The Megyn Kelly Show - Part 2 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Deep Dive, on The JFK Assassination, Growing up Kennedy, His Marriage

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00:00:31.240 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:42.840 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:46.040 I hope you and your family had a great Thanksgiving.

00:00:49.340 Today we are bringing you part two of my lengthy conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:00:54.600 It took place back in March of 2022 when he was de-platformed from nearly everywhere.

00:01:01.160 In this part of the discussion, we get into COVID, tech censorship, his wife Cheryl Hines,

00:01:07.380 the assassination of his father and his uncle, growing up a Kennedy, and so much more.

00:01:14.020 I actually think, personally, I enjoyed this half even more than the first half.

00:01:18.040 I think you will too. You get to know him in a very different way.

00:01:20.340 Please, take a listen, enjoy it, and we'll see you again live on Monday.

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00:02:51.340 What do you think about the censorship you've endured?

00:02:54.540 Oh, I mean, to me, Megan, that's the most disturbing feature of this.

00:02:59.900 You know, this kind of bewildering response to COVID that we've seen.

00:03:07.640 I, you know, first of all, I want to say this, that I'm accused of promoting vaccine misinformation,

00:03:13.960 but nobody, not Instagram, not the White House, not anybody else,

00:03:18.240 has actually identified a statement that I've made that is incorrect.

00:03:23.560 In fact, there were no statements on Instagram.

00:03:27.260 I didn't even say that, you know, the virus came from Wuhan.

00:03:31.500 I just said it should be investigated because it would be weird if the guy who was financing

00:03:37.220 those experiments and may have created the virus is now running the pandemic response.

00:03:43.500 And so these questions should be asked.

00:03:45.580 I didn't say it would happen because I couldn't at that point.

00:03:47.980 I have not made any inaccurate statements, as far as I know.

00:03:53.580 If I did make one and it was identified, I would immediately apologize and withdraw it.

00:04:00.760 Instagram or Facebook acknowledges that it uses the term vaccine misinformation as a euphemism

00:04:08.260 for any statement or assertion that departs from government proclamations,

00:04:14.880 whether they're factually true or not.

00:04:16.740 So my crime was criticizing government policies.

00:04:22.920 I'm not, it was not passing actual misinformation.

00:04:27.840 And that's a problem for our government.

00:04:30.080 You know, Adams and Madison and Jefferson said,

00:04:32.700 we put freedom of speech in the First Amendment

00:04:35.880 because all of the other rights are dependent on that right.

00:04:40.540 And if a government can silence criticism, it has a license to commit any atrocity.

00:04:50.720 And 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 0.71

00:05:00.140 to 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.

00:05:12.840 But, you know, at the same time, we need to be able to be willing to die to protect their right to say those things.

00:05:21.500 And that's, you know, what they understood, our ancestors and the American Revolution.

00:05:26.800 And that's what generations of writers, of politicians, of respected leaders have warned against any government that tries to limit speech.

00:05:38.840 And now, it's very strange living in this world where it's become, you know, it's become okay.

00:05:46.900 In my political party, I saw a Gallup poll recently.

00:05:51.360 It was either Gallup or Rasmussen that said that something like 70% of Democrats support government restricting speech.

00:06:01.880 And, you know, it's almost inexplicable to me that we could be in that place right now.

00:06:11.860 I 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.

00:06:21.860 And that's so critical for our democracy.

00:06:24.080 And, you know, it also is critical of public health.

00:06:27.120 So, listen, I may be wrong about the things that I talk about, but, you know, why can't we debate them?

00:06:35.000 Why can't we hear these discussions about masks?

00:06:39.400 Okay.

00:06:39.660 You know, I've sued agencies for 40 years for failing to go through a regulatory process to have an environmental impact statement.

00:06:49.380 The 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.

00:07:02.140 None of that happened.

00:07:03.640 It was, you know, we just suspended democracy.

00:07:06.560 We suspended due process.

00:07:08.020 And once they got rid of freedom of speech, they went after all the others.

00:07:14.580 They 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.

00:07:28.920 They shut down a million businesses with no justice compensation, no due process, no justice compensation, a direct violation of our Constitution.

00:07:38.020 They got rid of Seventh Amendment jury trials against any company that says that they're involved in providing a countermeasure.

00:07:45.920 If 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.

00:07:58.420 And 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.

00:08:16.440 And, you know, there is no pandemic exception in the U.S. Constitution.

00:08:22.500 And 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.

00:08:37.600 And there was another malaria epidemic that happened to the Army of Virginia.

00:08:43.360 So they knew very well what epidemics could do.

00:08:46.200 And yet they did not say that this document is suspended.

00:08:50.340 These rights are suspended whenever there is an epidemic.

00:08:53.180 And, you know, the disturbing part of this response was that it did not seem to be a public health response at all.

00:09:03.960 It was a militarized and monetized response.

00:09:07.380 We did things the opposite of what you would do if you wanted to stop a pandemic.

00:09:13.080 And 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.

00:09:29.960 We had 4.2 percent of the global population here in the United States.

00:09:34.420 I think we had something like 17 or 18 percent of the global COVID deaths.

00:09:40.580 The death rate in America was in the top 10 in the world.

00:09:46.660 So we had 2,800 people per million population die.

00:09:52.580 The African nations had an average of about 200.

00:09:57.860 Oh, Nigeria had 15 people per million population.

00:10:02.980 These countries, which Tony Fauci and Bill Gates at the beginning of the pandemic said Africa is going to get wiped out.

00:10:09.220 We need to get them all vaccines.

00:10:12.660 Nigeria has a vaccination rate of 1.5 for one vaccine, 1.5 percent.

00:10:20.400 Wow.

00:10:20.580 And they had a COVID death rate that was about 1,500th of our COVID death rate.

00:10:28.200 Wow.

00:10:29.040 You know, there's reasons, Megan, for there's reasons for that that are non-medical.

00:10:34.780 One is that African countries have younger populations, and COVID was a disease that killed elderly people.

00:10:42.320 But that doesn't explain it anywhere near these huge disproportions.

00:10:47.720 One of the things that could explain it is that Nigeria has the highest malaria burden in the world.

00:10:58.060 Oh, 27 percent of malaria cases globally come from that country.

00:11:02.920 Oh, everybody in the country is on hydroxychloroquine.

00:11:05.440 It also has the highest burden of river blindness.

00:11:09.840 A large part of the population is on ivermectin.

00:11:13.540 Is that what explains the, you know, this incredible record against COVID?

00:11:19.580 Well, we don't know.

00:11:21.320 But shouldn't we be asking that question?

00:11:23.560 And 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?

00:11:34.160 And the countries that did worse are the ones that focus on the vaccines.

00:11:38.180 And the fact it's not just Fauci, as you as you well know, big tech has been completely supportive of this shutdown.

00:11:45.200 You 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.

00:11:55.360 This is where they're going to jump in and try to censor us.

00:11:57.420 Nothing should be censored here.

00:11:58.600 This is a discussion about whether they work.

00:12:00.460 Should we have discussions about more discussions about about that fact?

00:12:04.820 But that's that's what they've done to us because they'll take away your platform.

00:12:08.540 As you well know, you can't even talk about it.

00:12:10.680 They've jumped in on the silencing of discussion, and they're the ones who control the public information highway.

00:12:17.160 So it's really damaging.

00:12:19.140 I I'm in news.

00:12:20.700 And to this day, I don't know what the truth is on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

00:12:26.280 And even talking about it makes even me feel like it's it's insane.

00:12:31.840 It's un-American. 0.82

00:12:34.700 That's right.

00:12:35.380 And, you know, I would I completely not.

00:12:39.520 I can be wrong about anything.

00:12:41.760 Let's have the debate.

00:12:43.140 Let's have the discussion.

00:12:44.240 You 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.

00:12:57.120 And none of that stuff is happening.

00:12:58.560 And as you point out, you know, we need to ask ourselves, qui bono, who is benefiting from this?

00:13:04.700 Clearly, the pharmaceutical companies and also the big tech platforms are.

00:13:09.780 And they you know, there has been this has been a war against the poor.

00:13:13.780 If you look at a black neighborhoods, Compton, Harlem had two or three times the death rates at Bel Air or Greenwich.

00:13:25.180 And, you know, you have the schools closed in those neighborhoods.

00:13:29.420 According to the Brown University study, children lost 22 IQ points during young children during the pandemic.

00:13:37.380 And, you know, and the mental illness went off the roof.

00:13:41.740 I think 51 percent of black children had suicidal ideation.

00:13:46.380 You had the police go into those neighborhoods and close down the, you know, the basketball courts.

00:13:53.860 Yeah.

00:13:54.320 And and who benefited from all of this?

00:13:57.180 It was the they you know, the Internet platforms.

00:14:00.400 It was Jeff Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergei Brandt, Larry Ellison.

00:14:07.380 Jeff Bezos, et cetera.

00:14:09.880 These 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.

00:14:26.260 And the same people who were benefiting were the ones who now control our communications of Facebook and all these platforms.

00:14:35.080 And they were using their control to suppress and to censor any criticism of the government lockdowns that were making them even richer.

00:14:47.400 And there's something really wrong with that.

00:14:49.640 And the government was allied with them and telling them what to censor and whatnot.

00:14:54.720 We have correspondence between Zuckerberg and Tony Fauci telling him about censoring people like me.

00:15:04.580 Oh, 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.

00:15:12.080 Oh, I'd buy a ticket to that.

00:15:14.080 What?

00:15:14.560 I would buy a ticket to that.

00:15:19.960 Listen, I it's not just suppression.

00:15:21.820 That's what's scary.

00:15:22.780 It's also demonization, ostracization.

00:15:25.760 It's smearing.

00:15:27.480 Right.

00:15:27.740 And we've seen in the Fauci papers that have been collected by places like the Intercept.

00:15:32.000 That's his MO that that's they intentionally smeared several scientists and so on who weren't following the Fauci line.

00:15:38.920 They've definitely smeared you and some of the doctors that you just mentioned and tried to create this.

00:15:44.020 You know, they're freaks.

00:15:44.760 They're they're disinformationists.

00:15:46.640 You know, that's that's by design.

00:15:48.360 They don't want people listening to you.

00:15:49.760 And 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.

00:16:03.100 You probably gathered that.

00:16:05.120 Yeah, but I really am.

00:16:08.560 But I like the I liked I love the anti mandate rally and those who organized and I thought it was great.

00:16:14.560 So you got in trouble when you were there.

00:16:16.700 You I mean, I got your overall point.

00:16:18.380 And people get upset when you compare anything to the Holocaust.

00:16:21.660 But you were basically saying, I don't know, I have in front of me just so so I don't get it wrong.

00:16:25.360 But it was even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland.

00:16:30.360 You could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did today. 0.59

00:16:33.440 Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run.

00:16:36.980 None of us can hide.

00:16:38.180 Well, all hell rained down on you.

00:16:40.160 I mean, when the Auschwitz Memorial is responding to you on Twitter, you know, you've stepped in it.

00:16:44.660 They came out and said it was it's a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.

00:16:48.520 So those people don't like you.

00:16:50.640 And some of them don't like you for political reasons.

00:16:53.120 But 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.

00:16:58.940 Um, she came out and she gave it to you, too.

00:17:02.080 She gave it to you right between the eyes and said, um, his we should not be comparing the Holocaust to anything or anyone.

00:17:08.960 His opinions are not a reflection of my own.

00:17:10.920 And his reference to Anne Frank was reprehensible and insensitive.

00:17:14.140 So I know you said you were sorry for that comment.

00:17:17.700 Well, what did you make of it?

00:17:18.580 Yeah, well, let me let me get to my wife in a minute and just make a couple of comments on that. 1.00

00:17:25.460 Number one, I regret making that analogy.

00:17:28.940 Number two, I was not comparing COVID policies to the Holocaust.

00:17:33.200 I never mentioned the Holocaust.

00:17:34.360 I was making a point.

00:17:37.820 I was comparing a number of totalitarian regimes, left wing and right wing.

00:17:44.160 So 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.

00:17:59.680 And 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.

00:18:28.360 With 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.

00:18:37.600 We have vaccine passports, which is a way of social control, digital currencies.

00:18:45.020 We saw what they did to the truckers in Canada, where they closed their bank accounts and, you know, denied the money.

00:18:52.780 And 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.

00:19:08.760 Let 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.

00:19:23.020 That's the point I was going to make.

00:19:24.300 I 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.

00:19:41.260 And 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.

00:19:58.860 Oh, and, you know, I apologize because I don't want to hurt anybody.

00:20:02.940 I have no, you know, desire to hurt anybody.

00:20:05.260 I 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.

00:20:24.700 Death camps didn't come until 1941.

00:20:28.840 There 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.

00:20:41.900 Over 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.

00:20:57.900 And 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.

00:21:10.920 That's what Gina Carano got fired from ABC for, from Disney, for trying to talk about that. 1.00

00:21:17.260 It'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.

00:21:25.260 People cannot hear my words.

00:21:26.980 They're going to hear from their feelings and their hearts, and they're entitled to those feelings.

00:21:33.120 Yes, but you know when your spouse is on the side of the other people, you know you've done wrong, right?

00:21:38.400 Because your spouse is rooting for you.

00:21:39.880 And I want to say this, I, you know, I encouraged Cheryl to publish that statement.

00:21:47.740 In fact, I asked her to do a statement that was much tougher than that.

00:21:52.140 Really?

00:21:52.400 Which, 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.

00:22:07.800 You 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.

00:22:17.180 She was, you know, she was, you know, getting tremendous blowback from her friends, from her industry, from others.

00:22:25.320 And it was, and it was, it was a terrible experience for me.

00:22:30.880 And she, you know, by the way, what she said, she believed.

00:22:35.500 So she wasn't saying something, you know, she is, she does not accept all of the things that, you know, I believe.

00:22:47.440 But she, she, about, about what's happening with the vaccines and the medical department.

00:22:52.040 Yeah, you don't speak for her.

00:22:54.360 What?

00:22:55.160 Yeah, I got it.

00:22:56.360 Yeah.

00:22:57.000 So I, I don't need to convert her, and I don't need her to, you know, to be, I, I, I don't want her to. 1.00

00:23:04.460 She started reading my book.

00:23:05.820 She read all my other books.

00:23:08.300 And she started reading that book, and she got on Fauci, and she had just made her depressed to read that, you know, she has an idealism.

00:23:16.180 And, and a, and just a gentle heart.

00:23:22.240 And 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.

00:23:33.640 It just, it, it was, it was, it was, it was making her soul wither.

00:23:42.220 And I said to her, you guy, you kid, you don't have to read that book, and you should stop reading it.

00:23:47.900 Because let me just tell you something about, about Cheryl.

00:23:52.940 She, she is literally the best human being that I've ever met.

00:23:57.940 And 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.

00:24:13.800 She was married then, and she was married then, and then she came back in 2011, and both of us were separated.

00:24:24.120 And I, you know, had got a crush on her on that weekend.

00:24:27.920 So I knew I wanted to date her.

00:24:29.800 And 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.

00:24:44.740 And 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...

00:24:56.080 Might have been crossing a boundary.

00:24:57.500 I got it.

00:24:57.940 Exactly.

00:24:59.240 So I went and met him at the Carlisle Hotel around 11 o'clock at night.

00:25:03.080 I went up to his room and sat down with him.

00:25:06.600 It was like asking her parents to date, although, you know, he's my age.

00:25:11.720 And I said, what do you think of that?

00:25:13.920 And he said, she is the best person, human being I've ever met.

00:25:18.400 And he said, she's the only person in this industry that is universally beloved.

00:25:24.380 She doesn't have a single enemy.

00:25:26.480 And she has a level of professionalism.

00:25:29.580 She's never late for an appointment.

00:25:31.460 She always knows her line.

00:25:33.320 She does what she's supposed to do.

00:25:35.200 And she really...

00:25:36.960 You know, Cheryl came from total poverty. 1.00

00:25:39.560 And she was born in North Florida.

00:25:42.020 Her father lived in a trailer in Frostbrook, Florida.

00:25:46.660 Cheryl slept in the same bed with her mother until she left high school. 0.96

00:25:50.580 So she came out.

00:25:52.780 She paid for her own way through college.

00:25:54.480 She put her way through waitressing and working as a joke teller on a telephone line.

00:26:02.120 And 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.

00:26:15.300 And before she finally got a break, which, you know, she was working at the ground lanes and doing improv.

00:26:22.440 But 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.

00:26:32.920 And, you know, then her career took off.

00:26:35.180 She directs films.

00:26:36.260 And she has an incredible career that she put together single-handedly.

00:26:41.280 And the idea that my activities would be jeopardizing this thing that this incredible person put together was just...

00:26:54.480 I felt like my job is to protect her.

00:26:57.460 And I was doing the opposite of my job.

00:27:00.160 So my heart was breaking.

00:27:02.140 And I was, you know, I would have taken any blow to make sure that she could distance herself from, you know... 0.96

00:27:14.800 Yes.

00:27:15.420 My grandpa, you know, my parents were all really good friends with leading figures at the time who had been terrible enemies of my grandfather.

00:27:24.440 And my grandfather used to always say, I don't want my enemies to be my children's enemies.

00:27:31.140 They can pick their own fights, but they don't need to fight mine.

00:27:34.960 And I don't want them to.

00:27:36.200 And I feel that way about my family, too.

00:27:38.980 I, you know, I chose this life.

00:27:41.800 I chose this, you know, crusade.

00:27:45.100 And they need to figure out their own way.

00:27:47.980 My children and other members of my family have other things to do.

00:27:51.760 They're all doing valuable stuff.

00:27:53.640 And I'm not insisting that they read my book.

00:27:57.140 If you...

00:27:57.700 This issue is so hard to learn.

00:28:00.480 You know, I've been litigating it.

00:28:02.140 I've written book after book about it.

00:28:06.040 Coming up, Robert talks about his uncle and his father's battles with the FBI and the CIA.

00:28:11.840 And I also ask him if he still considers himself a Democrat after all the backlash he's taken from his side.

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00:29:57.520 Now, trust me, I'm a lawyer and a journalist, and it took me a lot just to come up with,

00:30:08.720 you know, like, where am I going to challenge him?

00:30:11.380 What are some sort of points?

00:30:13.500 Megan, I want to tell you how impressed I am because you're very brave to have me on because

00:30:21.780 you saw what they did to Joe Rogan for having Dr. Malone on.

00:30:27.920 Yeah.

00:30:28.740 And I'm the only worst person, Dr. Malone.

00:30:32.100 So, you know, they try to destroy Joe Rogan.

00:30:34.480 He's got 40 million followers.

00:30:36.380 I know.

00:30:37.320 And Joe Rogan wouldn't put me on.

00:30:39.500 Joe Rogan wanted to put me on.

00:30:41.200 He won't put me on.

00:30:42.400 And he has good reason for it because they will, you know, what you face if you allow

00:30:48.160 me to talk is, and you've pushed back at me appropriately, you and I, you know, you've

00:30:55.720 made good points on this show.

00:30:58.180 You've done, you know, you're tough and you're smart, but you also, you have a lot of courage

00:31:04.480 to, you know, to even allow me to talk.

00:31:06.800 I've never been allowed to talk like this on a, on a major platform, except, you know,

00:31:13.840 Dr. Carlson.

00:31:15.060 Yep.

00:31:15.340 Yep.

00:31:15.900 A friend of mine too.

00:31:16.920 And thank you for saying that.

00:31:18.580 Um, I, I was really looking forward to it.

00:31:20.660 I have to say the more they try to suppress someone like you or Dr. Malone, the more I

00:31:26.080 want to do it.

00:31:26.640 You know, that I've always been that person and I'm thrilled, I'm thrilled you're here.

00:31:30.700 And I should tell the audience, of course, nothing was off limits.

00:31:33.180 You, you're not that guy, but you were like, I'll stay as long as you want.

00:31:36.220 We can go, we can talk about anything because you're not afraid of pushback.

00:31:40.540 Unlike these censors who only want to air one sided story.

00:31:45.020 I've said this before, you know, as a lawyer, and I know as a lawyer of 10 years before I

00:31:48.940 got into journalism, if you only, if you go into a courtroom and you only present one

00:31:52.140 side, you're going to win.

00:31:53.280 It's very easy to win when you only have the one side talking, you can persuade even the

00:31:59.100 least gullible of jurors to come over to your side, but that's what they're doing.

00:32:03.000 They're just shutting down one side and then declaring it a victory.

00:32:06.220 And they'd had, they haven't won the hearts and minds.

00:32:08.260 That's why there's so many skeptics still out there.

00:32:10.040 And that's why your book is in its 12th printing, even though no one will give it any promo.

00:32:14.900 It's not going to be reviewed by the times and celebrated in the magazines and, you know,

00:32:20.020 all over the newspapers.

00:32:21.480 But the people have a, have a way.

00:32:23.380 The times and the Washington Post did, just did a big profile piece on me and neither of

00:32:31.600 them even mentioned the name of the book.

00:32:34.020 Oh my gosh.

00:32:35.080 That's how like radioactive it is.

00:32:38.120 So, um, let me ask you this.

00:32:40.480 Did, did everything die down for Cheryl?

00:32:42.760 Like everything was fine with her and her industry and show and all that after that?

00:32:47.200 I think so.

00:32:49.080 And, um, you know, I hope so.

00:32:51.960 She was nervous about me doing this show.

00:32:53.900 I can tell you that.

00:32:55.460 She's going to like it when, after she listens to it, she's going to approve.

00:32:58.460 I'll just tell you another thing because I brought her so much heartache on that other

00:33:04.840 thing that I, I want to say this about her that, you know, you mentioned my, my wife that

00:33:10.900 I had been through a real tragedy with, um, in my former marriage.

00:33:16.580 And, um, we, you know, I have, uh, six kids, men, a stepchild with Cheryl, but they, um, you

00:33:27.340 know, that was obviously anybody that listened to this can imagine how tough that was for

00:33:33.660 them and Cheryl coming into my life and becoming a friend, my kids adore her and she has these

00:33:43.320 extraordinary values.

00:33:44.740 Um, she has just a natural, uh, gift for understanding what you should do in any situation.

00:33:51.620 She has more wisdom than I know of in any person, but the word, the word wisdom means a knowledge

00:34:01.740 of God's will.

00:34:03.580 And she has this acute sense of what's right and wrong in every situation.

00:34:09.900 And she shared that with my children and just been a loving, loving friend to all of them.

00:34:16.800 And, you know, my kids are all incredible, are flourishing now and they're healthy and

00:34:22.160 they're, they're all doing well in careers and school and athletics, et cetera.

00:34:27.540 And a lot of that is because of the strength and the stability that she brought to my life.

00:34:32.160 So, you know, that I wanted to explain that because, um, that, you know, is why I would

00:34:41.320 do anything to spare her that kind of pain.

00:34:45.160 Well, I mean, we'll have to rain down hell on anybody who tries to mess with her for her 1.00

00:34:49.320 husband's opinions.

00:34:50.880 You're well-researched.

00:34:52.020 You're a lawyer.

00:34:52.600 You've devoted your life to this.

00:34:54.280 Of course you have strong opinions.

00:34:56.320 You know, I was thinking about it though, because you talk about I'm brave for having you

00:35:00.180 on, you're brave for staying on this after so much public shaming, you know, on all the

00:35:05.140 fronts that we've discussed.

00:35:06.540 And to me, in studying up on you and your family before the interview, I guess I thought

00:35:11.540 to myself, I shouldn't be surprised because one thing I knew even going into it, but then

00:35:16.120 was confirmed by everything I've read you say about your family is you're risk takers and

00:35:21.460 not by accident.

00:35:22.640 I mean, it's probably in your DNA as well, but it was encouraged, right?

00:35:26.500 From an early age, you write about how your dad may be too much.

00:35:30.180 So, you know, you'd get threats to the family.

00:35:32.760 And of course, given the way he died, of course, we all look at it differently now, but even

00:35:37.260 prior to that, there'd be death threats, there'd be something.

00:35:39.620 And, you know, he was like, we're fine.

00:35:42.580 You know, we don't need security and we're going to take risks and we're Kennedys.

00:35:46.240 And even the day, was it, um, you tell me, I'm trying to remember the story, but it was,

00:35:51.820 there was a death threat and, or maybe it was when JFK was, was shot, but he didn't want

00:35:56.600 you to leave school because he wanted you to be a good little soldier and not panic.

00:36:00.740 The other children during that Cuban missile crisis.

00:36:04.180 Oh, Cuban missile crisis.

00:36:05.360 Okay.

00:36:05.720 Yes.

00:36:06.180 Our schools came to our house.

00:36:07.760 My brother, Joe, and I were, I, you know, I think there were probably other kids that

00:36:12.000 people may know that there's 11 kids, my family, but Joe and I were kind of the older boys and

00:36:19.000 we were home and the U S marshals came by and they wanted to take our whole family down to

00:36:25.280 these, um, do this, you know, underground city that they have down in the blue Ridge

00:36:30.380 mountains where they, they have literally, they've followed out the blue Ridge and they

00:36:34.680 have, they have a whole city there for the government to hide in when the, you know, when

00:36:41.900 the bombs were raining down during nuclear winter and that, you know, um, and so we were

00:36:47.780 very, very excited.

00:36:49.280 You know, we just, we wanted to see the joint and, uh, and to go there.

00:36:54.660 And, um, but my father called us and he got us, the two of us on the phone on different lines.

00:37:00.960 And he said, if you children leave, people are going to recognize that in Washington and

00:37:07.720 it's going to cause people to panic and you need to go, you need to go to school.

00:37:13.460 You need to show, you need to show that, you know, everything is calm and be good soldiers.

00:37:21.440 And, um, so, I mean, I, and he also said that if there is a nuclear war, it will be better 0.94

00:37:27.780 to be dead than to be alive.

00:37:29.380 Now I did not go along with that.

00:37:31.940 I felt like I would thrive in that situation.

00:37:34.640 And I really wanted to see the place, but we did what he asked us to do.

00:37:39.960 You know, the story, this is from your book, American values, another thing that, that,

00:37:43.500 that the audience should buy.

00:37:44.400 But what my, one of my favorite stories from that book is your, of course, your father was

00:37:48.860 attorney general under president Jack Kennedy.

00:37:50.920 And, um, you write about how, when you were little, there was a red button on his desk

00:37:57.640 that would go directly to the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, who is just a crazed guy.

00:38:03.380 I mean, that's the stories about him in your book are great too.

00:38:06.000 And, um, you had some fun when you were a little one with that red button.

00:38:09.500 It was enjoyable for you.

00:38:10.460 Could you, do you remember this story from your book?

00:38:13.300 My father had a unique relationship with Hoover.

00:38:16.240 Hoover hated my father.

00:38:17.460 And after my uncle died, he never spoke to him again and he reported directly to John

00:38:22.780 City, even though my father continued as attorney general, my father was a sensible boss.

00:38:27.760 Um, but he had never reported to an attorney general in history.

00:38:31.740 He had always had direct access to the president of the United States.

00:38:36.580 And he hated that my father made him go through him.

00:38:39.680 Not only that, my father put a red button.

00:38:42.260 And the, the FBI was in an adjoining building.

00:38:47.740 They were actually linked by a bridge and they were linked by a tunnel, which we used to go

00:38:53.320 through.

00:38:53.760 We would go to the shooting range, the FBI shooting range.

00:38:56.440 And sometimes we'd go to Hoover's office.

00:38:58.860 He caught me in his office one day trying to, uh, catch the goldfish in his, uh, in his fish

00:39:05.520 tank.

00:39:05.880 He was very angry, but.

00:39:07.060 You're lucky you still have your hand.

00:39:10.040 Yeah.

00:39:10.520 My father had a button on the desk that he could summon Hoover.

00:39:16.000 And one day we were in there and we were, me and my, two of my siblings were mischievously

00:39:22.440 pressing that button.

00:39:24.020 And he came up, uh, very angry, which he should have been.

00:39:29.160 Um, it's amazing to think of you doing that.

00:39:33.860 The other, maybe not unrelated story was, um, of the red phone that president Kennedy

00:39:40.380 had installed so he could reach the, the, you know, Soviets immediately. 0.55

00:39:45.860 Um, and he had one of course in the oval office, but he had another one at your house where you

00:39:51.040 were raised in just outside of DC in Virginia, which was sort of like a satellite white house 0.90

00:39:55.620 for him.

00:39:56.040 And this is crazy.

00:39:57.600 I, I, apparently it's still there.

00:39:58.880 Like your brother owns the house.

00:40:00.520 Like we could go see it.

00:40:02.900 There was one in the Cape, which isn't my brother's now my brother's house, which for

00:40:07.260 one year was the summer white house.

00:40:10.380 And the wires are still going through the door.

00:40:13.040 But what happened was.

00:40:14.120 Could you call now?

00:40:15.080 Could you pick that up and just have a direct.

00:40:18.400 If you, I don't even know if they use landlines in the Kremlin anymore.

00:40:21.540 I have no idea how it works, but nobody's tried it for years.

00:40:24.420 Very useful.

00:40:25.660 But, um, my, my uncle had this very interesting relationship, which people don't know about

00:40:32.740 with Khrushchev because my uncle didn't trust his CIA.

00:40:38.420 He, in fact, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was early in his presidency, two months

00:40:43.640 into his presidency, he realized that CIA had lied to him, that they wanted to precipitate

00:40:48.420 a nuclear war and that they, um, had lied to him about the prospects and they knew that

00:40:56.740 the invasion was going to fail.

00:40:58.220 And they believe that he would be forced into sending in the S, the aircraft carrier and,

00:41:04.100 you know, and bombing Castro and doing a U S invasion.

00:41:08.620 My uncle was absolutely against doing that.

00:41:12.960 And when he, when he came out of the X of the meeting, the next morning, he said to his

00:41:21.300 aides, I want to take the CIA and shatter them into a million pieces and scatter them to the

00:41:27.380 wind.

00:41:28.940 He had this very hostile relationship with the agency and my book, American values is about

00:41:34.080 this, but the hostile relationship between the Kennedys and the CIA actually began 10

00:41:38.640 years before when my aunt, my grandfather picked a fight with Dallas by, by, he was on a commission

00:41:46.000 that recommended the, uh, the abolition of the clandestine services because they were causing

00:41:51.900 trouble and blowback all over the world.

00:41:54.860 My book is about the 60 year battle between my family and the CIA.

00:41:59.720 And my uncle had this very hostile relationship with his joint chiefs and with the CIA.

00:42:06.340 He had been a soldier himself.

00:42:08.420 He didn't trust the army for starters, the army brass.

00:42:12.300 And he, you know, he was mistrustful of them and he believed they wanted to make them go to war.

00:42:17.720 And he said the primary job of every, every president of the United States, the number one job is to keep

00:42:25.120 the nation out of war.

00:42:26.960 That's what he said.

00:42:27.900 What kind of a peace do I mean?

00:42:30.520 And what kind of a peace do we seek?

00:42:33.220 Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave 0.63

00:42:41.940 or the security of the slave.

00:42:44.560 I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,

00:42:53.160 the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children.

00:43:00.260 Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women.

00:43:04.840 Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.

00:43:10.000 And he wanted on his gravestone, he wanted, when he was asked what would be the epithet, he said he kept the peace,

00:43:19.500 that that should be what was printed on his gravestone.

00:43:22.500 So he, he, he began writing Khrushchev directly after the summit in Vienna failed.

00:43:31.080 Well, and they exchanged these 26 handwritten letters back and forth from each other that are incredibly intimate and caring.

00:43:41.280 And, you know, show this experience that both of the leaders were surrounded by war hawks who considered nuclear war,

00:43:52.800 not just inevitable, but also advisable, preferable.

00:43:57.240 And both of them were struggling against their own military industrial complexes to keep their nations out of war.

00:44:03.820 And they developed this very close relationship with each other,

00:44:07.940 where they talked with these intimate details about their families, their children, about us in these letters.

00:44:14.680 And they were smuggled between them by a KGB spy, whose name was Georgie Bolshakoy,

00:44:22.420 who developed a very strong relationship with my father, friendship with my father and mother.

00:44:28.240 And we loved him as a kid.

00:44:29.920 We knew he was a spy.

00:44:31.300 He 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.

00:44:41.380 And 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.

00:44:52.160 He smuggled these letters in the New York Times, folded in between the two men.

00:44:58.540 And 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,

00:45:09.200 end run the spies, end run the Pentagon, and the two men could talk directly.

00:45:13.540 And those phones were in three places.

00:45:16.580 In McLean, where I live, in Hyannisport, at the Summer White House, where we all play, and in the White House.

00:45:26.140 And, you know, it was extraordinary.

00:45:29.160 It 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,

00:45:40.720 which oftentimes has agendas that are contrary to the best interests of our country.

00:45:47.540 I mean, I only wish we felt that was the case with Putin now, right?

00:45:50.540 It seems like it's him and not his complex, given the amount of his power over there.

00:45:56.140 But, yeah, your uncle, I love how you just call him your uncle, the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

00:46:02.720 He came by those positions, honestly, because I read in your book, you write that your grandpa, his dad, Joe Kennedy,

00:46:09.720 that his pre-war sentiment, this is before World War II, was that America should avoid foreign entanglements.

00:46:15.840 And you write, but World War II had thrust leadership upon us.

00:46:20.560 But you say Jack Kennedy was determined, ultimately, that our role as an exemplary nation should be just that, leadership by example.

00:46:28.420 We should perfect our union and model democracy for the nations of the world, not force it upon them.

00:46:34.100 Boy, 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?

00:46:46.120 Well, I don't ever speak for my uncle, you know, in terms of what he would do on specific policies.

00:46:57.800 And I think that, you know, other members of my family, in respect to all of us, also avoid doing that.

00:47:06.780 But, you know, what I, listen, Megan, what I think is that we went to the war in Iraq in 2002, 2003.

00:47:20.240 And it turned out to be, and it was this hysteria, that Saddam Hussein was a monster, we had to get him, et cetera.

00:47:29.280 But there was no real explanation about what the U.S. interest in it was.

00:47:35.180 And he had nothing to do with 9-11, although we were made to think he did.

00:47:41.440 He had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks, although we were made to think he did.

00:47:45.560 And 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.

00:47:56.140 And 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.

00:48:15.580 And the Ukraine is an extremely complex geopolitically and historically, and in ways that Americans today are missing completely.

00:48:27.500 And 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.

00:48:49.200 And 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.

00:49:08.300 Yeah.

00:49:09.860 Coming up, Kennedy on how he tries to raise strong-minded, tough, resilient kids.

00:49:19.200 Well, and people should listen to you because you've been advising important people like presidents for a long time.

00:49:28.400 We pulled a picture of you sitting next to President Kennedy on the airplane.

00:49:32.560 And you tell me what this little boy in these cute little gray shorts is telling the president of the United States.

00:49:39.120 What's going on?

00:49:39.900 That picture on the airplane is coming back from the convention in Los Angeles in 1960.

00:49:48.980 And, you know, he had just been named a Democratic candidate.

00:49:52.580 He wasn't yet president.

00:49:54.640 He was not yet president.

00:49:56.360 He was still the United States senator.

00:49:59.380 And if you read, is there an inscription on the bottom of it?

00:50:02.020 There is.

00:50:03.200 I'm trying to read it here.

00:50:04.220 To me, saying a president gets his advice from, you know, many sources or something like that.

00:50:11.880 Yeah.

00:50:12.160 Yeah.

00:50:12.340 That's so great.

00:50:13.300 You were adorable, by the way.

00:50:15.420 Do you remember, like, were you, do you remember when he won the presidency?

00:50:19.900 Because you're young.

00:50:21.280 Yeah.

00:50:21.620 You remember that moment?

00:50:22.660 Of course.

00:50:24.160 Of course.

00:50:25.200 That was, you know, I mean, we all worked in the campaign.

00:50:28.220 I was out in Los Angeles for the convention.

00:50:32.820 My parents were really good about involving us and everything.

00:50:37.660 And, you know, we had sit-down dinners every night with all the kids.

00:50:41.020 And we talked about politics.

00:50:42.640 They talked about current events.

00:50:44.200 We had, from when we were really little, we had to read the papers every day, write down three current events every day in a journal.

00:50:51.360 I like that.

00:50:52.220 And we had to then give talks on the weekends at dinner.

00:50:58.000 Each one of us did a short talk on political or did a poem or something.

00:51:03.220 All 11 of you?

00:51:05.220 Well, you know, my, the family grew slowly.

00:51:08.300 They didn't have 11 kids all at once.

00:51:11.200 You're like, come on, keep it quick.

00:51:14.140 There were seven of us.

00:51:15.380 And some of them were young, but the older kids were expected to, you know, do these things.

00:51:21.120 And 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.

00:51:34.360 But 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.

00:51:58.800 And she did that every night with all of us.

00:52:00.840 And we did it.

00:52:02.000 And then we, we all said the rosary every night.

00:52:06.680 We read the Bible every single night.

00:52:08.920 We went to church every day in the summer and on Sundays, the winter as well.

00:52:16.780 And, you know, if I try to do that to my kids, then they ridicule me.

00:52:23.620 And so I really have tremendous respect for many, many gifts that she gave me.

00:52:29.740 But, 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.

00:52:43.140 Of course, everyone was a Democrat.

00:52:44.720 Now 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.

00:52:53.160 And you noted it yourself.

00:52:55.180 I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you, are you still a Democrat?

00:52:58.540 Yeah.

00:52:59.740 Like, 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.

00:53:11.840 But 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.

00:53:27.400 And those are, you know, and those are, you know, issues that both parties, people of both parties can share.

00:53:32.400 I 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.

00:53:49.140 And 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.

00:54:08.620 And 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.

00:54:18.700 We have a, we have a level of polarization now in this country that is dangerous.

00:54:24.360 If you read, if you see that, that documentary, Social Dilemma.

00:54:30.340 Yeah.

00:54:30.940 It'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.

00:54:41.840 It's the most dangerous polarization that we've had since the United States Civil War.

00:54:46.660 And 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.

00:55:03.080 And they're out of control of those algorithms.

00:55:05.600 They set them in motion.

00:55:08.140 And then they do things and learn things that nobody really knows how they were working.

00:55:13.540 But 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.

00:55:25.300 So I live in this house and there's a Republican next door and we make an identical inquiry on Google or whatever.

00:55:33.780 However, we get two different answers.

00:55:36.860 My answer will reinforce my worldview.

00:55:41.220 His answer is going to reinforce his.

00:55:43.580 And the division, the abyss between us gets deeper and deeper.

00:55:48.620 And this is a real problem for society.

00:55:51.880 And we have to figure out ways to build bridges with each other.

00:55:56.380 So I don't talk so much about my political party anymore.

00:56:00.100 I believe in all the values I've ever believed in.

00:56:02.860 I'm fighting for all the values and for the vision of our country that I always believe in.

00:56:08.320 But I am happy to talk to Republicans, work with them, to battle in the foxholes and the trenches side by side with them.

00:56:20.540 And Democrats and everybody.

00:56:22.280 And I don't ever ask anybody their political party.

00:56:25.500 I think, and I used to, you know, so I'm not saying that it's not part of my, you know, of what.

00:56:33.840 But 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.

00:56:48.020 I love what you said.

00:56:48.720 I agree with it wholeheartedly, and I'm trying to live it professionally and personally, and I am living it.

00:56:56.560 But forgive me for the follow-up, but do you think you could vote for a Republican presidential candidate in 2024?

00:57:03.460 Or do you plan on voting for Joe Biden?

00:57:05.480 Listen, my father always said, vote for the person, not the party.

00:57:09.400 I, 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.

00:57:27.380 Coming up, Robert, on why he believes his father's shooter and the man convicted of his father's murder, Sirhan Sirhan, should be free.

00:57:38.000 When 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.

00:57:55.620 Or President Kennedy, also assassinated same decade.

00:57:59.380 People often look back at the 60s and say, you don't know what division is.

00:58:03.200 Like what we're suffering right now as a country is nothing like what we went through back then.

00:58:07.840 And I realize you were just a boy, but how do you compare those two eras in terms of the country's division?

00:58:15.000 Let 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.

00:58:25.620 That I had with my father and it took place and I had many, many, you know, wonderful experiences, as I detail in that book.

00:58:33.600 But this took place in the days after he died and he was, of course, killed in here in Los Angeles.

00:58:40.180 And we, you know, I was here holding his hand when he died.

00:58:45.220 We flew him back to New York, where he was senator.

00:58:50.900 And we waked him at St. Patrick's Cathedral to a huge crowd of people.

00:58:56.760 And it was multicolored people, you know, every color, packing the sidewalks, eight to ten deep for, you know, the entire upper Manhattan.

00:59:05.820 And we put him on a train and we took that train down from Penn Station to Union Station in Washington, D.C.

00:59:14.900 There were two million people lining the train tracks.

00:59:18.620 The 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.

00:59:25.860 They 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.

00:59:46.000 So 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.

00:59:54.800 And 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.

01:00:05.360 I 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.

01:00:18.860 And there was just this incredible array.

01:00:21.400 It was a cross section of the American experience.

01:00:24.840 It 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.

01:00:32.000 And it was a complete mixture of the American, you know, diaspora.

01:00:37.660 And 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.

01:00:53.580 We got to Penn Station and Washington, or Union Station, Washington, President Johnson met us.

01:01:00.680 We took my father up the hill, Arlington, we passed them all.

01:01:06.620 And 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.

01:01:16.500 And there was thousands of poor men from all over the country.

01:01:19.280 They're trying to create a political movement for poor people.

01:01:22.380 Living in tents and shanties.

01:01:25.880 And they all came to the sidewalk.

01:01:28.040 They 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.

01:01:38.320 And four years later, I was in college, and I was looking at demographic data from the 1972 campaigns.

01:01:51.300 That was 1968.

01:01:53.100 My dad was killed in the middle of that campaign.

01:01:55.300 And 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.

01:02:24.560 He was a racist, segregationist, you know, of the worst kind.

01:02:31.540 And 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.

01:02:40.520 It 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.

01:02:50.500 And 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.

01:03:04.280 And 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.

01:03:14.140 And 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.

01:03:31.760 And 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.

01:03:42.500 And my father was able to get people to get people to see the hero inside of themselves at all.

01:03:49.720 He 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.

01:04:12.160 The 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.

01:04:22.540 What 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,

01:04:38.720 the 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.

01:04:47.380 We are a great country and a selfish country and a compassionate country.

01:04:51.080 And, 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.

01:05:15.780 And just say, what do we need to do to make this country, you know, the best, the exemplary nation that it ought to be?

01:05:22.460 Mm hmm. That was so moving hearing you talk about him.

01:05:26.260 It 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.

01:05:38.380 And they were still, you know, your dad, your uncle, still symbols of the Democratic Party and what it meant to be a Democrat.

01:05:44.260 It's changed so much now, as has the Republican Party.

01:05:48.520 But 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.

01:05:57.080 These 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.

01:06:07.100 And it reminded me of the way you wrote about growing up, just all the cousins was like twenty nine.

01:06:14.040 I think you just said seventy, but it's like twenty nine cousins, something like that running around.

01:06:17.520 Well, I had another, you know, my mother had a huge family, too.

01:06:21.460 So they were twenty nine.

01:06:22.180 Oh, Ronnie Skakels.

01:06:23.100 Yeah.

01:06:24.020 OK, yes.

01:06:24.800 But like growing up Kennedy, you know, they referred to Jackie and Jack as Camelot, but you guys had some of that, too.

01:06:32.300 And like, I just wonder, they didn't let you play inside if the sun was shining.

01:06:38.000 You had to be outside and you had to be playing games and you had to be with each other.

01:06:41.040 And it was sort of this seemed like a communal living in a way that, too, seems to be withering, right?

01:06:47.840 Like our connectedness to one another, be it family, friends, in part, thanks to technology.

01:06:54.440 Can 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?

01:07:06.540 All of it.

01:07:08.480 Yeah, well, you that was a pretty good description on that.

01:07:11.400 But we were raised communally with all my other cousins.

01:07:14.240 In fact, you know, we all live in the same town, the Seaside Village, Hyannis Fort, which is magical, magical place and still is.

01:07:22.940 And my kids go up there every summer and they have over 100 cousins who are their age and they adore.

01:07:31.300 At that point, we would migrate from one family house because my grandparents had nine children.

01:07:38.980 One of them, Joe, died during the war, kicked, had an air crash after the war.

01:07:43.440 Rosemary was intellectually disabled. 0.89

01:07:45.200 So 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.

01:07:56.160 And most of them had large families and we would migrate every night.

01:08:02.480 We would eat in a different house.

01:08:04.440 So, you know, on Thursdays, we'd eat at Shriver's house.

01:08:07.260 On Tuesdays, we'd eat at Smith's.

01:08:11.060 On Wednesdays, we'd eat at John Kennedy's house.

01:08:13.620 On Saturdays, we'd eat at Ted Kennedy's.

01:08:15.880 On Sundays, we'd eat at, you know, our house, Robert Kennedy.

01:08:21.040 And there was lots of competition between the family.

01:08:24.780 You know, there was people who were engaged in every kind of competition.

01:08:28.480 We had a, my grandfather had hired an Olympic swimming coach who was, who was an Olympian named Sandy Eilert.

01:08:37.600 And he, he taught us all sports.

01:08:41.400 You know, he taught us boxing and, and swimming.

01:08:47.300 And we had sailing and tennis lessons and all that kind of stuff.

01:08:51.240 And we were always competing.

01:08:52.780 Oh, you know, but it was a healthy kind of competition, I think.

01:08:56.500 And it was outside.

01:08:58.540 And I think we, we weren't allowed inside during the daytime, even if there was a rain or something, we were told, you can't come in.

01:09:09.560 You got it.

01:09:10.220 And there was no TV.

01:09:11.820 And you got to figure out a way to, you know, do something outside.

01:09:16.000 So, and it wasn't, we weren't tempted to go inside.

01:09:19.060 Everybody wanted to be outside.

01:09:20.380 But I really am frightened for my kids generally, and I raised my kids as much as I could outdoors.

01:09:28.440 So they, I think they, you know, they love that.

01:09:31.500 And, you know, I have a kid that just returned from two weeks whitewater kayaking in Patagonia.

01:09:39.360 And he's on his way up to run the, I did a ride.

01:09:42.620 And all my kids love the outdoors.

01:09:44.500 But the, the, I really am frightened and concerned about this generation.

01:09:53.200 Because 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.

01:10:09.580 Is, 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.

01:10:26.500 You know, these devices are designed to addict people and they're addicting themselves to something that is not apparently healthy for any reason.

01:10:39.020 Yeah.

01:10:40.400 And it concerns me a lot, but I don't know what to do with it.

01:10:43.260 I do.

01:10:44.820 You know, Megan, I think that the Democrats have a really, who are advocating censorship.

01:10:53.260 The concern they have, the underlying concern is a legitimate concern.

01:10:58.620 You have, because of the power of the social media, these, you know, inflammatory and violent and dishonest characterization.

01:11:09.020 It's kind of having a way of amplifying on the internet, the way they wouldn't do with conventional newspapers or news sources.

01:11:19.260 And 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.

01:11:41.260 Yeah.

01:11:42.260 And, and, and, and raising passions in a way.

01:11:45.520 And I think it's a society, we have to figure out how to deal with that.

01:11:50.640 We have to figure out some fix, but I do not believe in the fix of censorship.

01:11:55.740 I agree.

01:11:56.480 You can censor certain things.

01:11:58.800 You can censor pedophilia.

01:12:01.180 You can censor, um, incitements to violence.

01:12:06.580 When you get outside of, of those and a couple of other narrow categories that, you know, censorship is not legitimate for any.

01:12:15.600 It's really, it's, it's really offensive if you think about the fact that these same companies who are silencing your view, right?

01:12:22.520 They deem your view disinformation or too controversial for YouTube, whatever it is.

01:12:27.140 Those are the same companies that spend their days making money off of manipulating us and making us hate one another.

01:12:32.640 It's almost like they, they claim the moral high ground, you know, with absolutely no solid footing on which to stand.

01:12:40.800 Yeah.

01:12:41.720 And, you know, they're making money and they're tied in with the intelligence agencies and.

01:12:47.600 They're tied in with big pharma, you know, Google owns three vaccine companies, Facebook, Zuckerberg is, has a billion dollar investment in vaccines.

01:12:56.480 So they're, you know, and they're all making money on, they have partnerships with the big pharmaceutical companies.

01:13:03.760 They're inseparable.

01:13:04.800 And 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.

01:13:17.220 And you have the, you know, you have military applications, you have huge government contracts, you have deals with the pharmaceutical companies.

01:13:24.660 And you've created this, this government corporate cartel that controls all of our communications.

01:13:33.960 And so, and it's really, really dangerous.

01:13:36.800 It really makes you want to disconnect and just go live in the woods.

01:13:39.640 Just go play outside like a Kennedy and don't, don't look at any devices. 0.63

01:13:44.020 Just 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.

01:13:53.480 We played for hours in the hayloft, making forts from hay bales.

01:13:56.360 We 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.

01:14:09.300 It 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.

01:14:18.440 But what was attributed to her was, um, better broken bone than a broken spirit.

01:14:23.840 And I love that.

01:14:25.300 It seems to capture her overall attitude, if not her actual words.

01:14:30.180 But can I ask you about that?

01:14:31.540 Because, um, it's, it's, it's not without its downsides, right?

01:14:34.560 And, and I'm thinking in particular of JFK Jr.

01:14:38.960 More with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. next.

01:14:41.120 You know, a lot of us treasured him and Caroline Bissette and his wife and, you know, just thought, oh my God, what, why, right?

01:14:52.840 Like, why do you have to do it?

01:14:53.840 Why did he have to fly the plane?

01:14:54.940 Why do you have to go up in the bad weather?

01:14:56.880 And, but a lot of people talked about that.

01:14:58.620 Like, is it a, is it a blessing or a curse to be a Kennedy, to have this penchant for risk and this outdoorsman attitude?

01:15:05.920 And, you know, a lot of people felt better about leading a more sedentary life with fewer risks in it.

01:15:12.040 How do you make sense of it all?

01:15:13.380 Having suffered such loss?

01:15:15.460 People shouldn't listen to me as a parent.

01:15:17.660 The older I get, the less I know about parenting.

01:15:21.520 So I'm, I am not going to give people advice on parenting.

01:15:25.800 I 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.

01:15:53.600 And, 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.

01:16:08.300 And, you know, most of my kids went through periods of revolt against me, which I welcome.

01:16:16.020 I think children, you know, need to divorce their parents.

01:16:19.080 They need to develop their own sense of self.

01:16:21.680 They need to develop confidence and they need to be, you know, I like when my kids argue with me.

01:16:28.040 I have a couple of kids.

01:16:30.160 I have one kid in particular who does not, he's not completely bought into any of my vaccine, you know, baloney or whatever.

01:16:37.620 So he, and he argues with me all the time and I love that.

01:16:41.920 I 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.

01:16:56.440 And 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.

01:17:11.360 Because fear destroys capacity for critical thinking.

01:17:15.080 And we need to be armored against propaganda.

01:17:18.580 We need to be armored against the orchestrated fear.

01:17:22.360 Because 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.

01:17:33.020 There 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.

01:17:46.460 There's a lot worse things than time.

01:17:48.240 And living as a slave is one of them.

01:17:50.960 And that's why they gave their lives.

01:17:54.140 They gave their fortunes.

01:17:55.560 They, in some cases, lost their families in order to give us the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.

01:18:03.880 And, you know, we have lived off their courage for a couple of hundred years.

01:18:09.220 And now it's time that we have to, you know, renew that commitment to courage again.

01:18:14.840 Yes.

01:18:15.960 Yes, there's a new kind of risk taking.

01:18:18.240 Right.

01:18:18.940 You know, today, today's day and age requires a new kind of risk taking.

01:18:22.460 You 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.

01:18:31.220 Yeah, I think so.

01:18:32.740 I mean, my father always, you know, my father really admired, as I say in my book, physical courage.

01:18:39.980 And he was surrounded by people like Jim Whitaker, his best friends, Jim Whitaker, who was the first American on Mount Everest.

01:18:47.100 He was John Glenn, who was, you know, the first American to orbit the Earth.

01:18:53.380 You know, Sam, all these football players, Rosie, Rafer Johnson, people who had demonstrated, right?

01:19:00.420 And a lot of war heroes, like Gerald Tremblay and many others.

01:19:05.040 They were all in our house all the time.

01:19:07.060 And my father had this tremendous admiration for physical courage.

01:19:11.280 He always said that moral courage is an even rarer commodity than that.

01:19:17.560 You 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.

01:19:32.240 Of 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.

01:19:44.580 And, 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.

01:19:56.980 And 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.

01:20:07.800 Wow.

01:20:08.700 Not just courage, but forgiveness was another value.

01:20:11.480 I know it was instilled in you because you're Catholic.

01:20:14.840 And that brings me to Sirhan Sirhan, the man who killed your dad on June 5th, 1968, outside the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California.

01:20:25.060 He was sentenced to life in prison.

01:20:28.120 And 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.

01:20:44.040 He was paroled, and you supported it.

01:20:45.920 But then your other siblings were on the other side of it.

01:20:49.380 And the governor, Newsom, he quashed it.

01:20:53.520 So he's staying in prison.

01:20:56.180 What convinced you to support the parole of the man who killed your dad?

01:21:02.140 Well, number one, even if Sirhan had killed my father, I would be advocating his parole.

01:21:09.880 And my brother, Douglas, is agnostic about whether Sirhan killed my father or not.

01:21:16.740 But he even, he believes, like I do, that even if he did kill my father, he should be paroled.

01:21:23.220 And, 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.

01:21:43.180 I mean, resentments are like, as they say, like, swallowing poison and hoping someone else would die.

01:21:51.020 It has a corrosive impact on your own soul.

01:21:54.660 So 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.

01:22:05.300 But if you, you know, let them live in your head, rent free, then they are in control of you.

01:22:11.000 And only by forgiving them do you escape their control and their influence.

01:22:17.120 So I would be advocating, even if Sirhan didn't kill my father, Sirhan, Sirhan did not kill my father.

01:22:23.360 He certainly shot at my father.

01:22:26.880 My father.

01:22:27.920 And this is what Thomas Noguchi, who was the coroner, you know, said from the beginning.

01:22:32.680 Sirhan, Sirhan was standing in front of my father.

01:22:37.600 He was standing in front of a steam table.

01:22:39.880 He never got more than, less than five feet from my father.

01:22:44.140 There were 77 eyewitnesses in that Ambassador Hotel kitchen.

01:22:49.580 And they all saw what happened, which is Sirhan fired two shots at my father directly.

01:22:55.720 One of those shots went past my father and hit Paul Schrade, who was a United Auto Workers, a very close friend of my father.

01:23:05.580 He's the man who introduced my father to Cesar Chavez and one of his closest friends.

01:23:12.920 And he today is alive and has been advocating for Sirhan for 20 years.

01:23:18.540 And 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.

01:23:28.460 The 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.

01:23:42.980 Sirhan was then tackled by six men, including Rosalie Guerrier, Rayford Johnson, and a number of others.

01:23:49.800 And his gun hand was pushed away from my father.

01:23:55.780 But they couldn't.

01:23:56.780 He had a superhuman strength and they could not get the gun out of his hand.

01:24:01.440 And he fired off six more shots and emptied the chamber.

01:24:07.720 And all of those shots hit people.

01:24:10.340 So we have them all accounted for.

01:24:12.840 Oh, we know what happened to all of Sirhan's shots.

01:24:16.440 And none of them hit my father.

01:24:17.780 My father was hit by four shots, one that passed harmlessly through his shoulder pad, all of them from behind.

01:24:27.020 They 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.

01:24:37.960 They were fired by somebody who was standing immediately behind my father.

01:24:43.020 And all of the shots were fired on an upward trajectory.

01:24:47.680 So the gun was being held against my father's back.

01:24:51.680 And the trigger was pulled four times.

01:24:53.960 The audio of the night records 14 shots or 13 shots fired.

01:25:00.080 So Sirhan only had eight shots in his gun.

01:25:03.200 And there were many more shots than that fired.

01:25:05.800 And he never had a chance to reload.

01:25:07.380 But the man who killed my father is almost certainly Eugene Dane Cesar, who was a security guard.

01:25:17.160 And he worked at the Lockheed Land.

01:25:19.840 He had a classified position.

01:25:22.060 Lisa Pease, in her book, establishes that he identified himself as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

01:25:33.620 And he died at the very beginning of the pandemic in the Philippines.

01:25:43.820 And the gun that he had that night was a .22, which he lied about repeatedly.

01:25:53.440 He was, when my father died, or when my father was shot, he fell onto Caesar.

01:25:59.800 And Caesar fell back.

01:26:01.560 So the two men were lying on the ground.

01:26:03.860 And then Caesar pushed my father off and got up.

01:26:07.360 And he was seen by a dozen people with a gun in his hand.

01:26:10.360 And he never denied that he had his gun pulled.

01:26:13.540 He said he had pulled the gun to fire at Sirhan.

01:26:17.100 But that gun was not found.

01:26:20.060 And it was not turned over to the police.

01:26:22.260 It has since been found.

01:26:24.140 And Caesar lied repeatedly about what he had done with the gun.

01:26:27.480 And so there's a lot more evidence.

01:26:30.740 It's too much to go into here.

01:26:32.400 But if you, you know, people are curious about it.

01:26:35.740 There are, you know, many, many books about that are written about what happened.

01:26:40.880 And the orthodoxy in this case doesn't make any sense, as it does in so many cases.

01:26:50.560 That's fascinating.

01:26:53.180 So, I mean, that leads me to ask you what you think about your uncle's assassination,

01:26:57.680 because that's one of the most speculated about moment in U.S. history, right?

01:27:02.620 I mean, from Oliver Stone, right, to the Warren Commission, they concluded it was Arlen Spector,

01:27:11.860 Senator Arlen Spector, now, God rest his soul.

01:27:15.400 He used to, I knew him kind of on Capitol Hill, and he used to say, it's not the single

01:27:20.240 bullet theory.

01:27:21.260 It's the single bullet conclusion.

01:27:23.880 That's what happened.

01:27:25.400 Single bullet.

01:27:26.480 It was Lee Harvey Oswald and only Lee Harvey Oswald.

01:27:30.440 Where do you land on it?

01:27:31.280 Well, that was the Warren Commission.

01:27:34.820 And the Warren Commission, of course, the key commissioner was Alan Dulles.

01:27:42.380 And Alan Dulles, of course, was the head of the CIA, who my uncle had fired after the

01:27:48.000 Bay of Tigs.

01:27:50.480 And he, we now know that he was deliberately, and this is not controversial, this is well

01:27:58.440 established.

01:27:58.940 He was deliberately steering the committee away from many facts that would have been, that

01:28:07.720 would have implicated the CIA, including the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset

01:28:14.900 beginning in 1958, when he worked as a radar operator at the Atosui Air Force Base in Japan, which

01:28:25.500 was the CIA base that was, where the, he was a Marine, where the, where the U-2 flights

01:28:33.500 were based out of, that were over the Soviet Union.

01:28:36.120 And he defected to the Soviet Union.

01:28:39.520 It was a fake defection.

01:28:41.140 It was a, it was a dangle.

01:28:43.860 They, it was orchestrated by James Jesus Angleton and Langley, who was the head of counterintelligence

01:28:52.360 in Langley, meaning the division of the CIA that looks for Russian spies.

01:28:58.360 And there was a CIA, there was a KGB mole in Langley for many years, that to this day

01:29:06.200 has not been identified.

01:29:07.260 And they were trying to track a chase out that mole and leave a thought that when Lee Harvey

01:29:14.880 Oswald defected, Angleton believed that mole, that the KGB would wonder who he was and would

01:29:22.720 ask the mole to check his file.

01:29:24.280 And they had a trigger system on his file in Langley, that would identify anybody who

01:29:30.000 touched it, but they weren't able to do it.

01:29:31.980 And, and Oswald came back without any punishment, without even being debriefed by the State Department.

01:29:38.500 He simply, he had made a very, very high profile defection to Russia.

01:29:42.840 He married a daughter of a KGB colonel.

01:29:46.720 And then just walked into the State Department, said, I want to go home.

01:29:50.260 They bought his ticket, gave him $600.

01:29:52.480 He was met at the airport in Dallas by a guy called George Marshall, who was also working

01:30:00.520 for the agency, an agency asset.

01:30:04.160 And, you know, they're in, you talk about the Warren Commission findings, but the United

01:30:09.680 States Congress assassination committees and the Senate did a new investigation five years

01:30:18.440 after the Warren Commission, and they came to the opposite conclusion that it was indeed

01:30:23.220 a conspiracy.

01:30:23.900 They didn't know whether the conspirators who actually murdered my uncle were mafia or whether

01:30:32.200 the CIA, there was a split within the committee.

01:30:35.380 You know, the Warren Commission is, I was working on very little knowledge that was heavily orchestrated

01:30:42.440 and the subsequent investigations.

01:30:44.260 And now we have millions of documents that, you know, that suggest a strong involvement

01:30:53.100 by the agency.

01:30:55.680 Coming up, he said nothing was off limits.

01:30:58.880 So I went there and asked him point blank about the rumors about his father, his uncle,

01:31:04.740 and Marilyn Monroe. 0.99

01:31:12.900 Wow.

01:31:13.860 I mean, how does that, sorry to go Oprah on you, but how does that make you feel that

01:31:18.260 you got, you know, you believe the CIA was responsible for the assassination of two men

01:31:23.440 who are so dear to you?

01:31:27.940 When you ask me, how does it make me feel?

01:31:31.900 Well, it's hard for me to separate my feelings from the, you know, from the kind of,

01:31:42.060 from the larger issue about what the implications are for our country and for our democracy.

01:31:50.640 Yeah.

01:31:51.040 That these are murders that, you know, whether I'm right or wrong about them, we should be

01:31:56.660 able to talk about them.

01:31:58.180 We should be able to reason.

01:31:59.400 We shouldn't be, again, shut down and censored.

01:32:02.300 The people ought to be able to have a congenial conversation about these.

01:32:07.760 And if the original verdicts do not make any sense, then let's have an investigation on

01:32:13.560 what happened, because our country took a turn when my uncle was killed.

01:32:18.000 You know, when I was a boy, when I was on my sixth birthday or seventh birthday, Dwight

01:32:26.460 Eisenhower, January 17, 1961, made what I would consider the most important speech in American

01:32:34.300 history, where he warned our country against the rise of the military industrial complex and

01:32:41.440 the subversion of democracy through its ascendancy of this corrupt cartel of intelligence agencies,

01:32:53.580 the military agencies, military contractors, and other people who are attached to the military

01:32:59.500 industrial complex.

01:33:00.380 In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,

01:33:08.040 whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.

01:33:13.120 The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

01:33:18.680 My uncle took office two days later.

01:33:25.680 It was a farewell speech for Eisenhower.

01:33:28.540 And he said, this is the most important issue of the enemy within.

01:33:32.840 It's, you know, not the people from outside our country, but people within.

01:33:36.940 And he talked also about the health agencies and the health cartel, but very, very explicitly

01:33:42.220 and presciently.

01:33:44.340 And my uncle spent three years of his presidency battling the military industrial complex.

01:33:52.440 And in the end, if the conclusions of those, you know, that subsequent committee of the

01:34:01.200 health assassinations committee are correct, and it was members of that cartel that killed

01:34:08.620 him.

01:34:08.860 And if that's true, we should be trying to resolve that still, because at that point,

01:34:18.180 so what happened when he died?

01:34:20.060 He had, two months before he had died, he had signed national security order, ordering all

01:34:26.920 of our troops out of Vietnam, ending the Vietnam War.

01:34:29.820 The first thousand troops, there were 1100 troops, 11,000 troops, and the first thousand would

01:34:35.320 be out by December.

01:34:38.180 The remainders would all be out within 12 months, but at the end of 1965, or by the beginning

01:34:46.620 of 1965, as soon as he died, Linton and Johnson, by the way, my uncle's been fighting for three

01:34:55.420 years, his own military intelligence apparatus, who wanted to send a quarter million troops into

01:35:00.560 Vietnam and make it our war. 0.98

01:35:02.040 And he said, no, there's the Vietnamese war, they have to win it or lose it, we can help

01:35:07.640 them, we can give them advisors, we can give them helicopters, but we are not going to fight

01:35:11.860 the war for them.

01:35:12.740 Sounds familiar.

01:35:15.200 And Johnson came in, and immediately sent, and we had the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, he sent

01:35:24.320 a quarter million troops in there, and it became the American War.

01:35:28.780 And then after Johnson, my father ran specifically against the war, specifically against the military

01:35:36.020 industrial complex.

01:35:38.000 He won California.

01:35:40.840 And that meant he was almost certainly going to win the convention.

01:35:47.660 And he had already beat Nixon once.

01:35:49.420 He beat Nixon.

01:35:50.380 He was his brother's campaign manager in 60.

01:35:53.480 He beat Humphrey, who was his only other opponent, real opponent, Eugene McCarthy, who was not

01:36:00.100 a serious candidate.

01:36:02.300 He would have beaten, he'd already beaten Humphrey in 1960, and he'd already beaten Nixon in 1960.

01:36:08.540 So he had a clear path to the White House.

01:36:12.400 When he was murdered, and he was specifically running against the Vietnam War and against the

01:36:17.360 military industrial complex, as soon as he was killed, Nixon comes in and sends a half a million

01:36:23.820 troops over there, and then fights until 1963.

01:36:27.960 When my uncle left office, 75 American Special Forces advisors had been killed in Vietnam.

01:36:35.180 By the time, Nixon left 56,000 American troops, and millions of Vietnamese had died in that conflict.

01:36:42.100 And the military industrial complex had been more and more powerful.

01:36:47.300 And then, you know, you look at the rest of American history, and it's just a, it's a battle

01:36:53.020 between this dwindling impulse for a democracy and the growing power of this cartel.

01:37:02.020 And I think, you know, the murders of my uncle and my father were key parts in that turn that we

01:37:09.980 made in the road, and that part of unraveling that, restoring the path to democracy and the control

01:37:16.400 over these, these dangerous, dangerous forces, you know, probably ought to begin with a real

01:37:25.340 investigation of both of those murders, a real investigation of the first time in history.

01:37:30.540 Indeed, indeed.

01:37:31.760 What, what could it hurt?

01:37:32.920 What would be the reason not to?

01:37:34.080 So, um, on the subject of everything's okay to talk about, so forgive me, because this

01:37:39.380 is, I realize, impolitic.

01:37:41.420 Um, can we spend one minute on Marilyn Monroe?

01:37:45.500 Happy birthday to you.

01:37:52.080 Happy birthday to you.

01:37:57.860 There's not much I can tell you about Marilyn Monroe.

01:38:00.600 I mean, I met her when I was a kid.

01:38:01.420 The rumors are that she had an affair with your dad, that she had an affair with your uncle,

01:38:05.480 and even possibly that your dad was somehow there the night she died out in California.

01:38:12.580 Yeah, well, those are, um, rumors that have been time and again proven completely untrue.

01:38:18.720 There's two days.

01:38:21.020 My father's schedule, every minute of his day is known.

01:38:26.960 So people know where he was every moment of the day.

01:38:30.200 And it happens that the day that they say that my father, you know, that these people

01:38:36.440 who are selling books saying these things, the day that they say my father was with her,

01:38:43.960 he was with us at a camping trip up in Oregon and in Northern California.

01:38:48.900 And it would have been impossible for him to be here.

01:38:52.540 That was the day that she died.

01:38:55.080 Oh, and all the days that people, that these authors who are just bogus authors have suggested,

01:39:03.280 who are making money by, you know, saying these things, all the days that they claim that

01:39:10.300 my father could have been with Marilyn Monroe are days when we know exactly where he was.

01:39:14.880 And he was on opposite sides of the country from Marilyn Monroe.

01:39:19.100 What do you make of the affair rumors of, you know, between Bobby Kennedy and or Jack

01:39:25.060 Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe?

01:39:26.700 Yeah, I, again, all of the rumors about the affair, you'd have to find a time where he

01:39:34.340 could have had an affair.

01:39:35.260 And there is no conceivable time when the two people are in the same city.

01:39:40.240 What?

01:39:41.000 There's always a way.

01:39:41.900 When a man wants to have an affair, he can find a way.

01:39:44.600 Like, come on.

01:39:45.460 There's that.

01:39:45.720 I'm talking about my father.

01:39:47.160 We know where he was on all the days.

01:39:49.280 You know, the authors claim to know the days and you'd have to know the day because my

01:39:54.780 father's schedule was known.

01:39:56.480 He was on the campaign trail.

01:39:58.100 What about all of Jack Kennedy's affairs?

01:39:59.940 Like we, you know, we know he did that, even though the New York Times wasn't writing

01:40:02.700 about it.

01:40:04.340 Washington Post.

01:40:04.980 Listen, I wasn't around then, so I can't answer that question.

01:40:11.820 I can't answer the question about my uncle.

01:40:14.820 You were talking to him about salamanders on the plane, not his love life.

01:40:17.880 That makes sense to me.

01:40:18.940 I was not talking about his extracurricular.

01:40:25.560 Yeah.

01:40:25.820 There was only so much he was going to share with you on board that Air Force.

01:40:30.240 I get it.

01:40:30.740 Listen, I, I don't know how to thank you for all this time.

01:40:34.740 Here we are four hours later and you've just been so open and giving on every subject, personal

01:40:40.440 and professional.

01:40:41.920 I really, really enjoyed the exchange and I hope we can have more.

01:40:46.300 Thank you very much.

01:40:47.420 Thanks for your courage, Megan.

01:40:48.960 Thank you for your integrity.

01:40:50.500 And I hope they leave this up more than about 10 seconds.

01:40:55.720 Wow.

01:40:56.680 What an interesting man, right?

01:40:58.320 What a fascinating exchange.

01:40:59.940 Thank you so much for joining us today, for sharing in it with us and, and both days.

01:41:05.120 And remember, if you missed part one of my interview with RFK Jr., you can find that

01:41:09.700 wherever you get your videos or podcasts for free.

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01:41:16.460 And I would especially love to hear what you thought of this one.

01:41:20.620 What were your opinions?

01:41:21.960 Did he persuade you on anything?

01:41:23.320 Were you glad to hear from him?

01:41:24.700 Do you think he's so controversial?

01:41:26.620 He needs to be universally banned as he has been?

01:41:30.160 Would love to know your thoughts.

01:41:31.120 Leave me a note.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - November 29, 2024

Part 2 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Deep Dive, on The JFK Assassination, Growing up Kennedy, His Marriage

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