Is RFK Jr an embarrassment for the Kennedys or a gamechanger in the US election? America’s royal family has a new challenger
President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, 60 years ago. I do not remember that fateful day on 22 November 1963, as I was just four years old.
But I do remember the summer day, five years later in 1968, when his brother – former US attorney general and would be president, Robert F “Bobby” Kennedy – was shot dead in that tumultuous election year.
Over the decades since their deaths the two brothers, often referred to just by their initials – JFK and RFK, have never been forgotten.
In the United States, and much of the Western democratic world, they have assumed iconic status in death. Their family members left behind, have tried to pick up their political legacies.
The Kennedy name has been the biggest brand in American politics, public interest in its members sharpened by numerous tragedies and scandals.
RFK with his wife and their seven children, including Robert F Kennedy Jr (back, far left). Pic AP
Some likened them to America’s royal family complete with symbolic castles at the “family compounds” in Massachusetts and Florida. Clan members seemed to occupy political office, almost as if by divine right.
But the dynastic vision has been fading at last. The myths, personalities and untimely deaths associated with the Kennedys are inevitably resonating less and less with contemporary electorates. There are currently none of the dynasty in elected state or national office.
In this election year, a maverick Kennedy is hoping to reverse all that. RFK’s 69-year-old son, who shares his father’s name, is running for president.
Whether Bobby Junior revives or further tarnishes the Kennedy brand is an open question. At least four of his 10 siblings say he is “an embarrassment”.
He has abandoned his family’s traditional allegiance to the Democratic party. He pulled out of the Democratic nomination contest to run as an independent candidate against both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, declaring “my intention is to spoil it for both of them”.
John F Kennedy (centre) surrounded by his family, including his brothers and father, Joseph. Pic AP
RFK junior is a self-styled environmentalist, an anti-vaxxer, and a supporter of the right to bear arms. He has embraced numerous conspiracy theories – even suggesting the CIA was involved in the assassinations of his father and uncle.
He marked the 60th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy by launching a petition to release the last of the government’s records relating to the shooting.
The National Archives says 99% of the material is already in the public domain, following orders from Presidents Trump and Biden. RFK junior retorted, “what is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the American public 60 years later?”.
Political dynasty
The Kennedys came to America as immigrants from Ireland. JFK was the first Roman Catholic US president. A grandfather of Joseph Kennedy was mayor of Boston in the 1890s.
Joe Kennedy was the patriarch of the clan and founder of the family fortune. His businesses flourished through the great depression and the prohibition of alcohol.
JFK reaching toward his head seconds before being fatally shot in 1963. Pic AP
President Franklin Roosevelt gave Joseph P Kennedy I his highest rank in politics by appointing him a controversial ambassador to the UK.
He resigned during the Battle of Britain in 1940, suspected of Nazi sympathies, after commenting “democracy is finished in England”.
He was subsequently a major supporter of the anti-communist senator Joe McCarthy.
Today Joseph’s fortune is shared by several generations of direct descendants, who have mostly chosen to go into public service rather than business. Their net worth is put at several billion dollars.
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Joe and his ambitious wife, Rose, had nine children, all now dead. The eldest son, Joe junior, a US Navy bomber pilot was killed above the English Channel in 1944. Their youngest daughter, Jean Kennedy Smith, was US ambassador to Ireland and died in 2020.
Rose and Joseph put their ambitions and their money behind their surviving sons – Jack, Bobby and Ted. All three became US senators and presidential candidates. Their siblings and descendants have often followed in their political footsteps – to a lesser and dwindling degree.
JFK was elected the US’s youngest-ever president. Young, rich, and beautiful, the Kennedys carefully curated their glamourous image in the White House.
President John F Kennedy
Most famously Marilyn Monroe sang a seductive “Happy Birthday, Mr President” at the Madison Square Garden for his 45th birthday.
He and his stylish wife Jackie had three children. Patrick died in infancy. John junior and Caroline were still small when their father was killed.
Neil Diamond has said Caroline was the inspiration for his song “Sweet Caroline”. More recently Biden appointed Caroline Kennedy US ambassador to Japan, she was previously Obama’s ambassador to Australia.
John junior and his wife Carolyn Bessette were killed when a plane he was piloting crashed off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.
The last powerful, world-famous Kennedy died in 2009. Edward Kennedy was the younger brother of JFK and RFK.
“Ted” died while still a US senator. Many viewed the liberal Democrat’s 47 years of continuous service as an attempt to expiate for what happened at Chappaquiddick in 1969.
Caroline Kennedy, who has been a US ambassador to Japan and Australia, with her father JFK
A 29-year-old aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned in his car when Kennedy drove it off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard. He survived but was later linked to a further scandal.
After a night partying with his son and nephew, his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was charged and subsequently acquitted, of rape. Dr Smith went on to found the charity Physicians Against Land Mines (PALM).
Ted had three children, including Patrick who served eight terms as a congressman from Rhode Island before retiring with mental and addiction issues.
Of RFK’s 11 children, Joseph P Kennedy II was a six-term congressman for Massachusetts, Kathleen was a two-term lieutenant governor in Maryland and then there is RFK jnr.
Jack, Ted and Bobby’s sister Eunice married Sargent Shriver, who ran unsuccessfully in 1974 on the Democratic ticket as George McGovern’s vice-presidential candidate.
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Their daughter Maria Shriver was married to the bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was twice elected Republican governor of California.
‘Challenger’
Joe Biden has always enjoyed a close relationship with his fellow Irish Americans. As well as sending Caroline Kennedy to Tokyo, he made Ted’s second wife, Victoria, ambassador to Austria.
President Biden also appointed Ted’s 23-year-old grandson, Joseph P Kennedy III, US special envoy to Northern Ireland.
Now Bobby is challenging Biden. In a favourability opinion poll this month by Harris, he topped the candidates list with a net rating of +27, ahead of Trump on +7 and Biden on -2.
That does not make him a likely winner in the US’s fundamentally two-party system, but third-party candidates matter because they often affect who becomes president.
In 2000, when Democrats won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, the activist Ralph Nader scored 97,488 votes in Florida. If Al Gore had picked up just 537 of those votes he would have become president instead of George W Bush.
In 2016 Democrats again won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College.
In the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, and Green Party’s Jill Stein, each took multiples of the margin of votes by which Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump.
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Kennedy’s current ratings around 20% are on a par with the businessman Ross Perot, the strongest third force of modern times.
Perot won 19% and 8% of the popular vote respectively in 1992 and 1996, arguably assisting Bill Clinton’s election.
With typical entitlement, Kennedy says he is confident he will win the battle against Trump and Biden’s lawyer to “get on the ballot of every state”.
If he succeeds, polls suggest he takes slightly more votes from Trump than from Biden. That could be enough to change who wins in closely fought key states.
Trump has called Bobby a Biden “plant”. The Biden campaign is worried that the Kennedy name could cost Democratic votes.
They note Bobby’s visit to Trump’s White House and the encouragement he has received from Steve Bannon and alternative media outlets such as Fox News, Joe Rogan and Jordan Petersen.
Plugging into the mood of populist discontent, Bobby is appealing for votes from “people who are willing to question orthodoxy”.
As embodied by JFK and RFK, the Kennedy name is one of the most revered in American politics. Now yet another descendant is attempting simultaneously both to exploit and to escape from being a Kennedy.
World
Ex-CIA director John Brennan calls Donald Trump’s plan in Ukraine ‘naive’ and ‘unsophisticated’
It is nearly 150 days since Donald Trump took office for the second time, promising peace in the Middle East and Ukraine.
For the latter, the war grinds on, with reports last week that Russia passed the grim milestone of one million deaths.
Ukraine continues to be bombarded, with Russia launching its biggest drone attack against the country since the start of the war. Most likely in retaliation for Ukraine’s audacious Operation ‘Spider’s Web’ at the beginning of the month, which saw remote-controlled drones launched deep into Russia, blowing up billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment.
Russia saw this as a significant escalation, as Moscow’s ambassador to the UK told me in a sit-down interview last week.
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Peace feels a long way off right now.
But does President Trump have a plan?
Ex-CIA director John Brennan does not think so.
On this week’s The World podcast, he called Trump’s understanding of both Ukraine and Vladimir Putin “naive” and “unsophisticated”.
I asked him what he thinks the president may do and, in no uncertain terms, he told me: “I think that Donald Trump doesn’t know what he will do.”
Ex-CIA director John Brennan thinks Trump doesn’t know what he will do in Ukraine. File pic: AP
It is no secret that the former director holds a low estimation of the president. For what it’s worth, the feeling is mutual.
In January, Trump revoked the director’s security clearance, and during his first term called him the “worst” CIA chief in history.
But, Brennan knows Ukraine.
Some reports say that it was during his time as director that the CIA began training Ukrainian spies.
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When he first visited the country in 2014, he recounts how the forces “were still riddled with a lot of the Russian services”, but a decade later, what is his assessment of the country’s military?
“Pound for pound, [it] punches above the weight of virtually every other military on the globe, I would say including the United States, given the tremendous experience that they’ve gained on the battlefield”.
So, does the director really believe Ukraine’s allies had no prior warning of Ukraine’s drone attack?
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A career spook, he trod carefully around the questions, but admitted: “I don’t doubt for a moment that they were given some additional assistance from Western intelligence and military authorities and capabilities.
“The Ukrainians have done a lot on their own, but I think a lot of this is initially enabled by some ideas that come from their Western allies.”
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As the battlefields of Ukraine dry out to face another summer of war, this conflict continues to prove it is the “laboratory of the future”, as my co-host Richard Engel described it. The drone war intensifies, as does the battle of words between the two countries.
As a war of attrition continues in Ukraine, will Donald Trump, now preoccupied with protests in Los Angeles and unleashing thousands more troops on demonstrators, walk away from Ukraine and abandon it?
In the absence of detail, all we can do is read between the lines of what may or may not have been agreed in the London talks between the US and China.
And a degree of scepticism feels appropriate.
The fact neither side is saying much says a lot in itself. A major new breakthrough seems unlikely.
You only need to compare it to the conduct of the delegations following the first round of talks in Geneva to feel the difference in tone. Those talks did indeed yield significant breakthroughs including temporary reductions to most of the tariffs and an agreement to keep talking.
There, the Americans in particular were quick to get in front of the cameras to describe the “substantial progress” with Trump himself extolling “a total reset” in the relationship.
Not so this time.
Instead we have relatively dry statements from both sides about a “framework to implement the consensus” reached at both Geneva and during a phone call between Trump and Xi last week.
Any further description was tepid at best, with China’s official news agency describing the discussions as “candid” a word often used when there has been substantial disagreement.
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High stakes
It’s hard to overstate how high the stakes have become.
What started as a trade war has morphed into a dangerous supply chain war with the potential to wreak deep economic harm.
And by most assessments, it is China that has the upper hand.
Indeed, while the US has introduced a spate of new measures designed to block China’s access to high-tech chips, China has moved to slow and complicate the exports of crucial rare earth minerals to the US.
These metals are absolutely vital in the manufacture of everything from cars to weaponry, and China has the vast majority of the world’s supply.
The new controls have brought some production lines to the brink of standstill, and the West is alarmed.
On the ground here in China you get a sense that while this standoff will cause pain, there is confidence too, particularly in its ability to home grow the type of technology the US is attempting to block.
Indeed, as these talks were ongoing, a branch of the Chinese government was showing foreign journalists around usually hard-to-access high-tech businesses.
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A confident China
A controlled and choreographed affair, yes, but an insight too into where government attention and priorities lie and where they are feeling confident.
“We’ve caught up with America in terms of technology and quality,” said Zhou Zhiliang, CEO of GeneMind, a high-tech DNA sequencing and diagnostics company.
“We just need to catch up in terms of the market, building trust in Chinese products and the scale of utilisation.”
Others, when we asked about restrictions imposed by the US, seemed relatively unfazed.
“The trade friction between China and US will have an impact on many industries,” said Zhang Jinhua, founder of IASO Biotechnology, a company specialising in high-tech cell therapies.
“But this is what running a business is like, you always have to face challenges and situations you never expected before, you have to face them.”
And while some moments of candour reveal the frustrations faced by Chinese businesses, the attitude seems to be that none are insurmountable.
“We were selling our products via Amazon, although we now face some problems,” said Yu Kai, co-founder of conversational AI product AISpeech.
“But I believe it can be solved. The current technology dispute doesn’t affect us very much, because we rely on ourselves.”
Indeed, that is the key problem for the US.
China can increasingly rely on itself and is making rapid progress in the development of its own chips and AI technology.
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In contrast, the US is totally beholden to China on rare earths; the development of its own supply would be lengthy and extortionately expensive.
With this upper hand, China will have been driving an exceedingly hard bargain in London.
In an atmosphere of extreme distrust, where neither side will want to be seen to concede, reaching a sustainable truce will be very hard indeed.
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