By Tom Brennan
Late in 1963, when notions of Camelot were the height of fashion, a Stanley Kubrick movie titled Dr. Strangelove made it’s way into the public consciousness. A year earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had almost resulted in nuclear war. The movie told a darkly hilarious tale of a rogue American general who unilaterally starts a nuclear war because he believe fluoride in the public drinking water is a communist plot to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” The mad general was masterfully played by the once blacklisted actor Sterling Hayden. Anti-fluoridation was widely understood then to be an emblem of far right battiness. The John Birch Society was adamant that fluoridation was a communist mind control plot. If it was, it was a forlorn one. In proper doses all fluoride ever yielded was stronger teeth.
The Kooks have made some advances since. Today the so called Free State contingent in the New Hampshire legislature has gotten into the act about fluoride. We can at least be thankful that this body does its work in close proximity to the state mental hospital. But pick up the paper now and you will read that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to remove fluoride from public drinking water, linking it to lower IQ in kids. You may first think you are reading the Onion. Sometimes the apple falls very far from the tree.
November 20th marked the centennial of the birth of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Thoughts naturally turn to his newly prominent son and namesake. The Kennedys still stir powerful sentiments, perhaps felt more acutely by Irish Catholic Boomer Democrats. Bobby the Elder’s last years suggested an awakened social conscience, making his murder even more poignant than that of his president brother. The two martyred Kennedy brothers looked like movie stars, and the family still moves easily in show business circles. The Camelot myth took hold just as the intimate and visual medium of television came to dominate. Long after the dream of another Kennedy presidency died pols invoked and aped the Kennedy style. This is powerful stuff. We knew less about the foibles of our heroes in the 1960s. JFK and RFK are forever young in our memories, their potential limited only by imagination and longing.
Any NH primary challenge to an incumbent president is catnip to Granite State Pols and pundits. RFKJ’s run for president was a great story. If you approached this with an open mind, you have been appalled twice. Appalled by the early excesses of Kennedy critics. Appalled by RFKJ’s subsequent confirmation of many of the bad things said about him. The whole story is tragic and cautionary.
Some disclaimers: My brother’s wife is the sister of one of RFKJ’s closest associates, a publisher of his books, and a key operative in his projects. The GSO editorialized against the grotesque decision to deny Kennedy Secret Service protection in 2023. We stand by that. Kennedy was never my choice for president, but he seemed interesting and impressive in other ways. Not just his environmental work, but his wide ranging curiosity, independent cast of mind, decades long recovery from addiction, navigation of spasmatic dysphonia in a public role, and youthful friendship with the incomparable Alabama Judge Frank Johnson (an unsung hero of the Civil Rights era) and John Ray (the best mayor the nation’s Capitol never had). Some alternative to Biden seemed reasonable to many, and some of RFKJ’s critics and censors were insufferable. Some of the issues Kennedy long championed were laudable. Alas, and without rancor, I found his misguided positions on Ukraine and vaccines to be deal breakers.
RFKJ’s son Conor courageously fought the Russians in Ukraine. Conor’s father leans too heavily on defeatism, and rationalizations about Russian “encirclement.” Neither justify Putin’s aggression and barbarism, or wishful thinking about what they portend.
One ought not minimize the stress of any parent of an autistic child, or public angst about a new and deadly virus being managed, of necessity, on the fly. Science is indeed subject to ongoing inquiry. The capture of regulatory entities, by the very industries being regulated in the public interest, is all too real. This includes Big Food and Big Pharma. The corrosive effect of unlimited and untraceable money in our elections can not be overstated. All of these things can be true while Kennedy’s burden of proof regarding vaccines remains unmet. This is the case. Analyze this with great care and you will find conclusions that rest too heavily on speculation and innuendo. It is not persuasive to simply say “there is no proof vaccines don’t cause autism.” The demonization of Dr. Fauci is both baffling and implausible.
Biden’s plausibility as a presidential nominee in 2020 rested heavily on his intimations he would serve one term. He presented as the senior statesmen stepping into an emergency, a transitional figure. Affection and appreciation for Biden could not obscure his inability to communicate with the public effectively. Like it or not this is central to the modern presidency, and the stakes in 2024 left no margin for error. Joe Biden’s generous and avuncular personality was well suited to the civil discussion Kennedy and Congressman Dean Phillips first invited.
Instead the ferocity of the attacks on both Kennedy and Phillips displayed a disturbing impulse to censor. This is never a good way to refute bad ideas. The harshest attacks often came from party and legacy media pooh-bahs, preoccupied with their own status, unwilling to consider the role their own arrogance played in the rise of MAGA, and the crisis this has brought. Phillips was highly regarded enough to be on leadership track in congress. Then he was ostracized. Kennedy was a highly regarded and accomplished environmental lawyer, TIME magazine’s 1999 “Hero of the Environment,” and a hot prospect for the Obama EPA. Until his heresy.
Particularly unbecoming was the crass use of obviously anguished Kennedy family members who differed with RFKJ. Kennedy asked critics if they agree with every member of their family about everything? “In our family we can disagree and still love each other. I want that for my country as well,’ RFKJ said. Contrast this tone with the conduct at a July 2023 congressional hearing, where congressional hacks who never knew RFK presumed to berate his son about what his murdered father would have thought of him. Such tactics were excused in light of the threat Trump represented. However, it is beyond dispute now, and these people were warned then, that the danger was not in timely consideration of alternatives to Biden, but trying to put Biden across while shushing his most loyal supporters — telling them not to believe their own eyes and ears.
RFKJ’s tendency to think out loud, his resort to maladroit phrases and analogies, has made it easy for bad faith actors to caricature him. There was the canard that he is antisemitic. Even his wife took exception to his likening the plight of people avoiding vaccines to that of Anne Frank, and his musing about ethnic vulnerabilities to Covid were indeed maladroit, but hardly antisemitic. Ostensibly serious people excoriated Kennedy at length about such trivialities as his ‘brain worm,” his carting around a dead bear at unseemly length, and even where he wears shoes and socks. A so called “sex diary” was weaponized to depict him as some kind of monster. The accounting was actually part of a 12 step recovery program. Rambunctious youth, and complicated adult private lives are not a novelty in that family, in politics generally, or among many of his critics. While Kennedy invited some of the calumny, the alacrity with which it was pursued by people who sought to silence debate of his assertions gives pause about the pursuers too.
Dynastic politics are not unusual in America. Children of larger than life figures often struggle with unrealistic expectations. FDR was denounced by his Oyster Bay Republican cousins long before the RFKJ controversies. As the Second World War approached, the founding father of the Kennedy political dynasty was FDR’s isolationist ambassador to Britain. FDR’s widow remembered, and withheld support from JFK in 1960. The Kennedy campaign manager was Bobby the Elder, who was reported to have said that Mrs. Roosevelt was “just mad that the ambassador’s kids turned out better than her own.” The children of FDR indeed had mediocre careers, shopping for congressional districts, failing in bids for statewide office, and leaving a trail of divorces and minor scandals. In due course most of the boomer Kennedy’s did as well. Derided by some family members as “addicted to attention,” RFKJ did not seek public office until he was almost seventy. He didn’t shop for a congressional district. He supported the bids for office by his siblings and cousins. Given the attention he could have commanded, he labored in relative obscurity on his environmental issues. When his uncle and a number of cousins famously supported the mildly insurgent presidential bid of Barrack Obama, RFKJ stuck with Hillary. He took a pass on a run for New York attorney general in 2006, clearing the way for the comeback of his then recently minted ex brother in law Andrew Cuomo.
RFKJ has departed on occasion from family orthodoxy, most notably in his support for the parole of Sirhan Sirhan, who pled guilty to the 1968 murder of RFK. This might easily be dismissed as far fetched. Any compassionate person would understand the desire of most Kennedy family members to not stir this up.Nobody disputes that Sirhan was there, shooting off a gun that fired eight shots.
However, the autopsy said RFK was shot fatally from behind at point blank range. Sirhan was in front of him, not within point blank range. Perhaps RFK turned in the pandemonium. Perhaps memories are incorrect. Bullet fragments taken from RFK don’t match Sirhan’s gun. That remains unexplained. Important evidence was destroyed or went missing from police custody. Acoustics experts differ about whether recordings of the event indicate eight or thirteen shots were fired. Speculation abounds about a second shooter, a mystery woman in polka dot dress, and even Sirhan being hypnotized. Sirhan now claims to not remember the shooting. It is not far fetched to suspect Sirhan’s 1969 guilty plea was made under duress. Most of the family opposed Sirhan’s parole, but never address the legitimate questions the evidence raise. Like the late Dexter King, who met with James Earl Ray and stated his belief in Ray’s innocence of the murder of his father, RFKJ met Sirhan, favors his parole, and sympathizes with suspicions about the role of rogue elements in the U.S. government in this. This mystery is not likely to ever be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction. We know more now than we did earlier about government excesses during that era. Reputable people shared RFKJ’s doubts, including Allard Lowenstein and United Auto Workers official Paul Schrade (who was wounded in the RFK shooting). These people were not crackpots.
Sirhan is now 81 years old and frail. After many failed attempts, the California parole board granted him parole. This was according to criteria usually applied. Governor Gavin Newsom took the unusual step of overruling them.
In the end, it was the craven nature of RFKJ’s presidential bid that disappointed conclusively. A populist progressive challenge within the Democratic Party devolved into a lunge at the Libertarian nomination, and ended in a vanity independent candidacy financed by a manifestly unserious VP pick. At first cynically nurtured by such luminaries as Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon, in hopes of dividing Democrats, RFKJ was soon emphasizing dangerous and absurd positions that appealed more to MAGA’s tin foil hat brigades. As his poll numbers dropped, Kennedy made clumsy overtures to Trump and Harris, and in a crowning absurdity, endorsed the ever transactional Mr. Trump.
A year later, the regime’s defilement of the Kennedy Center feels profoundly symbolic. This was no ordinary political compromise. Many see it as a betrayal. This Kennedy traded credibility to become hostage to a criminal clown famous for firing people on TV. This regime’s conception of loyalty requires public recitation of obvious untruths, and seems a tenuous perch from which to accomplish anything worthwhile. Little has occurred the past ten months to offer much hope. Much of the Kennedy family has abandoned the cautious expressions of disagreement from 2023. It was jarring to see the video of Caroline Kennedy, this most circumspect member of this most tribal political family, denounce her cousin as a predator and con man, using language that goes far beyond mere statement of political differences. Reports of acrimonious conflicts at Ethel Kennedy’s funeral were heartbreaking. No outsider fully knows what goes on in private relationships or families. The Kennedys are a large family and have endured repeated trauma. Divergent processing of this should not scandalize anyone, or prompt harsh judgments from casual observers about who is, or is not, honoring their ancestors. It is legitimate to measure RFKJ’s political career, not against myths about his family, but based his own record.
It would be progress if this saga resulted in more mature public attitudes about celebrity, dynastic politics, and group think in families or political parties.