The war within the Kennedy family
The “real” Bobby Kennedy was 26-years old the day he took over management of his brother Jack’s campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1952.
“Tanned and wiry with a mop of unruly hair,” according to JFK biographer Frederik Logevall, the new campaign manager was not especially interested in electoral politics.
When an aide to his older brother first broached the idea that only he could rescue the floundering (but ultimately successful) campaign, Bobby dismissed the notion out of hand. He was young and inexperienced. He felt he would screw things up for good.
It took awhile, but he finally came around. The deciding factor was familial. “He had no choice,” Logevall writes “- loyalty to family was everything.”
Throughout their half-century-plus reign as the first family of American politics, the Kennedys have demonstrated time and again the singular trait of always having one another’s back. The Kennedy family stood strong, proud, and united.
Until now.
The attempt by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become, like his Uncle Jack, president of the United States has shattered the harmony normally emanating from the Cape Cod clan. It’s no longer all for one, but many against Bobby the younger.
Oh, the candidate may talk of the relatives who are supporting him, but we know better. There was that photo taken on St. Patrick’s Day at the White House: Joe Biden surrounded by better than three dozen Kennedys. To emphasize that the family is (nearly) all in for Joe, the photo was snapped in John F. Kennedy’s beloved Rose Garden, just outside the Oval Office.
The snapshot all but screamed, “Four more years, four more years!”
Then there are public statements. Rory Kennedy, the youngest of the 11 siblings of Attorney General and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, said last week that she feared that her brother’s third party candidacy would “siphon” votes from Biden and throw the election to Donald Trump, whom she worries would make country “unrecognizable.”
Earlier, Rory joined Joe, Kathleen, and Kerry Kennedy in denouncing their brother’s run for the White House. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision, and judgment,” they said in a prepared statement.
The highest branch in the extensive Kennedy family tree has also been heard from. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, posited, “If my cousin Bobby Kennedy Jr. cared about any of [JFK’s legacy] , he would support Joe Biden. Instead, he is trading on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories, and conflict for personal gain and fame.”
Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline Kennedy, who is the Biden administration’s envoy to Australia, sounding as if she’d like to stay out of the worst of the fray, added, “I know what I think. I know what [my son] Jack thinks. I know what Bobby Kennedy thinks. And so, it’s not complicated.”
“I have a big family,” Bobby Jr. told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “about 105 cousins. I don’t know anybody in America who’s got a family who agrees with him on everything. I love my family. I feel loved by them.”
The real Bobby Kennedy must be turning over in his Arlington Cemetery grave.
Maybe.
Scrappy to a fault, Bobby Sr. relished a good fight. The question is: Is the fight his son is putting up a good fight or a bad fight?
The candidate told Burnett: “I don’t think either President Trump or President Biden are going to solve the debt crisis, which is existential. I don’t think either of them is going to get us out of foreign wars, this addiction that we have for forever wars.”
Kennedy said the United States should project “economic and moral strength” overseas, not military power. “The chances of that happening are too great and too important for me to give up this contest.”
Fair enough. On the other hand, there is Kennedy’s conspiracy-mongering, his cage fight with Dr. Anthony Fauci over the COVID pandemic response, and his vaccination skepticism, if not outright denialism. Bad stuff, that.
Equally problematic is Kennedy’s recent assertion that Biden was a greater threat to U.S. democracy than Trump. That’s bad stuff made worse by Bobby Jr.’s fabrications in service of a wild-eyed, harm-filled conclusion.
Good Bobby, bad Bobby? Good fight, bad fight? Bad.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.