Trustafarian, Junkie, Womanizer, 'Environmentalist'
For Throwback Wednesday, Biden's troubled challenger
In the fall of 2015, I wrote a review of what I believe is still the only biography of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. With the trustafarian in the news lately, I figured a revisit was in order.
A whole lot of people who should know better — Tucker Carlson thinks he is “deeply insightful” and “one of the most remarkable people we have ever met” — are RFK Jr. fans.
Please.
Yeah, he was right about Fauci. Beyond that, it’s tough to see why anyone who favors taxpayers, free enterprise, and personal responsibility would offer the candidate much support. His life choices have been appalling, he’s a junk-science peddler, and as he (predictably) told Carlson, a major concern is “corporate control of our government.”
Okay, I’m hardly impartial on the Kennedys. (Raised in New England. Hate doesn’t even begin to cover it.) But read on, and decide if you’d be comfortable with RFK Jr. in the Oval Office.
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In 1997, moonbat pundit Margaret Carlson described the sons of JFK, RFK, and EMK as “good teeth, good hair and the best public relations a trust fund can buy.”
Ouch. In their defense, the boys were burdened with terrible parents, family tragedies, and predilections for guzzling, snorting, smoking, or mainlining whatever substances gave them pleasure. Yet despite access to resources most of us couldn’t imagine, the scions have consistently failed to overcome the worst devils of their nature.
RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream (St. Martin’s Press; 403 pages; $28.00) can be tough reading. Ethel and Robert’s thirdborn is known today as Al Gore’s rival for the nation’s leading eco-alarmist. But author Jerry Oppenheimer offers a fuller picture of the man People dubbed “America’s Toxin Avenger.”
RFK Jr. was 14 years old on the day his father, who had just prevailed in the Democrats’ 1968 Democratic presidential primary, was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan. The politician’s wife, never reliably rational, grew even nuttier after the assassination. She had too many kids — 11! — to manage while fulfilling the considerable duties of being the widow of another Kennedy martyr. A 21-year-old college dropout hired to supervise her brood, Oppenheimer writes, found them to be “spoiled, arrogant, undisciplined know-it-alls.”
RFK Jr. has always been a little odd, but at the boarding schools he kept getting kicked out of, he surrendered to narcotics addiction, and spent very little time hitting the books. When it came time for college, Harvard was a given, “despite his addictive drug use, his erratic and often bizarre behavior, his run-ins with law enforcement, and what were said to be mediocre grades and little if any extracurricular activities.”
Law school at the University of Virginia followed, which led to a gig with “legendary Manhattan DA Robert M. Morgenthau, who happened to be a boyhood friend of Bobby’s uncle the president.” But flunking the bar exam on his first try — a fate suffered by only 6 of 55 newly hired ADAs — suggested that a career in real-world law wasn’t to be. It didn’t help that in 1983, on a flight out of Minneapolis, RFK Jr. overdosed, and was charged with felony possession of heroin.
In contrast to his brother David, who destroyed himself with drugs, RFK Jr. eventually got clean. As part of his guilty plea, he performed community service with the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association. Since then, he’s been a full-time “environmentalist.” The greenie scold rewarded his eco-mentor Robert Boyle by ousting the writer and activist from the organization he founded. (“I think he’s a despicable person. I have no interest in Mr. Kennedy.”)
Joe Kennedy and his sons were manically uncommitted to their vows of marital fidelity. Ditto for the third generation. RFK Jr. has waged a one-man war on women. His first wife, a sharp attorney — she passed the bar on her first try — had trouble “transforming her Indiana-born-and-bred natural style into being the model, exuberant Kennedy wife like her mother-in-law.” Separation came in 1992, with a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic in 1994. The next month, Mary Richardson, already pregnant, became wife #2. The union ended in horrific fashion in 2012, when amidst a nasty divorce process, the mother of four hanged herself. Actress Cheryl Hines became wife #3 last summer. Good luck, sweetie.
RFK Jr.’s had a sordid life, and Oppenheimer covers it all. Perhaps most disturbing is the trustafarian’s relationship with the late Lem Billings, who befriended JFK “while working together on the Choate school yearbook.” Surprisingly, his homosexuality didn’t keep the New York advertising executive from becoming a top Kennedy errand boy. Ethel chose Billings to become RFK Jr.’s surrogate father. His performance was abysmal. Billings cleaned up the scion’s many messes, and even boozed and did drugs with his ward. Mom didn’t seem to mind — or care, really.
For those willing to endure it, RFK Jr. supplies an exhaustive compendium of its subject’s depravity. The biography lays out, in gruesome specificity, the reasons why he chose, rather wisely, not to pursue elective office.
But don’t count the Most Awful Family in America out. Sister Kathleen was a bust as a pol in deeply Democratic Maryland, and Ted Kennedy Jr. is merely a member of the Connecticut legislature. However, U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-MA), RFK’s nephew, is young and hungry. The Kennedys’ political ambition goes on, their solipsism endures, their sense of entitlement still lives, and their haughtiness shall never die.
The Kennedy's glamorous political personification has long since deteriorated due to their dismal genetic inevitability. They stand for their name alone, which is only as good as your last successful Kennedy, which died in the 1960's. Robert Kennedy Jr. really does not come off well when you hear him speak and his voice is awful sounding. He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden! However, you have to like your chances against Biden no matter who you are, so Kennedy may be able to rise to 20% or so of the vote for the primary. The current Democrat Marxist Socialist Party wants a patsy; not a President. So, good luck to anyone that thinks this will end well, regardless of whomever it is that gets the grease from the Sleaziest Political Party EVER!!
Good article. I'll send a copy to a friend who is a fan of RFK, Jr. I honestly know nothing about him other than his screed against Fauci and his occasional appearances on Tucker Carlson's former show.
NM has some Kennedy connections. The Kennedy-Townsend who lost the race for Governor in MD went to UNM law school. We also had Joseph Kennedy Smith do his medical interning at UNM hospital. He's the one that was accused of raping a girl at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach after bar hopping with uncle Teddy. The case went to trial, and he was acquitted. He hired Roy Black, one of Florida's then leading criminal defense attorneys to represent him. There was an all woman jury who obviously didn't buy the "victim's" story about being Ms. Innocent.