Part One: The RFK Jr. Episodes

who actually could influence the election. The most popular third party candidate in like a generation, assuming that is roughly twenty five years something like that. Yeah, Bobby F. Kennedy Junior, RS Junior. Yes, currently polling it n percent a lot of places. It depends on where you go, But like I think nationally that's broadly accurate. I also think that

there's a lot of flex in those numbers. You know, you're talking pulling nine or ten percent in like three plus plus or minus three four percent, you know, error rates. So could he very well could wind up not being influential at all, but he could siphon away enough votes to cost Biden the election or cost Trump the elections.

a pretty sizable impact. So I figured we should talk about the guy, especially because, in kind of a remarkable turn of events, a bunch of articles I think Vanity Fair published the first one, have come out in the last week accusing him or publishing allegations that he's sexually assaulted women, and he has had kind of a unique response in which he's basically said, yeah, maybe he might hear more about this, yeah, because he apologizes, like how

can I make this right? When he was reached out to directly by one of the women, and his public statements have been like, yeah, you'll probably hear more about this.

And I will tell you two things. Number one, he definitely ate that dog. And number two, I'm actually not surprised that he both is perfectly willing to admit that he sexually assaulted people genuinely thinks that he feels bad about it. Now I'm not saying he actually does, because I think the act of being a Kennedy might be fundamentally deranging. And primarily what we'll be talking about in

these episodes, this is not a list. Well, we're gonna talk about some fucked up shit that Bobby Kennedy did, but mostly what we're talking about is the creation of the Kennedys as a concept is maybe the most profoundly abusive thing that's ever happened to a group of children. Yeah, like, that's that's really the story.

that's part of anyway, it's an interesting story. So we're gonna we're gonna talk about that this week, Cody. But first I wanted to ask, how do you feel about Bobby Kennedy? You know, how do you feel about the Actually I scratched that, how do you feel about the Kennedys.

a comprehensive history of the family. And I'm actually not going to talk much about the bad shit that Joe Kennedy or JFK or the original RFK did. We'll cover some of that, because like there's kind of a lot in the story of how they became a thing, and we're focusing mostly on RFK this week. So this story is important for how it sets up the way in which he and his siblings and cousins, his peers in

like coageous members of the Kennedy family, how they were raised. Right, So don't come to this being like, wow, Robert didn't really mention, you know, what Joe Kennedy did to Rosemary Kennedy, the lombotomy. He didn't talk about RFK. Why you're tapping Martin Luther King junior. And it's not because those aren't important. It's because like that doesn't factor in as much to like what RFK Junior experienced as a kid, right, And so that's kind of the focus with which we're covering

the background here, right. Like many Irish families, the Kennedys first entered the United States during a rough period for Ireland the late eighteen forties. Unlike most of the refugees who fled there in that time, twenty six year old Patrick Kennedy was not fleeing starvation and death and depression. He was the son of a pretty comfortable man financially, a big farmer in County Wexford with eighty acres, So like a guy who's doing pretty well. So Patrick comes

because he's not going to inherit this land. That's not the way shit works at the time, and he wants to strike it rich, right, So his goal is specifically not this is my only chance at survival. It's America. Is my chance to make a name for myself, right, because I'm not going to inherit anything. Yeah, the American dream. He never returns to the old Country or sees his family again, but he does meet a hot lady on the boat over, and that's not half bad. They get

married in Boston shortly after arriving. This generation does not make it out of Boston, you know, like a lot of Irish people in that period, they are kind of trapped there. Patrick gets a job as a cooper. In his free time, he gets his wife pregnant. They have four kids, the last of whom is finally a son, Patrick Joseph Patrick, the first, the original Patrick, having been

put on this earth just to make Patrick. Joseph dies immediately after his son is born of colera, just instating all right, got it done, got it done, made sure that baby made it out of the birth canal, and then drop the fuck dead. Yeah, yeah, dedicated, he knew, Yeah, exactly exactly. He's like one of those mosquito. He's like a salmon returning to yeah. Yeah, yeah, Samon returning to

Boston to spawn. Yeah. So, in total, the first Kennedy family patriarch only lived nine years and died never having made any kind of fortune or real impact himself. He is going to be the last Kennedy patriarch to kind of have a quiet, unimportant death right within the kind of the context of how the nation sees it, since Patrick Joseph the baby is because he's less than a year old. I think when his dad dies was the

only male left in the family. The job of making a fortune fell entirely on his shoulders, and his earliest memories were basically that, like, everyone is expecting me to figure out how to make something of this family, right. All of his sisters and his mom are obsessively focused on just his health and well being.

soon he has got he's got a business. He's got an actual bar going, and he is very good at running a bar. He is a competent business owner. And he is because when you're the way politics works in this time, Right, the city is largely run by Democrats who are not Irish and who do not want Irish people anywhere near power, but who are kind of reliant upon them for votes. Right, So Irish folks are restricted in what jobs they can hold in the local power

structure there, as you're probably aware of by stereotypes. They're welcome to become police officers. There's a few local elected offices that they're able to take, but for most of the mid eighteen hundreds, higher elected offices are pretty closed to Irish immigrants. And you know, once Patrick Joseph buis

his bar, the status quo is starting to change. And because he's now a business owner, and because bars are you know, a social center in his society, he kind of immediately gets shunted into a part of the kind of power structure, right, because like that that's where a lot of dealing happens. That's social business.

takes bribes from people and is hideously corrupted. Also is where you get your social services. If you are in the Democratic Party and you are providing them with your vote, they offer you primitive forms of welfare and a kind of social stability. The Democratic Party is a shadow state in Boston, right, this is the only plate part of the country that has something like this, but that you can't think of the party as like what it is now right, where it's like this is you know how

we get and change policy. It's the party is almost like a social club that guarantees me some kind of stability in exchange for my vote, right, and in exchange for some all my money sometimes. Right. The Democratic Party is generally described as a machine, and it is corrupt as hell. It runs a lot of it runs on

bribes and strong arm violence. Right. There is a violent mafia aspect to political parties in this period in Boston in particular, but it's also kind of the best your best, Like if you're coming from Ireland as an Irish refugee in the mid eighteen hundreds. The way this system works, you might say, is a lot better than the way the last system you, yeah, worked, right.

to the State Senate. This is better than Irish people who had been able to do in the generation previously, right, But it's kind of going to be the top of where he's able to reach to, Like, there's this isiing to like yeah, yeah, the old democratic power structure still is able to keep the Irish from getting too much higher than that. Right now, Like a good Irish boy, he marries a girl named Mary from a family that happened to have more money than his family, and by

this point he's got a bit of money too. You know, he's not rich the way there're going to be a generation later. But the Kennedy's are very comfortable at this point in time, and Patrick Joseph keeps sliding up the greasy poll of Democratic Party politics state legislator is as high as he's going to rise. But you know he doesn't take this sitting down. A lot of his bills, the things he tries to get through in the state legislature gets stymied by this kind of ossified power structure

that doesn't like this upity Irish kid. But PJ succeeds in building an army of loyal goons at the local level. In eighteen ninety eight, he launched an ambitious attempt to oust his rival, Martin Lomasney for control of the city democratic nominating process. And it doesn't quite work. But I want to describe how that went by reading a quote from a book called The Kennedys by Peter Collier and

David Horowitz. Quote, playing by the rules of the day, PJ had his troops put up blockades around the convention site. They kept rivals out until the Mahatma that's the nickname for his rival, disguised his delegates as a funeral procession and smuggled them through Kennedy's lines in ahearse that's.

Right that said, there's also it includes just a lot of interviews with Kennedy's who were in and arout like members of the family. And so you even with these things that are when they're very when they're sources, people will question our issues with you can't just discard them because sometimes like, oh, this is where David Kennedy gave his side of events, right, and like so we can't

just ignore entirely these books either. But a lot of Kennedy history is tabloid gossip, right because they're the Kennedy Yeah exactly.

of course I'll watch. I would watch any of the movies that that George Lucas is producing for no one but him and his friends. It's crazy man branch. Yeah, let's let's do. Let's do. Let's do a mission impossible to break into the George Lucas ranch.

them right, certainly on that edge. He kind of winds up as a ward boss and a moderately wealthy small business owner. And his son, Joseph P. Kennedy, was born in eighteen eighty eight, kind of midway through his dad's journey up the Democratic Party ladder. We can infer that Patrick Joseph and his wife never quite got over the frustration of being locked artificially out of advancing further. Mary Augusta insisted on Joseph Patrick as the name for their

son rather than Patrick Joseph, because there's two stories. One is that she didn't want him to be a junior, right, thought that might be bad for him in some way, It might be bad for his advancement. There's also claims that she told relatives that she thought that Joseph Patrick sounded less Irish than Patrick Joseph and honestly, those are the two most Irish names I can conceive of.

fearing contagion, politics had become a faintly disreputable profession. She wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband, whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston, was not sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds for the rest of his life. He remembered one election day when they were walking down the street and a Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had already voted one hundred and twenty eight guys.

a Mighty Joe Young. That's not even a joke. Yeah you do. You've got it, you know, Cody. It's because we're hooked up the heart.

very well. And it's understood that Joe's job is to go where his father could not and establish the name Kennedy as a name to be reckoned with. As a young man, he worked as a uniformed delivery driver for a fancy hat company. He did other old timey jobs too. Joe Kennedy has all of the old timey jobs. He sells candy on the street. Well, he works as a newsboy,

and he's this is my favorite. He has a part time job is what's called a sabbath goy, which goy is a term for gentile for like create like a Jewish term for or I think Kiddish term for like gentiles, right for Christians. And his job was on the Sabbath, he would go to Orthodox Jewish people's homes to like light their stoves and light their candles. Nowadays, there's like automated systems for this because there's certain rules about what you shouldn't do. But you can also trick God a

little bit and get away with stuff. Yeah, which is my favorite kind of religion.

minds is the important part. So he also it's interesting there's a period of time where he has an artistic bent too, so you do get the sense that, like maybe if someone had given him drugs at the right time,

he might have wound up a very different person. Because in addition to trying to start all these small businesses, he directs plays in the family yard, and he like manages these fairly complex productions where he'll get a bunch of people, he'll play roles, he'll have other people playing roles, and he'll also have people collecting money. Like he'll be actually running both running a business, but also he is writing plays and like being in the yeah, which is

interesting and for an idea. One of his productions features him in an Uncle Sam costume reading essays with titles like Columbia the Gym of the Ocean. So it's like, oh shit, that could be like in the background of a BioShock game, like that boy Childhood.

you know. The best example of kind of the kind of person he is becoming might be the little baseball team that young Joe organized, which was named I don't know why. The reasons are lost the time, but the the name of his baseball team is the Assumptions, and he makes himself the coach, the business manager, and the first baseman. I don't know why. The assumptions.

of a very strange name. I think it's it's got to be that there's that like Babylonian joke, the first record of like an actual structured joke that like the punchline is something like a dog in a bar, and like nobody actually knows what was supposed to be funny about it, but like we get, we get that it was supposed to be a joke. I had this experience. I watched a nineteen eighty three live stand up performance with Robin Williams the other night, and I hadn't seen

him live for a while. In the first like ten minutes or so, because both like the quality of the video and because like some of the style of stand up that he was doing is just people don't do it anymore, I was like, Oh, I wonder if he's just not funny anymore. And then he steps into the crowd and starts taking things from people, and it becomes like the funniest stand up set I've seen in my life. And I was like, oh no, he was. He is as good as I remember. There's just some bits in

there that haven't aged. You couldn't do a lot of what he did. Like he like starts drinking from somebody's like liquor and like picks up a glass from someone's table and drinks from it and makes a joke about like sorry about the cold source, and then just moves on and picks up some lady's jacket from her table. But like everybody's losing their fucking minds the whole time.

one man band. Kennedy's sister Margaret, to whom he tossed his glove to put away when he came home from a game, always remembered his response, if you can't be captain, don't play. And that gives you a lot, right both, Like he comes home from the game, like throws his glove to his sister, just knowing she'll put it away. Right, that's kind of says everything about how he's raised and his attitude. This is good because Joe Kennedy is the

guy who starts the Kennedys as a political dynastic. Right, he is the patriarch of what the Kennedy's become and why. I mean, you could say his dad was the one who starred them in politics, but it's Joe that makes them their fortune. And it's Joe who you know, is the guy who makes.

hand to, monstrous things. But he's also just like, no one else in the Kennedy family is really going to be. RFK might have wound up that way, if you know, the thing that happened hadn't happened, But like JFK really isn't, you know, Like JFK is to a significant extent supported by the folks around him. Joe Kennedy is the most capable I think of the Kennedys that I have read about.

And it's not for nothing that by the time he comes around, he is our our Now we are in our second generation of Kennedy boys who are raised by a crowd of sisters and aunts who make the boy or the boys their primary responsibility, right, and Joe is the first era in which this is happening, and the Kennedy's are kind of wealthy. Right, So he grows up egocentric and obsessed with the idea of proving his own

in the family's greatness. But he is also the last Kennedy that where they're like, there's enough connection to the real world that he's really capable of understanding it or succeeds. I think, because things are going to get a lot more deranged after this point, right, I don't fully know why, but that's kind of my read.

on Joe. But he becomes a banker. He starts as an examiner for the state government with all of the corruption that implies. Right again, the debate is like how mobbed up was he? But there's no no involvement in corruption and crime if you're anywhere close to this part of the political process in the period, right there's.

were end up would end up. And for an idea of that, he dies worth at least like half a billion dollars, you know, he's extraordinarily well, like half a billion dollars, and we're talking a while ago. He passes in like seventy sixty nine something like that, so like that's a lot more money.

are involved in. His biographer, David Nassau, claims to have found no hard or even very soft evidence of like bootlegging and researching his book The Patriarch, And I believe David when he's like, I would have loved to have that in my book about him, Like that's fun.

the Kennedy clan. They found all sorts of dirt on Joe Kennedy, says Nasau, but not that he was a bootlegger. And I think that's a fair way to listen out. I was like, yeah, he's doing crimes because you have to to be involved in politics and business banking at his level. There's not people who own banks today who aren't doing some crimes. Right, But he's not running rum because why would he be, right, what's the Yeah, where does that get Joe? Yeah, so where he does make

his fortune is as shady as bootlegging. Hollywood, and again, Hollywood in the twenties is also very organized crime. A lot of the Hollywood studio families got their start as like these were primarily like Jewish gangsters in the East Coast who move over to the West Coast for a variety of reasons. But like that is the root of a lot of early cinema money. Right, it does come out of crime, because like a lot of it's porn, right, Like that's that's how a big chunk of this industry

gets its start. Joe Kennedy buys a dying studio and he reorganizes it to mass produce what we would now call b movies. Nasau thinks this is where a huge amount of his early money comes from, right, And he's he's able to make this profitable not just because like the movies make money, but because he is one of the first CEOs to demand his pay and stock options, and he is really good at manipulating stock prices.

the primary source of the Kennedy fortune. Right, he bets all of this money that he's accumulated on the Great Depression happening, and Black Tuesday makes him one of the richest men in the country. That is the Kennedy money. They short in America.

this is where the Kennedy family fortune comes from. Because no subsequent members of his family are nearly this successful, and they don't have to be. But Joe never managed to build up momentum in the area that mattered most to him, which is elected office. Right, as we'll talk about, he's influential in politics. He becomes a powerful man, but he doesn't like get elected places. That's not really how

he makes his way in. And so as he starts having kids in the early nineteen hundreds, nine of them, he lets the boys know that a lot is expected of them, Right, I am having use because like me, I want, like my dad said with me, I want you to go further than I went, right, I want to I want the Kennedys are going to run this fucking country.

that he kind of wants the Nazis to win. And like during the Battle of Britain he makes a statement that democracy is finished in England and maybe finished in the US too.

I've got all these other kids. I've got you know, John F. Kennedy, I've got Robert Kennedy, I've got Ted Kennedy, and all of them are going to bs to compete as kids whenever they're like swimming, when they're playing like football in the yard, when they're doing it, like they're constantly in competition with each other, and Joe is constantly setting them in competition with each other, and they are all raised go as far as you can do more than I was able to do, and you are constantly

measuring yourself against your brothers. Right. This has very early on some calamitous results for the family because when World War Two breaks out, this competition extends to wartime service. The elder Kennedy Boys, which came to include John F. Kennedy in nineteen seventeen and then Robert didn't just join the military. They had to do the most impressive things

they could do in the military. John becomes a pt boat commander and we're not going to go into the whole Pt one oh nine story, but his ship goes down. There's I think a lot of people argue because of mistakes that he and others made right that like they fucked up, which is why this happened in the first place.

But he does legitimately help get a lot of the survivors out, like in a way that is heroic, and Joe is able to spin this into an act of this whole thing into an act of heroism, right, And it's kind of have to ignore the fact that there were some fuck ups along the line, but it works. Liker. The pr version of this plays right because America is looking for war heroes at that time and they find one in JFK. This spurs Joe, his brother has now

become a public war hero. And Joe is, you know, by any one stretch of the imagination, doing a heroic thing. He is a bomber pilot flying bombing missions daylight raids over Western Europe, one of the most insanely things and insanely dangerous things any group of human beings has ever done. Right, and he flies the required there's something like twenty missions you have to fly, and at that point you can stop,

right because it's so dangerous, like once you've redid. Yeah, But when he hits that, he's like, that's not enough. I still have not you know, like I have to measure myself against JFK. So he keeps doing missions after the point at which he wouldn't have had to continue doing missions, and he gets shot down and killed late in the war, and hey, that he's a hero in my book, Like that had to be done, like the like fighting the Nazis. And he goes down fighting the Nazis.

But you can already see this competition legacy thing is getting the.

is very successful early on. He is one of Joe McCarthy's guys for a period of time. He is like involved in the Lavender scare, but he kind of gets edged out because Roy Cohne, who like doesn't like him. He and Roy Cohne kind of are like enemies in it, but not because RFK is like better about McCarthyism, right, he is pretty invested in McCarthyism. That said, he becomes the attorney General of the country when his brother is

the president. He's going to be a congressman after that, but it's during this brief era where his brother is the president and he's the attorney general. This era just lasts a couple years. But this is Camelot, right, this is the period of time that people call camelot, and it's legitimately like a heady time to be a Kennedy. And this is the period of time, this very brief period where JFK is the president, RFK is the Attorney General.

And it's very clear to everyone after JFK finishes being the president, Bobby Kennedy's probably going to become president.

like half of the world economy. Of course, people remember this is a golden age, you know, yeah, I know. And it says a lot that it lasts, yeah, like two years something like that. You know, it's times not a long period, you know. So and again, but this is the period that that RFK Junior, our RFK junior, the subject of these episodes, is going to have his first memories. And Robert Francis Kennedy Junior was born on January seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in the Georgetown University Hospital.

His father, Robert, had married a member of the wealthy Scackle family, also part of the budding US aristocracy. This part gets left out a lot in the histories, but rfk's wife is Ethel Kennedy originally Ethel Skakel, and they're they're kind of a unique sort of quiverful type, you know, the quiver FLEs like believe we need to have as many kids as possible to create soldiers for the army of God. We're going to gain control of the nation by swarming them with our kids, who will take your

trip doctors in power. Ethel and RFK believe that, but just for themselves, Like not everyone should do this, but we are going to have all of the children possible so that we can we can flood the government with Kennedy's who will take control of the levels of power. They have eleven kids, you know, like you're not doing that unless you really have a reason, right and Ethel is a very driven woman. She's a controversial woman. One depiction of her is she's basically a saint, and the

other depiction is she's kind of a monster. It winds up in the middle one way or the other. But she's a she's a very driven person. There's no arguing with that. And like, within sort of the context of what can be done in this family, the boys are going to be the ones who hold office, but you can you can be part of the Kennedy greatness by creating a bunch of those boys, right and creating some daughters who are going to help raise and take care of those boys, because the women in the family are

focused on the men, right. And yeah, her, her whole thing is I'm in a birth an aristocracy all on my own. RFK Junior from a very young age. The primary thing everyone knows about him is that he is always obsessed with animals. He is he kind of is almost maybe even a savant with animals. He is really good and with every kind of animal he loves. He loves everything that's not human beings. Meethel claimed that as a baby, he is fascinated by the bugs hees crawling

in the garden before he is ten. He has a whole menagerie, a swarm of pets, and some of these are normal, rich kid pets. He's got a horse, obviously, right, he's a Kennedy, of course, of course. Yeah. But there's also weird stuff. He has pet raccoons, he has pet lizards. He has thousands of crickets to feed the lizards. In the book RFK Junior Robert F. Kennedy Junior and the Dark Side of the Dream, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, who I

do not like, tells this story. The two thousand and eight thriller Snakes on a Plane could have been based on an experience Bobby had as a kid when he took a sack of his pet reptiles and a poet a flight from Washington National to LaGuardia in New York, and all of the slithery, scary things accidentally got loose mid flight as female passengers screamed and may have jumped up onto their seats. Bobby crawled around and gathered them all up.

a really useful perspective to have on the man. And it talks to a shitload of people, a lot of primary sources who grew up with him, so you can't ignore it. But Oppenheimer is like super homophobic. Talk about that later, and like you can even see some of like the bullshit where he's like probably female passengers screamed and jumped up onto their seating. Well know what said that? You just you just want it to be more like snakes on the plane than maybe it was.

you know, he's probably gonna winde up. And obviously Teddy Kennedy is an incredibly successful politician. If a certain thing that we'll talk about later hadn't happened, he might have been the president. It is not unrealistic in this period where RFK Junior is making his earliest memories, to expect the country might see three separate Kennedy presidencies, maybe in a row. It's not wild at that point to think we might have twenty four straight years Kennedy's running the country.

You know, that's not a bad prediction to make in this period of time. And as a result, all eyes from the beginning of his life are on RFK Junior and his generation of Kennedy's because everyone knows if they're not going to be president, they'll probably be in Congress. Some of them might be judges, you know, someone might be governors. Right, these are the people who are going to run the country. And the whole country knows this.

And so all of these Kennedy kids grow up under an insane microscope, the degree of and it's a pressure that was completely absent from Joe Kennedy and from JFK and RFK. Right, they have the pressure off you need to be president, but there's not the amount of spotlight.

for a dollar a bag. They stood at the fence and answered Kennedy questions. What does Jackie eat for breakfast? Where did the Kennedy shop? For a quarter? Apiece asked what it meant to be a Kennedy. Bobby's son David had once replied and means that we're exactly the same as if everybody else, except better. Things are going well with these kids.

as the challenge of their lives. Each of them was always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his or her standing, always wondering if someone in an age orability group just above them would slip, always aware above all else that their parents were watching and assessing their

performance to see which of them had it. If the Beale Street house, where some of the prior Kennedy generation were born, had been an enigma of latency, the compound where this generation gathered every summer was a training ground to recapture the achieved greatness that had once belonged to the family. As Chris Lawford said later, we were all, every one of us raised to be president.

side of the Kennedy myth. This is his brief shining moment inside the limelight, inhabited by his glorious doomed elders. The salamander, by the way, is later given a home in the White House Fountain. So don't worry. It winds up, winds up better than all of the kids.

You know, RFK Junior, because he likes animals, gets regular safaris to Africa, and he is on safari when JFK is gunned down by Merenard Montgomery sand there's one cold November day. This story from Oppenheimer's book really gives an understanding of the kind of privilege these children dealt. Within quote, Bobby had been taken on a safari in Kenya and

participated in the capture of a huge leopard tortoise. Because he was a scion of Camelot, he was permitted to bring it home in a suitcase unquestioned, as if he were a diplomat. It helped that his escort was his aunt Eunice's husband, Sergeant Shriver, who then headed the JFK

Established Peace Corps. Many years later, the turtle stuffed was on display, along with a multitude of other Kennedy memorabilia, in the din of Bobby's own Hickory Hill like a state in the fashionable New York City suburb of Mount Kisco. She's such a taking an endured dangered turtle.

But she also kind of bounces from being in the family after this, which, like, I don't blame her again, it seems like it's the healthiest thing for you get your family. It seems like a boundary setting to me. Yeah, I thinkio NASAs might just have had a really good head on her shoulders. But this does mean that now the entire weight of the family's dreams are on R. FK and Ethel Kennedy. You know, with the most glorious Kennedy out of the picture, the family legacy suddenly feels

in doubt too. There's suddenly a questioned like, are we going to have this glorious period of Kennedy dominance of the presidency? Are we all going to go on to be the people who run this country? Right? And in short order, the older Kennedys have to because Robert Kennedy kind of reorganizes the family, you know, in order to hey, we still have we still got a lot of Kennedy's in the game. There's Teddy you know, fifty of us right right, Yeah, we got plenty. We can take a

few more bulletsy in. Yeah, so they you know, the older Kennedy's also feel like they need to reclarify their expectations. Grandma Rose constantly repeated her favorite quote from Saint Luke, to whom much is given, much will be required, and Bobby passed on the same idea in his own words, saying.

that's yeah, classic fair fair. I don't think the media is wrong to point that out, and the Kennedy's move him to an integrated private school run by Quakers after that point. The principal at Our Lady of Victory would later claim that the whole story about integration being the issue had been created after the fact. That's not why Bobby gets transferred, because Bobby and his brother Joe skipped school so constantly to fuck around in the woods and

like had to couldn't continue to be students there. And I actually he might not be lying, because that happens several more times, and it's it's going to happen in the future that like, when he has to get kicked out of a school, another thing gets made as the scapegoat for it, right, because like, you can't have a Bobby Kennedy and Joe Kennedy get kicked out of a school for just being dog.

have his presidential campaign. Ethel is constantly campaigning on his behalf. She loves being the wife of a powerful man. She loves hosting these big events and fundraisers and stuff and being out in front. And RFK, in addition to always campaigning, loves having Cody so many affairs like there's the like honestly, if there was an Olympics and how many people you could cheat on your wife with. RFK is like a

solid contender. You know he could have he could yeah, he could have won the gold Yeah, fucking so, you know, while they're doing this, and I don't actually know this may have been that, this may have been a thing that in an age like today, we might actually say is closer to non monogamy. I don't think that he is informing her, But I also she's not dumb. I

think she just underslike, that's what is. I'm the wife of a powerful woman and I get these benefits from it, and are a powerful man and I get all these benefits from it. But he is going to fuck around constantly. We will we will just never talk about it. I'll be angry about it forever. But oh, we never talk about it.

back together after JFK's death. He also does he's not around as a father. He's not really raising his kids to much of an extent, but he has a check book and he kind of indulges his son, Bobby Kennedy Bobby Junior's passions by paying for them. Right, That's how RFK kind of raises RFK juniors. Whatever you're into, I've got I've got plenty of money. I have no time for you, but I have money. And as a result, r FK Junior gets into falconry as an eleven year old.

of feeding pigeons to the predators. The two of them worked out a compromise the distinctive Kennedy twist. If a pigeon managed to avoid a hawk on two successive flights, it was retired and never forced to face death again. Struck by the boy's range of interests, Bobby Senior had once remarked that Bobby Junior was just like the President. Unfortunately, he was also what some of the adults around the

family would politely call rambunctious. This was a kid you could not keep in class or get to obey the rules at all. Starting in seventh grade, he was sent away to a boarding school along with his brother Joe to stay out of his mom and dad's hair.

boy like Clone High their JFK. They have him portrayed as like the football captain brotheran JFK had that public personality at least. RFK Junior is a weird kid. He is defiantly weird. He dedicates most of his time to playing with his hawk, Morgan le Fay, who he would take to school for show and tell sessions During the week. He lived under strict discipline, but occasionally he and his older brother Joe would be allowed to show off what being a Kennedy meant to their classmates. And I'm going

to quote again from Oppenheimer's book here. On weekends, one of the Kennedy's many helpers, or Ethel Kennedy herself, usually with two dogs in here convertible, would arrive to pick up Bobby and his brother Joe, and then someone would return them on Sunday evening. She had once invited Bobby's entire class and some of his teachers for a field day at Hickory Hill, where they swam in the pool, toured Bobby's menagerie of animals, and watched the surfer film

The Endless Summer in the pool cabana. As one class member who made the tour recalled, it was a circus out there, and they mean that litter because of all of the wild animals yeah, right, yeah. But then on June fifth, nineteen sixty eight, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Like his brother, there are going to be decades of debate and conspiracy theories as to whether or not Sir Hans Sirhan, who's

officially the gunman, had rather done it. I have my own theories about a certain mister Sanders, but we don't need to get into that today, right, I will say RFK Junior subscribes to these theories. He does not believe it's last I checked. He doesn't think that Sir Hans Sirhan is who killed his dad, right.

twenty percent chance it wasn't, sir. I'll give it. I'll give it that, you know, it's not my odds on bet, but there's a lot of shady ship that went down, and I'm not I'm not, you know, gonta rule anything out entirely here, But that doesn't really matter. It does matter that RFK Junior subscribes to these theories, and it matters that when RFK dies, he takes the dream of the Kennedy dynasty with him, and the son who bore his name is never going to be the same. And

we're going to talk about all of that. Cody in part Dukes ah mm hm, Cody, Hi, Shody pluggable Yo.