster claimed her son used to do business with Kennedy. Nassau doesn't believe these stories, mostly because Richard Nixon, when he was running against JFK in 1960, hired a team of opposition researchers to investigate the Kennedy clan. They found all sorts of dirt on Joe Kennedy, says Nassau, but not that he was a bootlegger.
And I think that's a fair way to list it. I was like, yeah, he's doing crimes because you have to, to be involved in politics and business banking at his level. There's not people who own banks today who aren't doing some crimes. Right. But he's not running rum because why would he be right? What's the, where does that get Joe? Yeah.
So where he does make his fortune is as shady as bootlegging. Hollywood. And again, Hollywood in the 20s is also very organized crime. A lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as like these were primarily like Jewish gangsters in the East Coast who move over to the West Coast for a variety of reasons. But like that is the root of a lot of crime.
early cinema money, right? It does come out of crime because like a lot of it's porn, right? Like that's how a big chunk of this industry gets its start. Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now call B movies. Nassau thinks this is where a huge amount of his early money comes from.
right? And he's able to make this profitable, not just because the movies make money, but because he is one of the first CEOs to demand his pay in stock options. And he is really good at manipulating stock prices, right? Yeah, we love to do that. We love making fake money.
And a lot of what he's doing is stuff that is illegal now. We would say like he's insider trading now, but it's not illegal back then. Right. So like it's shady, but he's really not breaking the law as much as people would think. Right.
Joe is a guy with a lot of eyes everywhere. And so he sees the 1929 crash coming and he sells off basically everything he's got. And then he shorts the entire US economy, basically, like he shorts the stock market. And that is the primary source of the Kennedy fortune, right? He bets all of this money that he's accumulated on the Great Depression happening. And Black Tuesday makes him one of the richest men in the country. That is the Kennedy money. They shorted America. That's-
so darkly poetic yeah nice work if you can get it like yeah uh you know maybe i'll do something like that for this fucking election throw all my money on rfk i mean where there's some there's there's a way to bet against america that will make sure so much money yeah yeah there's a certain kind of betting on america that will always work the trouble is figuring out at any given moment what that kind of betting against america is
Joe's always going to be great at making money. This is a thing that he never really loses his head for. And again, he dies worth half a billion dollars or so. You know, I think it's kind of unclear entirely. And this is where the Kennedy family fortune comes from, because no subsequent members of his family are nearly this successful and they don't have to be.
But Joe never managed to build up momentum in the area that mattered most to him, which is elected office, right? As we'll talk about, he is influential in politics. He becomes a powerful man, but he doesn't like get elected places. That's not really how he makes his way in. And so as he starts having kids in the early 1900s, nine of them, he lets the boys know that a lot is expected of them.
Right? I am having you because like me, I want... Like my dad said with me, I want you to go further than I went. Right? I want... The Kennedys are going to run this fucking country. Yeah. That's so much... Like...
Yeah. Like I did better than my dad and you're going to do better than me. Also, I'm worth $500 million. Yeah. It's the difference because like the healthy version of that is like I want my kid to be like happier than me and to have opportunities that I didn't. All the things. Which is the whole reason why we have civilization, right? Everybody's normal feels that way. But some people feel the toxic version of this, which is my kid had better do better than me or there's going to be hell to pay.
And like do better in a, in a, like a warp sort of like whatever your personal idea of success is. Yeah. Yeah. In which case it's running everything and having a lot of money. Running everything. Right. Being the captain, right? Because if you're not the captain, then it's not worth being in. Yeah. Why fucking play if you're not the captain, right? He spent his later working life and his period of greatest influence adjacent to elected power.
In World War I, he's on – I think it's the War Production Board or something. He's helping to organize war production, right? So because he's – he's good at this kind of stuff, right? He's a good guy to put in that job and he does well at it. He's not charismatic or likable in the way that can get you elected. Yeah, but he is a good man to have doing a lot of nuts and bolts shit, right? In 1934, FDR appoints him to be the first head of the SEC. He is the first Securities and Exchange Commission guy we have and –
It's the guy that shorted the stock market. The guy that wasn't technically doing crimes, but. It was legal then, motherfucker. It was legal then. That's, God, so much poetry in this man's life. It's great. Yeah, he loved to say it. His final reward is a cushy gig as US ambassador to Great Britain. Kind of as at the last, you know, couple of, it's like 38 to 40. So it's like in that last period, right as World War II starts.
And the reason why he has to stop being the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain is that he kind of wants the Nazis to win. And like during the Battle of Britain, he makes a statement that democracy is finished in England and maybe finished in the U.S. too. Oh, buddy.
Great man. You can't say stuff like that. I mean, you can. He was almost able to. Yeah. A couple of things had broken different. You might have been able to say that in the U.S. But you are right. You're not able to say that in the U.S. And this is kind of he gets sort of disgraced by this. Right. That's good. Yeah, that's.
That part's fun. We love when people get disgraced for saying things like that. Yeah. That's good. It's not popular to say that to people who are actively getting bombed and who are like responding to being bombed the way the British did in World War II. You're not going to be very welcome on the island much longer.
Bad at reading a room. Might be why he wasn't good at getting elected. Yeah, seems like maybe he didn't read the wind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So his first son, the first of the Kennedy boys, Joe Jr., was born in 1915. And-
He's pretty clearly groomed for the presidency, right? I don't know how discreet the plan is to make him president. But he's – like I want you to go as far as possible, right? And to do that, you have to like make a name for yourself and extend sort of the glory of the family. And also, it's not just you. I've got all these other kids. I've got John F. Kennedy. I've got Robert Kennedy. I've got Ted Kennedy.
And all of them are going to be asked to compete as kids whenever they're like swimming, when they're playing like football in the yard, when they're doing like they're constantly in competition with each other. And Joe is constantly setting them in competition with each other. And they are all raised, go as far as you can, do more than I was able to do. And you are constantly measuring yourself against your brothers, right?
This has very early on some calamitous results for the family because when World War II breaks out, this competition extends to wartime service. The elder Kennedy boys, which came to include John F. Kennedy in 1917 and then Robert, didn't just join the military. They had to do the most impressive things they could do in the military.
John becomes a PT boat commander and we're not going to go into the whole PT 109 story, but his ship goes down. There's, I think a lot of people argue because of mistakes that he and others made, right? That like they fucked up, which is why this happened in the first place.
But he does legitimately help get a lot of the survivors out like in a way that is heroic. And Joe is able to spin this into an act of this whole thing into an act of heroism. Right. And it's kind of have to ignore the fact that there were some fuck ups along the line, but it works like the PR, the PR version of this plays. Right. Because America is looking for war heroes at that time and they find one in JFK.
This spurs Joe, his brother has now become a public war hero. And Joe is, you know, by any one stretch of the imagination doing a heroic thing. He is a bomber pilot flying bombing missions, daylight raids over Western Europe. One of the most insanely things and insanely dangerous things any group of human beings has ever done. Right. And he flies the required. There's something like 20 missions you have to fly. And at that point you can stop.
right? Because it's so dangerous. They're like, once you've reached this, yeah. Yeah.
But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough. I still have not, you know, like I have to measure myself against JFK. So he keeps doing missions after the point at which he wouldn't have had to continue doing missions. And he gets shot down and killed late in the war. And hey, that he's a hero in my book. Like that had to be done. Like the like fighting the Nazis and he goes down fighting the Nazis. But you can already see this.
competition legacy thing yeah is getting the first kill it's going to get them killed yes yes god especially like after like
Your dad's like, I don't know, the Nazis aren't so bad. And maybe like we gotta, right? And maybe that's part of why they have to go in so hard for like World War II. Make up for what he said. No, actually, we don't like this actually. Dan did not want me flying bombing missions over here. Yeah.
But yeah, so again, and you know, there's, there's debate over aspects of this, but that is what happens. Joe goes down and thus JFK is going to become the first and so far only Kennedy president. His brother,
And I'm yada yada-ing a lot here, but Robert also gets into politics and is very successful early on. He is one of Joe McCarthy's guys for a period of time. He is like involved in the lavender scare, but he kind of gets edged out because Roy Cohn, who like doesn't like him, he and Roy Cohn kind of are like enemies in a way, but not because RFK is like better about McCarthyism, right? He is pretty invested in McCarthyism.
That said, he becomes the attorney general of the country when his brother is the president. He's going to be a congressman after that. But it's during this brief era where his brother is the president and he's the attorney general. This era just lasts a couple years. But this is Camelot, right? This is the period of time that people call Camelot. And it's legitimately like
a heady time to be a Kennedy. And this is the period of time, this very brief period where JFK is the president.
RFK is the attorney general and it's very clear to everyone after JFK finishes being the president, Bobby Kennedy is probably going to become president, right? There's not a lot of people who doubt that even at the time. He is that kind of, and he does his, again, he like wiretaps Martin Luther King Jr., you know? Like there's a lot to criticize about this, but from the perspective of the populace, these are two handsome, young, intelligent, capable men. One of them is the president and
His brother's probably going to be president next. The American economy is like half of the world economy. Of course, people remember this as a golden age, you know? Yeah, I know. And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like two years, something like that. It's not a long period, you know? Yeah.
So and again, but this is the period that that RFK Jr., our RFK Jr., the subject of these episodes is going to have his first memories. And Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17th, 1954, in the Georgetown University Hospital. His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy Scackle family, also part of the budding U.S. aristocracy.
This part gets left out a lot in the histories, but RFK's wife is Ethel Kennedy, originally Ethel Skakel. And they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type. You know how the quiverfuls believe we need to have as many kids as possible to create soldiers for the army of God? We're going to gain control of the nation by swarming them with our kids. We'll take control of the numbers of power. Yeah, we're going to indoctrinate our army of children to – yeah.
Ethel and RFK believe that, but just for themselves, like not everyone should do this, but we are going to have all of the children possible so that we can flood the government with Kennedys who will take control of the levels of power. They have 11 kids, you know, like you're not doing that unless you really have a reason, right? Yeah.
And Ethel is a very driven woman. She's a controversial woman. One depiction of her is she's basically a saint, and the other depiction is she's kind of a monster. It winds up in the middle one way or the other, but she's a very driven person. There's no arguing with that. And within sort of the context of what can be done in this family, the boys are going to be the ones who hold office. But you can...
You can be part of the Kennedy greatness by creating a bunch of those boys. Right. And creating some daughters who are going to help raise and take care of those boys because the women in the family are focused on the men. Right. And yeah, her whole thing is I'm going to birth an aristocracy all on my own.
RFK Jr. from a very young age, the primary thing everyone knows about him is that he is always obsessed with animals. He kind of is maybe even a savant with animals. He is really good and with every kind of animal. He loves everything that's not human beings.
Ethel claimed that as a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs he sees crawling in the garden. Before he is 10, he has a whole menagerie, a swarm of pets. And some of these are normal rich kid pets. He's got a horse, obviously, right? He's a Kennedy. Of course, of course. Yeah. But there's also weird stuff. He has pet raccoons. He has pet lizards. He has thousands of crickets to feed the lizards.
In the book, RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I do not like, tells this story. The 2008 thriller Snakes on a Plane could have been based on an experience Bobby had as a kid when he took a sack of his pet reptiles on a board of flight from Washington National to LaGuardia in New York and all of the slithery scary things accidentally got loose mid-flight. As female passengers screamed and may have jumped up onto their seats, Bobby crawled around and gathered them all up.
Oh, that's... I mean, this is...
more like it's hard not to like having do it a snake son of a plane just like yeah like an animal is a lot i i dig that uh he posted a video the other day i'm just like i found this weird lizard and he explained what it was and like what it did and he's just used to that's um one thing that i think is absolutely true of him is that not only does he like and raise animals but he understands a lot about them he actually spends a lot of his life like
on all of these sort of like safaris. He spends, you know, months of his life with like native tribes and the Amazon and shit. Like he, again, it's not weird that he got a worm in his brain. Oh yeah. No, a lot of his life in the wild eating bushmeat. Yeah. Uh,
And dogs. And dogs, yeah, for sure. Probably where he got that brain worm. He has very, very unsurprising that he had a worm eat part of his brain, allegedly. Yeah, there are some mysteries about RFK Jr. That's not what I'm talking about. No, no, no, no, solved. Early on, solved early on. Now, again, this biography by Oppenheimer, like the one by Collier and Horowitz,
There's a lot of good criticisms, but I will make. Again, he's making snakes on a plane comparisons. The RFK Jr. book I've got, part of why I like it is it's published before he's a political figure. It comes out in 2015. So it is not tainted by everything that's happening now, right? So that is a really useful perspective to have on the man. And it talks to a shitload of people, a lot of primary sources who grew up with him. So you can't ignore it. But Oppenheimer is like super homophobic. We'll talk about that later. And like-
You can even see some of like the bullshit where he's like, probably female passengers screamed and jumped up onto their seats. Well, no one said that. You just you just want it to be more like snakes on a plane than maybe it was. Right. Yeah. And that passage like did ping me. I was like, wait, yes. Yeah, it should. He's yeah.
It's not a good biography. He's not a good biographer, but you also can't discard it because there's just a lot of shit that we get from it that we don't get anywhere else. Yeah, I mean, if the first part of the story is true, great. Thanks for telling me that he brought a bag of snakes on a plane. He probably did. Look, he's not... I don't think Oppenheimer makes shit up. I think he's just...
This editorializing sort of like adding the color. This says stuff about you, not about your subject. Right, right, right. So yeah, while modern quiverful families have shitload of kids in the hope of flooding our democracy, Ethel and Robert did the same thing with the knowledge that their children are definitely going to inherit political power. They are consciously breeding a ruling class. By the time RFK Jr. is eight, everyone knows RFK is going to be the president when John has done in office.
And, you know, no one's really sure about Teddy, but it seems like, you know, he's probably going to wind up. And obviously, Teddy Kennedy is an incredibly successful politician. If a certain thing that we'll talk about later hadn't happened, he might have been the president. It is not unrealistic in this period where RFK Jr. is making his earliest memories to expect that the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in a row. It's not wild at that point to think we might have 24 straight years of Kennedy's running the country, you know?
So that's not a bad prediction to make in this period of time. And as a result, all eyes from the beginning of his life are on RFK Jr. and his generation of Kennedys because everyone knows if they're not going to be president, they'll probably be in Congress. Some of them might be judges. Some of them might be governors, right? These are the people who are going to run the country, right?
And the whole country knows this. And so all of these Kennedy kids grow up under an insane microscope. The degree of and it's a pressure that like was completely absent from Joe Kennedy and from JFK and RFK. Right. They have the pressure of you need to be president. But there's not the the amount of spotlight. All right. There's not the public perception pressure. It's just like within the family. You have your dad telling you, you got to do this. Yeah.
And now the world is saying, and you're going to. Yeah. And all of you are going to. We're all expecting that. Yes. And I want to quote now from the book The Kennedys by Collier and Horowitz. They were, as one journalist had remarked, America's children. Yet while they had been in the spotlight all their lives, they had a curious innocence.
The important outsiders attached to being a Kennedy amused them. They gawked back at the tourists who peeked through the hedges at Hyannis. They scooped up sand from the public beach and sold it as Kennedy sand for a dollar a bag. They stood at the fence and answered Kennedy questions. What does Jackie eat for breakfast? Where do the Kennedys shop for a quarter a piece? Asked what it meant to be a Kennedy, Bobby's son David had once replied, it means that we're exactly the same as everybody else, except better.
Yeah. That's what they say and think. Things are going well with these kids. Cool.
Yeah. More people should be raised like this. Yeah. I'm going to continue that quote. They competed with other children in swim meets and sailing contests, succeeding so well that Hyannis port officials barred them from a certain number of these competitions every season so that other residents could win some ribbons. The competition within their own group was far more intense, far more metaphoric of what they saw as the challenge of their lives.
Each of them was always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age or ability group just above them would slip, always aware above all else that their parents were watching and assessing their performance to see which of them had it.
Yeah. So that's great. That's cool. Good way to raise kids. That's good. Yeah. And
And they all turned out normal. Yeah. And they all turned out normal. All right. Speaking of normal, one story RFK Jr. is later going to tell of his childhood is about one of his few visits to the Oval Office during the Camelot period. He brings a salamander in to give to his uncle, the president, as a gift to the Oval Office.
There's a photo of JFK with the salamander poking it with a presidential pin while Bobby sits nearby. And this picture is going to be one of the few artifacts to tie RFK Jr. forever with the glorious side of the Kennedy myth. This is his brief shining moment inside the limelight inhabited by his glorious doomed elders.
The salamander, by the way, is later given a home in the White House fountain. So don't worry. It winds up better than all of the kidneys in this story. Yeah, doing pretty well. Considering salamander-wise, it's doing all right. Yeah, salamander-wise, that's a very successful salamander. I'm sure it had lots of salamander kids like...
you gotta wind up what what's even there for a salamander after the white house fountain i don't know how you move up for that salamander you know yeah i mean it meant the fountain i guess maybe they became salamander artists you know there's a bunch of salamanders living in fucking dime square new york right now with podcasts who knows oh how the salamander has fallen
A great upside from the kind of having the kind of money so absurd that your house has a name is that you're almost immediately able to indulge in your pettiest interests and obsessions. A normal kid, you find that your kid likes animals. You buy him a picture book, right? They like dinosaurs. You get him a book with dinosaurs. Maybe you buy him a model replica of a dinosaur bone or something like that if they're really into it, you know?
RFK Jr., because he likes animals, gets regular safaris to Africa. And he is on safari when JFK is gunned down by Bernard Montgomery Sanders one cold November day. This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt with then.
Quote, Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and participated in the capture of a huge leopard tortoise. Because he was a scion of Camelot, he was permitted to bring it home in a suitcase, unquestioned, as if he were a diplomat. It helped that his escort was his aunt Eunice's husband, Sergeant Shriver, who then headed the JFK-established Peace Corps. Many years later, the turtle, stuffed, was on display, along with a multitude of other Kennedy memorabilia, in the den of Bobby's own hickory hill-like estate in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco.
She's such a... Taking an endangered turtle home with him. How old was he during that time? He's like eight or nine. That's too young to be doing that. To be importing endangered turtles in your suitcase? Because you're Sergeant Uncle or whatever? Sergeant Shriver is his name. This is fucking... What's her name? I forget her name. Yeah, Shriver's great grandpa or dad. I think dad, probably. Yeah.
just based on age. So the loss of JFK is obviously a crushing blow to Kennedy family morale. But the dream doesn't die with him, right? He was president for a couple of years, you know, very popular. When he gets blown away, what else do you have to say? And then, you know, you've got RFK waiting in the wings. Now, one of the things that does happen here that is kind of
devastating to the Kennedy family. Jackie Kennedy had been a pretty influential person in the family, and she marries someone else after he dies, which I'm not shitting on her for that, right? That's a perfectly normal thing to do at a certain point. But she is both a major purveyor of the Camelot myth. Some people will say Jackie Kennedy kind of creates it, but she also kind of bounces from being in the family after this, which like
I don't blame her. Yeah, again. It seems like it's the healthiest thing for you and your family, right? It seems like a boundary setting to me. Yeah, I think Jackie Onassis might just have had a really good head on her shoulders. But this does mean that now the entire weight of the family's dreams are on RFK and Ethel Kennedy. Yeah.
You know, with the most glorious Kennedy out of the picture, the family legacy suddenly feels in doubt, too. There's suddenly a question like, are we going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of the presidency? Are we all going to go on to be the people who run this country? Right. And in short order.
The older Kennedys have to, because Robert Kennedy kind of reorganizes the family, you know, in order to, hey, we still have, we still got a lot of Kennedys in the game. There's me and Teddy, you know, this can still work out. There's a reason there are 50 of us. Right, right. Yeah, we got plenty. We can take a few more bullets even. Exactly. Yeah.
So the older Kennedys also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations. Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from St. Luke, to whom much is given, much will be required. And Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying this. With great respect.
America has been very good to the Kennedys. We all owe the country a debt of gratitude and public service, right? This is a noblesse oblige thing, right? We're the people who have benefited most from this system. So of course we owe it the most, which I would love if that meant, well, we should pay a lot more in taxes as opposed to like, well, we should run things. We should have the positions of power to give back. No.
Well, and to be fair, I will say Kennedy's politically have tended to be more on the side of rich people should pay more taxes, right? You do have to give them that. But this idea of like, because we've benefited, we should run things is so poisonous. And it's going to get a lot of them killed, right? It's about to get RFK killed. Even more people killed. Yeah. Yep. Yep. That is what's coming in a second. So RFK Jr. is educated in very elite ways.
expensive private schools. The first Our Lady of Victory was an all white school. And this becomes a problem during the Camelot period because JFK is pro integrating schools, which is great, except for people point out, well, your nephew's in an all white school, huh? That's kind of bad. I mean, that's classic. Fair. I don't think the media is wrong to point that out. And the Kennedys move him to an integrated private school run by Quakers after that point.
The principal at Our Lady of Victory would later claim that the whole story about integration being the issue had been created after the fact. That's not why Bobby gets transferred. Because Bobby and his brother Joe skipped school so constantly to fuck around in the woods and like –
had to, couldn't continue to be students there. And I, I'd actually, he might not be lying because that happens several more times. And it's, it's going to happen in the future that like when he has to get kicked out of a school, another thing gets made as the scapegoat for it. Right. Because like you can't have a Bobby Kennedy and Joe Kennedy get kicked out of a school for just being dog shit. Being problems. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. For being problems. Now,
And RFK, because of what's about to happen, gets kind of sainted and Ethel is going to be like for a period of time the most admired woman in the country after his death. They get whitewashed a lot. You would not call either of these people good parents. I would call them almost criminally bad parents.
Now, part of this is that they're always away, right? They are campaigning constantly. RFK has his congressional campaigns. He's going to have his presidential campaign. Ethel is constantly campaigning on his behalf. She loves being the wife of a powerful man. She loves hosting these big events and fundraisers and stuff and being out in front. And RFK, in addition to always campaigning, loves having –
Cody, so many affairs. Like there's the, like, honestly, if there was an Olympics and how many people you could cheat on your wife with RFK is like a solid contender, you know, he could have, he could have won the gold. Yeah. He could have won the gold. Yeah. Fucking. Um,
So, you know, while they're doing this and I don't actually know, this may have been this may have been a thing that in an age like today, we might actually say is closer to non monogamy. I don't think that he is informing her, but I also she's not dumb. I think she just understood like that's what it is. I'm the wife of a powerful woman and I get these benefits from it and or a powerful man and I get all these benefits from it. But he is going to fuck around. That's the way we just we will just never talk about it. I'll be angry about it forever, but we'll never talk about it. Right.
They are very good at crafting an image for themselves and at kind of remolding the Kennedy family image to focus around them. And RFK is a great politician. He is extremely good at being in politics, at running for election, at building buzz around himself. And he's so good at it that it kind of papers over a lot of the failings he has as a living person.
His kids mostly remember during this period that he was the most vocal force in trying to weld the family back together after JFK's death. He also does...
He's not around as a father. He's not really raising his kids to much of an extent, but he has a checkbook and he kind of indulges his son, Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Jr.'s passions by paying for them, right? That's how RFK kind of raises RFK Jr. Whatever you're into, I've got plenty of money. I have no time for you, but I have money. And as a result, RFK Jr. gets into falconry as an 11-year-old. Sure. Why not? Sure, why not? Why not give him a falcon? Yeah.
- You got a thick glove, he'll be fine. - I do love all of the fucking Yeats references to RFK Jr. We do have a Falconer, you know? We've got a Falconer in this election. Can the Falcon hear him? I don't know. Jire seems to be widening.
Horowitz and Collier write, quote,
Struck by the boy's range of interests, Bobby Sr. had once remarked that Bobby Jr. was just like the president.
Unfortunately, he was also what some of the adults around the family would politely call rambunctious. This was a kid you could not keep in class or get to obey the rules at all. Starting in seventh grade, he was sent away to a boarding school along with his brother Joe to stay out of his mom and dad's hair while they enjoyed being famous and powerful. At private school, RFK Jr. reinforced his reputation as the poster child for what we now call ADHD.
One classmate later noted, he could climb straight up the wall like 10 feet and we would just be standing there watching in awe. He was always real skinny and lanky and he could get a real good grip on the bricks and he had absolutely no fear. He climbed up that wall like he was Spider-Man.
That's good for him. Yeah. That's so fun because like literally the great power, great responsibility quote from earlier is just, he's just Spider-Man. He's literally a Spider-Man. It is like one of those, obviously over medication is a problem, but I've never read about a kid who needed ADHD treatment more than RFK Jr. Like it's, he really, literally running up the walls. No, no, no. That's supposed to be a phrase. That's supposed to be just a thing that you say. Yeah.
Also, like if you're, you know, growing up and you're like, oh, I can I got to take this exotic turtle. Like, yeah, breaking the rules. You're not going to want to follow the rules. So I don't even know if you'd call it breaking the rules. There's not even a concept in his head that there are rules for him. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah.
His mom wanted him to join the football team at the fancy, I think it's Millbrook at this point, private school that he's at. But RFK Jr. is not a great football guy. He is actually not like a jock character. Like you would imagine, you think about like Clone High, JFK, they have him portrayed as like the football captain. JFK had that public personality at least.
RFK Jr. is a weird kid. He is defiantly weird. He dedicates most of his time to playing with his hawk, Morgan Le Fay, who he would take to school for show-and-tell sessions. During the week, he lived under strict discipline, but occasionally he and his older brother Joe would be allowed to show off what being a Kennedy meant to their classmates. And I'm going to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here.
On weekends, one of the Kennedys' many helpers, or Ethel Kennedy herself, usually with two dogs in her convertible, would arrive to pick up Bobby and his brother Joe, and then someone would return them on Sunday evening. She had once invited Bobby's entire class and some of his teachers for a field day at Hickory Hill, where they swam in the pool, toured Bobby's menagerie of animals, and watched the surfer film The Endless Summer in the Pool Cabana. As one class member who made the tour recalled, it was a circus out there. And they mean that literally because of all of the wild animals. Right. Yes, right? Yeah.
Yeah. But then on June 5th, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Like his brother, there are going to be decades of debate and conspiracy theories as to whether or not Sirhan Sirhan, who's officially the gunman, had rather done it. I have my own theories about a certain Mr. Sanders, but we don't need to get into that today. Right. I will say RFK Jr. subscribes to these theories.
He does not believe, last I checked, he doesn't think that Sirhan Sirhan is who killed his dad, right? Oh yeah, no, he's very, yeah, he's got. And like with any Kennedy, I kind of feel about Kennedy conspiracy theories the way I do with this election. People say, oh, so-and-so is definitely gonna win or definitely not, it's impossible. Nah, neither of them has less than a 30% chance of winning. And like every Kennedy conspiracy theory, 20% chance it's right. 20% chance it wasn't Sir, I'll give it that, you know? Yeah.
It's not my odds on bet, but there's a lot of shady shit that went down and I'm not, I'm not, you know, gonna rule anything out entirely here. But that doesn't really matter. It does matter that RFK Jr. subscribes to these theories. And it matters that when RFK dies, he takes the dream of the Kennedy dynasty with him. And the son who bore his name is never gonna be the same. And we're gonna talk about all of that, Cody. In part, Dukes. Wow. Mm-hmm.
Cody. Hi. Yodi. Plugables. Yo, Yodi. Yeah, I got some plugs to plug. Check out Some More News. It's on YouTube. And we've got a Patreon.com slash Some More News.
even more news is a podcast we also do um sometimes we do a podcast called way less news because who wants to talk about the news absolutely no one anymore nobody uh you check out my band it's called the hot shapes uh we've got an album called laverne it's on bandcamp and soundcloud oh you should have called them the assumptions cody uh i might now i might start another band called the assumptions who knows it's an rfk deep car joe kennedy deep cut yeah
Yeah. Check all that stuff out. Invite Cody to your band. Look, Mighty Mighty Boss Tones. We know you lost a singer because he became a COVID denier after that George Floyd album. You know, invite Cody. Wow. You know, knock on wood, Cody. Knock on wood. Every band that lost a member that ended up in the super group that is like the anti-vax super group. Yeah. I'll replace whomever.
in the other band. You know what? I think we finally need to merge the surviving members of Linkin Park with all of the non-crazy members of the Mighty Mighty Boss Tones. Is that going to make good music? There's not a chance in hell. Absolutely not. Not compatible in any way, but I want to hear that album. It's called novelty music. It's called novelty music. It's a hit? Anyway, go to hell. I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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