Last year, during our “Build, Baby, Build” panel discussion as part of our Real Estate Development … for Good series, author and public intellectual Richard Kahlenberg addressed the NIMBY problem by singling out the diverse coalitions behind zoning reform in California and Oregon. In the process, he called me out.
“Larry Platt and I, we’re both obsessed with Bobby Kennedy,” he said, and then he took note of some gasps in the audience. “Um, senior! Senior! Just to be clear.”
The audience laughed, palpably relieved; they thought he’d been invoking the anti-vax guy with a brain worm who’d been in the news for once dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park. Instead, Kahlenberg was quick to point out, we still have much to learn from that guy’s father. “In 1968, when he ran for president,” Kahlenberg said, “he brought together working class White people, working class Black people, Hispanic communities, and got them to recognize common interests.”
For those of us who have studied the most inspiring presidential campaign in modern history, the ghost of Senator Robert Kennedy was omnipresent this week when his son underwent grilling before a Congressional committee considering his fitness to serve as the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. It was a contentious, though predictable, hearing; Democrats confronted Kennedy with some of his many anti-vaccination statements. Some he grudgingly copped to; others he denied. His shameless gaslighting was instantly taken up on social media.
“RFK was a liberal patriot, who sought to heal the divisions in the country, so I think it would have been enormously painful to him that RFK Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, a man who tries to divide the country at every turn.” — Richard Kahlenberg
In fact, there’s so much in Kennedy’s past to hit him on, Democrats seemed paralyzed from too much choice. School shootings due to the rise of antidepressants? Autism caused by childhood vaccines? Meat producers a bigger threat to the nation than Osama Bin Laden? Anthony Fauci — not merely wrong, but carrying out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy?” All shit the dude’s said or written, and the list goes on.
Worse, the questioning by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, revealed the nominee to have little knowledge of the job he’s vying for. Kennedy claimed Medicaid is paid for by the federal government, when states actually also pay into it. He referenced Medicaid’s “high premiums and high deductibles” — it has neither. Questions about the thousands of community health clinics his office would fund in cities were met with blank stares.
It all makes one wonder: Just how would Senator Robert Kennedy vote if a candidate as ill-prepared, and yet so cocksure, as his son came before him? Like his father, Junior speaks often about the nation’s “moral authority,” but would he meet his father’s litmus test for character in public service? The senior RFK had plenty of detractors and even enemies, but not one — not even Richard Nixon — would describe him as a man lacking in substance, particularly in his last five years, when his humanity and compassion and political courage seemed to flourish.
The inclusive populist
The aforementioned Kahlenberg penned a brilliant reconsideration of RFK in light of the rise of Trump in 2018, entitled The Inclusive Populism of Robert F. Kennedy. The thesis was that, instead of knee jerk resistance and identity politics, the answer to Trumpism ought to be the precise political worldview Kennedy had advanced 57 years ago: “A liberalism without elitism, and a populism without racism.”
This week, Kahlenberg was shaking his head at how far the Kennedy apple has fallen from its tree. “I think Robert F. Kennedy would have been deeply saddened by the turn his son has taken,” Kahlenberg writes in an email. “RFK was a liberal patriot, who sought to heal the divisions in the country, so I think it would have been enormously painful to him that RFK Jr.. endorsed Donald Trump, a man who tries to divide the country at every turn. If RFK were in the Senate, he would surely have been torn by a father’s loyalty to his son and a senator’s loyalty to his country. But I think it would have been a bridge too far for Robert Kennedy to have supported for the cabinet an individual who rejected vaccines and perpetuated kooky and anti-Semitic theories that certain ethnic groups were largely spared from Covid-19.”
Another RFK biographer is similarly aghast. In his What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race, bestselling author and Citizen contributor Michael Eric Dyson gives us RFK, ever-evolving on race and matters of the heart. “Robert Kennedy, Jr. symbolizes a sad and abysmal decline in the epic political and social achievements of his father and uncles,” Dyson texted yesterday. “They had deep curiosity about the world; he has deep conspiracy about how the world works. They had great intelligence in advocating the use of science to advance our world; he possesses a paranoid perspective that is skeptical of science.”
True that, but what would RFK’s reaction be to a nominee like Junior? “After an intense grilling delivered with brutal directness — see his unrelenting cross-examination of L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty or his blunt directions to county sheriffs to ‘read the Constitution’ before arresting migrant workers — he would have settled on the issue closest to him, the treatment of children,” writes retired Temple professor James Hilty, author of the 2000 RFK biography, Brother Protector. “If he were not satisfied that the nominee put the protection of children’s health first, he would have opposed his / her confirmation.”
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” — RFK Sr.
Indeed, that was the underlying issue running through this week’s hearing. Kennedy rightly talked about the chronic disease epidemic facing American children (though he was short on solutions to it), while his interlocutors urged him to take some accountability for what his anti-vax advocacy has wrought. Josh Green, the Governor of Hawaii and a physician, makes a compelling case that Kennedy’s advice and rhetoric contributed to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of them babies and children.
But nothing is ever RFK Jr.’s fault. In that, he has much in common with his prospective new boss. They’re both insecure, traumatized sons. Trump’s father was demanding and abusive. Kennedy’s, taken too soon (he was 14) — perhaps triggering in him a 14-year heroin addiction, not to mention a sex addiction that still haunts. Like stunted teenagers (who might giggle at dumping a dead bear in Central Park), neither Junior nor Donald will ever admit they’re wrong. That’s in stark contrast to Kennedy’s father, who famously — and humbly — admitted his mistakes (he called it a “chronicle of error”) as an early architect of the Vietnam War and then became its staunchest voice of opposition.
Trump + RFK, Jr.
In fact, the comparisons and contrasts between Trump and RFK Jr., on one hand, and the senior RFK on the other are fascinating as you play them out. To wit:
Like Trump, RFK Jr. not only revealed himself this week to be unprepared, but also uninterested in preparing. The misstatements, the stammering, the heavy breathing into the mic — he was a kid caught off guard by the midterm. Turns out, going before a U.S. Senate committee isn’t quite as easy as bloviating on Joe Rogan, who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Like Trump, RFK Jr. is a podcast candidate who would whither under real cross-examination, the kind RFK was famous for as a Justice Department lawyer and a United States Senator.
Like Trump, RFK Jr. seems devoid of wit and self-deprecation. You could see him, steaming, as questioner after questioner attacked his veracity. The dourness of both men, again, stands in stark contrast to the senior RFK, who seemed to emit joy even in times of great stress. He’d close his presidential stump speech quoting George Bernard Shaw — “Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not?” — except for that one time when there was a torrential downpour. “As George Bernard Shaw once wrote,” Kennedy said then, “‘head for the buses!,’” bursting into a sprint toward dry cover.
After he won his 1964 Senate election, overcoming a widespread reputation for ruthlessness while serving as Attorney General in his brother’s administration, among his first words were: “Well, I guess I can go back to being ruthless now.” Can you imagine his son or Trump being comfortable enough in their respective skins to poke such fun at themselves?
Like Trump, RFK Jr. has become an avatar of toxic masculinity, with his bare-chested push-up videos and his well-chronicled sex addiction, with allegations, as in the scandal involving New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi, of “possessiveness” and “control.” There it is also in the book, RFK, Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, a portrait of a charismatic, but deeply troubled, narcissist. You can distrust author Jerry Oppenheimer for having written for The National Enquirer, but you can’t ignore all the on-record quotes and corroborated reporting, particularly as it regards the horrific suicide of RFK Jr..’s second wife, Mary Richardson. Listen to Robert Boyle, the respected environmentalist who took RFK into the Riverkeeper environmental organization after he’d been busted for heroin:
He’s picked up every flaw that any Kennedy ever had — from his grandfather onward — and concentrated them, whether it’s drugs or sex … Just imagine his wife hanging herself. If his wife had emotional troubles, you look after her. You don’t shake her off and screw 50 other women or whatever he put in his diary. Quite frankly, I don’t think he has a conscience, which means he can never reflect on something that he thought he did wrong.
Sound like anyone of a certain orange hue we might know of? Remember, on the eve of the hearing, RFK Jr.’s cousin Caroline — former Ambassador to Australia and President Kennedy’s daughter — released a video excoriating RFK Jr.., calling him not only unfit to serve, but also a “predator.” Watching it, one has to wonder two things: One, if the wrong Kennedy has been put forth for this position, and, two, why every network didn’t play Caroline’s comments in full as part of its coverage:
Seriously? The dude would put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed them to his hawks? Why is that alone not disqualifying? Forget about running American healthcare; would you hire someone who does that to watch your kids?
Why were there no questions from the senators about Caroline Kennedy’s comments? For that matter, why didn’t we hear from Eliza Cooney, the family babysitter who claims RFK Jr. sexually assaulted her in the late 90s when she was 23? Tellingly, he didn’t deny the allegation, simply saying he’d never been “a church boy” and privately texting Cooney an apology.
Now, it’s true that the Kennedy men were decidedly not church boys, including RFK Jr.’s father, as FBI files reveal in Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. But there’s quite a long distance between consensual private affairs and sexual assault, not to mention just plain meanness when it comes to the opposite sex, as chronicled in Oppenheimer’s book.
From Trump to Hegseth to RFK, Jr., we sure seem to have us a woman-hating Cabinet. (Poor Matt Gaetz will be missing out on all the frat boy parties.) Yes, Kennedy men have long been womanizers, but RFK was no misogynist. The hallmarks of his public life were toughness tempered by gentleness and rights balanced by responsibilities. Unlike Trump and his son, he didn’t just point fingers; he imagined solutions, and pursued them. In the mid-60s, for example, long before anyone had heard the term, he came up with a bipartisan public / private partnership to economically revitalize Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, and dedicated himself in his last years not to handouts but to offering a hand up to those in need.
Unlike Trump and RFK, Jr., Senator Robert Kennedy inspired. While Trump talks erroneously of wind farms killing whales and RFK Jr. goes on about WiFi causing cancer and “leaky brain,” the senior RFK struck at ideas that could lift all of us up.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world,” RFK said, a mission statement we sure could use right about now. Or how about this one, in apartheid South Africa, 1967:
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Let’s finish by going all Lloyd Bentsen on RFK, Jr.’s ass: We knew your father. Your father was a friend to all of us. RFK, Jr., you’re no RFK.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misnamed the L.A. mayor grilled by Robert Kennedy, Sr. It was Sam Yorty.
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