Part 2 of my conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about censorship, tech censorship, the assassination of his father, and growing up in the shadow of his uncle, Robert Kennedy Sr. In this part of the discussion, we get into COVID, Tech Censorship, the Kennedy assassination, and so much more.
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00:02:51.340What do you think about the censorship you've endured?
00:02:54.540Oh, I mean, to me, Megan, that's the most disturbing feature of this.
00:02:59.900You know, this kind of bewildering response to COVID that we've seen.
00:03:07.640I, you know, first of all, I want to say this, that I'm accused of promoting vaccine misinformation,
00:03:13.960but nobody, not Instagram, not the White House, not anybody else,
00:03:18.240has actually identified a statement that I've made that is incorrect.
00:03:23.560In fact, there were no statements on Instagram.
00:03:27.260I didn't even say that, you know, the virus came from Wuhan.
00:03:31.500I just said it should be investigated because it would be weird if the guy who was financing
00:03:37.220those experiments and may have created the virus is now running the pandemic response.
00:03:43.500And so these questions should be asked.
00:03:45.580I didn't say it would happen because I couldn't at that point.
00:03:47.980I have not made any inaccurate statements, as far as I know.
00:03:53.580If I did make one and it was identified, I would immediately apologize and withdraw it.
00:04:00.760Instagram or Facebook acknowledges that it uses the term vaccine misinformation as a euphemism
00:04:08.260for any statement or assertion that departs from government proclamations,
00:04:14.880whether they're factually true or not.
00:04:16.740So my crime was criticizing government policies.
00:04:22.920I'm not, it was not passing actual misinformation.
00:04:27.840And that's a problem for our government.
00:04:30.080You know, Adams and Madison and Jefferson said,
00:04:32.700we put freedom of speech in the First Amendment
00:04:35.880because all of the other rights are dependent on that right.
00:04:40.540And if a government can silence criticism, it has a license to commit any atrocity.
00:04:50.720And that's why it's like, you know, when I was young, I supported the ACLU and others who were supporting the right of Nazis
00:05:00.140to march in Skokie, Illinois, not because I, you know, I was, I was repulsed by their ideology and by their statements and horrified by them.
00:05:12.840But, you know, at the same time, we need to be able to be willing to die to protect their right to say those things.
00:05:21.500And that's, you know, what they understood, our ancestors and the American Revolution.
00:05:26.800And that's what generations of writers, of politicians, of respected leaders have warned against any government that tries to limit speech.
00:05:38.840And now, it's very strange living in this world where it's become, you know, it's become okay.
00:05:46.900In my political party, I saw a Gallup poll recently.
00:05:51.360It was either Gallup or Rasmussen that said that something like 70% of Democrats support government restricting speech.
00:06:01.880And, you know, it's almost inexplicable to me that we could be in that place right now.
00:06:11.860I believe my political party was the party that would go to the mat to, you know, to protect people's right to say what they want.
00:06:21.860And that's so critical for our democracy.
00:06:24.080And, you know, it also is critical of public health.
00:06:27.120So, listen, I may be wrong about the things that I talk about, but, you know, why can't we debate them?
00:06:35.000Why can't we hear these discussions about masks?
00:06:39.660You know, I've sued agencies for 40 years for failing to go through a regulatory process to have an environmental impact statement.
00:06:49.380The word it explains where, which has to explain the scientific basis for new regulations or actions, show the studies, and then do a cost-benefit analysis.
00:07:08.020And once they got rid of freedom of speech, they went after all the others.
00:07:14.580They closed a million churches, all the churches in this country, for a year with no public hearing, no discussion of the science, no offering of, you know, a single scientific study to justify it.
00:07:28.920They shut down a million businesses with no justice compensation, no due process, no justice compensation, a direct violation of our Constitution.
00:07:38.020They got rid of Seventh Amendment jury trials against any company that says that they're involved in providing a countermeasure.
00:07:45.920If there's a vaccine company and you get injured, you have no rights to compensation, no matter how grievous your injury, no matter how reckless their conduct, no matter how negligent their conduct, you cannot sue that company.
00:07:58.420And then, you know, they got rid of the prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance that we now have to give our private information and our private medical records to people to get into a bar or to get on an airplane or whatever.
00:08:16.440And, you know, there is no pandemic exception in the U.S. Constitution.
00:08:22.500And by the way, it's not because they didn't know about pandemics, because there was a smallpox epidemic during the revolution that paralyzed Washington's Army of New England for a couple of months.
00:08:37.600And there was another malaria epidemic that happened to the Army of Virginia.
00:08:43.360So they knew very well what epidemics could do.
00:08:46.200And yet they did not say that this document is suspended.
00:08:50.340These rights are suspended whenever there is an epidemic.
00:08:53.180And, you know, the disturbing part of this response was that it did not seem to be a public health response at all.
00:09:03.960It was a militarized and monetized response.
00:09:07.380We did things the opposite of what you would do if you wanted to stop a pandemic.
00:09:13.080And ask yourself, you know, I would ask any of my fellow Democrats who are supporting Tony Fauci, his record is the worst record of any record of any country in the world, arguably.
00:09:29.960We had 4.2 percent of the global population here in the United States.
00:09:34.420I think we had something like 17 or 18 percent of the global COVID deaths.
00:09:40.580The death rate in America was in the top 10 in the world.
00:09:46.660So we had 2,800 people per million population die.
00:09:52.580The African nations had an average of about 200.
00:09:57.860Oh, Nigeria had 15 people per million population.
00:10:02.980These countries, which Tony Fauci and Bill Gates at the beginning of the pandemic said Africa is going to get wiped out.
00:11:21.320But shouldn't we be asking that question?
00:11:23.560And isn't that the first thing Tony Fauci should be doing is saying, why is there this huge delta between COVID death rates and all these different countries?
00:11:34.160And the countries that did worse are the ones that focus on the vaccines.
00:11:38.180And the fact it's not just Fauci, as you as you well know, big tech has been completely supportive of this shutdown.
00:11:45.200You can't even just hearing you talk about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin sends just a little piece of my spine up like, oh, Lord, this is, you know, YouTube.
00:11:55.360This is where they're going to jump in and try to censor us.
00:12:44.240You know that our democracy is based on the free flow of information with good notions and good ideas and good arguments triumphing in the marketplace of ideas.
00:14:09.880These there's been there was a transfer of wealth, the biggest in history, arguably three point eight trillion dollars on the global poor and from working people to this new class of all of our billionaires.
00:14:26.260And the same people who were benefiting were the ones who now control our communications of Facebook and all these platforms.
00:14:35.080And they were using their control to suppress and to censor any criticism of the government lockdowns that were making them even richer.
00:14:47.400And there's something really wrong with that.
00:14:49.640And the government was allied with them and telling them what to censor and whatnot.
00:14:54.720We have correspondence between Zuckerberg and Tony Fauci telling him about censoring people like me.
00:15:04.580Oh, it's not, you know, and I again, I there's nothing I'd like more than to debate Tony Fauci or any of these people.
00:15:48.360They don't want people listening to you.
00:15:49.760And I, I, I wonder, I was thinking about it because, you know, the the freedom rally that you went to that was anti mandate and I've anti mandate to I am pro vaccine for the for the record.
00:16:50.640And some of them don't like you for political reasons.
00:16:53.120But what did you make of your wife, Cheryl Hines, who, by the way, did not realize you were married to the wonderful Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
00:16:58.940Um, she came out and she gave it to you, too.
00:17:02.080She gave it to you right between the eyes and said, um, his we should not be comparing the Holocaust to anything or anyone.
00:17:08.960His opinions are not a reflection of my own.
00:17:10.920And his reference to Anne Frank was reprehensible and insensitive.
00:17:14.140So I know you said you were sorry for that comment.
00:17:37.820I was comparing a number of totalitarian regimes, left wing and right wing.
00:17:44.160So on that same, I think earlier in that sentence or later, I talked about the communist regime of East Germany and that all of these totalitarian regimes have similar features and similar intentions, which is to control every aspect of human behavior.
00:17:59.680And my point is that none of them have been able to do that in history, that today, however, because of these new technologies, technologies like 5G, which allows mass harvest of data and very, very intense surveillance satellites, 415,000 satellites, low altitude satellites that are going to be able to look at every square inch of the earth.
00:18:28.360With everyday facial recognition systems, we now have these AI systems that are going to look through walls and see people where they're hiding in buildings.
00:18:37.600We have vaccine passports, which is a way of social control, digital currencies.
00:18:45.020We saw what they did to the truckers in Canada, where they closed their bank accounts and, you know, denied the money.
00:18:52.780And there's all these new instrumentalities that make the rising, the emergence of totalitarianism, what I call turnkey totalitarianism, where they're putting in place all of these instrumentalities now, or they are getting put in place.
00:19:08.760Let me use the passive voice, and it's going to give people who have those kind of ambitions a level of control over every aspect of our lives and makes dissent and resistance almost impossible.
00:19:24.300I made a big mistake by making any reference to Nazi Germany because of the sensitivities and because I know that what I say is going to be distorted by people who want to silence me.
00:19:41.260And that, you know, I need to understand that, and I need to be careful in what I say, because there are people who are of sensitivities about that epic in history that are legitimate, that are, you know, that are horrific.
00:19:58.860Oh, and, you know, I apologize because I don't want to hurt anybody.
00:20:02.940I have no, you know, desire to hurt anybody.
00:20:05.260I would say this, and I do think that we need to find ways to be able to talk about our history, because if we can't talk about, you know, the, and the history of the rise of the Third Reich did not begin with death camps.
00:20:28.840There was a whole system of totalitarian controls that were put in place, and there were alchemies of demagoguery that were used that are common to all totalitarian systems.
00:20:41.900Over that 12-year period in which certain groups of people, and particularly Jews and Poles and Gypsies or Roma people, et cetera, were systematically dehumanized and robbed of their rights.
00:20:57.900And it was a 12-year process, and we need to, at some time, we need to figure out ways to be able to talk about that process without offending people.
00:21:10.920That's what Gina Carano got fired from ABC for, from Disney, for trying to talk about that.
00:21:17.260It's a very tricky area, and I should have known better to stay the hell away from it, because it's just, there's no winning for me.
00:21:52.400Which, yes, because, and I'm glad she didn't, I'm very glad she didn't, but I actually gave her language that was much, much tougher than that, because she needed to distance herself from me.
00:22:07.800You know, I, my job at her husband is to protect her, and the, the arrows and the bullets that were being slung at me were hitting her.
00:22:17.180She was, you know, she was, you know, getting tremendous blowback from her friends, from her industry, from others.
00:22:25.320And it was, and it was, it was a terrible experience for me.
00:22:30.880And she, you know, by the way, what she said, she believed.
00:22:35.500So she wasn't saying something, you know, she is, she does not accept all of the things that, you know, I believe.
00:22:47.440But she, she, about, about what's happening with the vaccines and the medical department.
00:23:22.240And to read, you know, about these injuries to children, to read the government officials that are charged with protecting our health or are compromised and corrupted.
00:23:33.640It just, it, it was, it was, it was, it was making her soul wither.
00:23:42.220And I said to her, you guy, you kid, you don't have to read that book, and you should stop reading it.
00:23:47.900Because let me just tell you something about, about Cheryl.
00:23:52.940She, she is literally the best human being that I've ever met.
00:23:57.940And when I, you know, I met her through Larry David, and Larry brought her, who was my friend, and Larry brought her in 2002 to go skiing at a ski event I did up in Banff in British Columbia.
00:24:13.800She was married then, and she was married then, and then she came back in 2011, and both of us were separated.
00:24:24.120And I, you know, had got a crush on her on that weekend.
00:24:29.800And I went, but I also knew that, you know, I went to basically to ask Larry's permission, because Larry has a lot of rules that, you know, are not written down anywhere, but a lot of men understand them.
00:24:44.740And one of them was, I know that even though it was his TV wife, that it was, I needed to get, you know, square with him before I...
00:25:52.780She paid for her own way through college.
00:25:54.480She put her way through waitressing and working as a joke teller on a telephone line.
00:26:02.120And then she came out here in a, you know, Toyota Turch cell with 100,000 miles on it and worked for 15 years as a bartender and as a personal assistant.
00:26:15.300And before she finally got a break, which, you know, she was working at the ground lanes and doing improv.
00:26:22.440But she didn't get a break in the industry until she got that job at Curb Your Enthusiasm, where they were looking for somebody who was not an actress.
00:26:32.920And, you know, then her career took off.
00:27:15.420My grandpa, you know, my parents were all really good friends with leading figures at the time who had been terrible enemies of my grandfather.
00:27:24.440And my grandfather used to always say, I don't want my enemies to be my children's enemies.
00:27:31.140They can pick their own fights, but they don't need to fight mine.
00:44:31.300He would, he was this compact little, but very strong Russian who could do the Cossack dancing and he could climb the ropes in our backyard.
00:44:41.380And one of the three times that my father got mad at my mom in her life was when she made him do a push-up contest against Georgie Bolshakoy.
00:44:52.160He smuggled these letters in the New York Times, folded in between the two men.
00:44:58.540And at the same time, and that prompted my uncle to put in a direct line to Grusha so that he could end run his State Department,
00:45:09.200end run the spies, end run the Pentagon, and the two men could talk directly.
00:45:13.540And those phones were in three places.
00:45:16.580In McLean, where I live, in Hyannisport, at the Summer White House, where we all play, and in the White House.
00:45:29.160It would be like Biden having a direct line to Putin and being able to talk with each other rather than talk through these, you know, official apparatus,
00:45:40.720which oftentimes has agendas that are contrary to the best interests of our country.
00:45:47.540I mean, I only wish we felt that was the case with Putin now, right?
00:45:50.540It seems like it's him and not his complex, given the amount of his power over there.
00:45:56.140But, yeah, your uncle, I love how you just call him your uncle, the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.
00:46:02.720He came by those positions, honestly, because I read in your book, you write that your grandpa, his dad, Joe Kennedy,
00:46:09.720that his pre-war sentiment, this is before World War II, was that America should avoid foreign entanglements.
00:46:15.840And you write, but World War II had thrust leadership upon us.
00:46:20.560But you say Jack Kennedy was determined, ultimately, that our role as an exemplary nation should be just that, leadership by example.
00:46:28.420We should perfect our union and model democracy for the nations of the world, not force it upon them.
00:46:34.100Boy, oh boy, I've been wondering, when I read these words, what do you think your uncle would make of what's happening right now with Ukraine and what we should do about it?
00:46:46.120Well, I don't ever speak for my uncle, you know, in terms of what he would do on specific policies.
00:46:57.800And I think that, you know, other members of my family, in respect to all of us, also avoid doing that.
00:47:06.780But, you know, what I, listen, Megan, what I think is that we went to the war in Iraq in 2002, 2003.
00:47:20.240And it turned out to be, and it was this hysteria, that Saddam Hussein was a monster, we had to get him, et cetera.
00:47:29.280But there was no real explanation about what the U.S. interest in it was.
00:47:35.180And he had nothing to do with 9-11, although we were made to think he did.
00:47:41.440He had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks, although we were made to think he did.
00:47:45.560And there was no, there was a uniformity, kind of a propaganda wall that infected all of the news organizations, what we used to call the yellow press.
00:47:56.140And I think it's really important when we have national policies like this, that we look at the nuance and that we allow other voices on TV and on the radio and in our newspapers.
00:48:15.580And the Ukraine is an extremely complex geopolitically and historically, and in ways that Americans today are missing completely.
00:48:27.500And the people that we are pretending that we are now saying we need to help are, you know, we know about these very extremist views that are in the Azov Battalion, et cetera, that we need to understand.
00:48:49.200And I just think that we should not rush into something without debate, without a real debate, without locking out alternative voices and about really understanding what the U.S. objectives are and what's best for the world.
00:51:15.380And some of them were young, but the older kids were expected to, you know, do these things.
00:51:21.120And the younger ones gradually didn't, you know, the thing about my mother and I had, I talk about this kind of very tense relationship that I particularly had with my mother for the first couple decades of my life.
00:51:34.360But she was, and then afterwards, I was able to see, you know, what an incredible human being she'd been and how, particularly when I had my own kids, you know, and try to make them sit down at the table every night and say their prayers and have, you know, high level conversations and arrive on time and have their, you know, their hands clean and all that stuff.
00:51:58.800And she did that every night with all of us.
00:52:08.920We went to church every day in the summer and on Sundays, the winter as well.
00:52:16.780And, you know, if I try to do that to my kids, then they ridicule me.
00:52:23.620And so I really have tremendous respect for many, many gifts that she gave me.
00:52:29.740But, you know, one of those was just a very rich experience of growing up in a household that had that kind of, you know, that kind of laughter and fun, but also the discipline.
00:52:44.720Now we know that, you know, the things that we've been discussing that have been so disturbing over the past couple of years have been perpetrated on us almost universally by Democrats.
00:52:59.740Like, yeah, I'm still a Democrat because I think of the Democratic Party as a party that believes in free speech, that, you know, believes in the highest ideals of our country.
00:53:11.840But I, and that is, you know, a party that is, you know, a party that is much more reluctant to go to war, that opposes the corporate domination of our country and that opposes environmental pollution.
00:53:27.400And those are, you know, and those are, you know, issues that both parties, people of both parties can share.
00:53:32.400I want to say this, Megan, that I think it is, you know, one of the intentions of people who are pushing totalitarianism is to encourage tribalism, you know, and division.
00:53:49.140And if you look at, you know, the strategies for shattering indigenous societies that the intelligence agencies have developed over many years, one of the key strategies is to divide people, divide them by race, by political party, by, you know, by religion, whatever.
00:54:08.620And so, you know, what I really try to do is, is I try to be a bridge to try to find the common values that we have.
00:54:18.700We have a, we have a level of polarization now in this country that is dangerous.
00:54:24.360If you read, if you see that, that documentary, Social Dilemma.
00:54:30.940It's very frightening because we are being manipulated to, away from each other, to close the door on each other, to burn the bridges and to create two Americas.
00:54:41.840It's the most dangerous polarization that we've had since the United States Civil War.
00:54:46.660And one of the frightening things in that show is that, I mean, what they show in that show is that these, you know, Facebook and the other companies have developed algorithms that are designed to keep your eyeballs on that site for as long as possible.
00:55:03.080And they're out of control of those algorithms.
00:55:08.140And then they do things and learn things that nobody really knows how they were working.
00:55:13.540But it turns out that the way that you keep people's eyeballs on the site is by reinforcing their worldview by telling them things that they already believe in.
00:55:25.300So I live in this house and there's a Republican next door and we make an identical inquiry on Google or whatever.
00:55:33.780However, we get two different answers.
00:55:36.860My answer will reinforce my worldview.
00:56:22.280And I don't ever ask anybody their political party.
00:56:25.500I think, and I used to, you know, so I'm not saying that it's not part of my, you know, of what.
00:56:33.840But I think right now, purposely, I really, I think it's so critical that we are talking to people that we disagree with and put aside all these tribal divisions, which are destroying this country.
00:56:48.720I agree with it wholeheartedly, and I'm trying to live it professionally and personally, and I am living it.
00:56:56.560But forgive me for the follow-up, but do you think you could vote for a Republican presidential candidate in 2024?
00:57:03.460Or do you plan on voting for Joe Biden?
00:57:05.480Listen, my father always said, vote for the person, not the party.
00:57:09.400I, you know, I'm not going to talk about who I vote for or what I vote for, but I'm not going to, you know, I really think it's critical that we become less partisan and that we find common ground, that we build bridges to each other.
00:57:27.380Coming up, Robert, on why he believes his father's shooter and the man convicted of his father's murder, Sirhan Sirhan, should be free.
00:57:38.000When you talk about division and how bad it is now, of course, I've got to ask you, as a man who lost his dad to an assassination in the tumultuous 60s, Martin Luther King was killed same year.
00:57:55.620Or President Kennedy, also assassinated same decade.
00:57:59.380People often look back at the 60s and say, you don't know what division is.
00:58:03.200Like what we're suffering right now as a country is nothing like what we went through back then.
00:58:07.840And I realize you were just a boy, but how do you compare those two eras in terms of the country's division?
00:58:15.000Let me, you know, tell you just a way of answering that question, an anecdote from my own life, which was one of the most poignant experiences.
00:58:25.620That I had with my father and it took place and I had many, many, you know, wonderful experiences, as I detail in that book.
00:58:33.600But this took place in the days after he died and he was, of course, killed in here in Los Angeles.
00:58:40.180And we, you know, I was here holding his hand when he died.
00:58:45.220We flew him back to New York, where he was senator.
00:58:50.900And we waked him at St. Patrick's Cathedral to a huge crowd of people.
00:58:56.760And it was multicolored people, you know, every color, packing the sidewalks, eight to ten deep for, you know, the entire upper Manhattan.
00:59:05.820And we put him on a train and we took that train down from Penn Station to Union Station in Washington, D.C.
00:59:14.900There were two million people lining the train tracks.
00:59:18.620The train trip that's usually two and a half hours took seven hours because the trains could not move because there were so many people on the tracks.
00:59:25.860They were a cross section of the American public who were black people, whites, they need the train stations in Newark, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, were just jammed with with black Americans singing the battle hymn of the Republic and holding candles as we came through.
00:59:46.000So my father's casket was in the caboose and, you know, I was riding at the end of the train or sometime in the different cars.
00:59:54.800And there were every religion, there were rabbis, there were priests, there were nuns, there were men in military uniform, there were hippies, tie-dye t-shirts, there were Boy Scouts.
01:00:05.360I remember a group of about seven or eight nuns standing in the middle of a baseball field in Delaware in the back of a pickup, a yellow pickup truck.
01:00:18.860And there was just this incredible array.
01:00:21.400It was a cross section of the American experience.
01:00:24.840It was all the crowds that I had seen in all these political campaigns with my dad and my uncle since I was a little boy.
01:00:32.000And it was a complete mixture of the American, you know, diaspora.
01:00:37.660And four years later, most of the crowd was white because our population was, and they were holding signs, American flags, pray for us, Bobby, goodbye, Bobby, you know, holding the babies up.
01:00:53.580We got to Penn Station and Washington, or Union Station, Washington, President Johnson met us.
01:01:00.680We took my father up the hill, Arlington, we passed them all.
01:01:06.620And at that time, the Poor People's Campaign, which had been organized, conceived by my father, organized by Martin Luther King and Marian Wright Edelman.
01:01:16.500And there was thousands of poor men from all over the country.
01:01:19.280They're trying to create a political movement for poor people.
01:01:28.040They bowed their head and they held their hats against their chests as we went up the hill to Arlington to bury my father next to his brother.
01:01:38.320And four years later, I was in college, and I was looking at demographic data from the 1972 campaigns.
01:01:53.100My dad was killed in the middle of that campaign.
01:01:55.300And four years later, the vast majority of those white voters between Baltimore and or between Wilmington and Washington, who had supported my father strongly, four years later, the vast majority of them were voting not for George McGovern, who was aligned with my father on most issues, but for George Wallace, who was diametrically opposed.
01:02:24.560He was a racist, segregationist, you know, of the worst kind.
01:02:31.540And it occurred to me then, so that same people that voted for my father were now voting for a guy who believed absolutely the opposite.
01:02:40.520It occurred to me then, and it struck me many times since, that every nation, like every human being, has a darker side and a lighter side.
01:02:50.500And the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our bigotry, to our hatred, to our selfishness, to misogyny, to xenophobia, and to our greed and anger.
01:03:04.280And it's much more difficult to do what my father was trying to do, which is to try to make us feel like part of a community.
01:03:14.140And we are all on a heroic mission to perfect the republic, to make this nation an exemplary nation, to make this nation a model for all the other nations of what human beings can accomplish from all the races and colors and creeds that are gathered here.
01:03:31.760And when we work together to elevate what's best about us and to create something that is a model democracy for the rest of the world.
01:03:42.500And my father was able to get people to get people to see the hero inside of themselves at all.
01:03:49.720He believed that each one of us had a hero inside of us and that his job was to bring that hero out and get us to transcend narrow self-interest and act on behalf of community and to resist the seduction of the notion that we can advance ourselves.
01:04:12.160The people by leaving our poor brothers and sisters behind that we had to go forward together, we had to lift up each other and all be part of this American experience.
01:04:22.540What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society,
01:04:38.720the divisions, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together.
01:04:47.380We are a great country and a selfish country and a compassionate country.
01:04:51.080And, you know, so that's the answer, I think, to your question that, you know, we need to start appealing to the best side of all Americans and stop looking at their race, their religion, their political party affiliation or anything else.
01:05:15.780And just say, what do we need to do to make this country, you know, the best, the exemplary nation that it ought to be?
01:05:22.460Mm hmm. That was so moving hearing you talk about him.
01:05:26.260It takes me back to I was born long enough ago that news about the Kennedys and the way they saw the world and presidential speeches and speeches by Bobby Kennedy were still in the news and they played them often.
01:05:38.380And they were still, you know, your dad, your uncle, still symbols of the Democratic Party and what it meant to be a Democrat.
01:05:44.260It's changed so much now, as has the Republican Party.
01:05:48.520But as you were talking, my producers put on the screen a black and white picture of your dad, of Jack Kennedy and of your uncle, Ted Kennedy together.
01:05:57.080These when they were younger, they were strong, robust, good looking guys, you know, brothers standing together, getting into politics, trying to help the country advance.
01:06:07.100And it reminded me of the way you wrote about growing up, just all the cousins was like twenty nine.
01:06:14.040I think you just said seventy, but it's like twenty nine cousins, something like that running around.
01:06:17.520Well, I had another, you know, my mother had a huge family, too.
01:06:24.800But like growing up Kennedy, you know, they referred to Jackie and Jack as Camelot, but you guys had some of that, too.
01:06:32.300And like, I just wonder, they didn't let you play inside if the sun was shining.
01:06:38.000You had to be outside and you had to be playing games and you had to be with each other.
01:06:41.040And it was sort of this seemed like a communal living in a way that, too, seems to be withering, right?
01:06:47.840Like our connectedness to one another, be it family, friends, in part, thanks to technology.
01:06:54.440Can you take me back just for a minute so I can feel that, too, of what it was like to be connected and be outdoors and not be glued to a phone and be taking risks and being going on boats and be playing football?
01:07:45.200So all the remaining kids, the remaining six kids, all had houses essentially next to each other or very close to each other in Hyannis Fort.
01:07:56.160And most of them had large families and we would migrate every night.
01:09:44.500But the, the, I really am frightened and concerned about this generation.
01:09:53.200Because I think they're, you know, the technology, the cell phones, the TikTok, the Instagram, and the, the kind of self-oathing that accompanies a lot of those addictions.
01:10:09.580Is, is, is, if they have to overcome stuff that we never had to overcome in the life that, you know, I think that the socialization of these children today, it's an, it's an addiction.
01:10:26.500You know, these devices are designed to addict people and they're addicting themselves to something that is not apparently healthy for any reason.
01:10:44.820You know, Megan, I think that the Democrats have a really, who are advocating censorship.
01:10:53.260The concern they have, the underlying concern is a legitimate concern.
01:10:58.620You have, because of the power of the social media, these, you know, inflammatory and violent and dishonest characterization.
01:11:09.020It's kind of having a way of amplifying on the internet, the way they wouldn't do with conventional newspapers or news sources.
01:11:19.260And the, the algorithms that they use to keep us on the site also have the, the side effect of, or the fallout of, of polarizing opinion and making opinion, I think, more extreme.
01:12:41.720And, you know, they're making money and they're tied in with the intelligence agencies and.
01:12:47.600They're tied in with big pharma, you know, Google owns three vaccine companies, Facebook, Zuckerberg is, has a billion dollar investment in vaccines.
01:12:56.480So they're, you know, and they're all making money on, they have partnerships with the big pharmaceutical companies.
01:13:04.800And it's a really dangerous conglomerate because the, you know, we, there's no, it's not paranoid to say the intelligence agencies are deeply, deeply embedded in these companies.
01:13:17.220And you have the, you know, you have military applications, you have huge government contracts, you have deals with the pharmaceutical companies.
01:13:24.660And you've created this, this government corporate cartel that controls all of our communications.
01:13:33.960And so, and it's really, really dangerous.
01:13:36.800It really makes you want to disconnect and just go live in the woods.
01:13:39.640Just go play outside like a Kennedy and don't, don't look at any devices.
01:13:44.020Just to round back to you guys outside and playing and all that, um, have to ask you, you write in the book, uh, we built tree houses in the Magnolia.
01:13:53.480We played for hours in the hayloft, making forts from hay bales.
01:13:56.360We invented our own games, mostly involving some element of risk, like tag on the roof, where we leapt from atop the barn to the tack room, tool sheds and horse trailers, roofs, or onto a neighboring white pine.
01:14:09.300It reminds me of a quote that I read from your grandmother, the matriarch of the Kennedy clan, Rose, where, you know, you never know whether these are real or not.
01:14:18.440But what was attributed to her was, um, better broken bone than a broken spirit.
01:15:15.460People shouldn't listen to me as a parent.
01:15:17.660The older I get, the less I know about parenting.
01:15:21.520So I'm, I am not going to give people advice on parenting.
01:15:25.800I mean, I can share kind of my experience, strength and hope, which is that, you know, I, my, my approach to parenting has been, has been to, to really laissez-faire, to try to be a good example, to try to encourage interest, my kids' interest in history and, and, you know, to, and values.
01:15:53.600And, but also to understand that as much as I love them, that God loves them more and that he's, they're his children and that, you know, my role is not to control them, but to encourage them.
01:16:08.300And, you know, most of my kids went through periods of revolt against me, which I welcome.
01:16:16.020I think children, you know, need to divorce their parents.
01:16:19.080They need to develop their own sense of self.
01:16:21.680They need to develop confidence and they need to be, you know, I like when my kids argue with me.
01:16:30.160I have one kid in particular who does not, he's not completely bought into any of my vaccine, you know, baloney or whatever.
01:16:37.620So he, and he argues with me all the time and I love that.
01:16:41.920I love that, you know, they can make up their own minds that it's really important that we develop in our country, a generation of children who understand the importance of critical thinking.
01:16:56.440And who understand that fear can disable our capacity for critical thinking and we have to resist that, you know, like Franklin Roosevelt said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
01:17:11.360Because fear destroys capacity for critical thinking.
01:17:15.080And we need to be armored against propaganda.
01:17:18.580We need to be armored against the orchestrated fear.
01:17:22.360Because if we, and so it's, it's important to have brave children is important to instill courage and risk taking if we want to continue to have a democracy.
01:17:33.020There was a generation of Americans in 1789 or 1776 who, you know, understand that there's, there's, there's a lot worse things than death.
01:18:18.940You know, today, today's day and age requires a new kind of risk taking.
01:18:22.460You know, you may not be getting in the cockpit of an airplane, but just to speak your opinion in today's day and age requires some measure of courage.
01:18:32.740I mean, my father always, you know, my father really admired, as I say in my book, physical courage.
01:18:39.980And he was surrounded by people like Jim Whitaker, his best friends, Jim Whitaker, who was the first American on Mount Everest.
01:18:47.100He was John Glenn, who was, you know, the first American to orbit the Earth.
01:18:53.380You know, Sam, all these football players, Rosie, Rafer Johnson, people who had demonstrated, right?
01:19:00.420And a lot of war heroes, like Gerald Tremblay and many others.
01:19:05.040They were all in our house all the time.
01:19:07.060And my father had this tremendous admiration for physical courage.
01:19:11.280He always said that moral courage is an even rarer commodity than that.
01:19:17.560You know, and ultimately, that was, you know, the reason that my uncle wrote that book, Profiles in Courage, and won the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer Prize, was to illustrate, you know, a dozen stories.
01:19:32.240Of American politicians who had sacrificed their careers, and in some cases, their lives, or principle, to stand on a principle that they knew was going to cost them.
01:19:44.580And, you know, I was raised in a milieu where we were taught that it was a great privilege to be able to be part of some great controversy.
01:19:56.980And that the best thing that could happen to us is if we could give our lives and our energies to something that, you know, was larger than ourselves.
01:20:28.120And you and my old pal and colleague from Fox News, Douglas Kennedy, your little brother, were the two in your family, the two of your dad's kids, who were, as I understand it, in favor of him getting parole.
01:20:56.180What convinced you to support the parole of the man who killed your dad?
01:21:02.140Well, number one, even if Sirhan had killed my father, I would be advocating his parole.
01:21:09.880And my brother, Douglas, is agnostic about whether Sirhan killed my father or not.
01:21:16.740But he even, he believes, like I do, that even if he did kill my father, he should be paroled.
01:21:23.220And, you know, to me, that is an important personal stand because I think resentments and anger and revenge are impulses that are never, they're never good for you.
01:21:43.180I mean, resentments are like, as they say, like, swallowing poison and hoping someone else would die.
01:21:51.020It has a corrosive impact on your own soul.
01:21:54.660So I think, you know, what you, what the better approach to people who hurt you is to pray for them, to forgive them, and then to keep moving.
01:22:05.300But if you, you know, let them live in your head, rent free, then they are in control of you.
01:22:11.000And only by forgiving them do you escape their control and their influence.
01:22:17.120So I would be advocating, even if Sirhan didn't kill my father, Sirhan, Sirhan did not kill my father.
01:22:27.920And this is what Thomas Noguchi, who was the coroner, you know, said from the beginning.
01:22:32.680Sirhan, Sirhan was standing in front of my father.
01:22:37.600He was standing in front of a steam table.
01:22:39.880He never got more than, less than five feet from my father.
01:22:44.140There were 77 eyewitnesses in that Ambassador Hotel kitchen.
01:22:49.580And they all saw what happened, which is Sirhan fired two shots at my father directly.
01:22:55.720One of those shots went past my father and hit Paul Schrade, who was a United Auto Workers, a very close friend of my father.
01:23:05.580He's the man who introduced my father to Cesar Chavez and one of his closest friends.
01:23:12.920And he today is alive and has been advocating for Sirhan for 20 years.
01:23:18.540And he's the one who made me look at the evidence and read the autopsy report against my will and showed me that Sirhan could not have killed my father.
01:23:28.460The second shot that Sirhan fired at my father ended up in a door, a doorjamb, a wooden doorjamb behind my father and was later removed by the Los Angeles Police Department.
01:23:42.980Sirhan was then tackled by six men, including Rosalie Guerrier, Rayford Johnson, and a number of others.
01:23:49.800And his gun hand was pushed away from my father.
01:24:17.780My father was hit by four shots, one that passed harmlessly through his shoulder pad, all of them from behind.
01:24:27.020They were contact shots, meaning the barrel of the gun was either touching his flesh or within an inch of his flesh or touching his clothing.
01:24:37.960They were fired by somebody who was standing immediately behind my father.
01:24:43.020And all of the shots were fired on an upward trajectory.
01:24:47.680So the gun was being held against my father's back.
01:24:51.680And the trigger was pulled four times.
01:24:53.960The audio of the night records 14 shots or 13 shots fired.
01:25:00.080So Sirhan only had eight shots in his gun.
01:25:03.200And there were many more shots than that fired.