Robert Kennedy, the youngest son of President John F. Kennedy, who served as a senator from Texas and served as the president of the United States from 1961 to 1963, was a man of many talents. He was a lawyer, a philosopher, a humanist, and a man who believed in peace and human rights. In this episode, Robert tells the story of how he and his father, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, struggled to make peace with Fidel Castro, the man who was responsible for the assassination of his brother, John Bobby Kennedy, and the events that led to his death in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Robert Kennedy was a loving son, husband, father, brother, and husband. He is a great human being, and an even better human being. Robert Kennedy is an American hero, and one of the greatest humanitarians of our time. His story is one of hope, courage, and hopeless optimism. This episode is a must-listen-to-memories-filled tribute to the life and memory of his beloved brother, JFK, who was shot to death by a crazed gunman on the morning of November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas by the city s worst mass shooting in the streets of America s worst massacre in modern history, but whose life changed the course of American history forever. The Kennedy s legacy lives on in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, and in the history books and books written by the people who remember his life and the stories he wrote about his life, and how he left behind the legacy he left in his honor and memory. . Thank you, Robert Kennedy, for joining me in this episode of This American Hero. Thank you for being here, for being a voice for peace and hope, for peace, and for standing up for the fight for freedom and freedom, and standing up to the truth. and for fighting for the truth, and fighting for what s good enough to be heard and for the rest of us to speak out loud and loud and everywhere else for the voiceless. in the words of John Kennedy, no matter how loud and clear thank you, for your courage, thank you for listening, Mr. John F Kennedy, my friend, for coming here, and God bless you, and I love you, my dear friend, and thank you forever, for listening to me, for loving you, so much
00:00:04.000So I have a preface here for this question that I think is worth it, so I hope that you'll agree.
00:00:11.000And it deals with the question of peace, so I'm just going to go with it now.
00:00:16.000On November 29th, 1963, your father and your aunt, Jackie Kennedy, sent a secret message to the Soviets through William Walton.
00:00:26.000The Soviet Georgi Bolshakov had been a back channel to the Kremlin for JFK. William Walton told Bolshakov that Robert and Jackie Kennedy knew that the Soviets were not behind the guns in Dallas and that it was a domestic right-wing conspiracy.
00:00:41.000They also warned that LBJ would not continue JFK's policies because he was too close to big business and so the quest for peace would have to wait until Robert Kennedy could get to the White House.
00:00:52.000Of course, we know what happened, or today we know enough of what happened, but I have to ask, is it finally time to resume the quest for peace?
00:01:39.000My uncle took office in January of 1961, and I was at his inauguration three days before he took office on January 17th.
00:01:50.000The outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, gave a speech that is probably one of the most today, in retrospect, one of the most important speeches in American history.
00:02:00.000Where he warned Americans against the emergence of a military industrial complex that would devour our democracy, that would turn us into an imperial state abroad and a surveillance state at home, and that would corrode our democratic institutions.
00:02:17.000And my uncle, two months after he came into office in March of 1961, He had been meeting for two months with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and his CIA advisors, including Alan Dulles, Charles Cabal, and Richard Bissell, who were trying to get him to support the Bay of Pigs invasion by 2030.
00:02:45.000Cuban refugees who had armed themselves and trained, were trained by the CIA in Guatemala and Texas and Louisiana and camps in Florida.
00:02:55.000And they wanted to return to their homeland and depose Fidel Castro.
00:03:00.000And my uncle said he did not want to have the US military support that because it was an independent country and it would be inconsistent with American values.
00:03:12.000To begin a preemptive war against somebody who had not done anything to the United States that was warlike, that should provoke a war.
00:03:22.000And no matter how much distaste we had for Castro's choices in governing his country, those decisions were up to Cuba and the Cuban people that were not the province of the United States.
00:03:36.000And he refused to give the U.S. military support.
00:03:40.000They ended up, they wanted amphibious vehicles and transportation, ships from the U.S. military to bring the Cuban Brigade to the Bay of Pigs.
00:03:52.000And instead, they went to the corporations, they went to United Fruit, and the CIA got the United Fruit Company to transport, which of course had huge interest in the sugar plantations in Cuba, to transport the ships.
00:04:21.000There's nothing else we can do with them.
00:04:23.000They'd actually be dangerous if we kept them in the United States.
00:04:27.000And he said, you know, my uncle's attitude was the French had supported us during the U.S. Revolution, and that we could give support to revolutionary groups in other countries, but we couldn't fight the war for them, and we shouldn't do anything that looked like a U.S. invasion.
00:04:44.000And they lied to him, and they said that as soon as those As the Bay of Pigs Brigade landed, the Cuban people, Castro was so unpopular, the Cuban people were going to rise up and throw him out of office.
00:04:56.000They just needed a spark to light this nascent revolution.
00:05:03.000And they knew that Castro was actually immensely popular in Cuba at that time.
00:05:08.000And my father later found this out because he sent two aides down who spent weekends over a year negotiating with Castro over the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.
00:05:18.000And they ended up going to baseball games with him and traveling around the country.
00:05:22.000And they told me, John Nolan, who's one of those two, told me that when they walked into a stadium and the people saw Castro, they would spontaneously rob the prize and give him a prolonged standing ovation.
00:05:36.000And that it was clearly not orchestrated.
00:05:38.000It was people were fervent in that belief, but also he had a very well organized military and he had an intelligence service that was as good as any in the world.
00:05:49.000And so Dulles and the other CIA doyans knew they were lying to my uncle.
00:05:57.000And what they believed is that if they landed the brigade on the shore, and it was clear that they were about to be defeated, that my uncle would send in the Essex, which was the U.S. aircraft carrier, and give them air cover, and then the U.S. would be committed to getting rid of Castro.
00:06:16.000He said they believed that a young president would collapse and send in the Essex and the military, and they misjudged me.
00:06:24.000During the height of that fight, when it was clear that the Cuban refugees, the brigade was losing disastrously, he came out of his office and he said to one of his aides, I want to take the CIA, shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
00:06:43.000And he understood from that moment on.
00:06:46.000My grandfather, he looked at that as a catastrophe for his administration.
00:06:50.000And in fact, he said to his father, you know, I think I should resign.
00:06:54.000And his father said, it's the best thing that could happen to you because you...
00:06:58.000My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, who...
00:07:01.000He was very skeptical of the military his entire life.
00:07:04.000He said, it's good that you learned who these guys were at the outset, and now you know.
00:07:10.000And my uncle had fought in the war, World War II. He was a war hero, and he understood the brutality and the savagery of war.
00:07:20.000And he said to one of his best friends, Ben Bradley, who was the publisher of the Washington Post, that the primary job of a president was to keep the country out of war.
00:07:31.000And when Bradley asked him, he said that because Bradley had asked him, what do you want on your gravestone?
00:07:37.000And my uncle said to him, he kept the peace.
00:07:40.000That's what he wanted his legacy to be.
00:07:42.000And he succeeded, despite tremendous pressure from his military advisors, from his intelligence apparatus, he succeeded in keeping the country out of war.
00:07:54.000He was pressured to send 250,000 combat troops to Vietnam.
00:07:59.000He refused steadfastly, despite, you know, Maxwell Taylor and Avril Haram and all of his senior advisors, Dulles, etc., who said, you've got to send them in, you've got to send 250,000 troops, or the South Vietnamese government is going to collapse.
00:08:17.000He ultimately sent 16,000 military advisors, mainly Green Berets, who were forbidden.
00:08:22.000Under the rules of engagement, from engaging in combat.
00:08:26.000Now, a lot of them did engage in combat, but two weeks before he died, and incidentally, 16,000 troops is fewer troops than he sent to get one black man, James Meredith, into Ole Miss, into the University of Mississippi.
00:08:41.000He sent more troops there, federal troops there, than he did to Vietnam.
00:08:45.000And two weeks before he died, he signed a national security order ordering all those troops home.
00:08:50.000He had asked his aide that morning how many Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and his aide said 75, and he showed him the list of names, and my uncle said, that's too much.
00:09:18.000Johnson almost immediately reprimanded that order.
00:09:22.000And then the following year, during the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, which was, you know, essentially just a made-up event that was used to justify the American entrance to the war, he did send 250,000.
00:09:37.000Ultimately, half a million troops went over there, Americans, and 57,000 died.
00:09:43.000We killed at least a million Vietnamese.
00:09:47.000But after that, it was an American war.
00:09:49.000It was exactly what my uncle had tried to avoid.
00:09:58.000I think they understood exactly what Johnson, what Eisenhower warned, that if you allowed the military, if you allowed our country to persuade our people that we should be the policemen of the world, that the military-industrial complex would crush the middle class in this country with expenditures and basically turn America into a surveillance state, turn us against our democratic aspirations.
00:10:41.000Making the first preemptive war in American history, going after somebody who had done nothing to our country, who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, nothing to do with 9-11, but they just wanted to go, you know, it was an oil war, and for all the reasons the neocons wanted a war.
00:10:59.000We spent $8.1 trillion in that war and its aftermath, which was the war in Yemen and Afghanistan and Syria, etc.
00:11:08.000We left Iraq worse off than we found it.
00:11:11.000We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
00:11:14.000Iraq today is an incoherent nation where You know, that just is a battle between Sunni and Shia death squads.
00:11:21.000We pushed Iran, we pushed Iraq into the, basically turned it into a proxy for Iran, which exactly was what we had been trying to prevent, you know, during 40 years of diplomacy and military commitments.
00:11:35.000And we created ISIS. We drove 2 million refugees into Europe.
00:11:40.000We destabilized all the democracies in Europe.
00:11:42.000It probably, you know, was one of the things that led to Brexit.
00:11:47.000So all of the blowback from these wars, nobody ever accounts for.
00:11:52.000And, you know, one of the biggest blowbacks, besides all the people that we've killed, you know, the millions and millions of people unnecessarily, is that we've got it.
00:12:02.000The expense of doing that has gutted the American middle class in this country.
00:12:06.000And we're now turning into, let's say, almost like a colonial model where there's a These huge concentrations of wealth at the top and then a widespread poverty below.
00:12:17.000And everybody knows, any social scientist or political scientist will tell you, you cannot have that kind of configuration and continue to have a functioning democracy.
00:12:32.000That's what Eisenhower, exactly what he had warned was going to happen.
00:12:36.000Yes, and I'd say it goes back further than Eisenhower, because under FDR, which I think the New Deal administration was the most progressive in U.S. history, but under FDR, the Council on Foreign Relations...
00:12:53.000Yes, under the State Department, imprimatur, but using Rockefeller Foundation money, so, you know, standard oil money, they carried out the War and Peace Studies Project, and this was planning to enter World War II and to win because the U.S. is the biggest industrial power.
00:13:10.000And then to become basically the manager of global capitalism and to go for global hegemony.
00:13:17.000This gets sold to the public by the Council on Foreign Relations media magnate.
00:13:22.000Council on Foreign Relations is basically Wall Street's think tank.
00:13:26.000But they're going to pitch this American empire idea with Henry Luce of Fortune and Time and Life magazine and his famous American Century essay.
00:13:36.000You had Henry Wallace who opposed this and said that it should be a century of the common man and the Soviets should adapt or learn from our political liberties and that the U.S. could learn from the Soviets when it comes to full employment and education and health care for the whole population.
00:13:55.000But Henry Wallace gets swept away and replaced as vice president through a coup, essentially led by an oil man.
00:14:03.000And the U.S. goes on to pursue empire after World War II.
00:14:08.000And the Cold War is, you know, I would argue that it was in many ways a pretext for these plans because if you don't have a Cold War, it's hard to imagine how you justify doing all these things.
00:14:19.000I see Henry Wallace in a way similar to your uncle and your father in that they tried to fight U.S. Steel, U.S. Steel Wall Street, really, the biggest corporation at the time, the military brass, the CIA, the mafia.
00:14:34.000But all these groups are basically on the same side and part of the U.S. empire in different ways.
00:14:40.000So, to me, they seem to have overcome people like Wallace and like your father and uncle, and they seem to collectively represent the heart of our U.S. capitalist system.
00:14:52.000Can U.S. democracy really overcome and transcend imperial capitalism, if I can use that phrase?
00:15:02.000I would differ with you over some of that interesting take on history, because I know a lot of what you're saying is true, but there are other circumstances.
00:15:18.000I would not blame World War II on Standard Oil and the Rockefellers.
00:15:23.000I blame it on Adolf Hitler and Anita Mussolini.
00:15:26.000And you can go back before that and say that World War I was a conspiracy of bankers and industrialists.
00:15:38.000World War I laid the groundwork for the rise of it.
00:15:42.000Once Hitler was out there, I don't see any choice except to try to stop him.
00:15:50.000I'm not saying that World War II was organized that way.
00:15:55.000I'm saying that in the U.S., these forces were assessing the situation and looking at what the U.S. should do and going for a bigger role for the U.S. in the world.
00:16:08.000Of course, those groups are programmed to take advantage of crises and turn them into opportunities for imposing control and to de-democratize America.
00:16:18.000But, you know, I think, you know, Henry Wallace was, and I love Henry Wallace.
00:16:23.000He was not a popular, very, very popular political figure at that time.
00:16:30.000He wasn't as adept at politics as FDR was, but FDR shared a lot of his idealism.
00:16:38.000The Atlantic Charter, it was really a manifestation of that kind of wonderful side of FDR where he basically dragooned Churchill into agreeing to release the British colonies in Africa and elsewhere in exchange for the U.S. entrance to the war.
00:16:59.000So he leveraged our assistance in the war for the cause of nationalism in the developing world.
00:17:07.000So we didn't lose everything with Henry Wallace.
00:17:10.000We had a president who I think did not want our country to become an imperial.
00:17:14.000He was very different than his cousin Teddy Roosevelt who was the champion of kind of the imperial America.
00:17:22.000And my uncle You know, was part of that FDR tradition.
00:17:26.000My uncle hadn't been rescued when his ship, his boat on the PT-109 was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer in the middle of the night in the blackest race off the Solomon Island.
00:17:36.000He swam six miles to an island with his crew members and, you know, they were hiding out on the island.
00:17:43.000They could watch the Japanese patrol boats looking for them.
00:17:47.000They would have been in prison camps or been killed if they had been caught.
00:17:50.000And the two Solomon Islanders landed on that island.
00:17:54.000And my uncle to get to collect coconuts.
00:18:01.000His coordinates and, you know, a note that said JPK, you know, Captain Kennedy with us, I think it was eight crew members or nine crew members, and he put the coordinates down, and those two Solomon Islanders risked their own lives to bring that coconut and a big pile of coconuts in their boat 30 miles across the ocean to the British base to give it to the British commander, and he My uncle's life was saved.
00:18:30.000And I think, you know, that was part of his, the background of assumptions that he brought to office, that it was a colonized population of, you know, individuals acting out of great courage who had saved his own life.
00:18:45.000And that those kind of people ought to be able to govern themselves.
00:18:48.000And when he took control of his Subcommittee on African Affairs in the United States Senate, he fought harder than anybody to get the European colonial powers out of Africa and out of the Mideast.
00:19:03.000I've run into so many people who bear my uncle's name and people in the Arab countries who remember this famous speech he gave in 1956, where all the liberals in our country condemned him.
00:19:17.000Adlai Stevenson condemned him because he said, Europeans need to get out.
00:19:21.000The Arabs should be running Arabia and the Africans should be running Africa.
00:19:27.000At that time, the European nations were limping along and the only thing keeping them alive was the colonies that they could strip mine for their resources.
00:19:39.000And people in the United States, including the Republicans and Democrats, said we've got to bolster the European countries and continue to allow them to exploit their colonial possessions.
00:20:55.000And he had been part of the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 50s.
00:21:00.000And the Mau Mau was a very violent revolution, anti-colonial revolution, that kind of portrayed with horror for its savagery in the Western press.
00:21:09.000And he had been one of the people with Jomo Kenyatta, who was one of the Kenyan leaders.
00:21:14.000And Boyer was unusual because he had gone to Oxford for a year.
00:21:18.000He was the only Kenyan at that time who had any kind of college education.
00:21:24.000And the Mau Mau succeeded ultimately in the British.
00:21:28.000Agreed in 59 to hand Kenya back to the Kenyan people.
00:21:31.000But they said, look, we're going to give you five years and we're going to transition out and you need to get yourself ready to govern yourself.
00:21:40.000And the boy at that time looked around and said, we don't have anybody who can govern this country.
00:21:44.000We don't have a single college graduate that is Black African.
00:21:50.000And by the way, Tamaboy was from a little tribe, one of the smallest tribes in Kenya called Luau, which are these fish-eating tribes from up near Lake Victoria.
00:21:59.000And they're known as kind of being super smart and peacemakers.
00:22:03.000Jomo Kenyatta was Kikuyu, which was the largest tribe in Kenya.
00:22:08.000And Mboya had sent letters to 200 American colleges asking them each to give a scholarship to one Kenyan student.
00:22:16.000And he would pick the 200 students, the best students in Kenya.
00:22:21.000And he got 200 American colleges to agree, including Harvard.
00:22:25.000And in the summer of 1960, they were supposed to come that autumn.
00:22:30.000Remember, this was during the election.
00:22:32.000He realized that he had the scholarships, but he didn't have money to transport the students to the United States.
00:22:38.000So he flew to the United States and he went to the State Department.
00:22:42.000I asked the State Department for help transporting these African students over.
00:22:46.000Well, at that time, Dick Nixon was vice president, was effectively running the State Department, and when the Secretary of State consulted him, he said, you better not do it, because I'm trying to win the Southern states, and I need to ruin Southern whites, and if we bring 200 Africans over here, it's going to make people nervous about me.
00:23:07.000And so Mboya then was really panicked, and he called up Martin Luther King, who he knew, and he said, where else can I get this money?
00:23:19.000And Martin Luther King said, you should call the Kennedys, you should call John Kennedy, because he's on that African subcommittee, and he really cares about African nationalism.
00:23:30.000And King was at that time being financed by Harry Belafonte, you know, the famous Calypso singer, and who was very close to my family.
00:23:38.000And King knew that, you know, King knew my family, but he wasn't like a close personal friend, which Belafonte was.
00:23:45.000So he said to Amboya, I'm going to get Harry Belafonte to take you up to meet John Kennedy.
00:23:52.000And so Belafonte and Amboya came to our house in the summer of 1960, and I got to meet Tom Amboya.
00:23:57.000I was very excited to meet this A real African leader, and he was the Shiki, and it was very cool for me.
00:24:04.000And then in 64, after my uncle died, and my uncle, John Kennedy, fell in love with Mboya, and he gave him $200,000.
00:24:15.000And he said, on the condition that Mboya not tell anybody where he got them, because my uncle was also worried about winning the South.
00:24:23.000And Nixon found out that Jack had given a boy the money and he then branded it publicly.
00:24:31.000He's bringing Africans over, you know, to the United States when probably he thought we should be sending, you know, blacks back to Africa, you know, at that point.
00:24:43.000In 64, my uncle Sard Schreiber, who had started the PE score under JFK and was still running it under LBJ, took me and my cousin Bobby Schreiber, who was my best friend and the same age as me, to Africa for about three weeks.
00:24:59.000And we spent a lot of time with Tom and Boyer.
00:25:01.000And then in June of 68, my father was killed.
00:25:04.000And my mother had at that point 10 kids with another one on the way.
00:25:10.000And she needed to get us, the older ones, out of the house for this summer so that she could get some control over her life and figure out, you know, what she was going to do.
00:25:20.000And so she said, my brother David went out to work for Cesar Chavez for the summer out in Delano.
00:25:27.000My sister Kathleen went to work for the Inuit Indians in Alaska.
00:25:30.000And my brother Joe went with Everest climber Jim Whitaker and one of my father's best friends to be a guide on Mount Rainier.
00:25:38.000And I was sent to Africa for the summer.
00:25:41.000And I spent a lot of that summer with Tama Boya.
00:26:43.000And he was going to do a speech after me.
00:26:47.000And he went, and it was Barack Obama, of course, and he went and did this speech that just blew the roof off the convention and teed him up for his run four years later.
00:26:55.000Made everybody in the Democratic Party fall in love with him.
00:26:59.000But we spent a lot of time with him at the convention that day.
00:27:02.000We had floor passes, so it was really fun.
00:27:05.000We got to go out on the floor into all of the green rooms, etc.
00:27:09.000But we talked a lot to Obama, and he said that he was going to Martha's Vineyard that night, so we agreed to eat dinner with him.
00:27:17.000He was going down to raise money and Oaks Bluffs.
00:27:37.000And I said, oh, have you ever heard of Tom Mboya?
00:27:41.000And he said to me, Tom Mboya is the reason I'm over in this country because his father was the first student brought over on the Kennedy Airlift.
00:27:51.000That was, you know, just sort of an amazing experience that came out of my uncle's just love and affinity for nationalism in Africa and for nationalist movements everywhere.
00:28:03.000Right, and I don't think that this is just the grist for the mill of historical nostalgia.
00:28:11.000These issues are actually very, extremely relevant to today, because my assessment of your father and your uncle is that they...
00:28:40.000I think that even the people that were political enemies of the Kennedys still wanted the idea out there that the US was promoting prosperity in the third world and such because they needed people to believe that.
00:28:55.000But I think they were going for something like really what Kwame Nkrumah called neocolonialism.
00:29:00.000I think that he understood this pretty well.
00:29:05.000And then after he wrote the book on neocolonialism, they deposed him in what seems to be a CIA-backed coup, 1964, one of many coups that follow the removal of John Kennedy as president.
00:29:17.000It's really something when you look at the timing, Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana.
00:29:23.000But today, 9 million people a year die in the global south from poverty and malnutrition and starvation and lack of access to medical care.
00:29:33.000The U.S. crushes systems that try to provide these things today.
00:29:38.000So how can the U.S. role in the world change to get back to supporting countries?
00:29:45.000Yeah, I mean, I think what we have now, what we've had since World War II, which was unintentional to FDR, people like my uncle, is a kind of soft colonialism, you know, that spares the occupying nation, the colonial difficulties of actually managing local economies and, you know, putting local leaderships and, you know, military...
00:30:07.000Protection in place and just but allows us an opening to exploit the resources of that nation through a systems of military support for, you know, tin horned dictators and then these deals with local oligarchs where, you know, they get included and, you know, they get some to skim off some of the big money deals when the U.S. multinationals come in and liquidate all of their, you know, the nation's assets for cash.
00:30:34.000And it's this kind of corrupt bargain.
00:30:38.000My uncle, Nekrumah was an avowed Marxist.
00:30:42.000And my uncle had a talk with him one time where he said, my uncle said to him, you know, we don't care if you're Marxist or Leninist or whatever you are as A base for Soviet expansion, you should make your own choice about what you need to do with your country.
00:32:48.000He negotiated a peace between Sigarno and the government of the Netherlands.
00:32:52.000But his first trip over there during the Kennedy administration, My mother went with him, and they spent a couple days at Sukarnov's palace.
00:33:03.000And they told him that I was interested in Komodo dragons, which I was obsessed with at that time.
00:33:08.000And he sent back two Komodo dragons, which came to my house, but then they could have eaten any of us, but we sent them to the National Zoo.
00:33:16.000He also gave my father a tiger, stuffed tiger, that he had shot on the island of Sumatra, Sumatran tiger, that I've had since I was a little kid.
00:33:26.000My father gave it to me when he came home.
00:33:32.000Yeah, I'm very familiar with that Sukarno tale, and I've actually done hours and hours of material on Sukarno in Indonesia, and specifically the JFK policies.
00:33:47.000That he believes that he thought that Kennedy was killed because he was trying to stop the Konfrontasi, the Malaysian crisis that they had.
00:33:55.000I wouldn't say that that's an accurate assessment, but I think from his perspective, he knew that Indonesia was a prize at that moment.
00:34:03.000Yeah, everybody wanted the Congo and everybody wanted Indonesia.
00:34:07.000And your father or your uncle with that Solomon Islands story, I wonder if that had a...
00:34:14.000There's a book by an Australian historian named Greg Polgrain where he says he talked to Dag Hammarskjold's right-hand man who revealed that...
00:34:24.000Dag Hammerskold was being used by JFK as a stalking horse, basically, to allow for the UN to manage West Papuan independence.
00:34:35.000But when Dag Hammerskold gets killed, they can't do that.
00:34:39.000And because of Cold War calculations, JFK has to abandon that.
00:34:43.000And so West Papua gets absorbed by Indonesia.
00:34:49.000And it's like it takes decades to learn even what was really going on.
00:34:53.000The two guys who rescued my uncle when he was elected president, he sent a message to the Solomon Island.
00:35:05.000It was a protectorate of Great Britain at that time.
00:35:07.000He said he wanted them to come to his inauguration.
00:35:10.000He also, incidentally, he brought the admiral, who was the captain of the battleship, he was sent by then an admiral, that it cut his ship in two and sunk him.
00:35:22.000And he invited that guy who I met at his inauguration.
00:35:25.000We were very excited to meet him because he was the guy who sank Uncle Jack's ship.
00:35:30.000But he also was really excited about having the two Solomon Islanders who had saved his life come to his inauguration.
00:35:38.000But the British governor of the Solomon Islands was embarrassed because these guys didn't own shoes and they could not speak English.
00:35:49.000So he picked two Solomon Islanders who were more presentable, who were more civilized, and he sent them instead, thinking that would fool my uncle or assuage him or something.
00:35:59.000And my uncle was so angry at them at that point.
00:36:02.000But years later, maybe about 10 years ago, my little brother, Max, went to the Solomon Islands with, I think it's Robert Pellett, But anyway, he went there with him to find the PT-109 and they did a diving expedition and they went down with deep water submersibles and they found an engine block that they thought was the remains of PT-109.
00:36:28.000But at that point, my brother ran into the two Solomon Islanders, and one of them was wearing a t-shirt that said, I saved JFK. And when he saw Max, he just burst into tears, and he kissed him all over, and he was just weeping and weeping, and just this very, very kind of emotional reunion.
00:36:56.000I think that your uncle had an understanding of war that you don't find in people of that era, because he was there not as an officer, so he was actually involved in the combat.
00:37:08.000And people criticize JFK for policies of the US.
00:37:13.000And it's not as though all the imperial chicanery stopped under his watch at all by any means.
00:37:20.000I mean, you have things like Operation Mongoose and, you know, even propping up the South Vietnamese government, whose legitimacy was very dubious in the first place.
00:37:30.000But there was an attempt to avoid war.
00:37:33.000And as you say, you listed in the beginning, every time that there was a question of hot war, he avoided it.
00:37:43.000This, I do think, is worth looking at and thinking about.
00:37:47.000But now in 2023, and we have enough history to understand the parties, the political parties in the U.S. I was growing up in Indiana, and my mom was a Democratic congressional staffer.
00:38:01.000I worked for the Democrats in 2004, and I was on the Obama campaign staff in 2008.
00:38:06.000I went to the inauguration and the staff ball even.
00:38:10.000But when Obama ended up carrying out many of the George Bush policies and ended up saying we should look forward and not back when it came to crimes like torture and illegal war, it really disillusioned me.
00:38:22.000And oddly enough, or interestingly enough, at Oliver Stone's recommendation, I read the book JFK and the Unspeakable, and this radicalized me more, Not because of, I thought that one person is really the key to understanding U.S. history, but it's that all that it revealed about the history before and what followed was really illuminating.
00:38:47.000I watched the Democratic Party orchestrate two primaries that were farcical, I thought, in which they just destroyed Bernie Sanders to ensure that you would get a more corporate and pro-empire candidate.
00:39:01.000So how do you respond to those who say that reforming the Democrats and the Democratic Party is just not feasible?
00:39:10.000It's almost like, I don't want to say reforming the mafia from the inside, but it's a difficult thing to even imagine how it could be done.
00:39:21.000Well, I mean, the only way it's going to be done is, I mean, if I get in there, and if I can somehow get through, you know, run all those traps and get in there, that's one of the few organizations that you reform from the top down, because it's corrupt from the top down.
00:39:41.000It's the, you know, it's the party organization.
00:39:44.000And, you know, the president has the ability as leader of the party to change that.
00:39:50.000If Bernie Sanders had gotten in there, you know, Bernie Sanders could have won.
00:39:55.000And he may have won last time that he dropped out.
00:39:59.000In kind of a weird way, you know, if Bernie Sanders had won and he had become president, the DNC would no longer be that corrupt organization that is now.
00:40:10.000There's a guy here that I'm going to quote who I don't normally have an affinity for, but I think it may be relevant.
00:40:17.000And that is Winston Churchill, who said that Americans will always do the right thing when they've exhausted every other option.
00:40:27.000And to me, I think that that is relevant because it's to you and to this particular moment, because the empire is The U.S. ran the empire and a lot of people made ridiculous amounts of money.
00:40:41.000It's the richest empire in world history, the most powerful empire in world history.
00:40:45.000And it, oddly enough, doesn't even call itself an empire.
00:40:49.000But all empires go the way of all empires.
00:40:53.000And is there more of an opportunity now?
00:40:56.000because we actually can't keep doing what we've been doing.
00:41:04.000I see this as either the U.S. becomes more authoritarian and kind of delegitimizes its whole mythology of freedom and liberty and so on, or the U.S. takes an honest look at itself and maybe an honest look at its history and then tries to reform its institutions.
00:41:21.000But do you feel that this creates an opportunity, the fact that it actually can't go on, that we seem to be headed for a...
00:41:28.000There's a catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine that has American fingerprints all over it.
00:41:34.000I mean, I know that the Putin invasion of Ukraine is a dubious legality, but the sovereignty of Ukraine after 2014 is also debatable, and international law is not really...
00:41:46.000able to deal with these sorts of issues where there's threats on a border of a great power like this.
00:41:52.000How do all these things that are happening now and the rise of China giving countries another place to turn rather than American, you know, the IMF and so on, there's going to be even more of this, more trade conducted outside of the dollar.
00:42:04.000How does the strength or weakness of the U.S. empire impact your calculations here?
00:42:09.000Well, I think the empire has collapsed, you know, thanks to the neocons and thanks to And the end of every empire, You know, David Kennedy, or Paul Kennedy, who wrote, was the Yale historian in a relationship to me or to my family.
00:42:25.000But he, you know, wrote the definitive book on the decline and fall of empires.
00:42:30.000And he looked at all the empires in the last 500 years, and every one of them collapsed for the same reason, which is the overextension of the military, which hollowed out the economies at home.
00:42:43.000You know, we are at the end of the cycle with the U.S. empire, and the side of that is the Saudi Arabian defection to make an independent peace, a separate peace with Iran, with the orchestrated by the Chinese.
00:43:01.000And Saudi Arabia was the keystone to our entire defense strategy.
00:43:06.000You know, we were going to create the Shia Crescent with Saudi, the Emirates, Omar, Abu Dhabi, Lebanon, Jordan, all the way up to Syria, had this kind of serious Shia Crescent that would contain Iranian expansion in the region.
00:43:23.000And then the Saudis just walked away from it.
00:43:29.000You know, we've spent $1.1 billion a year for the past decade.
00:43:34.000If you include the Homeland Security at home, because we can spend about $8.4 billion on our military, but we also then, the Homeland Security costs us, if you add that together, it's $1.1 trillion a year.
00:43:50.000We wouldn't need that Homeland Security if we weren't bombing Iran and stationing troops in Mecca and bombing Iraq, etc.
00:44:02.000The middle class has shouldered that burden.
00:44:06.000While we spent 8.1 trillion bombing ports and roads and universities and hospitals all over the Mideast and, you know, Iraq and Syria, etc., the Chinese have spent the same amount, about 8 trillion, building roads and bridges and ports and projecting economic power rather than military power.
00:44:44.000And that's going to cost us the end of the U.S. dollar, the dominant currency, will cost us $750 billion a year.
00:44:52.000So, you know, three quarters of a trillion.
00:44:54.000And we just can't sustain these military commitments anymore.
00:44:58.000We've spent $113 billion we've committed to Ukraine for a war that was utterly unnecessary, that we pressured the Ukrainian government, Zelensky, into prosecuting a war that everybody wanted to settle.
00:45:16.000But we, the neocons in our country and the ultra-right in his country, basically forced him into this war that has now destroyed Ukraine and killed 300,000 Ukrainians, a flower of Ukrainian youth.
00:45:31.000And it's for no reason other than the geopolitical ambitions of the neocons and crushing Ukraine between these anvils of superpowers as a pawn.
00:46:01.000I'm going to close most of those 800 bases that we have abroad.
00:46:06.000We're going to do what my grandfather said that we should do, which is to make Fortress America, arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders, make ourselves too expensive to invade, and then build an economy, rebuild our middle class, robust middle class at home, and project economic power robust middle class at home, and project economic power abroad.
00:46:26.000Not withdraw from the international scene, but to project moral authority and economic power and generosity and kindness and economic financial partnerships the way that the Chinese are doing and compete with the Chinese, but on a financial basis, not on a military basis. but on a financial basis, not on a military basis.
00:46:45.000We can beat the Chinese if we're fighting with the thing that we do best, which is business.
00:46:52.000I personally have been going through some family tragedies myself, and I know that you've had the Kennedy family has famously suffered some tragedies, and yet you're here running for president.
00:47:06.000I am, in my own small way, worked and tried to use academic work to improve the world and respond to try to enlighten people or understand things myself about how we got to this part, this point in history.
00:47:22.000How do you, as a human being, function and continue to try to go on and fight for something better for the world against very powerful forces knowing that The chances of success are not, you know, success is not guaranteed and enormous, you know, challenges are ahead.
00:47:45.000What do you do to keep, to steel yourself so that you are able to persevere under adversity and, you know, sometimes very heartbreaking conditions?
00:47:56.000How do you, what do you, what would you say to people about going on and just the, how to persist in the face of all of this?
00:49:31.000And, you know, you see a lot of things that you love, a lot of sacred places, species being eradicated that can never be reclaimed.
00:49:39.000And people get crushed by that and they burn out.
00:49:42.000And I made a decision really early on that I wasn't going to let that happen to me, that I was going to make myself resilient by not investing in the outcomes.
00:49:54.000I think my uncle, President Kennedy, had the same idea about projecting economic power abroad rather than military power.
00:50:03.000He believed that America should be an exemplary nation, we should be a moral authority, that we should use our wealth to try to build middle class and democracy in other countries around the world, not by bullying, because people wanted American leadership all over the world, but they didn't want bullying, and they knew the difference.
00:50:25.000And my uncle wanted the vision that people, children, and communities abroad in Africa and South America and Asia, their vision of an American should not be somebody in a military uniform with a gun in a bag.
00:50:41.000And a bandolero, it should be a Peace Corps volunteer.
00:50:46.000And he created the Kennedy Milk Program to bring nutrition to hundreds of millions of children who are undernourished around the world.
00:50:53.000He created USAID, which at that point was an idealistic organization before the CIA took it over as a front.
00:51:02.000It was created to rebuild or to build middle classes in these countries that were highly stratified.
00:51:08.000And he created the Alliance for Progress to do that in Latin America.
00:51:12.000And because of that, you know, and I pointed this out in my speech in Boston, there are more roads named after John Kennedy, more boulevards, more hospitals, more schools, universities than any other United States president.
00:51:26.000I've met over my lifetime hundreds of children, adults now, from Kenya, from Nigeria, from South Africa, from all over the world, whose name is Kennedy.
00:51:40.000You know, that is good for our national security.
00:51:43.000That's the best answer to our national security.
00:51:46.000Have people, you know, actually love our country and, you know, fear it or resent it.
00:51:53.000I want to restore that vision of America, America that has moral authority, that has love and respect around the world.
00:52:00.000You know, I'm pretty confident that I can do that.