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JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images |
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RFK Jr. Meets the Party of 'Shut up!' |
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By Roger Simon |
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It’s been a few days now since I motored to Memphis, Tennessee, from Nashville to interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as part of the Presidential Roller Coaster 2024 series. The first of these, with Vivek Ramaswamy, has already aired on Epoch TV and NTD. The second with RFK Jr. is being edited and will premiere on July 28. Driving down, I admit to having what the French call “le trac,” often translated as “stage fright”—basically an attack of nerves. Bobby, after all, is a Kennedy—they had a rather significant role in the dreams and aspirations of my generation. Specifically in my case, Mr. Kennedy’s uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated on my 20th birthday. I sat in a motel room in Saratoga Springs, New York, with my then-girlfriend, a Skidmore student, watching open-mouthed two days later as someone I learned was named Jack Ruby appeared out of nowhere and fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged presidential assassin. How could such a thing have been allowed to happen? As for Robert F. Kennedy père, either one or two days before he was shot (June 1968), I watched him speak amid nonstop cheering and shouts of “Viva!” to a largely Mexican American crowd in East Los Angeles. He was brilliant, charismatic, and destined to be our next president, I was then certain. He would be the one to get us out of the Vietnam quagmire. It turned out that Richard Nixon did. On that three-hour-plus drive, I kept mulling over how much the Democratic Party had changed since then. The party of free speech had become the party of “Shut up!” The party of peace had become the party of endless missiles for Ukraine. The party of “our bodies, ourselves” had become the party of "Take your vaccines and put on your mask or else." How had that happened? |
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And now, RFK Jr. had risen up like a ghost from the past to bring things back to sanity. I wondered if he could possibly succeed. I knew on that same drive what a complex position he's in, running on ideas that many of which are anathema to his own party, while appealing to the constitutional inclinations of many libertarian-leaning Republicans, MAGA or not. (The interview was to take place in and around the libertarian FreedomFest.) When I finally met him, he seemed rather normal, but also impressive in his depth of knowledge, something, I will be rude and say, I haven't seen frequently in politicians. He was very interested in where things went wrong, particularly at that point when his uncle and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had developed a secret correspondence after the Cuban missile crisis, both with an interest in saving the world from nuclear annihilation, something that's so contemporary at this moment it can take your breath away. And then the world fell in when JFK was assassinated, and Khrushchev no longer had a clandestine correspondent. Whodunit? Bobby has some ideas that didn’t correspond with the Warren Commission. For decades, he had been fighting it. (Some of this was discussed in our video.) Nevertheless, 60 years later, the man I met was a warm and decent-seeming guy, but there was a sense of anguish about him, a sadness in his eyes that on the slightest reflection is understandable given his life story. Being a child of privilege isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. And yet he has been superb at dealing with the "woke" left of his party many of us have been watching during confrontations at the recent congressional hearings. He is calm, respectful, and to the point—the very opposite of his frequently enraged adversaries. They literally can’t bear to hear what he’s saying. To say they are triggered is an understatement. They are simply out of their minds. Most bizarre is they accuse him of racism and anti-Semitism. Don’t they realize the history of the Kennedys as leaders of the civil rights movement or that RFK Jr. himself is a strong supporter of Israel? Or is the support of Israel to them anti-Semitic? It seems to have gone that far. Listening to these people has become unbearable. With the media in support, they aim to make RFK Jr. a non-person before too much of the public hears what he has to say and quite possibly begins to think he's making sense. I intend to remain in his corner, even if I disagree with him on some issues. What he is trying to do is too important, arguably more important than anyone at this moment in our history. |
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