Speaker 1: Also media. Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 1: podcast that's not about the election. But this week I'm
Speaker 1: bringing back a special buddy, my good friend from the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty election, who I have ripped through a hole
Speaker 1: in time and pulled into the future, Cody Javn.
Speaker 2: Hi. Hello everybody. Hey, thank you so much for the
Speaker 2: comment of production, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Tody. Hello, Yeah, yeah, welcome to the I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's I wouldn't say it's the worst year ever
Speaker 1: yet because really, as much as everybody's unhappy, I don't know,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty was pretty bad. I keep going back before
Speaker 1: the more people died still in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was. I've actually been working on an update
Speaker 2: to that song, and I'm like going back and forth, like, well,
Speaker 2: the worst year ever will get maybe it'll be a
Speaker 2: bit better than last time, but then it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: the worst you're ever? Yeah yeah, yeah, but uh, you
Speaker 2: know there's still time. It might not be pandemic bad,
Speaker 2: but you know, if Donald Trump becomes the president again, that.
Speaker 1: That's that could be worse. That could be worse. You know,
Speaker 1: that could be worse. Yeah, I mean it's it's I
Speaker 1: have mixed feelings, you know, as we go through this
Speaker 1: horse race, Cody, because it feels like, you know, the
Speaker 1: upside of if Donald Trump gets a second term is
Speaker 1: you will finally be punished for all of your many crimes.
Speaker 1: But the downside is that I might be punished for
Speaker 1: all of my many crimes.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: That's that's tough.
Speaker 2: I know justice is a little wonky, it's a little unbalanced.
Speaker 2: You know, we can't always get full pure justice that
Speaker 2: we want. Sometimes we have to make our own sacrifices.
Speaker 2: So you're gonna have to sacrifice your self order to
Speaker 2: see me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah, that's more or less what I learned
Speaker 1: from one of the Batman movies. Cody, what do you
Speaker 1: think of will in fight it to get other? Because
Speaker 1: all we do is in fight as.
Speaker 2: Well, just not al We're just not going to get
Speaker 2: along together.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just too accurate. Everyone will be unhappy together.
Speaker 2: Before the You want everybody to get pumped before the chorus.
Speaker 2: But if everyone's but then we go or not or not?
Speaker 1: I think everyone knows that's a lie.
Speaker 2: I think I was wearing this shirt when we recorded
Speaker 2: that song. Oh that's fun. It's the time capsule.
Speaker 1: It's a time capsule.
Speaker 2: Remember when it was worse in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was, when I was huddled in my
Speaker 1: tiny efficiency with all of my beans and ammunition. And
Speaker 1: now I'm I'm huddled in my house with all of
Speaker 1: my beans and Ammunitionally, life has really changed for me now, Cody,
Speaker 1: when it comes to the election, you know, we can
Speaker 1: sit here, you and I and jawbone about old Joe R.
Speaker 1: Biden or old Donald, old Jay Trump, whatever his middle
Speaker 1: name is.
Speaker 2: I forget John.
Speaker 1: I believe John. Okay, cool, great, great great.
Speaker 2: I need that Donald John president, I believe is the name.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's very much either of us can
Speaker 1: say that that will matter here, right, even though people
Speaker 1: on the internet keep coming into like any comment you
Speaker 1: make about the election going, oh so you want Trump
Speaker 1: to win or whatever, Like nobody who listens to us
Speaker 1: like matter. The entire election is going to come down
Speaker 1: to like one hundred thousand people in five to seven
Speaker 1: swing states. Right, Yeah, so let's talk about a guy
Speaker 1: who actually could influence the election. The most popular third
Speaker 1: party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly
Speaker 1: twenty five years something like that. Yeah, Bobby F. Kennedy Junior,
Speaker 1: RS Junior. Yes, currently polling it n percent a lot
Speaker 1: of places. It depends on where you go, But like
Speaker 1: I think nationally that's broadly accurate. I also think that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of flex in those numbers. You know,
Speaker 1: you're talking pulling nine or ten percent in like three
Speaker 1: plus plus or minus three four percent, you know, error rates.
Speaker 1: So could he very well could wind up not being
Speaker 1: influential at all, but he could siphon away enough votes
Speaker 1: to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the elections.
Speaker 2: Kind of a toss I don't really know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of a toss up. I think most
Speaker 1: of what I've seen has led me to expect he's
Speaker 1: probably takes more votes away from Trump. But I also
Speaker 1: think so that's yeah, nothing conclusive.
Speaker 2: It's really hard to say that, right any Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's what it's. That's what it seems like for sure.
Speaker 1: Either way, he definitely could be the decider of the election.
Speaker 1: It's not impossible. Given again how kind of narrow things
Speaker 1: are probably going to come down in a handful of
Speaker 1: swing states, it's not impossible that he winds up having
Speaker 1: a pretty sizable impact. So I figured we should talk
Speaker 1: about the guy, especially because, in kind of a remarkable
Speaker 1: turn of events, a bunch of articles I think Vanity
Speaker 1: Fair published the first one, have come out in the
Speaker 1: last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he's sexually
Speaker 1: assaulted women, and he has had kind of a unique
Speaker 1: response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe he might
Speaker 1: hear more about this, yeah, because he apologizes, like how
Speaker 1: can I make this right? When he was reached out
Speaker 1: to directly by one of the women, and his public
Speaker 1: statements have been like, yeah, you'll probably hear more about this.
Speaker 2: I mean, he said even when he's he'll mentioned that
Speaker 2: even when he started running, he's like, yeah, I got
Speaker 2: a lot of skeletons in my closet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, he's done a lot of bad stuff. He
Speaker 1: was essentially like, I didn't need that dog, But I
Speaker 1: didn't need that yeah what she did. What I have
Speaker 1: read now every piece of writing I can find on
Speaker 1: our FK Junior, I've gone through a biography of the
Speaker 1: Kennedy family. I have gone through a biography of the
Speaker 1: Kennedy family, specifically after the assassinations of JFK and RFK.
Speaker 1: I have gone through a biography of Bobby Kennedy and
Speaker 1: as many articles as I could find on the matter.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you two things. Number one, he
Speaker 1: definitely ate that dog. And number two, I'm actually not
Speaker 1: surprised that he both is perfectly willing to admit that
Speaker 1: he sexually assaulted people genuinely thinks that he feels bad
Speaker 1: about it. Now I'm not saying he actually does, because
Speaker 1: I think the act of being a Kennedy might be
Speaker 1: fundamentally deranging. And primarily what we'll be talking about in
Speaker 1: these episodes, this is not a list. Well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about some fucked up shit that Bobby Kennedy did,
Speaker 1: but mostly what we're talking about is the creation of
Speaker 1: the Kennedys as a concept is maybe the most profoundly
Speaker 1: abusive thing that's ever happened to a group of children. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: that's that's really the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're creating a royal family from scratch basically.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, and with none of the royal families.
Speaker 1: I don't think I don't get these these sins from
Speaker 1: looking at the current members of the House of windsor
Speaker 1: that it's good for you to be a member of
Speaker 1: the House of windsor it seems bad, but there's a
Speaker 1: support and work outside of the family set up. The
Speaker 1: whole country is kind of a supporting right for the
Speaker 1: royal family, and so usually there's limits on how far
Speaker 1: out they spiral. That didn't exist for the Kennedys, and
Speaker 1: that's part of anyway, it's an interesting story. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna talk about that this week, Cody. But
Speaker 1: first I wanted to ask, how do you feel about
Speaker 1: Bobby Kennedy? You know, how do you feel about the
Speaker 1: Actually I scratched that, how do you feel about the Kennedys.
Speaker 2: I have no strong opinions in that, Like I'm not
Speaker 2: a huge Kennedy fan, and I you know, mixed. I
Speaker 2: think I would say probably depending on the Kennedy we're
Speaker 2: talking about. I don't like political like dynasties and like
Speaker 2: that aspect of it. I'm just like very much against
Speaker 2: and about him specifically. It seems like he's got a
Speaker 2: lot of problems and a lot of stances that I
Speaker 2: disagree with heavily. So I would say I'm generally anti,
Speaker 2: but not in a way that I can articulate for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you land kind of about where Bernie Sanders is
Speaker 1: did with one one, one giant exception. Anyway, let's move
Speaker 1: on to ending the cold open and moving on to
Speaker 1: the hot open, and we're back. That was a Bernie
Speaker 1: Sanders shot the president joke. I don't actually know.
Speaker 2: I was like, I was like, wait what you oh right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's been a long enough time the last
Speaker 1: one of those, you know, that's that's the bit on
Speaker 1: this show. Anyway, let's talk about the Kennedy So I'm
Speaker 1: going to start this the first kind of half of
Speaker 1: this episode maybe is actually going to be an overview
Speaker 1: of like how the Kennedys became the Kennedys, because and
Speaker 1: this is not you know, there are there's there are
Speaker 1: so many people who are like Kennedy historians and Kennedy
Speaker 1: fan experts. I'm not going to pretend that this is
Speaker 1: a comprehensive history of the family. And I'm actually not
Speaker 1: going to talk much about the bad shit that Joe
Speaker 1: Kennedy or JFK or the original RFK did. We'll cover
Speaker 1: some of that, because like there's kind of a lot
Speaker 1: in the story of how they became a thing, and
Speaker 1: we're focusing mostly on RFK this week. So this story
Speaker 1: is important for how it sets up the way in
Speaker 1: which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers in
Speaker 1: like coageous members of the Kennedy family, how they were raised. Right,
Speaker 1: So don't come to this being like, wow, Robert didn't
Speaker 1: really mention, you know, what Joe Kennedy did to Rosemary Kennedy,
Speaker 1: the lombotomy. He didn't talk about RFK. Why you're tapping
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King junior. And it's not because those aren't important.
Speaker 1: It's because like that doesn't factor in as much to
Speaker 1: like what RFK Junior experienced as a kid, right, And
Speaker 1: so that's kind of the focus with which we're covering
Speaker 1: the background here, right. Like many Irish families, the Kennedys
Speaker 1: first entered the United States during a rough period for
Speaker 1: Ireland the late eighteen forties. Unlike most of the refugees
Speaker 1: who fled there in that time, twenty six year old
Speaker 1: Patrick Kennedy was not fleeing starvation and death and depression.
Speaker 1: He was the son of a pretty comfortable man financially,
Speaker 1: a big farmer in County Wexford with eighty acres, So
Speaker 1: like a guy who's doing pretty well. So Patrick comes
Speaker 1: because he's not going to inherit this land. That's not
Speaker 1: the way shit works at the time, and he wants
Speaker 1: to strike it rich, right, So his goal is specifically
Speaker 1: not this is my only chance at survival. It's America.
Speaker 1: Is my chance to make a name for myself, right,
Speaker 1: because I'm not going to inherit anything. Yeah, the American dream.
Speaker 1: He never returns to the old Country or sees his
Speaker 1: family again, but he does meet a hot lady on
Speaker 1: the boat over, and that's not half bad. They get
Speaker 1: married in Boston shortly after arriving. This generation does not
Speaker 1: make it out of Boston, you know, like a lot
Speaker 1: of Irish people in that period, they are kind of
Speaker 1: trapped there. Patrick gets a job as a cooper. In
Speaker 1: his free time, he gets his wife pregnant. They have
Speaker 1: four kids, the last of whom is finally a son,
Speaker 1: Patrick Joseph Patrick, the first, the original Patrick, having been
Speaker 1: put on this earth just to make Patrick. Joseph dies
Speaker 1: immediately after his son is born of colera, just instating
Speaker 1: all right, got it done, got it done, made sure
Speaker 1: that baby made it out of the birth canal, and
Speaker 1: then drop the fuck dead. Yeah, yeah, dedicated, he knew, Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. He's like one of those mosquito. He's like
Speaker 1: a salmon returning to yeah. Yeah, yeah, Samon returning to
Speaker 1: Boston to spawn. Yeah. So, in total, the first Kennedy
Speaker 1: family patriarch only lived nine years and died never having
Speaker 1: made any kind of fortune or real impact himself. He
Speaker 1: is going to be the last Kennedy patriarch to kind
Speaker 1: of have a quiet, unimportant death right within the kind
Speaker 1: of the context of how the nation sees it, since
Speaker 1: Patrick Joseph the baby is because he's less than a
Speaker 1: year old. I think when his dad dies was the
Speaker 1: only male left in the family. The job of making
Speaker 1: a fortune fell entirely on his shoulders, and his earliest
Speaker 1: memories were basically that, like, everyone is expecting me to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make something of this family, right.
Speaker 1: All of his sisters and his mom are obsessively focused
Speaker 1: on just his health and well being.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of pressure. Google Gaga, I'm just a
Speaker 2: y fucking baby. What do you want me to do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, it's a lot of pressure, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see how this is going to make a
Speaker 1: man who is narcissistically focused.
Speaker 2: On like being the one guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, God,
Speaker 2: what a complex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not great right out of the gate. The
Speaker 1: thing that the Kennedys have been doing since before they
Speaker 1: had any money is putting such a so much pressure
Speaker 1: on their young men that the kind of only way
Speaker 1: for them to grow up is completely deranged.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That sometimes makes a guy who's really good at making
Speaker 1: money or being the present.
Speaker 2: But it can Yeah, can help that a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like, yeah, putting immense pressure and then dying, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then dying immediately.
Speaker 1: They're so good at that, Yeah, dying tragically young and
Speaker 1: putting a lot of pressure on their young men. So
Speaker 1: Patrick Joseph goes to a Catholic school. He helps his
Speaker 1: their mother work in the small shop that the family owned.
Speaker 1: He takes on odd jobs as a teenager, working hard
Speaker 1: for his family, but never quite able to get ahead.
Speaker 1: This changed when he was twenty two and he sees
Speaker 1: a damaged old saloon building for sale on Haymarket Street.
Speaker 1: He gets loans from his sisters and his mom, and
Speaker 1: soon he has got he's got a business. He's got
Speaker 1: an actual bar going, and he is very good at
Speaker 1: running a bar. He is a competent business owner. And
Speaker 1: he is because when you're the way politics works in
Speaker 1: this time, Right, the city is largely run by Democrats
Speaker 1: who are not Irish and who do not want Irish
Speaker 1: people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant
Speaker 1: upon them for votes. Right, So Irish folks are restricted
Speaker 1: in what jobs they can hold in the local power
Speaker 1: structure there, as you're probably aware of by stereotypes. They're
Speaker 1: welcome to become police officers. There's a few local elected
Speaker 1: offices that they're able to take, but for most of
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds, higher elected offices are pretty closed
Speaker 1: to Irish immigrants. And you know, once Patrick Joseph buis
Speaker 1: his bar, the status quo is starting to change. And
Speaker 1: because he's now a business owner, and because bars are
Speaker 1: you know, a social center in his society, he kind
Speaker 1: of immediately gets shunted into a part of the kind
Speaker 1: of power structure, right, because like that that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of dealing happens. That's social business.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Socially you're paying bribes right as a business owner, right
Speaker 1: to like, to the police, to everything. Like you just
Speaker 1: kind of wind up involved. Right. The actual government at
Speaker 1: the time is hideously corrupt and incompetent and provides basically
Speaker 1: no security or like meaningful services to people in the city,
Speaker 1: and as a result, in this period of time, it's
Speaker 1: best to look at the Democratic Party as kind of
Speaker 1: a mafia. But it's not just a mafia that like
Speaker 1: takes bribes from people and is hideously corrupted. Also is
Speaker 1: where you get your social services. If you are in
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party and you are providing them with your vote,
Speaker 1: they offer you primitive forms of welfare and a kind
Speaker 1: of social stability. The Democratic Party is a shadow state
Speaker 1: in Boston, right, this is the only plate part of
Speaker 1: the country that has something like this, but that you
Speaker 1: can't think of the party as like what it is
Speaker 1: now right, where it's like this is you know how
Speaker 1: we get and change policy. It's the party is almost
Speaker 1: like a social club that guarantees me some kind of
Speaker 1: stability in exchange for my vote, right, and in exchange
Speaker 1: for some all my money sometimes. Right. The Democratic Party
Speaker 1: is generally described as a machine, and it is corrupt
Speaker 1: as hell. It runs a lot of it runs on
Speaker 1: bribes and strong arm violence. Right. There is a violent
Speaker 1: mafia aspect to political parties in this period in Boston
Speaker 1: in particular, but it's also kind of the best your best,
Speaker 1: Like if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee
Speaker 1: in the mid eighteen hundreds. The way this system works,
Speaker 1: you might say, is a lot better than the way
Speaker 1: the last system you, yeah, worked, right.
Speaker 2: He was beneficial. Let's bind this and yeah.
Speaker 1: I have some degree of agency here. Yeah. Patrick Joseph
Speaker 1: proved an able assistant to some of the more established
Speaker 1: local men, and his businesses flourished. Soon he had several bars,
Speaker 1: and then he owned part of a hotel, and then
Speaker 1: he owned a liquor importing company. In eighteen eighty four
Speaker 1: he was elected to the Democratic Club of his ward,
Speaker 1: and in eighteen eighty six he and a group of
Speaker 1: allies took power in the ward and elected Patrick Joseph
Speaker 1: to the State Senate. This is better than Irish people
Speaker 1: who had been able to do in the generation previously, right,
Speaker 1: But it's kind of going to be the top of
Speaker 1: where he's able to reach to, Like, there's this isiing
Speaker 1: to like yeah, yeah, the old democratic power structure still
Speaker 1: is able to keep the Irish from getting too much
Speaker 1: higher than that. Right now, Like a good Irish boy,
Speaker 1: he marries a girl named Mary from a family that
Speaker 1: happened to have more money than his family, and by
Speaker 1: this point he's got a bit of money too. You know,
Speaker 1: he's not rich the way there're going to be a
Speaker 1: generation later. But the Kennedy's are very comfortable at this
Speaker 1: point in time, and Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the
Speaker 1: greasy poll of Democratic Party politics state legislator is as
Speaker 1: high as he's going to rise. But you know he
Speaker 1: doesn't take this sitting down. A lot of his bills,
Speaker 1: the things he tries to get through in the state
Speaker 1: legislature gets stymied by this kind of ossified power structure
Speaker 1: that doesn't like this upity Irish kid. But PJ succeeds
Speaker 1: in building an army of loyal goons at the local level.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety eight, he launched an ambitious attempt to
Speaker 1: oust his rival, Martin Lomasney for control of the city
Speaker 1: democratic nominating process. And it doesn't quite work. But I
Speaker 1: want to describe how that went by reading a quote
Speaker 1: from a book called The Kennedys by Peter Collier and
Speaker 1: David Horowitz. Quote, playing by the rules of the day,
Speaker 1: PJ had his troops put up blockades around the convention site.
Speaker 1: They kept rivals out until the Mahatma that's the nickname
Speaker 1: for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession
Speaker 1: and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in ahearse that's.
Speaker 2: Wild, right, Yeah, the by gone days. Honestly, gotta try something.
Speaker 2: Doesn't seem than.
Speaker 1: How it shit's working now, you know, maybe we could
Speaker 1: have a little bit more slapstick elements.
Speaker 2: Comedy of errors in their politics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's worth it's worth a try, Cody. That's That's
Speaker 1: where I'm gonna land now. This Collier in Horowitz book
Speaker 1: is controversial among Kennedy nerds because it does make claims about,
Speaker 1: for example, the next Joe Kennedy's involvement with organized crime
Speaker 1: that are not really provable, and it generally it seems
Speaker 1: to have done what a lot of Kennedy books do,
Speaker 1: which is it there's often multiple stories about what happens
Speaker 1: with the Kennedy's, and it usually believes the most salacious version.
Speaker 1: Right that said, there's also it includes just a lot
Speaker 1: of interviews with Kennedy's who were in and arout like
Speaker 1: members of the family. And so you even with these
Speaker 1: things that are when they're very when they're sources, people
Speaker 1: will question our issues with you can't just discard them
Speaker 1: because sometimes like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave
Speaker 1: his side of events, right, and like so we can't
Speaker 1: just ignore entirely these books either. But a lot of
Speaker 1: Kennedy history is tabloid gossip, right because they're the Kennedy
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you want the the you want the clicks.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. Like that's what we're doing here, right, We're
Speaker 1: all getting clicks from the Kennedy. It's the Kennedy industrial Complex.
Speaker 1: Gobble up your salacious crumbs. Yeah yeah, Wow, what a
Speaker 1: great Star Wars reference cody for you somewhere. George Lucas
Speaker 1: just got like a little trigger of dopamine into the
Speaker 1: bath for him, continued editing his cut of Redtails three,
Speaker 1: which no one but him and his two friends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course I'll watch. I would watch any of the
Speaker 1: movies that that George Lucas is producing for no one
Speaker 1: but him and his friends. It's crazy man branch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's do. Let's do. Let's do a mission impossible
Speaker 1: to break into the George Lucas ranch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, watches terrible movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, this is just these are just unwatchable. One
Speaker 1: of them was literally just Morbius, and I know he
Speaker 1: hasn't seen the original Morbius. He just happened to make
Speaker 1: the identical movies.
Speaker 2: Some frame just like it.
Speaker 1: He built his own AI and recreated Jared leto independently
Speaker 1: generational terror. So Patrick Joseph's story mostly isn't interesting to
Speaker 1: us other than that he wound up topping out kind
Speaker 1: of the highest level of power available to an Irish
Speaker 1: immigrant son at this stage. He probably probably fair to
Speaker 1: say he pushes how high someone like like no can do. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not the only person doing that, but certainly one of
Speaker 1: them right, certainly on that edge. He kind of winds
Speaker 1: up as a ward boss and a moderately wealthy small
Speaker 1: business owner. And his son, Joseph P. Kennedy, was born
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty eight, kind of midway through his dad's
Speaker 1: journey up the Democratic Party ladder. We can infer that
Speaker 1: Patrick Joseph and his wife never quite got over the
Speaker 1: frustration of being locked artificially out of advancing further. Mary
Speaker 1: Augusta insisted on Joseph Patrick as the name for their
Speaker 1: son rather than Patrick Joseph, because there's two stories. One
Speaker 1: is that she didn't want him to be a junior, right,
Speaker 1: thought that might be bad for him in some way,
Speaker 1: It might be bad for his advancement. There's also claims
Speaker 1: that she told relatives that she thought that Joseph Patrick
Speaker 1: sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph and honestly, those are
Speaker 1: the two most Irish names I can conceive of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if I had to rank them, she's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I'm not going to do the accent. But
Speaker 1: hearing I hear both of those names and an Irish
Speaker 1: accent in my head.
Speaker 2: One half the other. Yeah, really not really moving the
Speaker 2: needle munch there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ah, yeah, nobody's gonna think Joseph Patrick's and irishman
Speaker 1: not a very c but yeah, yeah, I don't really
Speaker 1: know how much that worked for you. Horowitzen Collier, right.
Speaker 1: She was proud of the status in the community that
Speaker 1: Pj's political activity brought, you know where that for proper people,
Speaker 1: the Bostonians had moved away from the Irish is of
Speaker 1: fearing contagion, politics had become a faintly disreputable profession. She
Speaker 1: wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband,
Speaker 1: whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston, was
Speaker 1: not sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. He remembered one election
Speaker 1: day when they were walking down the street and a
Speaker 1: Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had
Speaker 1: already voted one hundred and twenty eight guys.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Oh that's gold.
Speaker 1: That's the good stuff. That's just the good stuff. That's
Speaker 1: that good Old timy got one and twenty.
Speaker 2: I go out and participated in democracy as many Again.
Speaker 1: I feel kind of similarly about democracy these days that
Speaker 1: I do towards sports, where it's like, can't just let
Speaker 1: them take all the all the crazy drugs they want.
Speaker 1: Let's see who can be the best at drugs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let everybody cheats. Who's the best at cheating? Just go
Speaker 1: for it? Why not give them all knives?
Speaker 2: Fuck it? Yeah, with the knife party now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody wants to get inside the Knife Party convention.
Speaker 2: Dangerous place, it wasn't there's two knives, Yeah, too many knives.
Speaker 1: That's not that far off from the fact that at
Speaker 1: the r n C and the soft zone around it,
Speaker 1: guns are legal, but hard sighted water bottles are not,
Speaker 1: nor are soup cans.
Speaker 2: Or tennis balls.
Speaker 1: Balls backpacks larger than a certain size. Very funny bag rule.
Speaker 1: I was like, I was like, that's big enough to
Speaker 1: be a problem, but small enough to be annoying. Why
Speaker 1: why is that your rule?
Speaker 2: That makes no sense?
Speaker 1: You just explain what. Yeah, nobody can fit a bomb
Speaker 1: in a small backpack. That's what everyone knows. It's okay, everybody,
Speaker 1: It's gonna be good. It's going to be a fun convention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: speaking of bombs, these products are the bomb. We are back,
Speaker 1: my friends. We had returned to the podcast where we
Speaker 1: talk about Bobby Kennedy, but first we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about Young Joe Kennedy. Mighty Joe Kennedy Young. We can
Speaker 1: infer that he grew. I don't know why I did
Speaker 1: a Mighty Joe Young. That's not even a joke. Yeah
Speaker 1: you do. You've got it, you know, Cody. It's because
Speaker 1: we're hooked up the heart.
Speaker 2: Exactly the people. The people are clamoring for more Mighty
Speaker 2: Joe Young references.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, Thank god, we're going to give
Speaker 1: it to him. This is going to be what saves
Speaker 1: content from AI. Honestly, there's not enough Mighty Joe Young
Speaker 1: and everyone's online discussions for the AI to make a
Speaker 1: good joke about it. They don't even know what it was,
Speaker 1: you know, to get AI to talk about Hoody and
Speaker 1: the Blowfish. What's it gonna do. There's like three comments
Speaker 1: about that shit on the modern Internet anyway, Sorry Hoody,
Speaker 1: not sorry to the Blowfish.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, they know what they did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Young Joe Kennedy, we can infer grew up with
Speaker 1: a certain level of comfort around the idea of mild
Speaker 1: to moderate criminality to further his political ends, right, that
Speaker 1: is the norm in his period of time, and it's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of debate over how mobbed up this
Speaker 1: guy was, but I don't really think any credible sources
Speaker 1: say none mobbed up right, right, Yeah, Yeah, It's not
Speaker 1: like a lot for his time. It's not a weird
Speaker 1: amount for his time, but it's not a nun right,
Speaker 1: it's not a zero involvement in organized.
Speaker 2: Crime at least plus one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, at least a little bit, right. You know.
Speaker 1: He also grows up wealthy at this point. The family
Speaker 1: is rich, right, They're not mega rich, which this Kennedy
Speaker 1: is going to make them mega rich, but they are
Speaker 1: extremely comfortable. He has cared for nurses and maids and
Speaker 1: butlers and cooks as a little kid, as a baby,
Speaker 1: as a young man, his dad perch is a sixty
Speaker 1: foot yacht that they have like a guy whose job
Speaker 1: it is just to pilot the yacht. So they're doing
Speaker 1: very well. And it's understood that Joe's job is to
Speaker 1: go where his father could not and establish the name
Speaker 1: Kennedy as a name to be reckoned with. As a
Speaker 1: young man, he worked as a uniformed delivery driver for
Speaker 1: a fancy hat company. He did other old timey jobs too.
Speaker 1: Joe Kennedy has all of the old timey jobs. He
Speaker 1: sells candy on the street. Well, he works as a newsboy,
Speaker 1: and he's this is my favorite. He has a part
Speaker 1: time job is what's called a sabbath goy, which goy
Speaker 1: is a term for gentile for like create like a
Speaker 1: Jewish term for or I think Kiddish term for like gentiles,
Speaker 1: right for Christians. And his job was on the Sabbath,
Speaker 1: he would go to Orthodox Jewish people's homes to like
Speaker 1: light their stoves and light their candles. Nowadays, there's like
Speaker 1: automated systems for this because there's certain rules about what
Speaker 1: you shouldn't do. But you can also trick God a
Speaker 1: little bit and get away with stuff. Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: my favorite kind of religion.
Speaker 2: Oh, just like Hier Kennedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hired to Kennedy. There's there are some Jewish families
Speaker 1: whose ancestors had the patriarch of the Kennedy family lighting
Speaker 1: their Sabbath candles. And I don't know, kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's you, listener, Maybe it's.
Speaker 2: You, Maybe it's you.
Speaker 1: Encouraged by his father, he is one of those kids
Speaker 1: you might describe as a child businessman, right. He is
Speaker 1: a kid who has a lot of business ideas and
Speaker 1: wants to be an entrepreneur. And I you know, I'm
Speaker 1: on record as saying like that's a real big warning sign.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, a kid. We don't need to go
Speaker 2: off on a huge tangent. But like a kid is
Speaker 2: like super into politics, yeah, or super into business stuff.
Speaker 2: Is like, dad, don't let that happen. You can't help
Speaker 2: get you get him on drugs.
Speaker 1: Look that I've been long on the record that schools
Speaker 1: need to have like a little emergency cabinet, where like
Speaker 1: if a kid shows too much of an interest in politics,
Speaker 1: you know, you give them a little bit of acid,
Speaker 1: a little bit of hand herowin, you know, or close it.
Speaker 1: Either way, do something different, do something different to their
Speaker 1: minds is the important part. So he also it's interesting
Speaker 1: there's a period of time where he has an artistic
Speaker 1: bent too, so you do get the sense that, like
Speaker 1: maybe if someone had given him drugs at the right time,
Speaker 1: he might have wound up a very different person. Because
Speaker 1: in addition to trying to start all these small businesses,
Speaker 1: he directs plays in the family yard, and he like
Speaker 1: manages these fairly complex productions where he'll get a bunch
Speaker 1: of people, he'll play roles, he'll have other people playing roles,
Speaker 1: and he'll also have people collecting money. Like he'll be
Speaker 1: actually running both running a business, but also he is
Speaker 1: writing plays and like being in the yeah, which is
Speaker 1: interesting and for an idea. One of his productions features
Speaker 1: him in an Uncle Sam costume reading essays with titles
Speaker 1: like Columbia the Gym of the Ocean. So it's like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, that could be like in the background of
Speaker 1: a BioShock game, like that boy Childhood.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like a theater kid, but like with
Speaker 2: like real sinister yeah, like just this like an adult
Speaker 2: and a child just like, yeah, I'm gonna write play
Speaker 2: like you're not.
Speaker 1: Like this one's imagination. Yeah, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: Like the goal seems to be like, no, you're going
Speaker 2: you want to You want to do the production of
Speaker 2: the play. You don't want to write plays and be
Speaker 2: in them. You want the Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: You want to be the center of it. Right, and yeah,
Speaker 1: one does get the feeling. Obviously, children can't be diagnosed
Speaker 1: as narcissists, but we also know enough about Joe Kennedy
Speaker 1: to say that it's probably fair to say he was
Speaker 1: a narciss early signs maybe, Yeah, so you know that's
Speaker 1: my I don't like diagnosing people, but really, with Joe Kennedy,
Speaker 1: I feel like you can't. Really, it's not a stretch,
Speaker 1: you know. The best example of kind of the kind
Speaker 1: of person he is becoming might be the little baseball
Speaker 1: team that young Joe organized, which was named I don't
Speaker 1: know why. The reasons are lost the time, but the
Speaker 1: the name of his baseball team is the Assumptions, and
Speaker 1: he makes himself the coach, the business manager, and the
Speaker 1: first baseman. I don't know why. The assumptions.
Speaker 2: He's supposed to do everything. Yeah, odd name it's a
Speaker 2: good band name.
Speaker 1: Actually good band name, yeah for sure. Yeah, solid band name. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want you to make an ass out of you.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, I don't know that that joke existed. Man,
Speaker 1: maybe creative, I don't think. Yeah, But it's really kind
Speaker 1: of a very strange name. I think it's it's got
Speaker 1: to be that there's that like Babylonian joke, the first
Speaker 1: record of like an actual structured joke that like the
Speaker 1: punchline is something like a dog in a bar, and
Speaker 1: like nobody actually knows what was supposed to be funny
Speaker 1: about it, but like we get, we get that it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be a joke. I had this experience.
Speaker 1: I watched a nineteen eighty three live stand up performance
Speaker 1: with Robin Williams the other night, and I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: him live for a while. In the first like ten
Speaker 1: minutes or so, because both like the quality of the
Speaker 1: video and because like some of the style of stand
Speaker 1: up that he was doing is just people don't do
Speaker 1: it anymore, I was like, Oh, I wonder if he's
Speaker 1: just not funny anymore. And then he steps into the
Speaker 1: crowd and starts taking things from people, and it becomes
Speaker 1: like the funniest stand up set I've seen in my life.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh no, he was. He is
Speaker 1: as good as I remember. There's just some bits in
Speaker 1: there that haven't aged. You couldn't do a lot of
Speaker 1: what he did. Like he like starts drinking from somebody's
Speaker 1: like liquor and like picks up a glass from someone's
Speaker 1: table and drinks from it and makes a joke about
Speaker 1: like sorry about the cold source, and then just moves
Speaker 1: on and picks up some lady's jacket from her table.
Speaker 1: But like everybody's losing their fucking minds the whole time.
Speaker 2: Of course, it's amazing stuff. Yeah, that's a moment you're experiencing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a moment. And also like we have lost
Speaker 1: the technology to have a man beyond as much cocaine
Speaker 1: as nineteen eighty three Robin Williams says, you just can't do. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking about fucking Joe Kennedy. Here, he's got the
Speaker 1: assumptions his baseball team. He's playing half of the team.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, and I found this line from the
Speaker 1: Collier in Horowitz book particularly enlightening. Some of his teammates
Speaker 1: complained that they were functioning as second fiddles in a
Speaker 1: one man band. Kennedy's sister Margaret, to whom he tossed
Speaker 1: his glove to put away when he came home from
Speaker 1: a game, always remembered his response, if you can't be captain,
Speaker 1: don't play. And that gives you a lot, right both,
Speaker 1: Like he comes home from the game, like throws his
Speaker 1: glove to his sister, just knowing she'll put it away. Right,
Speaker 1: that's kind of says everything about how he's raised and
Speaker 1: his attitude. This is good because Joe Kennedy is the
Speaker 1: guy who starts the Kennedys as a political dynastic. Right,
Speaker 1: he is the patriarch of what the Kennedy's become and why.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could say his dad was the one
Speaker 1: who starred them in politics, but it's Joe that makes
Speaker 1: them their fortune. And it's Joe who you know, is
Speaker 1: the guy who makes.
Speaker 2: Or does right, Like his dad was like, oh, like yeah,
Speaker 2: kind of slowly got involved, was like I want to
Speaker 2: do a politics. I want to be the captain of
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: Yes, right, right, And Joe is whatever else you want
Speaker 1: to say about him, an intensely capable man. Right, there's
Speaker 1: no disagreement about that, right. He's also an intensely bad
Speaker 1: man in my opinion. Again, he orders later in life
Speaker 1: ay a lobotomy on his daughter because she's like, likes
Speaker 1: boys too much. Right, that's the gist of what goes down.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this in the lobotomy episodes. But uh,
Speaker 1: he's capable. He's incredibly good at everything he puts his
Speaker 1: hand to, monstrous things. But he's also just like, no
Speaker 1: one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be.
Speaker 1: RFK might have wound up that way, if you know,
Speaker 1: the thing that happened hadn't happened, But like JFK really isn't,
Speaker 1: you know, Like JFK is to a significant extent supported
Speaker 1: by the folks around him. Joe Kennedy is the most
Speaker 1: capable I think of the Kennedys that I have read about.
Speaker 1: And it's not for nothing that by the time he
Speaker 1: comes around, he is our our Now we are in
Speaker 1: our second generation of Kennedy boys who are raised by
Speaker 1: a crowd of sisters and aunts who make the boy
Speaker 1: or the boys their primary responsibility, right, and Joe is
Speaker 1: the first era in which this is happening, and the
Speaker 1: Kennedy's are kind of wealthy. Right, So he grows up
Speaker 1: egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own
Speaker 1: in the family's greatness. But he is also the last
Speaker 1: Kennedy that where they're like, there's enough connection to the
Speaker 1: real world that he's really capable of understanding it or succeeds.
Speaker 1: I think, because things are going to get a lot
Speaker 1: more deranged after this point, right, I don't fully know why,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of my read.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the pressure that we've talked about so
Speaker 2: far is one aspect of it. But then like you
Speaker 2: just add like, oh, yeah, you're also growing up wealthy
Speaker 2: end of story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, at a certain point, it's like making
Speaker 1: copies of clones or whatever. You've just like introduced too
Speaker 1: many transcription errors that.
Speaker 2: Have gotten a multiple situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's exactly. It's the multiplay. He is actually
Speaker 1: inspired by the Kennedy family.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 1: So Joe does well enough that with some of his
Speaker 1: dad's money, he gets accepted to Harvard, where one classmate
Speaker 1: said he quotes sucked up to important people quite ingloriously
Speaker 1: and without scruple, which sounds about right to me. He
Speaker 1: is a bad student, shockingly bad when it comes to
Speaker 1: technical stuff like finance, and this is shocking because he's
Speaker 1: going to be one of the most successful bankers of
Speaker 1: all time. So I kind of think Harvard might just
Speaker 1: suck as a school because he's clearly not bad at this.
Speaker 2: He's also like at that point, like organized so many
Speaker 2: different things and like, yeah, been able, like you're saying,
Speaker 2: like very capable of the manager, like all the things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this might this might just speak to the quality
Speaker 1: of Harvard's education at the time. He's not wildly successful
Speaker 1: socially either. He's not great with people, but he does
Speaker 1: manage to catch the eye of the Mayor's daughter, the
Speaker 1: mayor of I think Boston's daughter Rose Fitzgerald, from which
Speaker 1: I think John gets the f at Kennedy. I think
Speaker 1: that's why fitz Gerald comes into the family. Joe becomes
Speaker 1: a banker. Long story short, again, this is not we
Speaker 1: could actually maybe will do a whole series of episodes
Speaker 1: on Joe. But he becomes a banker. He starts as
Speaker 1: an examiner for the state government with all of the
Speaker 1: corruption that implies. Right again, the debate is like how
Speaker 1: mobbed up was he? But there's no no involvement in
Speaker 1: corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part
Speaker 1: of the political process in the period, right there's.
Speaker 2: No zero before he got some stuff on you, You've got.
Speaker 1: Something going on right before long, through some complicated and
Speaker 1: questionable financial maneuvering, he's able to put together the loans
Speaker 1: and investments to buy a bank of his own, and
Speaker 1: Joe Kennedy becomes the nation's youngest bank president at age
Speaker 1: twenty five. His goal at this point is to become
Speaker 1: a millionaire by age thirty five, which is a sign
Speaker 1: of how modest his ambitions were compared to where they
Speaker 1: were end up would end up. And for an idea
Speaker 1: of that, he dies worth at least like half a
Speaker 1: billion dollars, you know, he's extraordinarily well, like half a
Speaker 1: billion dollars, and we're talking a while ago. He passes
Speaker 1: in like seventy sixty nine something like that, so like
Speaker 1: that's a lot more money.
Speaker 2: He became a billionaire.
Speaker 1: Base yeah, yeah, e fact, yeah, for all intents purses.
Speaker 1: Right now, there are again persistent allegations that he was
Speaker 1: heavily involved in bootlegging and more serious crimes during the
Speaker 1: prohibition years. Years. I don't think this is true that
Speaker 1: he's like a bootlegger doing like actual like fucking Capone,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of shit. I think it is kind
Speaker 1: of the sorts of corruption that a lot more people
Speaker 1: are involved in. His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have
Speaker 1: found no hard or even very soft evidence of like
Speaker 1: bootlegging and researching his book The Patriarch, And I believe
Speaker 1: David when he's like, I would have loved to have
Speaker 1: that in my book about him, Like that's fun.
Speaker 2: I just can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, speaking of not being involved in bootlegging, I
Speaker 1: can't prove any of our advertisers are involved in bootlegging.
Speaker 1: No hard evidence, no hard evidence, no proof. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of allegations, all make some of them, but
Speaker 1: no proof. Ah, we're back. So most of these allegations
Speaker 1: of bootlegging and really serious criminal involvement from Joe don't
Speaker 1: crop up until the late sixties, so they're part of
Speaker 1: the mythos around the Kennedy assassinations.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: As this article for history dot Com notes, various mafia
Speaker 1: characters came out of the woodwork to back up the
Speaker 1: accusations against Kennedy. Al Capone's piano tuner said that he
Speaker 1: overheard conversations between scarface and the elder Kennedy. The ex
Speaker 1: wife of another Chicago mobster, claimed her son used to
Speaker 1: do business with Kennedy. NASA doesn't believe these stories, mostly
Speaker 1: because Richard Nixon, when he was running against JFK in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty hired a team of opposition researchers to investigate
Speaker 1: the Kennedy clan. They found all sorts of dirt on
Speaker 1: Joe Kennedy, says Nasau, but not that he was a bootlegger.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a fair way to listen out.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, he's doing crimes because you have
Speaker 1: to to be involved in politics and business banking at
Speaker 1: his level. There's not people who own banks today who
Speaker 1: aren't doing some crimes. Right, But he's not running rum
Speaker 1: because why would he be, right, what's the Yeah, where
Speaker 1: does that get Joe? Yeah, so where he does make
Speaker 1: his fortune is as shady as bootlegging. Hollywood, and again,
Speaker 1: Hollywood in the twenties is also very organized crime. A
Speaker 1: lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as
Speaker 1: like these were primarily like Jewish gangsters in the East
Speaker 1: Coast who move over to the West Coast for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons. But like that is the root of
Speaker 1: a lot of early cinema money. Right, it does come
Speaker 1: out of crime, because like a lot of it's porn, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's how a big chunk of this industry
Speaker 1: gets its start. Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and
Speaker 1: he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now
Speaker 1: call b movies. Nasau thinks this is where a huge
Speaker 1: amount of his early money comes from, right, And he's
Speaker 1: he's able to make this profitable not just because like
Speaker 1: the movies make money, but because he is one of
Speaker 1: the first CEOs to demand his pay and stock options,
Speaker 1: and he is really good at manipulating stock prices.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, we love to do that.
Speaker 1: We love we love to do.
Speaker 2: That's making fake money.
Speaker 1: And a lot of what he's doing is stuff that
Speaker 1: is illegal. Now we would say, like he's insider trading now,
Speaker 1: but it's not illegal back then, right, So, like it's shady,
Speaker 1: but he's really not breaking the law as much as
Speaker 1: people would think. Right. Joe is a guy with a
Speaker 1: lot of eyes everywhere, and so he sees the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine crash coming and he sells off basically everything
Speaker 1: he's got and then he shorts the entire US economy
Speaker 1: basically like he shorts the stock market, and that is
Speaker 1: the primary source of the Kennedy fortune. Right, he bets
Speaker 1: all of this money that he's accumulated on the Great
Speaker 1: Depression happening, and Black Tuesday makes him one of the
Speaker 1: richest men in the country. That is the Kennedy money.
Speaker 1: They short in America.
Speaker 2: That's so darkly poetic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nice work, he can get it. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll do something like that for this fucking election,
Speaker 1: to throw all my money on RFK.
Speaker 2: I mean, where there's some there's there's a way to
Speaker 2: bet against America that will make share so much money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, there's a certain kind of betting on America
Speaker 1: that will always work. The trouble is figuring out in
Speaker 1: any given moment what that kind of betting against America is.
Speaker 1: Joe's always going to be great at making money. This
Speaker 1: is a thing that he never really loses his head for.
Speaker 1: And again he dies worth half a billion dollars or so.
Speaker 1: You know, I think it's kind of unclear entirely. And
Speaker 1: this is where the Kennedy family fortune comes from. Because
Speaker 1: no subsequent members of his family are nearly this successful,
Speaker 1: and they don't have to be. But Joe never managed
Speaker 1: to build up momentum in the area that mattered most
Speaker 1: to him, which is elected office. Right, as we'll talk about,
Speaker 1: he's influential in politics. He becomes a powerful man, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't like get elected places. That's not really how
Speaker 1: he makes his way in. And so as he starts
Speaker 1: having kids in the early nineteen hundreds, nine of them,
Speaker 1: he lets the boys know that a lot is expected
Speaker 1: of them, Right, I am having use because like me,
Speaker 1: I want, like my dad said with me, I want
Speaker 1: you to go further than I went, right, I want
Speaker 1: to I want the Kennedys are going to run this
Speaker 1: fucking country.
Speaker 2: That's so much like, yeah, like I did better than
Speaker 2: my dad, and you're gonna do better than me. Also,
Speaker 2: I'm worth five hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's the it's the difference because like, the healthy
Speaker 1: version of that is like I want my kid to
Speaker 1: be like happier than me, to have ID which is
Speaker 1: the whole reason why we have civilization. Right, everybody, basically
Speaker 1: everybody normal feels that way. But some people feel the
Speaker 1: toxic version of this, which is my kid had better
Speaker 1: do better than me, or there's going to be held
Speaker 1: a pack.
Speaker 2: And like do better, you know, in a like a
Speaker 2: warp sort of like whatever your personal idea of success is, yeah,
Speaker 2: in which case is running everything, running everything right, capital right,
Speaker 2: because if you're not the captain, there's not worth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why fucking play if you're not the captain.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He spent his later working life and his period of
Speaker 1: greatest influence adjacent to elected power. In World War One,
Speaker 1: he's on I think it's the war production border something.
Speaker 1: He's helping to organize war production. Right. So because he's
Speaker 1: he's good at this kind of stuff, right, he's a
Speaker 1: good guy to put in that job, and he does
Speaker 1: well at it.
Speaker 2: He's not charismatic or likable in the way that can
Speaker 2: get you elected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he's he is a good man to have
Speaker 1: doing a lot of nuts and bolt shit right. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four, FDR appoints him to be the first
Speaker 1: head of the SEC. He is the first Security's inn
Speaker 1: Exchange commission guy we have and it's the guy that's
Speaker 1: short extended. He wasn't technically doing crimes, but it was legal,
Speaker 1: then mother was legal.
Speaker 2: Then that's gone so much.
Speaker 1: Post Man's great yeah, he love to say it. His
Speaker 1: final reward is a cushy gig as US Ambassador to
Speaker 1: Great Britain kind of as at the last you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of years, Like it's like thirty eight to forty,
Speaker 1: so it's like in that last period, right as a
Speaker 1: World War two starts, and the reason why he has
Speaker 1: to stop being the US Ambassador to Great Britain is
Speaker 1: that he kind of wants the Nazis to win. And
Speaker 1: like during the Battle of Britain he makes a statement
Speaker 1: that democracy is finished in England and maybe finished in
Speaker 1: the US too.
Speaker 2: Great man, you can't say stuff like that, and you can.
Speaker 1: He thought he was almost able to. Yeah, a couple
Speaker 1: of things had broken different, you might have been able
Speaker 1: to say that in the US, but you are right.
Speaker 1: You're not able to say that in the US. And
Speaker 1: this is kind of he gets sort of disgraced by this, Right.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that party.
Speaker 2: We love when people get disgraced for saying things like that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's good.
Speaker 1: It's not popular to say that to people who are
Speaker 1: actively getting bombed and who are like responding to being
Speaker 1: bombed the way the British did in World War Two.
Speaker 1: You're not going to be very welcome on the island
Speaker 1: much longer. Reading a room might be why he didn't
Speaker 1: wasn't good at getting elected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, seems like maybe he didn't read wind. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he's his first son, the first of the
Speaker 1: Kennedy boys, Joe Junior, was born in nineteen fifteen, and
Speaker 1: he's pretty clearly groomed for the presidency, right. I don't
Speaker 1: know how discreet the plan is to make him president,
Speaker 1: but he's like, I want you to go as far
Speaker 1: as possible, right, and to do that you have to
Speaker 1: like make a name for yourself and extend sort of
Speaker 1: the glory of the family. And also it's not just you.
Speaker 1: I've got all these other kids. I've got you know,
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy, I've got Robert Kennedy, I've got Ted Kennedy,
Speaker 1: and all of them are going to bs to compete
Speaker 1: as kids whenever they're like swimming, when they're playing like
Speaker 1: football in the yard, when they're doing it, like they're
Speaker 1: constantly in competition with each other, and Joe is constantly
Speaker 1: setting them in competition with each other, and they are
Speaker 1: all raised go as far as you can do more
Speaker 1: than I was able to do, and you are constantly
Speaker 1: measuring yourself against your brothers. Right. This has very early
Speaker 1: on some calamitous results for the family because when World
Speaker 1: War Two breaks out, this competition extends to wartime service.
Speaker 1: The elder Kennedy Boys, which came to include John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy in nineteen seventeen and then Robert didn't just join
Speaker 1: the military. They had to do the most impressive things
Speaker 1: they could do in the military. John becomes a pt
Speaker 1: boat commander and we're not going to go into the
Speaker 1: whole Pt one oh nine story, but his ship goes down.
Speaker 1: There's I think a lot of people argue because of
Speaker 1: mistakes that he and others made right that like they
Speaker 1: fucked up, which is why this happened in the first place.
Speaker 1: But he does legitimately help get a lot of the
Speaker 1: survivors out, like in a way that is heroic, and
Speaker 1: Joe is able to spin this into an act of
Speaker 1: this whole thing into an act of heroism, right, And
Speaker 1: it's kind of have to ignore the fact that there
Speaker 1: were some fuck ups along the line, but it works. Liker.
Speaker 1: The pr version of this plays right because America is
Speaker 1: looking for war heroes at that time and they find
Speaker 1: one in JFK. This spurs Joe, his brother has now
Speaker 1: become a public war hero. And Joe is, you know,
Speaker 1: by any one stretch of the imagination, doing a heroic thing.
Speaker 1: He is a bomber pilot flying bombing missions daylight raids
Speaker 1: over Western Europe, one of the most insanely things and
Speaker 1: insanely dangerous things any group of human beings has ever done. Right,
Speaker 1: and he flies the required there's something like twenty missions
Speaker 1: you have to fly, and at that point you can stop,
Speaker 1: right because it's so dangerous, like once you've redid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough.
Speaker 1: I still have not you know, like I have to
Speaker 1: measure myself against JFK. So he keeps doing missions after
Speaker 1: the point at which he wouldn't have had to continue
Speaker 1: doing missions, and he gets shot down and killed late
Speaker 1: in the war, and hey, that he's a hero in
Speaker 1: my book, Like that had to be done, like the
Speaker 1: like fighting the Nazis. And he goes down fighting the Nazis.
Speaker 1: But you can already see this competition legacy thing is
Speaker 1: getting the.
Speaker 2: First kill killed, yes, yes, God, especially like after like
Speaker 2: your Dad's like, I don't know the Nazis are aren't
Speaker 2: so bad.
Speaker 1: Right, and that maybe that's part of why they have
Speaker 1: to go in so hard for like World War Two.
Speaker 1: We don't like this. Actually, Dan did not want me
Speaker 1: flying bombing missions over here. Yeah, but yeah, so again,
Speaker 1: and you know there's there's debate over aspects of this,
Speaker 1: but that is what happens. Joe goes down and thus
Speaker 1: JFK is going to become the first and so far
Speaker 1: only Kennedy president. His brother and I'm YadA YadA ying
Speaker 1: a lot here, but Robert also gets into politics and
Speaker 1: is very successful early on. He is one of Joe
Speaker 1: McCarthy's guys for a period of time. He is like
Speaker 1: involved in the Lavender scare, but he kind of gets
Speaker 1: edged out because Roy Cohne, who like doesn't like him.
Speaker 1: He and Roy Cohne kind of are like enemies in it,
Speaker 1: but not because RFK is like better about McCarthyism, right,
Speaker 1: he is pretty invested in McCarthyism. That said, he becomes
Speaker 1: the attorney General of the country when his brother is
Speaker 1: the president. He's going to be a congressman after that,
Speaker 1: but it's during this brief era where his brother is
Speaker 1: the president and he's the attorney general. This era just
Speaker 1: lasts a couple years. But this is Camelot, right, this
Speaker 1: is the period of time that people call camelot, and
Speaker 1: it's legitimately like a heady time to be a Kennedy.
Speaker 1: And this is the period of time, this very brief
Speaker 1: period where JFK is the president, RFK is the Attorney General.
Speaker 1: And it's very clear to everyone after JFK finishes being
Speaker 1: the president, Bobby Kennedy's probably going to become president.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of people who doubt that even
Speaker 1: at the time. He is that kind of and he
Speaker 1: does his again, he like wiretaps Martin Luther King Junior.
Speaker 1: You know, like there's a lot to criticize about this,
Speaker 1: but from the perspective of the populace, these are two handsome, young, intelligent,
Speaker 1: capable men. One of them is the president. His brother's
Speaker 1: probably going to be president next. The American economy is
Speaker 1: like half of the world economy. Of course, people remember
Speaker 1: this is a golden age, you know, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like
Speaker 1: two years something like that. You know, it's times not
Speaker 1: a long period, you know. So and again, but this
Speaker 1: is the period that that RFK Junior, our RFK junior,
Speaker 1: the subject of these episodes, is going to have his
Speaker 1: first memories. And Robert Francis Kennedy Junior was born on
Speaker 1: January seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in the Georgetown University Hospital.
Speaker 1: His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy
Speaker 1: Scackle family, also part of the budding US aristocracy. This
Speaker 1: part gets left out a lot in the histories, but
Speaker 1: rfk's wife is Ethel Kennedy originally Ethel Skakel, and they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type, you know,
Speaker 1: the quiver FLEs like believe we need to have as
Speaker 1: many kids as possible to create soldiers for the army
Speaker 1: of God. We're going to gain control of the nation
Speaker 1: by swarming them with our kids, who will take your
Speaker 1: trip doctors in power. Ethel and RFK believe that, but
Speaker 1: just for themselves, Like not everyone should do this, but
Speaker 1: we are going to have all of the children possible
Speaker 1: so that we can we can flood the government with
Speaker 1: Kennedy's who will take control of the levels of power.
Speaker 1: They have eleven kids, you know, like you're not doing
Speaker 1: that unless you really have a reason, right and Ethel
Speaker 1: is a very driven woman. She's a controversial woman. One
Speaker 1: depiction of her is she's basically a saint, and the
Speaker 1: other depiction is she's kind of a monster. It winds
Speaker 1: up in the middle one way or the other. But
Speaker 1: she's a she's a very driven person. There's no arguing
Speaker 1: with that. And like, within sort of the context of
Speaker 1: what can be done in this family, the boys are
Speaker 1: going to be the ones who hold office, but you
Speaker 1: can you can be part of the Kennedy greatness by
Speaker 1: creating a bunch of those boys, right and creating some
Speaker 1: daughters who are going to help raise and take care
Speaker 1: of those boys, because the women in the family are
Speaker 1: focused on the men, right. And yeah, her, her whole
Speaker 1: thing is I'm in a birth an aristocracy all on
Speaker 1: my own. RFK Junior from a very young age. The
Speaker 1: primary thing everyone knows about him is that he is
Speaker 1: always obsessed with animals. He is he kind of is
Speaker 1: almost maybe even a savant with animals. He is really
Speaker 1: good and with every kind of animal he loves. He
Speaker 1: loves everything that's not human beings. Meethel claimed that as
Speaker 1: a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs hees crawling
Speaker 1: in the garden before he is ten. He has a
Speaker 1: whole menagerie, a swarm of pets, and some of these
Speaker 1: are normal, rich kid pets. He's got a horse, obviously, right,
Speaker 1: he's a Kennedy, of course, of course. Yeah. But there's
Speaker 1: also weird stuff. He has pet raccoons, he has pet lizards.
Speaker 1: He has thousands of crickets to feed the lizards. In
Speaker 1: the book RFK Junior Robert F. Kennedy Junior and the
Speaker 1: Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I
Speaker 1: do not like, tells this story. The two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight thriller Snakes on a Plane could have been based
Speaker 1: on an experience Bobby had as a kid when he
Speaker 1: took a sack of his pet reptiles and a poet
Speaker 1: a flight from Washington National to LaGuardia in New York,
Speaker 1: and all of the slithery, scary things accidentally got loose
Speaker 1: mid flight as female passengers screamed and may have jumped
Speaker 1: up onto their seats. Bobby crawled around and gathered them
Speaker 1: all up.
Speaker 2: Oh that's I mean, this is.
Speaker 1: More like it's hard not to like having do it.
Speaker 2: A Snakes on a play just like liking animals A lot.
Speaker 2: I dig that he posted a video the other day
Speaker 2: of just like I found this weird lizard, and he
Speaker 2: explained what it was and like what it did, and
Speaker 2: he just seems to That's.
Speaker 1: One thing that I think is absolutely true of him
Speaker 1: is that not only does he like and raise animals,
Speaker 1: but he understands a lot about them. He actually spends
Speaker 1: a lot of his life like on all of these
Speaker 1: sort of like safaris. He spends you know, months of
Speaker 1: his life with native tribes and the Amazon and shit.
Speaker 1: Like he again, it's not weird that he got a worm.
Speaker 2: In his brain.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, No, a lot of his life in the
Speaker 1: wild eating bush.
Speaker 2: Meat, yeah, and dougs and dogs.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. Yeah, probably where he.
Speaker 2: Got that brain worm. Very very unsurprising that they had
Speaker 2: a worm part of his brain, Yeah, allegedly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There are some mysteries about RFK Junior. That's not
Speaker 1: one of salves early on solved early on. Now again,
Speaker 1: this biography by Oppenheimer, like the one by Collier and Horowitz,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of good criticisms, but I will make
Speaker 1: again he starts he's making snakes on a plane. Comparisons
Speaker 1: the RFK Junior book. I've got part of why I
Speaker 1: like it is it it's published before he's a political figure.
Speaker 1: It comes out in twenty fifteen, so it is not
Speaker 1: tainted by everything that's happening now, right, So that is
Speaker 1: a really useful perspective to have on the man. And
Speaker 1: it talks to a shitload of people, a lot of
Speaker 1: primary sources who grew up with him, so you can't
Speaker 1: ignore it. But Oppenheimer is like super homophobic. Talk about
Speaker 1: that later, and like you can even see some of
Speaker 1: like the bullshit where he's like probably female passengers screamed
Speaker 1: and jumped up onto their seating. Well know what said that?
Speaker 1: You just you just want it to be more like
Speaker 1: snakes on the plane than maybe it was.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and that passage like did ping me. I
Speaker 2: was like, wait, yes, yeah it should. He's basic.
Speaker 1: Yah, it's not a good biography. He's not a good biographer.
Speaker 1: But you also can't discard it because there's just a
Speaker 1: lot of ship that we get from it that we
Speaker 1: don't get anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's the first part of the story
Speaker 2: is true. Great, thanks for telling me that. He right,
Speaker 2: he probably did. Look, he's not I don't think Oppenheimer
Speaker 2: makes shit up.
Speaker 1: I think he's just.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, this says your suject right.
Speaker 1: Right right, So yeah. While modern quiverful families have shitloaded
Speaker 1: kids in the hope of flooding our democracy, Ethel and
Speaker 1: Robert did the same thing with the knowledge that their
Speaker 1: children are definitely going to inherit political power. They are
Speaker 1: consciously breeding a ruling class. By the time r. FK
Speaker 1: Junior is eight, everyone knows RFK is going to be
Speaker 1: the president when John has done in office, and you know,
Speaker 1: no one's really sure about Teddy, but it seems like,
Speaker 1: you know, he's probably gonna winde up. And obviously Teddy
Speaker 1: Kennedy is an incredibly successful politician. If a certain thing
Speaker 1: that we'll talk about later hadn't happened, he might have
Speaker 1: been the president. It is not unrealistic in this period
Speaker 1: where RFK Junior is making his earliest memories, to expect
Speaker 1: the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in
Speaker 1: a row. It's not wild at that point to think
Speaker 1: we might have twenty four straight years Kennedy's running the country.
Speaker 1: You know, that's not a bad prediction to make in
Speaker 1: this period of time. And as a result, all eyes
Speaker 1: from the beginning of his life are on RFK Junior
Speaker 1: and his generation of Kennedy's because everyone knows if they're
Speaker 1: not going to be president, they'll probably be in Congress.
Speaker 1: Some of them might be judges, you know, someone might
Speaker 1: be governors. Right, these are the people who are going
Speaker 1: to run the country. And the whole country knows this.
Speaker 1: And so all of these Kennedy kids grow up under
Speaker 1: an insane microscope, the degree of and it's a pressure
Speaker 1: that was completely absent from Joe Kennedy and from JFK
Speaker 1: and RFK. Right, they have the pressure off you need
Speaker 1: to be president, but there's not the amount of spotlight.
Speaker 2: All the public perception pressure. It's just like within the family,
Speaker 2: you have your dad telling you got to do this,
Speaker 2: and now the world is saying and you're going to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And all of you are going to we're all
Speaker 1: expecting that yes. And I want to quote now from
Speaker 1: the book The Kennedys by Collier in Horowitz. They were,
Speaker 1: as one journalist had remarked, America's children. Yet while they
Speaker 1: had been in the spotlight all their lives, they had
Speaker 1: a curious innocence. The important outsiders attached to being a
Speaker 1: Kennedy amused them. They goked back at the tourists who
Speaker 1: peeked through the hedges at Hayannas. They scooped up sand
Speaker 1: from the public beach and sold it as Kennedy sand
Speaker 1: for a dollar a bag. They stood at the fence
Speaker 1: and answered Kennedy questions. What does Jackie eat for breakfast?
Speaker 1: Where did the Kennedy shop? For a quarter? Apiece asked
Speaker 1: what it meant to be a Kennedy. Bobby's son David
Speaker 1: had once replied and means that we're exactly the same
Speaker 1: as if everybody else, except better. Things are going well
Speaker 1: with these kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people should be raised.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to continue that quote. They competed with
Speaker 1: other children in swim meets and sailing contests, succeeding so
Speaker 1: well that Haannisport officials barred them from a certain number
Speaker 1: of these competitions every season so that other residents could
Speaker 1: win some ribbons. The competition within their own group was
Speaker 1: far more intense, far more metaphoric of what they saw
Speaker 1: as the challenge of their lives. Each of them was
Speaker 1: always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in
Speaker 1: the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his
Speaker 1: or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age
Speaker 1: orability group just above them would slip, always aware above
Speaker 1: all else that their parents were watching and assessing their
Speaker 1: performance to see which of them had it. If the
Speaker 1: Beale Street house, where some of the prior Kennedy generation
Speaker 1: were born, had been an enigma of latency, the compound
Speaker 1: where this generation gathered every summer was a training ground
Speaker 1: to recapture the achieved greatness that had once belonged to
Speaker 1: the family. As Chris Lawford said later, we were all,
Speaker 1: every one of us raised to be president.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's great.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 1: Good way to raise kids.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And they all turned out normal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they all turned out normal. Speaking of normal,
Speaker 1: one story RFK Junior is later going to tell of
Speaker 1: his childhood is about one of his few visits to
Speaker 1: the Oval Office during the Camelot period. He brings a
Speaker 1: salamander in to give to his uncle, the President as
Speaker 1: a gift. There's a photo of JFK with the salamander,
Speaker 1: poking it with a presidential pin while Bobby sits nearby.
Speaker 1: And this picture is going to be one of the
Speaker 1: few artifacts to tie RFK Junior forever with the glorious
Speaker 1: side of the Kennedy myth. This is his brief shining
Speaker 1: moment inside the limelight, inhabited by his glorious doomed elders.
Speaker 1: The salamander, by the way, is later given a home
Speaker 1: in the White House Fountain. So don't worry. It winds up,
Speaker 1: winds up better than all of the kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, considering salamander wise.
Speaker 1: Yes, salamander wise, that's a very sick salamander. Lots of
Speaker 1: salamander kids like you gotta wind up? What's even there
Speaker 1: for a salamander? After the White House found and I
Speaker 1: don't know how you move up for that salamander. You
Speaker 1: know it was a fountain. I guess maybe they became
Speaker 1: salamander artists. You know, there's a bunch of salamanders living
Speaker 1: in fucking Dimes Square in New York right now with podcasts.
Speaker 2: Who knows, oh how the salamander has fallen.
Speaker 1: A great upside from the kind of having the kind
Speaker 1: of money so absurd that your house has a name,
Speaker 1: is that you're almost immediately able to indulge in your
Speaker 1: pettiest interests and obsessions a normal kid. You find it
Speaker 1: your kid likes animals, you buy him a picture book,
Speaker 1: right they like dinosaurs, you get him a book with dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Maybe you buy him a model replica of a dinosaur
Speaker 1: bone or something like that, if they're really into it.
Speaker 1: You know, RFK Junior, because he likes animals, gets regular
Speaker 1: safaris to Africa, and he is on safari when JFK
Speaker 1: is gunned down by Merenard Montgomery sand there's one cold
Speaker 1: November day. This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an
Speaker 1: understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt. Within quote,
Speaker 1: Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and
Speaker 1: participated in the capture of a huge leopard tortoise. Because
Speaker 1: he was a scion of Camelot, he was permitted to
Speaker 1: bring it home in a suitcase unquestioned, as if he
Speaker 1: were a diplomat. It helped that his escort was his
Speaker 1: aunt Eunice's husband, Sergeant Shriver, who then headed the JFK
Speaker 1: Established Peace Corps. Many years later, the turtle stuffed was
Speaker 1: on display, along with a multitude of other Kennedy memorabilia,
Speaker 1: in the din of Bobby's own Hickory Hill like a
Speaker 1: state in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco.
Speaker 1: She's such a taking an endured dangered turtle.
Speaker 2: Hog with him.
Speaker 1: How he's like eight or nine. Kennedy dies to be
Speaker 1: to be importing in dangered turtles.
Speaker 2: Sergeant like uncle.
Speaker 1: Like what sergeant Shrever is his name? Yeah? Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is fucking what's her name? I forget her?
Speaker 1: Shriver's a great grandpa or dad? I think dad, probably
Speaker 1: just based on age. So the loss of JFK is
Speaker 1: obviously a crushing blow to Kennedy family morale. But the
Speaker 1: dream doesn't die with him, right. He was president for
Speaker 1: a couple of years, you know, very popular. When he
Speaker 1: gets blown away, what else do you have to say?
Speaker 1: And then you know you've got RFK waiting in the wings.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: One of the things that does happen here that is
Speaker 1: kind of devastating to the Kennedy family. Jackie Kennedy had
Speaker 1: been a pretty influential person in the family and she
Speaker 1: marries someone else after he dies, which you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not shitting on her for that, right, Like that's a
Speaker 1: perfectly normal thing to do at a certain point, but
Speaker 1: she she is both a major purveyor of the Camelot
Speaker 1: myths and people will say Jackie Kennedy kind of creates it.
Speaker 1: But she also kind of bounces from being in the
Speaker 1: family after this, which, like, I don't blame her again,
Speaker 1: it seems like it's the healthiest thing for you get
Speaker 1: your family. It seems like a boundary setting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thinkio NASAs might just have had a really good
Speaker 1: head on her shoulders. But this does mean that now
Speaker 1: the entire weight of the family's dreams are on R.
Speaker 1: FK and Ethel Kennedy. You know, with the most glorious
Speaker 1: Kennedy out of the picture, the family legacy suddenly feels
Speaker 1: in doubt too. There's suddenly a questioned like, are we
Speaker 1: going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of
Speaker 1: the presidency? Are we all going to go on to
Speaker 1: be the people who run this country? Right? And in
Speaker 1: short order, the older Kennedys have to because Robert Kennedy
Speaker 1: kind of reorganizes the family, you know, in order to hey,
Speaker 1: we still have we still got a lot of Kennedy's
Speaker 1: in the game. There's Teddy you know, fifty of us
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, we got plenty. We can take a
Speaker 1: few more bulletsy in. Yeah, so they you know, the
Speaker 1: older Kennedy's also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations.
Speaker 1: Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from Saint Luke,
Speaker 1: to whom much is given, much will be required, and
Speaker 1: Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying.
Speaker 2: This with great America has been very good.
Speaker 1: To the Kennedy's, we all owe the country a debt
Speaker 1: of gratitude and public service. Right, this is a no
Speaker 1: less obliged thing. Right. We're the people who've benefited most
Speaker 1: from the system, so of course we owe it the most,
Speaker 1: which I would love if that meant well, we should
Speaker 1: pay a lot more in taxes as opposed to like,
Speaker 1: well we should run things.
Speaker 2: We should have the power to give back well.
Speaker 1: And to be fair. I will say Kennedy's politically have
Speaker 1: tended to be more on the side of rich people
Speaker 1: should pay more taxes, right will you got to you
Speaker 1: do have to give them that. But this idea of like,
Speaker 1: because we've benefited, we should run things is so poisonous,
Speaker 1: and it's going to get a lot of them killed. Right,
Speaker 1: It's about to get urfk.
Speaker 2: Guilt even though other people killed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, yep, that is what's coming. In a second,
Speaker 1: so our FK junior is educated in very elite, expensive
Speaker 1: private schools. The first Our Lady of Victory was an
Speaker 1: all white school, and this becomes a problem during the
Speaker 1: Camelot period because JFK is pro integrating schools, which is
Speaker 1: great except for people point out, well, your nephew's in
Speaker 1: an all white school. Huh, that's kind of bad. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, classic fair fair. I don't think the media
Speaker 1: is wrong to point that out, and the Kennedy's move
Speaker 1: him to an integrated private school run by Quakers after
Speaker 1: that point. The principal at Our Lady of Victory would
Speaker 1: later claim that the whole story about integration being the
Speaker 1: issue had been created after the fact. That's not why
Speaker 1: Bobby gets transferred, because Bobby and his brother Joe skipped
Speaker 1: school so constantly to fuck around in the woods and
Speaker 1: like had to couldn't continue to be students there. And
Speaker 1: I actually he might not be lying, because that happens
Speaker 1: several more times, and it's it's going to happen in
Speaker 1: the future that like, when he has to get kicked
Speaker 1: out of a school, another thing gets made as the
Speaker 1: scapegoat for it, right, because like, you can't have a
Speaker 1: Bobby Kennedy and Joe Kennedy get kicked out of a
Speaker 1: school for just being dog.
Speaker 2: Shit staying problems. Yeah, exactly right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: For being problems. Now RFK, because of what's about to happen,
Speaker 1: gets kind of sainted, and Ethel is going to be
Speaker 1: like for a period of time, the most admired woman
Speaker 1: in the country. After his death, they get whitewashed a lot.
Speaker 1: You would not call either of these people good parents.
Speaker 1: I would call them almost criminally bad parents. Now, part
Speaker 1: of this is that they're always away, right, They are
Speaker 1: campaigning constantly. RFK has his congressional campaigns, He's going to
Speaker 1: have his presidential campaign. Ethel is constantly campaigning on his behalf.
Speaker 1: She loves being the wife of a powerful man. She
Speaker 1: loves hosting these big events and fundraisers and stuff and
Speaker 1: being out in front. And RFK, in addition to always campaigning,
Speaker 1: loves having Cody so many affairs like there's the like honestly,
Speaker 1: if there was an Olympics and how many people you
Speaker 1: could cheat on your wife with. RFK is like a
Speaker 1: solid contender. You know he could have he could yeah,
Speaker 1: he could have won the gold Yeah, fucking so, you know,
Speaker 1: while they're doing this, and I don't actually know this
Speaker 1: may have been that, this may have been a thing
Speaker 1: that in an age like today, we might actually say
Speaker 1: is closer to non monogamy. I don't think that he
Speaker 1: is informing her, But I also she's not dumb. I
Speaker 1: think she just underslike, that's what is. I'm the wife
Speaker 1: of a powerful woman and I get these benefits from it,
Speaker 1: and are a powerful man and I get all these
Speaker 1: benefits from it. But he is going to fuck around constantly.
Speaker 1: We will we will just never talk about it. I'll
Speaker 1: be angry about it forever. But oh, we never talk
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They are very good at crafting an image for themselves
Speaker 1: and at kind of remolding the Kennedy family image to
Speaker 1: focus around them. And RFK is a great politician. He
Speaker 1: is extremely good at being in politics, at running for election,
Speaker 1: at building buzz around himself. And he's so good at
Speaker 1: it that it kind of papers over a lot of
Speaker 1: the failings he has as a living person. You know,
Speaker 1: his kids mostly remember during this period that he was
Speaker 1: the most vocal force in trying to weld the family
Speaker 1: back together after JFK's death. He also does he's not
Speaker 1: around as a father. He's not really raising his kids
Speaker 1: to much of an extent, but he has a check
Speaker 1: book and he kind of indulges his son, Bobby Kennedy
Speaker 1: Bobby Junior's passions by paying for them. Right, That's how
Speaker 1: RFK kind of raises RFK juniors. Whatever you're into, I've
Speaker 1: got I've got plenty of money. I have no time
Speaker 1: for you, but I have money. And as a result,
Speaker 1: r FK Junior gets into falconry as an eleven year old.
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, why not?
Speaker 1: Why not give a falcon.
Speaker 2: He'll be fine.
Speaker 1: I do love all of the fucking yeats references to
Speaker 1: RFK Junior. We do have a falconer. You know, we've
Speaker 1: got a falconer in this election. Can the falcon hear him?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Gyre seems to be widening horowitzon Collier
Speaker 1: right quote. His father had commissioned naturalists from the Bronx
Speaker 1: Zoo to make him a walk interrarium for his thirteenth birthday.
Speaker 1: He had encouraged the interest in falconry, although admitting to
Speaker 1: his son that he was just sturbed by the implications
Speaker 1: of feeding pigeons to the predators. The two of them
Speaker 1: worked out a compromise the distinctive Kennedy twist. If a
Speaker 1: pigeon managed to avoid a hawk on two successive flights,
Speaker 1: it was retired and never forced to face death again.
Speaker 1: Struck by the boy's range of interests, Bobby Senior had
Speaker 1: once remarked that Bobby Junior was just like the President. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: he was also what some of the adults around the
Speaker 1: family would politely call rambunctious. This was a kid you
Speaker 1: could not keep in class or get to obey the
Speaker 1: rules at all. Starting in seventh grade, he was sent
Speaker 1: away to a boarding school along with his brother Joe
Speaker 1: to stay out of his mom and dad's hair.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: They enjoyed being famous and powerful at private school, RFK
Speaker 1: Junior reinforced his reputation as the poster child for what
Speaker 1: we now call EIGHTYHD. One classmate later noted, he could
Speaker 1: climb straight up the wall like ten feet and we
Speaker 1: would just be standing there watching in awe. He was
Speaker 1: always real skinny and lanky, and he could get a
Speaker 1: real good grip on the bricks, and he had absolutely
Speaker 1: no fear. He climbed up that wall like he was man.
Speaker 2: That's that's good for him. Yeah, is like literally the
Speaker 2: great power, great responsibility quote from earlier. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: that's he's just he's a spider man.
Speaker 1: He's literally literally a spider man. It is like one
Speaker 1: of those Obviously over medication is a problem, but I've
Speaker 1: never read about a kid who needed ADHD treatment more
Speaker 1: than our FKG. Yeah, like it's he really literally running No.
Speaker 2: No, that's supposed to be a phrase that's supposed to
Speaker 2: be just the thing that you say. Also, like if
Speaker 2: you're you know, growing up, and you're like, oh I
Speaker 2: can I got to take this uh exotic turtle. Like,
Speaker 2: if you're breaking the rules, you're not gonna want to
Speaker 2: follow the rules.
Speaker 1: So I don't even know if you call it breaking
Speaker 1: the rules. There's note even a concept in his head
Speaker 1: that there are rules for him exactly, you know, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: his mom wanted him to join the football team at
Speaker 1: the at the Fancy of Millbrook at this point, private
Speaker 1: school that he's at. But r f K Junior is
Speaker 1: not a great football guy. He is actually not like
Speaker 1: a jock character like he would imagine you think a
Speaker 1: boy like Clone High their JFK. They have him portrayed
Speaker 1: as like the football captain brotheran JFK had that public
Speaker 1: personality at least. RFK Junior is a weird kid. He
Speaker 1: is defiantly weird. He dedicates most of his time to
Speaker 1: playing with his hawk, Morgan le Fay, who he would
Speaker 1: take to school for show and tell sessions During the week.
Speaker 1: He lived under strict discipline, but occasionally he and his
Speaker 1: older brother Joe would be allowed to show off what
Speaker 1: being a Kennedy meant to their classmates. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here. On weekends, one
Speaker 1: of the Kennedy's many helpers, or Ethel Kennedy herself, usually
Speaker 1: with two dogs in here convertible, would arrive to pick
Speaker 1: up Bobby and his brother Joe, and then someone would
Speaker 1: return them on Sunday evening. She had once invited Bobby's
Speaker 1: entire class and some of his teachers for a field
Speaker 1: day at Hickory Hill, where they swam in the pool,
Speaker 1: toured Bobby's menagerie of animals, and watched the surfer film
Speaker 1: The Endless Summer in the pool cabana. As one class
Speaker 1: member who made the tour recalled, it was a circus
Speaker 1: out there, and they mean that litter because of all
Speaker 1: of the wild animals yeah, right, yeah. But then on
Speaker 1: June fifth, nineteen sixty eight, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned
Speaker 1: down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Like his brother,
Speaker 1: there are going to be decades of debate and conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories as to whether or not Sir Hans Sirhan, who's
Speaker 1: officially the gunman, had rather done it. I have my
Speaker 1: own theories about a certain mister Sanders, but we don't
Speaker 1: need to get into that today, right, I will say
Speaker 1: RFK Junior subscribes to these theories. He does not believe
Speaker 1: it's last I checked. He doesn't think that Sir Hans
Speaker 1: Sirhan is who killed his dad, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, he's very Yeah, he's got.
Speaker 1: And like like like with any Kennedy I kind of
Speaker 1: feel about Kennedy conspiracy theories the way I do. With
Speaker 1: this election. People will say, like, oh, so and so
Speaker 1: is definitely gonna win or definitely not. It's impossible. No,
Speaker 1: neither of them has less than a thirty percent chance
Speaker 1: of winning. And like every Kennedy conspiracy theory, twenty percent chances, right,
Speaker 1: twenty percent chance it wasn't, sir. I'll give it. I'll
Speaker 1: give it that, you know, it's not my odds on bet,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of shady ship that went down,
Speaker 1: and I'm not I'm not, you know, gonta rule anything
Speaker 1: out entirely here, But that doesn't really matter. It does
Speaker 1: matter that RFK Junior subscribes to these theories, and it
Speaker 1: matters that when RFK dies, he takes the dream of
Speaker 1: the Kennedy dynasty with him, and the son who bore
Speaker 1: his name is never going to be the same. And
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about all of that. Cody in
Speaker 1: part Dukes ah mm hm, Cody, Hi, Shody pluggable Yo.
Speaker 2: Yody, Yeah, I got some plugs to plug. Check out
Speaker 2: Some More News. It's on YouTube, uh and we've got
Speaker 2: a Patreon dot com slash Some More News. Even More
Speaker 2: News is a podcast we also do. Sometimes you do
Speaker 2: a podcast called way Less News because who wants to
Speaker 2: talk about the news?
Speaker 1: Absolutely no one anymore Nobody.
Speaker 2: Check in. My band's called the Hot Shapes. We've got
Speaker 2: an album called Laverne. It's on band camp and SoundCloud.
Speaker 1: You should have called him The Assumptions. Cody, Uh, I M.
Speaker 2: Now I might start another band called the Assumptions.
Speaker 1: Who knows it's an RFK Deep or Joe Kennedy Deep Cut.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, check all that stuff out.
Speaker 1: Invite Cody to your band. Look, Mighty Mighty boss Tones,
Speaker 1: we know you lost a singer because he became a
Speaker 1: COVID denier after that George Floyd album. You know, invite Cody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, knock on wood, Cody, knock on every.
Speaker 2: Band that lost a member that in the supergroup that
Speaker 2: is like anti vax supergroup. I'll replace whomever or the other, you.
Speaker 1: Know what, you know what, I think we finally need
Speaker 1: to merge the surviving members of Lincoln Park with all
Speaker 1: of the non crazy members of the Mighty Mighty boss Tones.
Speaker 1: Is that going to make good music? There's not a
Speaker 1: chance in hell. Absolutely not need animal in any way.
Speaker 1: But I want to hear that album.
Speaker 2: You know, it's called Novelty Music and I love.
Speaker 1: It anyway, Go to Hell. I Love You. Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts.