Robert and Cody continue the epic tale of Bobby Kennedy Jr, falconer and rotting animal carcass connoisseur.
Also media.
Oh god, yeah, it's Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that just made you reconsider listening to this podcast, because that's not an appropriate sound to make for a bunch of people driving to work gardening with their kids in the yard. You know, I apologize for that. We're not going to go back. You can't edit audio, you know, it's impossible. You know, if if that dream were real, if you could, by god, we would change this podcast.
Oh my god, if only there's there's so many things would be different if we could edit audio and video.
What's exciting, Robert is that we may or may not release video at some point at an undisclosed time, maybe maybe not allegedly, who knows.
So we can edit that.
Finally, the listeners will get to see Cody and I make faces. Maybe that were.
Maybe maybe include those were really just just some honest reactions.
I really enjoyed Cody's Sayce, that's what I was saying, Yeah, yeah, or maybe we'll all get to hm. I don't want to make any of those jokes. Let's move on, Cody, how are we feeling about Bobby Kennedy? You know, as we as we roll in depart two right now, he's not a bad guy, you know.
My feeling is that he never had a chance.
Yeah right, that is the Bastardrey here is primarily not because again he is admitted to sexually basically admitted to sexually assaulting people. So I'm not trying to whitewash rfkguni'or either, but like, the primary bastard of the story is the concept of the Kennesty dynasty and what it does.
Yeah, not good, no good, never had a chance, really bad.
Really bad. Just the it's like if you if it's like scientists in the lab, we're trying to cook up the worst way to raise people. I just watched the movie They Cloned Tyrone, which is I don't want to like spoil it for you, but excellent excellent, really really really really good movie, and the Kennedys kind of feel like the reverse of that premise. If instead of, you know, I don't know how to say, this is going to bed, but it's like somebody, it's like a bunch of creepy scientists we're trying to like design a ruling dynasty in a lab and just completely fucked up at it, you know, like the experiment did not work.
Or like a more ambitious like dog tooth.
Yeah, I don't know.
Let's just like raise our kids in the most like fucked up way possible.
Yeah, yeah, I think about like those those like those fucking nerds who keep winding up in the media. Every like three months, the news will decide, let's have a little circus around these, like we have to have as many kids as possible because we're exceptionally smart people, and yeah, we've got to. We have a responsibility. And I hit my kids, but for science reasons, you know.
And then you ask them for the science reasons and they're like, I saw a tiger do it once.
There kids, Man, what else do you when they get sick? Do you eat your young because I have seen a cat do that. I have seen it eat its own kittens because the kitten was ill. Are you doing that? Are you going to eat your sick kids so that predators don't smell them? You know, No, you're not doing that because we don't take parenting advice from tigers.
Data points from tigers. H We're never gonna this is I mean, I last episode, I kept wanting to like bring them up because this is just that, or we got to as many as possible. Our army is being created by us, and there our children.
All I hope, and I again, this is the not to whitewash RFK Junior. But I actually walked away, very rare for me. But I walked away more sympathetic towards him than I was, because it's just not again not that he he doesn't have agency and the bad things he's done. But my god, how could this story have ended?
Well? Well, yeah, I mean it's the you know, it's how you create empathy for like villains in stories like well, if you know their backstory, then you stand how they got that way. It doesn't excuse their actions at that point, but yeah, you're like, oh man.
Yeah, it honestly makes them scarier. And you know, I talk about like the sympathetic young Hitler a lot, but like another young Hitler story is when he was a young man living independently as like a poor artist in Vienna. He was kept afloat by his dad's old government pension, which he gave up which rendered him completely destinut because his sister had a kid and she needed the money. More you can you can find in the Hitler story a truly selfless act because he wasn't always destined to be fucking Hitler, and you kind of have to accept that with most of them.
No one's destined to be.
There's some five year olds out there torturing cats and stuff. Maybe those people, right, Maybe, maybe it happens occasionally, but that's not the story we're talking about today for sure. No, he loves animals, Yeah, he loves them. He did maybe kill that endangered turtle, but you know, someone just stopped him. That was the adults. And at this point Sergeant Schreiver shouldn't have let him steal it. Endangered turtle.
Probably shouldn't let him do that. Maybe that was maybe that was the start, maybe the start of it all.
It's just like, well, you know, your uncle Jess died. Sure abduct come.
On, here you go.
He's got plenty of them. Yeah, speaking of things Africa, it's got a lot of probably podcasts cold opens, and this podcast cold Open is done.
It's time to warm it up.
That's right, that's right.
Wasn't a great cody.
Band. If you send me that audio file, I will turn that into a hit. Yeah, he's already a hit.
You can turn that into a hit. Along with that clip we found of Rush Limbaugh saying, bust female vaginal walls. Cody, that's a great one. It's in the Doctor Laura episodes. You gonna love it, really good stuff, really good.
Actually you love it.
It's really horrible thing to hear.
Yeah.
On the day his dad died, Bobby Junior was at his boarding school, Georgetown Prep, which was run by Jesuits and had a reputation for being one of those places you sent rich boys to turn them into responsible members of the power elite. Bobby was sleeping in his dorm room when his dad was assassinated and was woken by one of the one of the fathers or whatever. I don't know if it's a father, if it's like more of a monk type deal. But one of the Jesuits guys comes down and is like, hey, a chartered car has come for you in the night. I'm not gonna explain why, but you probably you're a Kennedy at this point you probably can have say a bad thing happened.
The pattern is establishing itself.
Yeah, So he is taken to the Kennedy compound at Hickory Hill. The whole experience is obviously his dad got shot to death. Right, that's traumatic. You know, there's no way for that not to be traumatic. Bobby and his siblings are ushered in to see their father before, like while he's still technically alive. But like, and that's like a hitty. I don't know, I don't know. I can't say that's the wrong thing to do, yeah, or a right.
Thing, but like what condition, Like how how responsive is he? Is That going to be more traumatic?
But still seeing him at some point where he's technically alived is that, I don't know, everyone's different. What definitely does not help is that this whole period, every moment of this where they're outside the compound and outside of that hospital room, they're surrounded by press right to an extent that like even today is probably pretty rare, right, Like, the sheer degree of attention on them is has to make this even harder to handle, right than just having your dad shot to death in public? They are subjected to a massive public show of mourning at the funeral of their dad. There's like a hobo march for RFK because he was such like a so beloved by so many like poor and struggling people, right like he really is. And again you can. We can argue, like how fair is it? There's some bad stuff he did, but like that that love is real, you know, and that contributes to how RFK Junior and his siblings are processing all of this. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's moms kind of collapses after her husband gets murdered. And I have a lot of criticisms of Ethyl, but like, again, you got eleven kids and your husband gets shot to death. Sure, I mean, like what do you who?
Like, what are you gonna do? Like it's so easy to judge how people react to these sort of things, but.
What's the good reaction? It's not what she did, But I can't say that like I would have done better as Ethyl, you know. The big change, the biggest difference between how the Kennedy family as a unit reacts to JFK getting shot. I was gonna say JFK getting blown away? But how many How any more Billy Joel references are necessary in this episode? Probably one more, but maybe not that one.
Only one more.
But there's a big difference between how the family reacts to JFK getting killed and to RFK getting killed. Because when JFK gets killed, RFK is there and he is there to re mold the family around him and make them feel like we still have a pretty bright future. We're going to move forward. That's not there after he dies, right Teddy Kennedy is kind of the family patriarch at this point, and he tries this is not Teddy will become a more capable and responsible person. He is not at this point. So we will talk about and like, you know, to a little bit of like like how could he be? Like what what do you do here? Right? Like you have had to the two patriarchs of the family and like a two or three like not to like but like within very shorter it's like a four year period.
It's a very short period.
Yeah, assassinated right Like.
And at that point you're like, is are we all going to get assassinated? Like what's like?
What is if I'm Teddy? What I'm was like? Should we keep doing this?
Should like rich family plan?
What is this? Seems like this might have been a really bad plan?
What are you doing? Yeah?
One of the Kennedy cousins, who's you know in the compound of the family later recalled to Horowitson Callier for there it was so different from Jack's death, there had been a coming together. Uncle Bobby had seen to that in a strange way. We'd felt even more like Kennedy's than ever, proud of what Jack had been, determined that our time would come again. But once Uncle Bobby died, there was just this sense of splitting apart. RFK Junior was only an occasional presence at the Kennedy compound in Hickory Hill at that point. Ethel kind one of the ways she reacts to RFK getting killed is she is kind of permanently angry at her son's like forever and in a way that's really hard to forgive, and that must have been devastating to them. The youngest children and girls were, according to Colerin Horowitz, immune to her temper. She's not shitty to her girls, she's not shitty to the little kids, but she is really bad to Joe, Bobby Junior, and David. Right quote, she told Joe he must be the man of the house now and allowed him to sit in his dead father's chair at the dinner table. But when he hit his younger sister Carrie for making noise, she gave him the infantile punishment of having to walk up and down the stairs one hundred times times. Later, Joe went into the yard and in a moment of tenderness, took the hands of his younger brothers and sisters and began to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, their father's favorite song. Meanwhile, Ethel kept saying to Bobby Junior and David get out of here, as if the house itself, with all the pictures of family triumphs, where a sanctuary. They defiled with their presence, and you've got here is these kids are reacting to their uncle and dad getting shot. These boys by acting out. Joe, who's the oldest, is like being kind of a bully. He hits his younger siblings a lot. You know, he like tackles let me fire. But like that's not abnormal, it's not great. It's certain something you got. You want to deal with that behavior, you don't want to ignore it. But like you're not a bad person as a twelve year old boy something like that, because like that is how you react.
That's an indicator that he's dealing with something and going through it. Not that like he needs to be like the target of your ire and your Yeah, like everything that your feeling shouldn't be targeted at the at these kids.
And Ethel's only response is your disgrace the family, Like, how fucking dare you get the hell out of here?
Right?
That is her go to parenting move for the boys. Bobby Junior also acts out constantly and his particular style he's less violent, but he seems to think the best way for him to get attention. And nobody's really got time to give attention to Bobby Junior, right, he has like servants and stuff. He gets like technically attention, but not from the people he needs it from, right, And he tries to get it by playing pranks.
And he this is say yeah, it sounds like he would do yeah, yeah.
He's a pranker, and he does one of these. He plays a prank at his dad's memorial. So there's a neighbor and friend of the family, Philip Kirby, who's like this rich kid who lives nearby. He's part of the memorial service for RFK and he recalls like before it starts, the priest gives him a bell to ring during the liturgy, and the priest says like, I'll touch you in the shoulder when it's time for you to ring it right so you don't time it wrong. And Bobby starts tapping him randomly during the services a bit, so he rings the bell when there's not supposed to be any kind of music or noise. And like Kirby, this is like the biggest funeral and national history at least since JFK. He is like weeping in tears because he has fucked this up. And he looks back and he sees RFK Junior holding in laughter because it's a very little kid thing to do. It is also on the mean side.
Oh yes, I mean if you're if you're a kid, you're not going to really be able to Christ.
You're not a moral actor in the same way.
Right right? But man, that yuy sorry Phillips, Oh man.
The pranks continued. A week after his dad's funeral, David Kennedy, the younger of the Kennedy of this generation Kennedy brothers, has a birthday. This is obviously a fragile time for everybody, the first birthday for one of Rfk's sons. After his death, Bobby Junior decides the right thing to do is to poison everybody, and I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from Bihacker for Jerry opp and iimer here Bobby had spiked everyone's milk with a laxative. Infuriated, his mother demanded, just leave home, get out of my life.
Choice, and I mean, aren't going well.
It's very bad behavior to poison your family. You know, there's certainly a punishment. That's now we can always tell what kind of parents do get away with poisoning the family. But get out of my life. What a devastating thing to say to your child, after your after his data set.
Yeah, right, at that point, it's like, I mean, just let me get into politics and wait a few years and I will, like.
Fucking he is. These boys are all abandonment issues. The guy like that is that is the Kennedy boys of this generation. Uh. Soon after, possibly to make up for the ruined party, ethel flies the kids with Ted Kennedy because again he's he's around a lot, he's kind of in the sometimes trying to be a father. He's also very young. He's a party boy. He is not mature enough to be responsible, and like, really, it's kind of unreasonable to expect a man of that is to suddenly take on the duties of being the head of this family of kids who aren't yours, who belong to your murdered brother. That's a lot to ask of Ted. But he doesn't do a great job at it, right, He does seem to be trying very hard. Ethel takes them all on this chartered boat ride. Right, And during this chartered boat trip, Ethel's moods swung wildly and RFK Junior is, as usual, pushing boundaries and fucking around with his siblings. Ethel grew furious at him and David and dragged them both below decks and beats them with a hair brush. This is the first time something like this has happened. I don't think she had been physically violent with them before. It is a really like searing moment for OURFK Junior and for David. Yeah, they remember it course. Yeah. And again, you know, on Ethyl's side of things, it's not good to do this. I might say that, like, yeah, you can't expect any kind of perfectly rational behavior from a woman in the situation, but this has.
A horrible and beyond the pills.
Yeah, yeah, the beating. I think we've crossed the line from just saying.
So it wasn't it was the first time? Was it the last time? Like? Did they become a pattern after that? I don't think it's just like, yeah.
I don't get the impression that she is a present enough parent for there who have been much many patterns at all, other than she repeatedly tells them to leave, get out of here. You're not welcome at home. That is the big pattern, is her saying, get out of here. You are no longer welcome at the family compound. You're no longer welome. Like Bobby's gonna spend time like hiding out, like camping and hiding and like outbuildings and stuff because he's not supposed to be there. He spends a lot of his childhood just like living with other families who are kind of adjacent to the Kennedys. Yeah, it's it's messed up, right.
Not gonna be good.
Yeah yeah. Ethel only expresses more and more frustration with her kids. After this, She exiles Bobby Junior back to a private school, this time a new one, a place called Millbrook. And Millbrook is you're routched to rest of development, right obviously you did? You know how? Like fucking Buster is he went to that school Milford. Milford is a parody of Millbrook, right, it could because this is the place where like, not just the sons of the rich and famous are sent, but it's the sons that are having problems, right, You send them there to get disciplined and to get like straightened out.
Right.
One teacher described it as quote a place where they're rich and famous would tuck their children away.
Right.
If you're wondering what that was a reference to, it's a reference to Millbrook. RFK Junior is just one of what would become a long line of rich boys with behavioral problems whose parents didn't want to deal with them full time. And Millbrook is also located very near the mansion where Timothy Leary kept all of his acid and his friends on acid, and drugs are not hard to come by for Millbrook kids. And it's this unique situation of people don't really know about drugs. There's like a vague understanding like maybe of marijuana, but even then that's not very visible, and like LSD is so fucking new, and so adults don't really know. They just noticed like, wow, these kids are behaving really weird, and they don't really notice that, Like, yeah, Bobby Kennedy is just always fucking on drugs. Now, Like from this point forward, he is always on drugs, you know. And it's funny because it seems like at this point mostly it's pot Oppenheimer, because he's going to wind up addicted to heroin. Oppenheimer treats pot like heroin. And his biography of Bobby where he's like and he was getting every day, And I was like, yeah, he's fifteen, you know, Like I know a lot like half of the people I know. I'm not saying you should You shouldn't do drugs until you're older. Kids, Wait a little, my opinion.
You've brain developed and stuff and all that.
How to say, ninety plus percent of people who smoke pot when they're sixteen, fifteen, seventeen, Like it's fine, you know, yeah, Okay, you'll be okay, people generally are. Bobby is not, though I will say that, But I don't know that I'm gonna blame the drugs. I think the drugs are more a symptom of this kid's disastrous early life. Yeah, being a Kennedy and having just lost his dad. None of the adults at Millbrook seem to have known how to handle him, Like, how do we discipline this kid. We're kind of now marketing a lot on the fact that a Kennedy goes here. It's kind of a selling point to other rich families. So like there's no He kind of comes and goes as he pleases, and he spends most of his free time getting fucked up or hunting small animals with his hawk. Morgan le Fay, his primary hobby is taking acid and going hawking, like hunting with his hawk.
So he got to bring his hawk.
He does get to bring his hawk. His hawk is with him all the time. It is always in the room. People who live with him is like roommates at these boarding schools say that there are just birds shitting everywhere all the time. Like if you are living with Bobby Kennedy, there's bird shit everywhere constantly because he is never far from his fucking bird. It's a weird guy. He loves his a weird guy. During this period of time, there is one adult who is a consistent presence in RFK Junior's life, and it's a guy named Limb Billings. And uh, we will talk about old Limb, but first Cody, speaking of Billings. Yeah, get your billings from the companies that support our podcast by sending them your money.
Yeah, I'm getting my money out right now.
Yeah, Limb those billings on over to them, you know, lim them out. Limit to win it. Anyway, We're done. Who's at.
Back?
So? Limb Billings was a former New York ad executive who had been very deep friends. He's like JFK's oldest friend and like so close that Joe Kennedy, who is not like the most emotional man in the world, considers Limb basically part of the family. Right, he has a house or he has a room at the Kennedy compound. Right, He's that close with the family. And he is also gay. He is in love with JFK. There are a lot of rumors that swirl around whether or not they had any kind of physical relationship. I don't actually think there's any evidence of it. It seems like the kind of thing that was not uncommon with a lot of particularly very prominent gay in back then. We're like, I am in love with this person, and my love take the form since there's no kind of relationship that's possible, maybe, you know, obviously they're probably not actually interested in reciprocating it that way, but I become basically like their closest confidant. I'm always watching out for them. I'm the guy who is.
Like, yeah, constant companion, constant buddy, who Yeah.
Yeah. There's a movie I like to talk about a lot, if Dot Dot Dot, which is the first Malcolm McDowell movie, and the it's.
A movie that's not the Imaginary Friends movie from the twisted mind of John Krasinski. New that's called If as well.
That's also called IF much worse movie. This If is an absolutely like incredible piece of cinema that everyone should watch. It is about a British boarding school. It's one of my favorite films. And McDowell has said later that, like, yeah, we didn't of the director. I didn't know at the time that he was gay, but now I can see that he was. And his way of like kind of making love to me was the way that he shot me right when he was filming me. You know, I think about that one. I think of Limb.
Billings right, Yeah, yeah, well yeah, I just have that it's like an intense like attraction admiration, but yeah, like you can't express it in the way you want to, so you find, yeah, like socially acceptable ways to.
Do exactly exactly, and that's kind of Lim. And Lim is obviously absolutely shattered by the jfk assassination. Right like this destroys him as a person. He starts drinking heavily. He's never a really functional adult right after this point. Now, depending on who you read, opinions on limb very Jerry Oppenheimer, who published the twenty fifteen biography of RFK Junior, is incredibly homophobic, and he I kept waiting for there to be like some evidence that Lim had abused RFK Junior had done something really bad, but like he really just seems to want us to be shocked by the fact that Lim was gay and see that as inherently sinister. He also alleges that Lim enabled Bobby's drug use. From what I have read in other sources, I kind of think it was the opposite. Lim is never fully functional after JFK dies. He becomes an alcoholic and when RFK Junior starts doing drugs, Lim, as the adult in this situation, doesn't stop him, and he should have, does not attempt to limit his access to drugs at all, but he starts doing them, and I don't think he's pushing RFK Junior. I think he is just like, yeah, sure, why the fuck not? Right right now? The fact that Lim is gay and in love with Jack with JFK shouldn't be totally dismissed though, not because he abused Bobby, but because I think he may have put added pressure on him to follow his uncle Jack. There's an allegation that I think probably does have legs that he is kind of trying to groom Bobby into being like JFK and kind of for a sweet reason of he like he wants his dead best friend back, you know, like it.
It's a very right right, it's got to exist again.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a very sad story, but not one that I think. I don't see Lim as like a villain now. Obviously he's not the best influence to be the one adult in Bobby's life.
Yeah, this seems unhealthy.
Yeah yeah, but it's unhealthy because everyone is just caught in this fucking poison matrix that is the Kennedy family legacy. Right in the book after Camelot, Bobby told author Jay Randy Tara Borelli quote In many ways, Lim was a father to me, and he was the best friend I will ever have. I have also read interviews with RFK Junior's brothers, I think with David, where David was like, yeah, it's kind of jealous of Bobby because like, none of us had any male authority figure, any adults, male adults interested in us after Dad died. Right, he got Lim and he was the only one right, as opposed to what Oppendheimer said of him being the sinister for us that like, well, at least RFK Jr.
Had somebody had some right, whether it's a role model or just some sort of guardian, some sort of gud and some sort of Yeah.
And as a spoiler, David's story is going to end a lotch faster and a lot worse than RFK Junior stuff. So maybe Lim having something kept him from spending out as much.
I don't know.
That said, it is beyond arguing that Lim is not what most people would call a responsible guardian. That said, any kind of normal childhood for Bobby was completely off the table at this point. Lim after RFK dies, he's on safari when JFK dies, and after RFK gets killed, Lim takes him on us. Sorry, your dad died Safari.
Maybe we'll get you another turtle.
Who knows, Yeah, get you another turtle. I've spent my time expressing issues with Oppenheimer's biography, but I do think his description of this trip, this second death Safari, can FaZe how damned weird it was. With professional thirty five millimeter cameras, Bobby and Billings documented their African adventure, which also included a rafting trip in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, and oddly, a VIP visit to a nightclub to watch the gyrations of a bevy of belly dancers hosted by members of the Egyptian Supreme Court, an evening of salacious interest more to the hormonal adolescent than to his gay, middle aged saparone. The Safari photos became quite lucrative because, at that time, in the wake of the latest Kennedy tragedy, anything a Camelot air did became front page media. Father aware of the demand building's broker to deal with Life magazine for an interview about their adventure and for the photos. The questionable story was put out that young Bobby wanted to use the money to build a memorial to his father, in the Serengeti National Park and uh yeah, the pictures sell for a lot of money. He gets to watch a what sounds like almost a strip tease put on by the Egyptian Supreme Court.
A burlesque sort of situation, just.
A baffling childhood Yeah. Yeah, if you've met members of the Egyptian Supreme Court, you have an odd child.
Yeah. It's just like this weird like Western rosie sort of like cript celebration, yeah, ring like thing. Yeah. Yeah.
It is very Game of Thrones in a lot of ways.
Right. Yeah.
So when they get back home from this very strange Safari, Bobby continues doing shitloads of drugs and most consequentially introducing his brothers to drugs, and he does not limit himself to just dosing them. One of the people who sold acid to Bobby was a neighbor kid, John Kelly, who recalled that Bobby fed doses of acid to his parakeet. He soon expanded to other drugs, like mescaline, which he pushed his younger brother David to try. David was scared. David did not want to experiment with drugs, with psychedelics, you know, it certainly wasn't ready as soon as Bobby was. But Bobby basically like bullies him kind of until he takes a shitload of mescaline. And David is a young boy too young to be doing shitloads of mescaline who has lost his dad and is traumatized, and that can make a trip nocked. He has a bad time of it, right, and Kelly recalls that Bobby's instinct seems to be to increase his younger to fuck with his younger brother, right when so David hallucinates that Bobby's laying like or standing up against like a bush or something, and there's leaves pressing against him, and David hallucinates that the leaves are sharp, and he's like, Bobby, get away, they'll cut you. And Bobby laughs and he plunges into the leaves and then pretends he's been impaled and fakes his own yes, and this prompts David to cry, you're dying just like daddy.
Oh god, oh boy, Oh no, that's so bad.
Oh Bobby, that's.
Like so bad, like being on that drug. And no, he thought that was really happening.
And guess guess which Kennedy is gonna wind up dying up a drug overdose.
That's such a fucked up d D David.
Yeah, real bad stuff, very bad behavior. Don't do that, like lean into.
To pretend that you are especially not just like to pretend that, Oh my god, it's so fucked up.
Yeah, one of the weird things. You know how America has kind of processed nine to eleven eventually by making a shipload of nine to eleven jokes. Bobby and his generation of Kennedy's processed the assassinations by making a lot of Dead Kennedy jokes, like more, even more than the band The Dead Kennedy's death, if actually ever made jokes, is just the name of the band anyway. The closest the Kennedy's had to an heir apparent was Ted Kennedy, who is a senator, who becomes a senator and is you know somebody do people do still think? You know, in the wake of rfk's death, Hey, he could be the president. You know, he's pretty good looking, smart, he's obviously starting to have success in politics. But within a year of rfk's demise, Ted is involved in the infamous chap Equitic incident, which fucking Republicans would not stop talking about, and it is a pretty bad situation. He is probably drunk, he drives off of a bridge, he abandons his the crash afterwards, and he abandons his twenty eight year old passenger, Mary Joe Kopekney, who drowns. Right, you know, the best case scenario is that Ted is so drunk that he's not really aware of what he's doing. I guess some people will argue it was just an accident. But he leaves afterwards and he goes to sleep, and it's like, is bad he does not he does a bad thing.
He does a bad thing.
I will say, Yeah, Now this is again like I don't know how you want to. We're not going to dissect fucking chap equitdic God. You can find so much of that if you really want to. What matters to us today is that it more or less punctures heads shot at the presidency, right, That is not really going to be in the concresce.
Yeah, yeah, I kind of took them out of that.
Now you could argue, and I think this is the strongest argument that he is probably the best politician in terms of technical skill, of any of his generation. Of the Kennedy's right, some of this is just because he's alive long enough to really have a full political career. But he's a very influential man in Congress. He winds up being kind of like, arguably most influential Democrat in Congress for a significant period of time. And that's you know, a lot for a family for most people. But that is a far cry from the vision Joe Kennedy had for his family, and even further from the rosy image of Camelot perpetuated in the public memory. Talk about a Kennedy curse had been a thing for about as long as anyone in the family could remember, but once RFK died, it went from something to and kind of a half joke sort of deal to something the upcoming generation felt deep within their bones as destiny. Even Joe Kennedy, the man whose ambition had started this all, seemed to feel a sense of woe at what he now saw coming for his grandchildren. Chris Lawfer, JFK's nephew, later claimed, sometimes Grandpa would look at us as if he wanted to say something. His mouth would move sort of convulsively, as if some words were trying to get out. Then this cloudy look would come over his eyes and he'd slouched down into his wheelchair and the attendant would wheel him off and that in the that biography, Maybe it was just he you know, he was stroking out, he couldn't come. Maybe it's that he's maybe he regretted, like, oh, I may my entire family to calamity.
Yeah, maybe sorry for the pressure I yeah created for you, all.
Of this, all of these terrible, terrible things. And he does, he lives.
You know.
It's one of those things like I don't know if Joe Kennedy made a deal with a devil or some sort of like House of Usher, asked cosmic evil right to have his success and then have it all ripped away when his children die at the last moment of his life. But that's kind of what happens, right. He lives long enough to see Chap equittic and then he fucking drops right after that.
You know. Yeah, he made some sort of deal and it led to the curse.
It led to the curse.
Part of it was you gotta kind of you gotta watch, you gotta watch some of it. Yeah, you're done.
Yeah he made it. And look he made some good calls, you know, making Mark Hamill the family Lawyer, great move House of Usher, good show. Watch it. Oh it's oh my god, it's an incredible Mark Campbell performance. Yeah, really really good show. Really good show. Everyone else is playing essentially like a Poe character, and Mark Hamill is playing like a Lovecraft protagonist. It's quite good. It's quite interesting, all right. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. So I will say, you know, you've got that one picture from the Collier in Horowitz book, where Grandpa maybe started to regret some of his decisions. In his biography of RFK Junior, Oppenheimer also talks to a significant number of people who are around the family and in the family at this point. Pet's a darker picture of what Joe mostly tried to pass on to his grandchildren, his twin family mantras where Kennedy's don't cry and Kennedy's don't complain, which is whatever else not going to help you process everything that's happened to them.
If Kennedys do die, yeah, you might want those other two things.
Actually they might need to cry. Maybe some complaints are warranted. Yeah, but he does live long enough to see his blessings turn into curses. His three most prominent sons dead because Joe died a while ago, his remaining son disgraced, and the vast entitled brood that he had helped create turn into a dynasty hurdling inefftably towards doom when he finally passed on November eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Bobby by this point seemed to show less inclination to follow his dad into politics and decidedly more of a bent to being a we might call like a I got mild gangster, you know, like a like a kind of adorable child gangster, because he has in this period formed a street gang focused or into the street game, made up entirely of Kennedy's and their friends, who are also very rich kids from this incredibly rich neighborhood with a family compound is located. They call themselves the Hannas port Terrors, the HPTs as we'll call them.
The assumptions, the assumptions.
So Joe Bobby Kennedy's got a street gang, and initially it's just his older brother Joe who's seventeen, you know, he's fifteen, and his brother David who's fourteen, but a bunch of cousins and neighbors join in and they'll they'll all dress in black and they'll paint their faces with grease. And first off, you know what, kudos guys to painting, to being rich white kids who paint your faces with grease and aren't doing blackface. You know, they were just trying to hide in the night.
And yeah, it's like, well, you know you're who we dodged.
Kennedy Families isn't great at dodging bullets, but they did dodge that one.
Yeah, thank goodness for that. Difference in motivation to Greece.
God, their motivation is they're doing pettybags. I imagine were also they might have been, might have been, might have been.
A little treat for them.
You know, I can't prove they weren't exactly, I can't. I can't prove a little justin Trudeau energy wasn't present there some of them. Sure sco should drop of that a dollip Sistically, One former member of the hyenasport Terrors later claimed to the author of the book After Camelot quote, we'd shoot off firecrackers to flate people's tires, stick potatoes, and the exhaust pipes of cars, turnover trash cans mess around with girls, all sorts of mischief. After we did our bit, Ethel would get called I know, I don't know what mess around with girls want in this context.
In the context of like vandalism.
They could be making out with them, they could be stealing their underwear, there could be There's a lot of mess around, with a lot of room for that to be ugly.
It's an odd item to include on that list. Yeah, gang activities.
If I'm the after Camelot author, I'm immediately be like, wait a second, Wait a second. Let let's talk about the messenger.
Let's gettext.
I'm going to continue to quote from this terror member. After we did our bit, Ethel, we get tech calls from everyone in town complaining about it. At first, she used to say, my kids were home asleep last night. I don't know what you're talking about. But one night she waited up and sure enough she caught me, Bobby and David jumping out of one of the second floor windows of her home. She chased us all over the compound in the middle of the night and her nightgown and bare feet, finally losing us somewhere on the stretch of beach. Now one of the real through lines in all these Kennedy kids' stories is that the adults have very little power in these relationships. And it's not because they're afraid to discipline their kids. Sometimes when they're around, they disciplined them very severely. It's it's that they're just not there right, and they're they're not there in large from because they have all of these as the Kennedy's, They've got this constant web of social political business, out fundraisers, all sorts of shit that they have to do because of who their family is. And they're also on vacation a lot. They're traveling, they don't always want their kids around, and they're able to not have their kids around right. Half of the brood are away at boarding schools at any given time, and the kids at boarding schools have access to money and thus drugs, but not any real submit supervision. You know, maybe the monk who teaches English will take an interest in them, but like that's some random monk. He doesn't have a lot of power in this relationship, you know.
And at a certain point, after like a lot of the reaction from like her specifically, Yeah, I feel like it's just not going to be effective no matter what where it's like okay, yeah, you're being this horrible to your your small children. Yeah, we don't really care for that approval or have like that sense of like, oh, we don't want to upset you know the adults.
Right, yeah became now Another constant through line is, as I mentioned earlier, this sense of gallows humor that pervades the kids as a result of the cloud of death that seemed to hang over their family. And I think the most passage from this period comes from I'm gonna read a passage from the book After Camelot describing this one prank had the boys playing in busy Hyanna's port tourist traffic, only to have one kid fall to the ground while another smacked the back of a car, making a loud noise. Then they would all gather around their fallen chum and shout hysterical sentiments at the drivers, such as you've just killed another Kennedy's. When panicked people came to the aid of the young Kennedy sprawled in the middle of the road, the boys would milk it for all it was worth by trying to get the boy to move his legs and then saying it looked as if he'd been paralyzed. But then the fallen Kennedy would suddenly stand up and walk away. At that, the other boys would proclaim, look, it's a Kennedy miracle, and then race, Oh god, I gotta say that kind of rules.
That's exactly if you were a kid and the Kennedy and all that stuff, like, of course you killed another Kennedy. Such a funny thing.
It's incredibly funny. It's amazingly funny.
Like horrific thing. Uh the acid trip? What, yeah, Bobby did horrific.
Yeah, that's funny. That's really funny. That's just actually very good comedy.
He kills another Kennedy.
That's I'll go so far as to say it that might actually even be example of like healthy processing of all of this. Right, take like you're taking to some extent, you're taking some ownership of this terrible thing that happened to your family, right, and maybe that does help a little.
And you're also taking you you're also like very aware of like the world's like eyes, and you're.
Kind of taking agency as opposed to just being subjected to it. You're taking agency on it and like using it for your own laughter entertainment.
Yeah, exactly.
Kind of see it as the healthiest thing that anyone has done.
In this.
Story.
It's definitely towards the top in this story of healthy reactions.
Yeah, and again, just very good comedy.
It's a Kennedy miracle. It's Kennedy miracles.
That's a good line. Back at Millbrook, Bobby cultivated a by this point probably understandable reputation for being out of control and very odd. Like any kid, he had folks who got along with him and people who thought he was a dick. You can find people being like, yeah, he was like the bully of the school. You can find people being like, yeah, he was like kind of a chill dude. He was a little bit of a loner and outsider. I'm not I wasn't around right. I'm just gonna say everyone does agree about one thing, which is that he was really specifically weird about his hawk and dead animals.
Yeah. I was gonna say, like, yeah, his dorm smelled like bird shit. Yep, that was the thing everybody thought.
Boy Cody, it's about to get a lot weirder, But first it's about to be ads. Oh okay, we're back Cody, you had a follow up question, what do.
You mean by his relationship with dead animals?
Great question, Cody, Great question. So let's go back to the undeniable reality that I don't know, like a month or two time flat circle right now. But it became public knowledge that RFK Junior, serious third party presidential candidate with like a possibly historic chunk of the votes certainly looked like that at that point in the election, had part of his brain eaten by a worm that got in there, presumably for some weird meat he ate and then died after eating part of his brain. Right the claim. That's the claim, and the claim came out during divorce proceedings, right, And this is part of RFK trying to basically argue his alimony should be amended in light of his disability.
Right.
And as a result of that aspect of it, I have seen people doubting was he just lying? You know, maybe there was no worm. He's bullshitting like and I'm going to say this, a survey of his childhood makes me feel, yeah, that brain worm was probably real. Probably this is the story that we're about to tell that makes me feel that way. So as an adult, one of the sources we have on Bobby's life is this book called The River Keepers, which he co writes, I think, and it's related to he works for an environmental charity called the River Keepers, and his book on that includes a deeply sanitized and kind of short version of his own backstory. And one of the things he talks about is his time at Millbrook that he spent with what he calls an informal falconry program. And this is the very sanitized version of how that his falconry at Millbrook went. In the autumn, we captured and trained kestrels, red tails, and immature passage hawks on their first migration. I've caught upwards of fifty hawks a day squatting atop a ridge line on Schinnemunk Mountain in the Hudson Valley. In autumn, we flew wild redtails, falcons, and ghost shocks and pioneered many of the game hawking techniques still used by American falconers. We talked about hawks every spare moment. So maybe that's all true. It can coexist with what I'm about to read next. But Jerry Oppenheimer, biographer talks to one of Bobby's child falcon Rebuddies who describes him very differently and in a much less camera friendly manner Mill Brooks, and this is his falcon rebuddy talking years later, millbrooks motto was non Sibby said, kuntsis Latin for not for oneself, but for all. Everyone had to participate in required community service, whether it be working in the school post office, washing dishes, performing grounds maintenance, or handling the zoo's inhabitants. Bobby had chosen the latter, But the way he described his falcon and birding interest in his book was not the way Beer Regard, who is that's the kid telling the story who later went on to teach ornithology at the University of North Carolina, remembered to Beer Regard, who was one of the leaders of the falconry group at Millbrook, Bobby's pursuit of the sport was more like a scene out of a horror movie. Myself and a couple of others had our hawks, and we'd go out in the countryside hunting rabbits and squirrels. But one of the reasons why I didn't spend much time with Bobby was his idea a falconry next to the school there was a cowpit where the local dairy farmers threw their dead cows, and it was full of rats. Bobby would take his hawk and go hunting rats in the midst of the rotting cow carcasses, and he's sort of reveled and how off the wall that was now Beer Regard expressed disgust at Bobby for wanting to be in such a disgusting environment. Wanted to go hunt rats in this rotting cow carcass graveyard rather than going to like a well maintained chunk of the woods and doing the thing that right right, and one gets the feeling. I think his discuss comes from. This is something Bobby did specifically to freak out preppier rich kids like Beer Regard. Right, you know, he is also a rich kid, but he is not preppy, and he wants to kind of freak the normies.
He's a little freaking.
He's also no one goes to the rotting corpse pit because it's a rotting corpse pit, so he can get high there. He can do drugs, he can take acid, can He spends a lot of time hunting rats and taking acid at a like fucking pit of bloated cow carcasses. That is a big chunk of Bobbby Junior's childhood.
And that's a little choko Bobby's brain. That's gonna right.
Yeah. One of the kids who visited the pit with Bobby, maybe because Bobby had drugs and he wanted to score them, was the son of a Republican horse trainer, Jamie Fanning. And Jamie Fanning gives us this description of RFK Junior and his late teens on the cusp of adulthood, and it is the most incredible description I have read of a subject. For these episodes, I still to this day see him standing there in his black necktie that he wore every day over a blue Oxford Brooks Brothers shirt and a beat up tweed jacket, and wearing the wildest bell bottoms that were purple with day glow green stripes like he was some soul band guy, and in his funky boots, and there he was hunting rats out of that pile of dead sheep and cow carcasses. Yeah, I bets were funky, amazing, amazing paragraph well, oh cows and sheep, cows and sheep yeah yeah, So debate and the sources was it just thousands of rotting cow carcasses. By either way, Bobby loves carcass.
Apparently he loves being around them, he really does.
He seems to be comforted by death. I don't know, and it's Fanning. I think this description from Fanning is the most accurate of some competing descriptions of child RFK Junior. Because he's an edgy kid. He has been traumatized by some seriously dark shit. He has a deranged, unhealthy family life. He's got infinite money, but only one adult who cares about him, and that adult is not doing it in the healthiest way, and he develops this edge. Maybe part of it is just like surrounding yourself with death, kind of like in the sense that maybe a goth would later because there's been so much in your life, but also some of its freaking out people is maybe the only way you know to get attention.
Right, yeah, attention and keepeople at a distance and yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and would continue. He was such an edgy kid that that thing, the cow carcasses thing, as bizarre as it was to be over there hunting these rats out of this pile of dead carcasses, was almost normal for him. It was a pretty dark grim time. He was miserable and he was angry. It only got worse with the drugs. And we most of the sources we have on earlier RFK life are self serving in some nature, right, everybody's got an agenda. These are the Kennedys. But I think Fanning has probably got it right. Yeah, that that is that just feels like a person to me.
Yeah, like an actual like an actual human being who's dealt with all these things we've talked about, and like the little the little stories of him growing up and like you know, like being a little a little fucker right right, asshole trying to cause trouble and then gets darker and darker, and he's gonna his humor is gonna get darker and darker. His like environment, he's going to want to be Yeah that I don't know. Yeah, and the brainworm.
And the brain worm the brain worm doesn't now out heroin? What else? What else doesn't help Cody is heroin, which makes it way into his drug rotation. And look, we can talk about the potential benefits of psychedelics. I don't know anybody who's like improve their life problems unless though, unless those problems are just I am dying of horrible pain with heroin. That's really the one thing that's.
Good, right. You know, there's like, oh, I took mushrooms and like I saw something today or yesterday of like eighty percent people take mushrooms like they can quit smoking easily. Yeah, And it's literally just because they're like, uh stupid. Oh, like I have the thought of like I shouldn't do that, and they don't.
Yeah, it has intense potential.
Sure, Yeah, Like oh I took mushrooms, I stopped smoking. It's like, oh I took heroin, stop smoking because I died?
Yeah, Or like heroin will help you in again one very It's great as a pain killer, but that's only useful in certain situations, and.
Bobby, heroin is something you saved to the end.
It's great as a pain killer, but it works very well as an emotional pain killer, but not in a way that helps the problem. Right, if you actually if you have like you had your leg blown off by a mind, Yes, a heroin might be the right thing for you in the moment, right, that's probably real good to get heroin in there. If you are mourning your dad and your uncle and the collapse of your family and all of the pressure you're under, the fact that your mom doesn't love you. Heroin's probably not gonna.
Help in the spotlight like all the thing. Yeah.
Now that said, despite the fact that he is now Heroin is in the mix, it's pot that's gonna get Bobby. In his first real trouble, he was arrested for the first time in Barnsdale, Massachusetts, for marijuana possession at age sixteen. Now, one of the fun parts of the RFK Junior story is that he always has this endearingly tense relationship with the cops. I don't think he likes the police, at least not as a young man. One story Oppenheimer tells is a RFK Junior and the Terrors. They're sticking potatoes into gas pipes one night and they get caught by a cop and everyone runs away, and the only one who can't escape is Bobby Shriver, who is his cousin. Bobby Junior is kind of something in his favor. Even though he's escaped, goes back to confront the cop to try and rescue his cousin. You know which to say something, And here's how Oppenheimer describes it. Seeing that his cousin was in the clutches of a policeman. Bobby defiantly reappeared from his hiding place and sauntered up to them. What have you got in there, the policeman asked, noting that Bobby had his hand inside his coat. I have a hawk and he's trained to kill cops. Bobby answered, you're lying, the policeman said, but Bobby kept advancing towards him until they were only inches apart, whereupon he pulled the hawk out and shoved the raptor's beak into the face of the cop, who jumped back with a hand on his gun.
I have a hawk. It was trained to kill cops.
It's really cool.
You still got some bangers, like despite it all.
Part of the cop you're lying, you want to find out.
It's such an only someone who has grown up in that degree of privilege who would like in that situation with a cop shove a hawk and near and like bold power were power to you, buddy, You're the only guy who's ever been in that situation, and I'm glad you did it.
You might you might not be the only guy who's ever shouted like I got a hawk, Yeah, yeah, but you're the one who did.
You're the only one who did and lived. Right, there's a dead Hawker out there. Wow, what a tale.
Thank you.
Anyway, Bobby's arrest was big news. You know, the media circus lights up around it, YadA YadA, YadA, and he and his cousin, He's arrested with Bobby Shreiver for pot possession. This is different from the Hawk thing. They go before a juvenile court judge and they get a slap on the wrist, right, you know, they get a punishment. It's not all that serious. Really. The worst thing about it is the media thing around it. And Bobby had actually been expelled from Millbrook a few weeks earlier because of his drug use, because the leadership at the school was really mostly word that he was going to o D on the property and they were like, you know, what's not going to be good for this schools continuing to have people is a fucking dead Kennedy like, get him out. And after he gets arrested, they start to claim basically he got kicked out of the school because of that. Right, you know, they don't want to say we did it for this reason, right, Nobody really wants to it's best if it kind of comes down to being part of the arrest. The family backlash against Bobby is intense and utterly impotent. At the same time, Ethel told her son, I'm throwing you out of the family, but no effort was made to stop Bobby, who is at this point sixteen years old, from taking six hundred dollars out of his savings account, buying a used Ford Falcon and driving across the country with two friends. He sells the car when they get to Fresno, and he and one friend continue on hopping trains and living with homeless people until they wash up in Texas for months. Bobby Kennedy is completely out of touch with any adult, but occasionally limb Billings, and Bob would later recall this as one of the happiest times of his youth quote, I was writing around with bums. It was good I could be one of them and not a Kennedy. And like, if you want an idea of how toxic being a Kennedy is. His fondest childhood memory is being homeless, Yeah, like willingly homeless.
Yeah basically yeah, but like yeah, hiding.
Because we're all we're all equally filthy you know at this point, you know, we're not bathing, we're not changing our clothes, like we look the same that they do, and they just kind of treat me as one of them. Nobody knows who I am. Yeah, it says a lot.
I mean about again, didn't have a chance.
Never had a chance. He has a next scent when he gets back from this road trip train hopping trip to a less reputable boarding school in the woods that's like, this is where you send the real problem kids. It's near Boston. He continues to do drugs while he's there, and he develops a notable reputation as not a racist. He is very Oppenheimer quotes, and Oppenheimer quotes is like, wow, a white guy that black people like, right, But he does quote several black students at this school who were like militant activists, like kind of black panther adjacent in the day, and we're like, yeah, Bobby was actually really cool, Like we liked hanging out with Bobby, Like he didn't no issues with Bobby.
Was clearly not a racist person.
Yeah, clearly not racist. So we'll give him that here too. Bobby Kennedy Junior graduated from this last boarding school in June of nineteen seventy two. He was now an adult. You will not be surprised to hear that his grades were not impressive. His extra curriculars at this point are basically just drugs and hanging out next to a cavern of rotting meat with my hawk men. Of this mattered to the Harvard Admissions board. RFK Junior was a legacy. His family had money and a with the Kennedy you never know, they could wind up congressman or president. So you might as well get that Harvard stank on him, right, And that's where Bobby's going to spend the mid seventies studying and getting real into heroin. And we will talk about that in part three, but for now, for this week, Cody, we're done with RFK Junior. How are you feeling? Where are we on? Are we on the boy at this point?
Uh?
You know, still some uh mixed in the sense that like sorry, Bobby, sorry, I get it, Yeah, but you gotta get it together. Also the rotten meat things, so like yeah, yeah, I'm just like I'm I'm very curious about where that thread leads because you don't stop there, like that's not like probably the most fucked up thing you're you're going to be doing in relation to dead animal carcasses. I don't know.
I yeah, I'm going to think about the hawk a lot.
The hawk.
The hawk is a real like that's a fascinating.
It's fascinating talk about his train to kill cops.
That's such a good life. There's some really he definitely had at one point. Maybe he's lost it now, but he had at one point some of that Kennedy charisma. Because that and the whole you've just killed.
It killed the Kennedy so good. It's a Kennedy miracle.
It's incredibly funny.
I've got a hawk and it kills cops.
Yeah all yeah, yeah.
And but you know the other stuff.
Yeah, good luck to him.
It turns out it doesn't turn out great, Cody.
Right, well, I can still say good luck.
Yeah, exactly, good luck and good night, Cody Pluggables.
Hi sure hi hello, Hi. Yes. Check out some more news on YouTube dot com. It's also a podcast if you want to listen to it instead of look at my face. And we've got even more news and other podcasts that we also are doing video now, so check that out on YouTube as well. But you can just listen to it if you don't want to see my face. Our Patreon dot com slash some more news and with me as always is a mention of my band, The Hot Shapes. You can check out on bandcamp and SoundCloud for all your Hot Shapes needs.
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