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How RFK Junior's Farcical Campaign Betrays The Kennedy Legacy

How RFK Junior's Farcical Campaign Betrays The Kennedy Legacy

When a neophyte named Edward Moore Kennedy first ran for the Senate in 1962 at barely 30 years old, his primary opponent delivered a debate quip that still echoes.

"If your name were Edward Moore," cracked Ed McCormack, then Massachusetts attorney general, "your candidacy would be a joke." Ted Kennedy won that primary, ascended to the Senate, and then spent a lifetime winning over skeptics with hard work and liberal commitment.

But that harsh zinger could score a bullseye on a different target now: Uncle Teddy's errant nephew Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., the grifting anti-vax lawyer and conspiracy monger whose campaign for president of the United States should be a joke — and certainly would be if his name were merely Robert Francis.

The difference is that RFK Jr., seeking public office for the first time, isn't 30. He is 70, a senior citizen, with a long and checkered record whose bright spots are overshadowed by menacing darkness. Far from upholding the values his family represents or the legacy of his martyred father and uncle, Bobby Jr. is an opportunist whose ambition, greed, dishonesty and arrogance have led him far astray.

There was a time many years ago when, as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy did useful work — usually under the tutelage of wiser heads — after he emerged from the drug addiction that followed his father's murder. At one point, I even wrote an admiring magazine profile of him.

But not too many years later, Bobby began the deceptive anti-vaccine campaign that has marked his moral and intellectual decline ever since. Having authored articles claiming childhood vaccines cause autism, he clung to their refuted arguments and falsified data long after the magazines were forced to withdraw them. He insists those lies are true to this day — and the anti-vax propaganda from which he profits is leaving American kids vulnerable to disease.

How would his late uncle John F. Kennedy, whose memory he so often invokes in his current campaign, react to what Bobby has done? In 1961, President Kennedy worried that resistance to the polio vaccine, which was still rather new, meant millions of schoolchildren might contract that deadly and crippling virus.

At a press conference that April, the president said: "I hope that the renewed drive this spring and summer to provide vaccination for all Americans, and particularly those who are young, will have the wholehearted support of every parent in America."

The following year, JFK pushed through the Vaccination Assistance Act, which financed immunization drives in every state for polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. That massive campaign established the federal government as the central authority in establishing and coordinating immunization policy for the nation — a role Robert Kennedy Jr. has persistently sought to undermine or even abolish, at potentially enormous cost.

Bobby's betrayal of his family goes further with every step he takes in this campaign, and in every direction. JFK and RFK were both known for surrounding themselves with advisers whose intelligence and experience drew admiration; Bobby is drawn to intellectually null sycophants and boobs, including a large contingent of crooks like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, as well as the anti-vax scammers, some of whom are outright fascists. These are people his father and uncle would have privately mocked and publicly shunned.

Even worse, Bobby has become a shill for Russian propaganda and an opponent of American military aid to Ukraine's besieged democracy. We don't have to wonder what his uncle would have said, because history tells us.

In his inaugural address, JFK uttered this indelible sentence: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Liberty doesn't mean surrendering to Putin and abandoning our allies.

Lately, Bobby has been sucking up to the Libertarian Party, whose platform would tear down all the achievements of his father and both of his uncles in civil rights, education, health care, environmental protection, food security and a score of essential programs. He wants their ballot line, and he is willing to promote their destructive ideology for his own benefit.

In this campaign, he has reversed the old epigram about history and its personages. In the first act, he presents a farce — and in the second act, should he help to elect Donald Trump, he will bring forth a tragedy.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom formerly known as The Investigative Fund, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center.


The 1968 RFK Speech On Violence That Joe Biden Should Deliver Now

The 1968 RFK Speech On Violence That Joe Biden Should Deliver Now

While Joe Biden's Democratic nomination acceptance speech was well-crafted, deftly delivered, and widely viewed (by many more Americans than watched Donald Trump's), the most important speech of his career—and of the 2020 Presidential Campaign—has already been written, and is just waiting for Biden's touch of humanity.

That speech, delivered by the late Robert F. Kennedy on April 5, 1968, at the Cleveland City Club, has long been overshadowed by the powerful and historic speech he made the night before in Indianapolis, when he learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Kennedy's extraordinarily emotional speech, sharing the pain of losing his own brother to an assassin's bullet, helped keep Indianapolis peaceful that night, when cities across the country erupted in grief, anger, and violence to the news of Dr.King's killing.

While the Indianapolis speech by RFK is available all over YouTube, and taught in speech, communications, and history programs across the country as a shining example of public speaking having an immediate, positive impact, the mostly forgotten address he delivered at the Cleveland City Club the following day—to a mostly wealthy, white audience — is far more relevant to this dangerous moment in our nation's history. The Biden-Harris campaign would be wise to adapt it for delivery immediately, in a troubled American city like Kenosha or Minneapolis.

The Biden-Harris team can get the full text of RFK's speech from the John F, Kennedy Library archives (or use this text, with some italicized additions and transitions of my own).:

…. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. (The killing of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, and the shooting of Jacob Blake are but the most current examples).

This is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands, (and of the clearly preventable deaths of more than 180,000 of our fellow Americans by a current killer called COVID.)

We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire (and to turn those deadly weapons on schools filled with young children, concerts, or stores filled with friends and neighbors, or on crowds of law-abiding Americans of all ages, backgrounds and skin color, exercising their Constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly).

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others (as Donald Trump did in 1989, when he took out full-page newspaper ads in NYC advocating the death penalty, for five young men of color who were later aquitted by DNA evidence of committing the crime for which they served years in prison). Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Kennedy continued before the packed Cleveland City Club audience, sounding as if he was eerily foreshadowing the rise of Trump and his supporters among Q-Anon, the Boogaloo boys, and others:

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Then Kennedy, like many citizens participating in today's Black Lives Matter movement, spoke eloquently of systemic, institutional racism in the United States:

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

… When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies - to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. (That doesn't reflect the standard of equal justice under law in this democracy.)

We learn… to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet, we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

(Pay attention, Donald Trump—this part is all about you.)

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

But, perhaps, we can remember (the teachings of all the great religions of the world): That those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness…

(Nothing else matters. That's why we each must rise to meet this moment.)



American Politics Is Very Imitative, So Remember — And Beware

American Politics Is Very Imitative, So Remember — And Beware

It’s a better than even bet that in Massachusetts today there is more than one ambitious young Democratic candidate running for local office who is deliberately pronouncing the word “again” so that it rhymes with “a pain.” Why, you logically ask? Because that’s how the martyred John F. Kennedy pronounced “again.” American politics and campaigns are frankly imitative.

Half a century ago, in 1968, then-presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, discarded his suit jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves and waded into the campaign crowds who came to see him. The unspoken message was clear: This leader in shirtsleeves was a regular guy, unpretentious, ready to go to work and even, if pushed too hard, prepared to defend, mano a mano, the less powerful against the Rich Bully.

How many times have we seen the candidate in her campaign TV spot listening attentively to children or to retirees signaling to us voters that this candidate truly cares about the next generation and also honors the older generation? Then there are the obligatory images of the candidate of the people (who may actually be on his way to a high-number fundraiser with hedge fund managers) smiling comfortably and respectfully in the company of blue-collar workers in hard hats or firefighters or cops; I’m a regular Joe at home with ordinary Americans who, unlike me, actually shower after work instead of before.

Why do we see these canned and unoriginal political TV spots year after year? Because they work and politics is imitative. That may be insulting to us voters’ intelligence, but it is usually not a threat to the nation. What can be a threat to the nation and to our public life is when a candidate runs and wins and becomes a major national force the way that US Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI)., did when on Feb. 9, 1950, he told a Republican party dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 … a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy at the State Department.” In Salt Lake City, McCarthy’s number of communists would be 81; in Reno, Nevada, it was 57.

So politically powerful did McCarthy become leading the Red Scare that Dwight Eisenhower, a national hero, failed during the 1952 campaign in Milwaukee to defend publicly his close friend and Army chief of staff General George Marshall — who served as secretary of state and received the Nobel Prize for authoring the Marshall Plan that rebuilt a war-devastated Europe and stopped Soviet aggression — after McCarthy had falsely accused Marshall of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Baseless charges and unfounded accusations of treason were Joe McCarthy’s M.O. Nobody on his “list” was ever arrested for treason. The guilt of no alleged spy was ever confirmed, but dozens of would-be Joe McCarthys ran as his disciples and imitators across the country, and too many won ruining the lives of American citizens with vicious unsubstantiated charges. McCarthy made cowards of all but a handful of U.S. senators. Sound a little familiar in America 2019?

If anyone still wants to know why the 2020 presidential campaign matters so greatly, just understand what the reelection of Donald Trump would mean to American political life and to the hundreds of ambitious young politicians who would rationally, if not admirably, conclude, “I see. That’s how you run and you win.” American politics is, do not forget, highly imitative.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Those Were The Days On Nantucket Sound

Those Were The Days On Nantucket Sound

The new memoir about the Kennedys, “The Nine of Us,” is a lyrical looking glass into a time that feels forever lost — when the richest class felt a deep obligation to give back to the people, to serve in the military and politics. The “to whom much is given, much us expected” motto was a mantra in the Kennedy summer compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Excellence in all things was encouraged, from riding to sailing to writing thank you notes. On these pages, a clear-eyed sister tells the tale of their younger, vibrant selves.

The scene is set from the beginning, a sharp contrast from the gaudy gold and chrome Trump Tower:

“The white house looked over the sea … an overgrown Cape Cod cottage with white wooden shingles and black shutters. … The white house was full of activity, chatter and laughter. Full of books on shelves and sports gear in closets. And especially full of children.”

Oh, it brings back the old days, of New England zest and camaraderie, a ready wit and willingness to get skin in the game. Touch football, anyone?

Then there were debates over dinner — you had to be scrubbed and dressed for dinner — on the raging issues of the day. “What would you do if you were president,” their father drilled them. Jack, the lover of history and books, would be 99 years old today. The striking Joe, the oldest, was the one groomed for the job, but he volunteered for a dangerous mission in World War II and got blown from the sky. He was the first to shatter the Kennedy family idyll. Jack, in a way, got elected to run by his family first. The ironic, impossibly cool Jack almost had no choice, as the second oldest son.

The author Jean Kennedy Smith is the only living one of the nine Kennedys born between the teens, ’20s and ’30s. At 88, the former ambassador to Ireland remained as the key holder of certain stories and insights about their youth, all nine of them. She and the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy were the youngest, and her character portraits of her sisters, brothers and parents come from that vantage point.

Who knew that the intense Bobby had a pink and black spotted pig named Porky that went with him everywhere? He also tended to rabbits, all manner of animals and made friends easily. “You have a lot on the ball,” his father Joe wrote to his third-oldest son.

A charmed moment is a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a stamp collector, to young Bobby, a fellow philatelist: “Perhaps sometime when you are in Washington you will come in and let me show you my collection.” Indeed, the boy did.

Smith suggests that her brother Bobby was the secret favorite of her parents, Rose and Joe Kennedy, Irish-Catholic Boston stock. Rose’s father, Honey “Fitz” Fitzgerald was the beloved mayor of Boston — political royalty.

Singing “Sweet Adeline” and reciting the classic “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” poem was the stuff of their childhood.

Joe’s dying young was followed by their sister “Kick,” a lively presence who married an Englishman destined to be a duke. She, too, died young in a plane crash. Eunice was “sporty” and such a force she might have been president if she wasn’t a girl. She founded the Special Olympics.

There are London days in Jean’s teens, as father Joe served as the ambassador to the Court of St. James (and gave Roosevelt bad advice about Germany and staying out of the war).

Nothing but the best might as well be written between the lines. Yet the Kennedys have a gift of being inclusive in their exuberant privilege, not running rampant with it simply for vainglory. You feel that you, too, are sailing on Nantucket Sound that summer day. Teddy, with the sweetest social nature, became a great sailor till nearly the end of his days, at age 77. He was the only brother to “comb gray hair,” as the elegiac Irish line goes. The artist Jamie Wyeth painted his friend Teddy sailing into the light.

Jack’s light touch comes through a letter to Jeannie: “I am most pleased to hear from you and am fully conscious of the honor.”

Call me nostalgic, because that’s exactly what I am this Thanksgiving.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

IMAGE: AFP Photo