Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a presidential candidate running for the White House in 2016. He is the son of Robert Kennedy Sr., a former Supreme Court Justice who served as President from 1968 to 1987, and was a fierce opponent of both Ronald Reagan and John Kerry. In this episode, Robert talks about his father s assassination, his path to the presidency, and why he s running for president.
00:03:02.760There are situations where less lethal is the way to go.
00:03:06.680And Berna, B-Y-R-N-A, is the best alternative to deadly force.
00:03:11.280It fires powerful deterrents like tear gas and kinetic rounds.
00:03:15.200We're talking things that will incapacitate an attacker for up to 40 minutes.
00:03:21.480Government agencies, police departments all over the country are replacing their tasers and anything else for their go-to less lethal option.
00:04:16.640The speech that he gave when he found out that Martin Luther King had died is probably the best speech and the bravest speech I've ever seen any politician give.
00:04:33.360Well, I mean, it's a source of pride and comfort for me in my, you know, the first 14 years of my life were spent in his company.
00:04:42.920And, you know, I had the advantage that a lot of people don't have, which is that there are so many books about my family that, you know, most 14-year-old kids who lose a dad, if they want to find out information about him or think about, you know, how would he have responded to a certain situation?
00:05:07.060And they don't have access to that material.
00:06:30.660And I asked my mom, why are they doing that?
00:06:33.760And she said a bad man killed Uncle Jack.
00:06:38.100When I got home, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, who was the head of the CIA.
00:06:51.360My uncle had fired Alan Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, after Dulles lied to him.
00:06:58.380He actually wanted my father to run the CIA because they thought the CIA was so out of control.
00:07:03.560And he believed only my father could straighten it out.
00:07:07.800My grandfather had intervened and said, you can't, the optics for the whole world will be terrible if a president's brother is running the secret police agency.
00:07:20.900It will be, there's too much temptation to collusion.
00:07:26.560Collusion and, you know, but to politicize it.
00:08:22.340And then when McCone was appointed, he would come to our house every day during the springtime and during the autumn to swim in our swimming pool after work.
00:08:34.320So, he would leave work around four or five.
00:09:06.220Then the next call he made was to Harry Ruiz, who was one of the Cuban activists.
00:09:14.280He had fought alongside of Castro, then turned against Castro and had been part of the, you know, the Cubans, the militarized Cubans in this country who were part of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
00:09:28.000He didn't actually go in the Bay of Pigs, but he was part of it.
00:09:30.480And he was very close to my father and remained loyal to him, even when many of the other Bay of Pigs Cubans had turned against him.
00:09:45.220And my father said to him, again, did it, was it your people who did this?
00:09:52.680His first suspicion, it was the Miami Cubans who were affiliated with the CIA and who were very, very hostile to Jack and my dad.
00:10:03.600And because they believed that my uncle should have invaded in the Bay of Pigs, should have provided air support and then gone in and deposed Castro.
00:10:18.180Some of them felt that he was a traitor for that.
00:10:20.640And then during in 62, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they wanted him to go in.
00:10:26.620And and he had instead began a process of detente with crew chef and with Castro.
00:10:34.720In fact, the day that my uncle was killed, he had an emissary meeting with Castro at Castro's summer house at Veradero Beach in in Cuba, outside of Havana.
00:10:46.000And talking about what, you know, the conditions would be to end the embargo to Cuba, which my uncle wanted to do.
00:10:52.900And so but, you know, he knew there was tremendous hostility toward him in the Cuban community, among some members of the Cuban community.
00:11:01.240And that a lot of those people had been working with the CIA on the assassination programs against Castro and on and that, you know, a lot of them were highly, highly militarized.
00:12:09.040Is there a way to bring the CIA, NSA, NSC, all of it under control?
00:12:15.780Yeah, I mean, you know, my uncle actually, you know, one of the documents that the CIA has been kept secret, you know, and there's a few thousand documents left.
00:12:26.200But in the most recent release last year, one of the documents that was released was a memo from Arthur Schlesinger to my uncle that summarized my uncle's plans for reorganizing the CIA for how to, you know, end this kind of rogue, you know, operation.
00:12:46.140And my father, a week before he died, my father was asked by Pete Hamill, who was a famous New York kind of street reporter, you know, and very close to my father.
00:13:03.200He was a high school dropout who'd become this, you know, incredible reporter, important reporter in New York.
00:13:11.340And Hamill asked my father, they were on a bus in California campaigning, and Hamill asked him, what are you going to do about the CIA?
00:13:20.740And my father essentially paraphrased what this earlier memo said, which is that he was going to separate the plans division, which is the dirty tricks division, from the espionage division.
00:13:34.440And those are the two main functions of the CIA.
00:13:39.540The espionage is what you want the CIA to be doing.
00:13:42.540That's information gathering and analysis, analytics.
00:14:25.260And my father had seen that that tail, the plans division tail, was now wagging the espionage dogs.
00:14:34.380And the espionage division had become the servant to the plans division.
00:14:37.800And the espionage division's function was to provide tasks for the plans division to fix things in other countries.
00:14:48.240And then it served the function of justifying those and making sure none of the blowback was ever accounted for or weighed or measured or reported.
00:14:57.500My father saw that that was catastrophic and that the espionage division was enabling the plans division to do all this stuff
00:15:07.080and making sure they were never held accountable.
00:15:10.580My father wanted to break them up into two separate agencies.
00:15:13.440And the espionage division would be looking over the dirty tricks division and saying, okay, what was the blowback?
00:15:21.820What, you know, if you ask the CIA one of the greatest coups in their history, that's not a good word to use because it's not the actual word.
00:15:31.540But one of the greatest triumphs in their history was overthrowing Mohamed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
00:15:40.380And then the next one in 1954, they overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
00:15:54.960Iran has never recovered from the overthrow of Mossadegh.
00:15:59.000Like, the problems we're having in Iran today and the, you know, problems that go to Gaza and Iraq and everything else all come from that overthrow.
00:16:08.060We took the first democratically elected president in the 4,000 history of Iran and who would love the United States.
00:16:18.700And Churchill tried to overthrow him first.
00:16:20.960And his advisor said to him, they threw out the British, British embassy clothes.
00:16:27.760And his advisor said to him, you should throw out the United States, too, because they're part of it.
00:16:33.780And he said, no, the United States would never do that.
00:16:36.200The United States is a colonial nation and they stand up for democracy and they believe in us.
00:16:41.220And that was when Truman was president.
00:16:45.260And but as soon as Eisenhower came in and Eisenhower kind of, you know, had this relationship with Dulles, where Dulles became very powerful.
00:16:55.540And, you know, for good reason, Eisenhower had been the general in World War Two.
00:16:59.200He did not want to go into another war.
00:17:00.940And he saw the CIA as kind of a way to manipulate public events and to, you know, to get rid of problems without sending U.S. troops abroad.
00:17:15.700And so he relied very heavily on Dulles.
00:17:18.300And Dulles, you know, had thisβDulles was able then to just run amok.
00:17:25.820And there's a terrificβprobably the best book on Dulles is by David Talbot.
00:17:35.660But one of the things Talbot says about him is that he was incapable of distinguishing between the corporation, the welfare of the corporations that he had represented.
00:17:47.620He had been an attorney for Sullivan Cromwell, which is the biggest white shoe law firm in New York.
00:17:54.300And his clients had been Texaco, United Fruit Company, and these other companies that were operating.
00:18:02.500Oh, and Texaco wanted toβyou know, when Mohamed Mouzadek said, hey, we're going to start actually charging BP and Texaco for the oil that they're taking from our country.
00:18:14.900Dulles said, oh, that means they're communists, and overthrew them.
00:18:18.640But it was protecting, you know, the financialβthe mercantile entrance of Texaco.
00:18:26.240And then the same thing happened in Guatemala.
00:18:32.280Jacob Arbenz was democratically one of the greatest leaders in Latin American history.
00:18:37.860And he said 80 percent of Guatemala's arable land was controlled by United Fruit, and they weren't using it.
00:18:49.100They were keeping it fallow to keep the price of labor low and the price of bananas high.
00:18:55.780And so Jacob Arbenz said, no, we're going to distribute it all to the peasants, including his own land.
00:19:03.880And he nationalized his own property, and he said, we're going to pay them for it.
00:19:09.720But United Fruit had claimed on its tax returns that all of this property, 80 percent of the land in the country, was worth only $17 million.
00:19:23.980Because they wanted to keep their taxes low.
00:19:36.120And he said, that's not what you've been saying for 20 years when you're paying tax, and we're going to give you what you said it was worth yourself.
00:19:43.820And so they, you know, got on the phone to Dulles and had them overthrow the government.
00:19:48.980And Guatemala's never been, so the espionage division ought to be looking at these blowbacks and say, okay, Obama, you used a drone and you killed the terrorists and, you know, his kids with that drone attack.
00:20:04.320And it was a bad terrorist, and we got rid of them.
00:20:18.260You know, and that kind of blowback is never, ever assessed by the CIA, and that's one of the problems with having those two divisions, you know, melded.
00:20:29.760So, with that being said, I think everybody has changed.
00:20:34.980I know I have changed dramatically since September 11th, because I've seen the things, you know, when they said, they hate us for our freedom.
00:21:01.560Can we get back to our Constitution and Bill of Rights and equal justice under the law, being colorblind, and all of those things that I always thought we were, but I guess it never really were.
00:21:17.420I mean, listen, I think if we have a president who understands what America is supposed to look like and is determined to do that, that we can do that.
00:21:33.060My uncle changed U.S. foreign policy dramatically, and just in the thousand days, he was in the White House.
00:21:38.960U.S. foreign policy, before he came in, had one objective, which was anti-communism.
00:21:44.660And the way that they were executing that objective is putting U.S. foreign policy and U.S. military aid.
00:21:51.240And the leaders who said, I'm anti-communist, I'm killing communists, but a lot of times they were just, they were in league with an oligarchy, and any peasant who complained about, you know, I'm not getting enough wages to live, that became a communist.
00:22:08.260And so the U.S. was on the side of the, you know, of the oligarchs, and it was actually empowering.
00:22:14.000Like, yeah, in fact, you know, my uncle had two trips when he was in his three years in office that were the happiest he's ever been.
00:22:26.820One was when he went to Ireland, and, you know, he was the first Irish Catholic president, and it was like a homecoming of a, you know, of a hometown boy who made good.
00:22:36.360And then the other was to Colombia, and he met the, the president of Colombia then was a man named Yedda Scaramargo, and Jackie and Jack said that all the people they'd met, and they'd met the greatest leaders in history.
00:22:56.740They'd met De Gaulle in France, they'd met Eamon de Valera, who was the George Washington of, of, of Ireland, who had fought in the Easter Rebellion against the British, and he became the president.
00:23:10.500They loved him, but they said the smartest and the most charming and brilliant of all the statesmen they met was Yedda Scaramargo in Colombia.
00:23:18.540I had a million people come out to see my uncle in the main square in Colombia, and Yedda Scaramargo turned to him, and he said, do you know why they love you?
00:23:44.260He said, his best friend, Ben Bradley, said to him, what do you want in your gravestone?
00:23:51.220And my uncle, Jack Kennedy, said he kept the peace.
00:23:54.540He said the principal job of a president of the United States was to keep the country out of war.
00:23:59.720He said he didn't want African children and Latin American children and Asian children, when they heard the United States of America, to think of a man in a uniform with a gun.
00:24:09.380He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, of the Alliance for Progress, which was helping the poor people create a middle class, the USAID, which that's what it was supposed to do.
00:24:31.420And he instead projected economic power abroad rather than military power.
00:24:37.260And today there's more statues to him in Africa, Latin America, Asia, or universities, more parks named after him, more hospitals than any other president, and probably more than all U.S. presidents combined.
00:24:50.160Because it was an effective foreign policy.
00:24:53.120And I think that's what we need to get back to.
00:24:56.720We need to tell the world we're not going to be on the side of the oligarchs and, you know, the power brokers.
00:25:01.880We're going to be on the side of the poor and of fairness.
00:25:04.600And, you know, and it's going to be good for our country because we need to build ourselves economically.
00:25:19.520Donald Trump has been against war the whole time and did some really great things in the Middle East, I think.
00:25:27.260Then we have another president that was running for president who I swear to you, it's almost to me, it's almost like there's a lot of people that want to go to war.
00:25:41.920And it all seems to be these Western leaders that I don't understand.
00:30:39.220One is that every time we move NATO into a new country, that country is under a contractual obligation to conform its weapons purchases to NATO specifications.
00:30:52.140That means billions of dollars, Eratheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed.
00:31:01.300And those companies, which are all owned by BlackRock, control both the Republican and Democratic Party.
00:31:08.400And, you know, that's part of the this whole engine that keeps us in a constant state of war.
00:31:15.340So they want to go into NATO and, you know, and then you have a president, President Biden, who always has been it's like the big the only foreign policy tool that he has is military.
00:31:31.100It's like the guy, Carpenter, has a hammer and is the only tool he's got.
00:34:53.980We got, you know, we got the Sherman Antitrust Act passed.
00:34:57.480And we made corporations to pay taxes for the first time.
00:35:01.080And we passed a law that made it illegal to for corporations to donate to federal political click candidates that came out of the populist movement in the country in the progressive movement.
00:35:42.220The liberal Democratic clubs were all against him.
00:35:44.920On the college campuses, he was, you know, McCarthy.
00:35:49.260My father always said McCarthy had the A students and he had the B and C students.
00:35:53.960And but he had he had, you know, everybody, all the power centers were against him.
00:36:03.440But he had this, you know, the last day of his life.
00:36:06.940He won the most rural state in our country, South Dakota, and the most urban state, California.
00:36:12.420And when, you know, when I took that train ride, taking his body, I was with him when he died in Los Angeles.
00:36:17.820And took that train ride from New York City to to Washington, D.C. to take his body down.
00:36:27.500And two million people on the train tracks.
00:36:30.000And there were every color was the entire cross section of the American people.
00:36:33.700There were people in military uniform, Boy Scouts, hippies or black people, white people, priests, rabbis.
00:36:40.740People carrying American flags, signing, you know, signs said goodbye, Bobby, pray for us, Bobby.
00:36:46.860And it was the, you know, it was like all America.
00:36:51.260Four years later, a lot of the white people who had stood on that train track between, you know, Newark and Baltimore and Delaware.
00:37:02.300And who had strongly supported my father in 68, they changed their vote overwhelmingly, not to George McGovern in 72, but to George Wallace, who was antithetical to everything my father.
00:37:16.640But he was now the standard bearer for the populist movement.
00:39:37.940And they're able to tell these world leaders, you know, how to govern us in ways that eradicate our constitutional and civil rights and constantly shifting.
00:39:53.100Well, I mean, COVID, during COVID, you know, and I know you're a President Trump fan, but President Trump got rolled by his bureaucrat.
00:42:32.860Because most reports on child abuse happen in the schools, and we closed down the schools.
00:42:38.720And we locked all those kids in the apartment with their abusers with no meals because they're getting their one hot meal a day from the schools.
00:42:47.000And, you know, what we did to our kids' development is just criminal.
00:47:06.440Well, he's not in jail because Joe Biden is president and because, you know, unfortunately Donald Trump colluded with or was, you know, run over by him.
00:47:47.620I don't defend him on the vaccine or any of it.
00:47:53.140But I think, I think you could make the case early on, everybody was trying, I try to believe, except for Fauci, I try to believe that everybody had good intent doing what they thought was right.
00:52:24.340And then they shut down the Fifth Amendment, right?
00:52:27.440You know, they shut down 3.3 million businesses, no due process, no just compensation.
00:52:31.680They got rid of the Seventh Amendment, which is a right to jury trial.
00:52:35.660It said if a vaccine company or any other entity that was responding to COVID, countermeasures,
00:52:46.100injures you no matter how negligent they are, no matter how malicious they are, no matter how much they lie,
00:52:52.120no matter how grievous your entry is, you can't sue them.
00:52:54.780And, you know, the Seventh Amendment says no Americans shall be denied a right to a trial before a jury of his peers in case of controversies exceeding $25.
00:56:18.480So, you know, and you talk to these senators and congressmen who are just not allowed to see what's happening inside of the U.S. government agencies.
00:56:31.760And, you know, what does this have to do with democracy?
00:56:34.840And everybody's treating it like it's normal.
00:56:52.400But a lot of them don't want to they don't want to be held responsible for anything.
00:56:56.420We just did an episode where we showed how many of them are performing well over the S&P 500, you know, with increases of two hundred and thirty two percent year over a year.
00:58:28.140Well, that's the thing is, I'm going to stop that.
00:58:31.980President Trump's not going to stop it.
00:58:33.620He ran up the biggest debt of any president in history.
00:58:36.140He ran up after saying, you know, I'm going to address the debt.
00:58:39.680He ran up an eight trillion dollar debt personally, which is more than all the presidents before him combined since George Washington for 283 years.
00:58:50.620And then and Biden is now on the route to matching that.
00:59:10.720And then we need to cut our health costs.
00:59:16.100The only way to stop our health costs is by ending the chronic disease epidemic, which we can do very quickly.
00:59:23.180But, you know, right now we have agencies that are all tied in with the food processors, the pharmaceutical companies that are driving this, you know, the chronic disease epidemic.
00:59:35.700When my uncle was president, the annual budget and the cost of health care was about four to six percent of our GDP.
01:01:51.820And BlackRock, that's the way they want it.
01:01:54.000So the government has the absolute power, and they're squeezing the ranchers, and they're squeezing the consumers, and they're making all the money and shifting the money upward.
01:02:07.460It's completely illegal, and they're getting away with it because they have political control.
01:02:18.520Environmental Social Governance Standards for the Banking.
01:02:21.880You know, I believe in free markets, and I think, you know, we should have markets in our energy sector and elsewhere that we need to get rid of subsidies.
01:02:38.240Most environmental pollution is subsidies.
01:02:43.000It's a way of liquidating the environment for cash and putting it on your profit line.
01:02:48.120And what I will, you know, what my policy is, is get rid of the subsidies, including the environmental subsidies.
01:02:57.020But will you get rid of the collusion between the governments of the world and the banks with ESG standards saying you have to have certain social practices, environmental practices, and governance practices,
01:03:14.780and the banks refusing to give loans to those companies that say, no, you don't have a place to tell me these things.
01:03:24.320You don't have a place to tell me you have to be on the board.
01:03:26.480I don't think that that's a good idea.
01:03:27.680And by the way, I, you know, listen, I've been working on civil rights issues my whole life.
01:03:33.120My first case as an environmental lawyer was NACP against, representing NACP and against the town of Austin for putting a waste transfer station in the oldest black neighborhood in the Hudson Valley.
01:03:52.800And I've worked on environmental justice issues my whole life.
01:03:56.14020% of my career has been representing American Indians in litigation against polluters and, you know, big resource companies.
01:04:11.140I've been on the board of Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration, which is the oldest and biggest community development corporation in the country,
01:04:18.860which is the purpose of it, is to get capital and entrepreneurial expertise into one of the biggest black communities in New York,
01:04:31.440and has been very, very successful at doing that.
01:04:34.220And I think that you can't eliminate racism by telling people don't be racist.
01:04:39.780What you do, what you can do is we can make our kids resilient.
01:04:45.460When I was a kid, I was, you know, it was, my uncle was running for president.
01:04:50.560He was the first Irish Catholic president.
01:04:53.480And there was a lot of Irish Catholic prejudice at that time and bigotry.
01:04:58.040And I was called a mackerel snatcher when I was a kid.
01:05:01.100I was called a mick and all of these other, you know, pejoratives.
01:05:30.940Oh, I want to make sure that every black kid in this country has that resilience so that if somebody says something or does something racist to them,
01:05:40.100that they can stand up for themselves and stand up with confidence.
01:05:43.120And the way you do that is by making sure our education system works for them.
01:05:48.560There are, you know, there are charter schools in New York, like the Success Academy, which brings kids in by lottery.
01:05:57.380So, okay, it's bringing, choosing kids from the, from the most impoverished neighborhoods by lottery.
01:06:05.220And they have a better graduation rate and a better college placement rate than Scarsdale High School, which is the best public high school in this state.
01:06:24.560Yeah, I'm for school choice, and I'm for, but I also want to make sure the principals have control over what happens in their schools so that they're held responsible for it.
01:06:34.480So, you saw the effect of the labor unions because of COVID on their schools.
01:06:40.520And I, you know, I disagree with a lot of things that children's, or that the, that the teachers union did.
01:06:49.080But, I would say this, that the people who have been very, very successful at this have been able to figure out ways to work with the unions.
01:06:57.000What you need is you need principals who have the power to fire people.
01:06:59.940And you can negotiate and work with the unions to buy out contracts and to, you know, and to do it in a way that is as least disruptive and as least tension as possible.
01:08:24.000And it's part of the Second Amendment.
01:08:26.020And so, yeah, and I think that we need to work with each other to understand why we're having the gun violence in this country that no other country has.
01:08:37.880So do you believe, I mean, I think these are kind of separate.
01:08:42.020I mean, the law-abiding gun owner, they're not the ones, you know, going out and shooting usually.
01:08:48.620It's the ones who aren't either taking care of them correctly in their home or it's, you know, criminal activity.
01:09:31.020There's never been a time in human history where individuals with guns were walking into crowds of strangers, crowds of children, and starting to butcher them.
01:10:28.300NIH won't look for the cause of the autism epidemic.
01:10:31.440They won't look for the cause of peanut allergies.
01:10:33.200They won't look at any of these things because they're frightened that there's a big shot, a big food processor, big ag, big pharma that is going to have β be angry at them with the answer.
01:11:09.200They're saying it's something that we should look at, that SSRIs have black box labels and benzos that say β known to cause suicidal and homicidal behavior.
01:13:41.940I'm already beating both President Trump and President Biden among all Americans under 35.
01:13:48.040I'm beating them in the battleground states under β among all people under the six battleground states under 45.
01:13:56.700I'm beating them among independent voters.
01:13:59.660And independents are now the biggest political demographic.
01:14:03.780So, it's the first election in United States history in which independent β self-identified independents are β represent more people than either Democrats or Republicans.
01:14:15.660So, 43 percent of Americans self-identify as independents versus 27 percent for Democrats, 27 percent for Republicans.
01:14:26.240My favorability ratings are 10 points ahead of President Trump or President Biden.
01:14:32.580Oh, and, you know, we have a β we're living at a time when we have two presidents who are running, former presidents, who each, if they were the only one running, would be the least popular person to run for a major party in history.
01:16:33.920Yeah, I β well, let me just say this about my family.
01:16:37.860I have a lot of family members who support me and a lot who are working on the campaign, particularly the younger generation.
01:16:43.220But β but my campaign's being run by Amaryllis Kennedy, who's β you know, my daughter-in-law, my cousin Anthony Shriver, is running Florida for me.
01:16:53.180So I have β you know, I β it's a big family.