The great RFK Jr. bamboozle of 2024: a brief history

RFK Jr. and Trump share a loving embrace as they join forces to allegedly fight the “Deep State” — August 23, 2024

At certain points in the 2024 election cycle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed poised to become the most formidable Third Party presidential candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. Reputable national polls showed RFK Jr. receiving as high as 17% of the vote — just a hair shy of Perot’s ultimate result in 1992, which was 18.9%. Perot, some may recall, came within striking distance of winning multiple states that year, having received a larger share of the vote than George H. W. Bush in Maine and Bill Clinton in Utah. If he hadn’t dropped out of the race under bizarre circumstances and then re-entered several months later, it’s not out of the question that Perot could have won the election outright. National polls from May 1992 showed Perot leading both Clinton and H.W. Bush, but his trajectory was interrupted when he suspended his campaign in July, claiming that Republican rivals were conspiring to sabotage his daughter’s wedding. Still, when he re-declared that October, Perot ultimately outperformed — in terms of national popular vote — any Third Party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

And so into the 2024 void leaped RFK Jr., with widespread discontent in the electorate strongly suggesting a mass constituency for some alternative to Donald Trump and (at the time) Joe Biden. RFK Jr. thus triumphantly launched his supposed Independent candidacy in October 2023, withdrawing from the Democratic primaries he initially claimed to be running in. The core argument of his latter-stage candidacy was a soaring pledge to dismantle the two-party “duopoly” that dominates US politics.

“The Democrats are terrified I’ll spoil the election for President Biden,” RFK Jr. proclaimed at a speech in Philadelphia billed as “declaring his independence” — a stirring reference to the locational backdrop, where the original Declaration of Independence is known to have been signed. RFK Jr. swore that his exhilarating new campaign would be truly one for the ages. “The Republicans fear I’ll spoil it for President Trump. The truth is — they’re both right! My intention is to spoil it for both of them.”

RFK’s case for the presidency always struck me as a bit peculiar — that his father and uncle got shot in the 1960s never seemed like a particularly compelling qualification for the job. Nor did the fact that he happened to be a descendant of an immensely overrated American political dynasty, or that he spent many decades as a Democratic Party lawyer/pundit/social climber. Beyond the mythical family lineage, there was little in RFK’s record that stood out as especially noteworthy, aside from his endorsing Hillary Clinton more consecutive times than perhaps anyone else in America, including Bill Clinton.

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the public were apparently mesmerized by his scattershot campaign, aided in large part by the fawning coverage he unfailingly received in right-wing and “alternative” media precincts, whose credulous podcasters were absolutely enthralled with RFK’s hallowed dynastic pedigree — a weird inversion of the “Camelot” mythology that underpinned earlier iterations of Kennedy lore. In those bygone times, it was largely mainstream liberals who exulted in the Kennedy mystique and “glamour.” Now, it’s hazily GOP-leaning people with a disproportionate social media presence who most eagerly lap up the Kennedy boosterism on YouTube.

So, bolstered by a right-wing and “independent” media that initially promoted him as an intriguing nuisance to Biden in the Democratic primaries, RFK gained a sizable enough following throughout 2023, and it seemed at least theoretically possible that his claimed Independent candidacy could make an appreciable impact.

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To get on the ballot in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, RFK deployed a multi-faceted strategy. In some states, he tried to form a new party (“We the People”) organized almost exclusively around his outsized, adulated persona. In other states, he lobbied for already-existing minor parties to nominate him for president, thus enabling him to use these parties’ ballot access and campaign infrastructure.

In August and September, after RFK withdrew from the race and melodramatically endorsed Donald Trump, I spoke with some of the minor party leaders whose presidential nomination RFK had sought and received in various states. “Swindled is not too strong a word for what some of them have said their feelings are,” Jim Rex, the founder of the South Carolina Alliance Party, told me of his membership’s reaction to news of the RFK withdrawal. Another segment of members, Rex granted, were more favorably disposed: “Some people just believe in him so much as a person, it’s almost cultish, which is kind of ironic, because it looks like he’s joining a cult.” The Alliance Party subsequently petitioned to remove RFK from the ballot in South Carolina, reasoning that RFK had reneged on his pledge to uproot the two-party system. “Our belief, my belief, personally, is that if you’re going to battle the two-party system that is so dysfunctional, and is disserving this country in so many ways, you battle it from the outside,” Rex said. “You don’t battle it from being inside the belly of the beast.”

Rex also recounted that the Alliance Party has a policy whereby any candidate seeking its nomination has to agree to a number of quasi-contractual conditions, such as endorsing term limits and publishing their last several years of tax returns online. RFK conspicuously refused to agree to the latter condition, but the party made an exception — thinking it worthwhile for the boon RFK’s high-profile candidacy would presumably give to their aspirations of forging a mass Independent electoral movement. Instead, as it later came to pass, the extensive volunteer time that party members had put into organizing on RFK’s behalf would be thoroughly squandered.

Another party whose presidential nomination RFK strenuously sought is the Natural Law Party of Michigan. “I kind of feel like he used us,” Doug Dern, the party chairman, told me after RFK endorsed Trump. “If he was allowed to withdraw from the party in Michigan, our party would be dead, our party would be no more.” No one, including Dern, would try to argue that the Natural Law Party is some kind of electoral juggernaut. But it undeniably requires a considerable amount of work to even maintain regular ballot access. 

Ironically, then, RFK’s candidacy ultimately served to imperil the very Third Parties he once claimed he would historically empower. “You give somebody your word, you stand behind it,” a disappointed Dern told me of RFK’s pro-GOP defection. “When you accept somebody’s nomination for president, that’s not a small deal.” Petitioning for and accepting a presidential nomination, only to withdraw and do the opposite of what you’d promised by joining forces with one of the two major parties you claimed to repudiate, can be seen as akin to violating a contract or covenant. “He hurt us, he really hurt us,” Dern told me. (RFK will still appear on the Michigan ballot despite his intensive efforts to withdraw after various deadlines had passed.)

RFK also obtained the nomination of the Florida Reform Party — the descendant of the same party formed by Ross Perot after the 1992 election. “We’re thrilled to give Floridians an independent option this November,” party chairperson Jennifer Desatoff declared in June. I followed up with her after the RFK withdrawal, which eliminated the Reform Party from the state’s presidential ballot and could jeopardize its ability to stay viable in the future. “The Reform Party does not endorse Donald Trump,” Desatoff told me. “I’m not working with the Trump campaign.”

Here’s an extremely obvious question for RFK to be asked, but which, to my knowledge, he has yet to be asked since opting to dissolve his well-resourced campaign infrastructure in favor of becoming a stalwart Republican functionary: “During your campaign, you claimed you were challenging the two-party ‘duopoly.’ Now, you have embraced the Republican nominee and are working tirelessly as a surrogate for the Republican Party. Aren’t you therefore strengthening the very ‘duopoly’ that you previously claimed you were running to dislodge, up until about a month and a half ago?”

I did get a brief opportunity to ask RFK a question at the presidential debate last month in Philadelphia, when he was sauntering around the “Spin Room” as a surrogate for Trump, surrounded by a phalanx of minders and guards diligently shielding him from unsanctioned questioning, as he navigated back and forth to all the “corporate media” interviews he was previously scheduled for.

Our interaction can be viewed here. 

My fleeting exchange with a stone-faced RFK Jr. — September 10, 2024

My question was prompted by the very simple premise that, as of just this past summer, RFK had stridently denounced Trump as partially responsible for causing the Ukraine war, and being wholly unrepentant about it. “He also walked away unilaterally from the intermediate range nuclear missile treaty with Russia, destabilizing our relationship,” RFK said of Trump. “He also exacerbated tensions between Ukraine and Russia that ultimately caused a war.”

So, given that RFK had just been castigating Trump for “bragging about arming Ukraine,” and Trump to this day has never stopped “bragging about arming Ukraine” — not to mention that Trump played a crucial role in getting the largest-ever provision of Ukraine funding enacted this past April — I wanted to know more about RFK’s sudden about-face. RFK told me his “opinions have evolved” on Trump thanks to a “series of conversations” the two had, which gave RFK “a lot of confidence” that Trump is going to end the war. But apparently, no concrete details from these secret consultations are forthcoming for the public to evaluate. Instead we’re all expected to remain politely entranced by RFK’s family legacy, and just take his word for it.

When details do trickle out about how Trump would magically end the war in 24 hours, he intimates that he could supply weapons to Ukraine with even more tenacity in order to force Putin into submission, which indeed has been a regular demand of self-described MAGA Congressional Republicans. Moreover, Zelensky emerged from his recent meeting with Trump optimistically indicating that Trump gave him “very direct information that he will be on our side, that he would support Ukraine.” In light of this, it might be worth getting some clarity as to what caused RFK’s dramatic Trump-related epiphany, but for now his lips are largely sealed.

Sadly, before he was whisked away, I didn’t get a chance to ask RFK about the issue of his bilking the small state parties whose presidential nomination he sought and then reneged on. (Earlier attempts by me to set up an interview with RFK throughout the summer, before he dropped out, were met with silence.)

Here’s another question I would have asked RFK, had I not been sadly thwarted:

“In May, you filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging illegal collusion between the Biden Campaign, the Trump Campaign, and CNN to exclude you from the first CNN debate. You said these entities ‘engaged in flagrant violations’ of federal election law to keep you out of the debate. Now that you’ve endorsed Trump and are campaigning for him, do you stand by your allegation that the Trump campaign engaged in illegal collusion against you?”

The sudden switcheroo from RFK was not particularly surprising, because if one ever tried to discern any real consistency in his philosophy or record, “your head would spin,” to use a favorite Trump colloquialism. RFK was a hardcore Russiagater during Trump’s first term, wondering aloud why conservatives had supposedly abandoned the legacy of Joe McCarthy in their refusal to investigate Trump’s collusive ties with Russia. He wrote op-eds condemning what he called Trump’s “comfortable bonhomie with military and authoritarian tyrants in Russia, China, and North Korea.” On one of his many pilgrimages to Israel, RFK declared that the United States was “no longer a democracy” because of Trump. None of this took place in some ancient era — it was literally during the first Trump Administration, during which RFK accused Trump of “scamming American workers” and a whole host of other indignities. “If you think a second Trump term would be any different, you are engaging in wishful thinking,” RFK said in May 2024. Which sure makes it appear as though the previous version of RFK is condemning the current version.

It was always baffling to be told by media-adjacent people whose judgment I’d ordinarily respect that I should be so deeply thankful for RFK’s contributions to the “discourse,” as if it’s somehow admirable that a career lawyer/activist in his 70s cannot hold together any set of coherent beliefs for any extended period of time about the most pressing national issues; all the more ridiculous when he’s touted in some quarters as an oracular political prophet. To me, the whole spectacle just reeked of classic Kennedy hucksterism.

Not especially surprising, then, was that RFK erratically discarded the campaign infrastructure he spent 10 months vowing to dislodge the dreaded “duopoly” with — opting to instead become a cog of that very same two-party system. At present, he runs around declaring that Trump is going to “make peace in the world” — while Trump literally calls for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and initiates private chats with Bibi Netanyahu to congratulate him on invading Lebanon. I have seldom seen such absurd propaganda; that it’s been credulously swallowed by much of the “alternative media” is a disturbing indictment of that segment of the information landscape. 

Considering that RFK hasn’t been divulgent with the details of how he came to be so enamored of Trump in their secret meetings, after previously condemning Trump’s first term and calling people delusional if they thought a second term would be any different, some informed speculation might be warranted. It’s very possible that the two bonded over their shared “pro-Israel” fanaticism, with Trump currently running on what by any measure has to be the most extreme “pro-Israel” platform of any major party nominee ever. RFK, even back when he was still denouncing both parties, had already earned the curious distinction of being unwaveringly dedicated to the current Israeli pulverization campaign and ridiculing the plight of Palestinians. With this in mind, it must warm RFK’s heart that Trump has repeatedly vowed to use the coercive power of the state to crack down on “anti-Semitic” political speech, building on his record of doing exactly that during his first term. I suppose we’ll just have to chalk it up as another unexplained asterisk, given RFK’s grandiose insistence that fidelity to “free speech” was a major factor in compelling his newfound allegiance to the Republican Party.

Left in the lurch from the whole affair is anyone who might have foolishly thought RFK’s candidacy would pose a material challenge to the national security state or “military-industrial complex.” Instead, RFK has misdirected any genuine consternation over such issues into a personality cult and Republican proxy campaign, and ultimately in service of a candidate, Trump, who has been abundantly clear about his intent to use the levers of state to continue projecting American hegemony, just like he did when he wielded power the first time. (Indeed, in June, RFK accused Trump of having an “imperial plan” for when he gets back into office. Did these plans suddenly change between June and August?) If anyone seriously thinks that a second Trump Administration staffed by Howard Lutnick and Jared Kushner is going to dismantle the “Deep State,” I have a bridge in Hyannisport to sell you. (Here’s my interview with Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of the Trump Transition Team, in which he confirms that Kushner is helping him staff the next government.)

I can already hear the anguished protests of people reading this article: “But RFK just wants to remove the toxins from the soil supply!” OK? Few would actually object to that supremely innocuous goal. What it has to do with demolishing the “Deep State,” a core theme of RFK’s erstwhile candidacy and among his worshipful followers, remains a mystery.

Maybe I’m being a bit repetitive here, but it should really be emphasized that RFK’s campaign turned out to be based on false pretenses: that he was going to forge some ground-breaking mass Independent movement, only to do the exact opposite — bamboozling minor political parties whose nomination he sought, and actually undermining their electoral and organizational prospects. The sum total of his campaign, then, was to strengthen the very “duopoly” he appeared briefly well-positioned to challenge.

One person who made out like a bandit in the whole deal, however, was Timothy Mellon, the reclusive heir who has been the largest individual donor in the 2024 election cycle, having simultaneously poured at least $172 million into both the RFK operation and Trump/GOP. If what he and similarly-inclined donors were conniving for was to simply use RFK as a Republican vessel, gobbling up disaffected voters with the idea of eventually funneling them right back into the Republican wing of the two-party “duopoly,” Mellon and Co. made a savvy bet.

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While it’s true that RFK’s Independent campaign was targeted with significant amounts of litigation and challenges from Democratic Party-aligned groups, this has long been true of Third Party candidates. Go ask the beleaguered Ralph Nader about the depredations to which he was subjected by Democrats after being widely accused of “spoiling” the 2000 election for Al Gore. (Republicans, it should be noted, also routinely challenge the ballot access of minor parties that are perceived to harm their election prospects, such as the Libertarian Party and Constitution Party.) There’s no doubt that well-funded DNC-aligned initiatives took on a particular vigor this cycle against RFK; then again, the entire premise of his campaign was to destroy the primacy of the two-party system, so one would expect a status-quo party to do whatever it could within the byzantine US electoral system to impede RFK’s candidacy.

For months and months, RFK made explicit fundraising appeals based on the idea that he needed major resources to surmount these very hurdles. That appears to have been why he chose as his Vice Presidential nominee a person whose sole apparent qualification was that she divorced one of the founders of Google and became obscenely rich. Unless you think Nicole Shanahan’s penetrating critique of the “Uniparty” — which she has now enthusiastically joined by becoming part of the Republican campaign network — was just so incisive and exhilarating that RFK simply couldn’t help himself, there doesn’t seem to be any other plausible rationale for her selection. “Questioning if the government might be satanically possessed” is one of the policy objectives that Shanahan has claimed the “Uniparty” so fiendishly opposes. If the most diehard critics of the so-called “Uniparty” are obsessed with the issue of Satanic possession, it seems the “Uniparty” is actually in pretty good shape.

RFK Jr. introduces his Google-fortuned running mate — March 27, 2024

The selection of Shanahan gets to another shambolic fallacy of the RFK Jr. campaign. Since 2017, RFK has been a resident of Los Angeles, California. However, for the purposes of his 2024 presidential campaign, he claimed his official residence was in Katonah, New York, at a location where he had clearly never lived. Now, one can dismiss this as trivial — residency requirements always deal in trivialities to some extent. But it remains the case that any high-profile candidate for elected office will inevitably have their residency scrutinized by opponents and the media. Not actually living in the place you declare to live in is about the most obvious liability any candidate can afflict themselves with.

RFK initially claimed residence at a house in Bedford, New York where he had periodically stayed as a guest in the past. But according to his own testimony and the testimony of the owners of the house, he hadn’t set foot there since 2017. (You can read the relevant court ruling, which lays out a series of uncontested facts, here.) He then shifted his declared residency to a separate house in nearby Katonah. When the New York Post reported in May 2024 that the house of his supposed residency was in foreclosure, RFK directed his assistant to send a $6,000 payment to the owner of this house where, by his own admission, he had never lived. When asked if he maintained a physical presence at this house, RFK explicitly replied “no.” When asked if he lives in California, he replied “yes.” This is really quite straightforward, notwithstanding whatever chicanery the DNC might have been up to. 

RFK noted in his testimony that his choice of a Vice Presidential running mate, the Google heiress investigating Satanic influence — who also happens to live in California — put him in a Constitutional bind given the stipulations of the 12th Amendment, which require that a presidential and vice presidential candidate reside in different states (although the vagaries of this Constitutional provision have never been fully litigated.) 

One could argue that RFK should have been permitted to appear on the New York ballot despite his fabricated residency, or that there should be no residency requirements at all. But to pin this absurd episode exclusively on the nefarious interventions of the DNC is laughable. Again, it’s certainly true that RFK’s ballot access was being challenged by a constellation of Democratic-allied groups. But it wasn’t the DNC that forced him to bizarrely misrepresent his place of residence. And it certainly wasn’t the DNC that forced him to pick a random billionaire who resided in the same state, Shanahan, thus sending him on a fishing expedition for a random New York address to slap his name on.

And regardless, RFK largely succeeded despite the Democrats’ best efforts; his campaign formally announced in August that they had “collected enough signatures for ballot access in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.” He was in fact on course to appear on every state ballot except New York, where he was found to have fabricated his residency. RFK was not “forced” out of the race by the “DNC.” He just chose to become a Republican functionary.

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One of the nagging issues I’ve always had with the RFK 2024 saga is that it’s been overwhelmingly fueled by the self-serving “anti-establishment” slant that he puts on standard-fare Kennedy clan mythology — which then gets mindlessly amplified by the gullible podcaster crowd. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that anyone would have ever even heard of this middling environmental lawyer if not for his allegedly awe-inspiring initials. And for bogus dynastic mythology to underpin the core rationale of a presidential campaign was a tell-tale sign that something was fundamentally amiss about the whole enterprise.

A full examination of the history-warping bunk that RFK Jr. and Co. peddle is beyond the scope of this article. But I know there will be people brimming with anger that I have desecrated the storied Kennedy legacy, so I will offer a truncated summary. (Oddly, lots of these same people would have been the most gleeful Kennedy excoriators in an earlier political era, probably heckling Ted Kennedy about “Chappaquiddick” and so forth.) 

The historical distortions are perhaps best encapsulated by a widely-circulated John F. Kennedy quote that RFK Jr. has frequently repeated, including at his April 2023 presidential announcement speech: that his martyred uncle wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” — with RFK Jr. endeavoring to complete that allegedly unfinished business. The origin of this chronically misused quote is the April 26, 1966 edition of the New York Times, in which an anonymous source sought to posthumously characterize JFK’s alleged attitude toward the CIA: 

Hence, there is no direct quote of JFK ever saying this. But even if he had, the clear context — entirely unbeknownst to legions of RFK Jr. followers — was JFK in the throes of pique after he had ordered a CIA invasion and aerial bombardment of Cuba, in hopes of killing Fidel Castro and imposing regime change — and the CIA failed to deliver. Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK did not move to “splinter” the CIA; instead, he radically empowered it to better advance his interests, including by authorizing the CIA to conduct combat operations in Vietnam, hugely boosting its budget, and turning it into his own personal assassination outfit to take out Castro. JFK only wanted to “splinter” the CIA insofar as it failed to achieve his initial regime change objective, and therefore required some reorganization to enhance its efficacy and lethality. 

In 1997, Seymour Hersh published The Dark Side of Camelot, quite possibly the best available corrective to persistent Kennedy mythology. The book is well worth reading in full, and it’s a shame that it’s been so relatively under-recognized within Hersh’s body of work. Hersh spent years reporting what would become the definitive dissection of the glittering aura around JFK, as well as his personal and political bagman Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. — sometimes touchingly referred to as “Jack and Bobby,” whose lionization in liberal circles had long insulated them from sustained critique. (Imagine any President today installing their own brother as Attorney General and it being depicted as a touching tale of fraternal bonding.) But in a peculiar twist, the most fervent Kennedy defenders nowadays are Republicans, by virtue of their devotion to RFK Jr. — at whose direction they now proselytize with the zeal of recent converts.

So what are they really defending? Among the most valuable contributions of Hersh’s book is his chronicle of Jack and Bobby’s maniacal obsession with orchestrating the assassination of Castro. During the 1960 election, JFK devised a plan to “outflank” Richard Nixon on the Cuba issue, and ridiculed both him and Dwight Eisenhower for being soft on communism. Nixon replied in kind by accusing JFK of risking World War III. As it turned out, Nixon was not too far off — JFK’s Cuba obsession would soon nearly plunge the world into nuclear annihilation. 

Contrary to the apologia that contends JFK meekly inherited the Bay of Pigs scheme from his predecessor Ike, and therefore somehow bore no real responsibility for the botched invasion, Hersh nails down how JFK was secretly briefed about the early-stage invasion planning during the 1960 campaign, which enabled him to accuse Nixon and Eisenhower of intolerable reticence to support “the forces fighting for freedom in exile and in the mountains of Cuba,” whom Kennedy demanded “should be sustained and assisted.” Nixon couldn’t divulge the fact that a classified invasion plot was already in the works, giving Kennedy a campaign issue to batter Nixon with, and hamstring Republicans from offering a response. Nixon in fact later attributed his defeat in 1960 to JFK deviously “outflanking” him on the Cuba issue, with JFK weaponizing intel that had been fed from his allies in the “Deep State.” According to Hersh, elements of the CIA had decided to support JFK over Nixon.

After the election, Kennedy did indeed inherit the contours of an existing scheme, but he was far from some passive bystander — he inserted himself aggressively into the most intricate details of the planning, and fulfilled his campaign pledge to set about imposing regime change on the rebellious island nation. Hersh writes: “Even before being sworn in, the president himself had told the CIA to be ready to kill, and the attorney general, his brother, would become his ally in political assassination after the Bay of Pigs, continually pressuring the CIA’s men to get on with their lethal plans.” The quote about JFK wanting to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces” was JFK bemoaning what turned out to be the operational incompetence of the CIA, which (with Kennedy’s full knowledge and approval, per Hersh) had recruited mobster Sam Giancana to assassinate Castro — the failure of which hobbled the overall mission.

“Jack and Bobby Kennedy were more than merely informed about the CIA’s assassination plotting against Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba,” Hersh writes. “They were its strongest advocates. The necessity of Castro’s death became a presidential obsession after the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, and remained an obsession to the end.”

After the book’s publication, Hersh went as far to say in a private letter that “there might have been some justice — one reviewer wrote ‘rough justice’ — in John F. Kennedy’s terrible death by assassination, a means he had sought to end Fidel Castro’s life.”

Hersh revealed that one of JFK’s first orders of business upon winning the presidency was to create a top secret program called “executive action,” code name ZR/RIFLE, that formalized US assassination policy. “The evidence linking Jack Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy [JFK’s national security advisor] to the murder plots is overwhelming,” Hersh writes, and “much of it was known” during the famous Church Committee hearings of the 1970s, but “Democratic members chose — for political reasons — not to confront it.” Now an analogous campaign of historical airbrushing has fallen to the latter-day Kennedy sycophants fawning over RFK Jr. — and by extension, weirdly enough, Trump.

The enduring Kennedy myth revitalized by RFK Jr. extends far beyond the Cuba fiasco — RFK Jr. has spent decades speciously portraying the Kennedy clan as peace-and-freedom lovers who were stymied by the “Establishment.” For instance, in his little-read hagiographical book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, RFK Jr. writes that JFK only “reluctantly” escalated the Vietnam War — similar to how Joe Biden is regularly said to have only “reluctantly” sent endless weapons to Ukraine, or how Trump “reluctantly” escalated the war in Afghanistan.

Hersh crisply dispenses with that canard. “Kennedy had a chance in 1961 to disengage from American involvement in South Vietnam,” Hersh writes. “He instead chose, quietly and indirectly, to go to war, with the vast majority of his senior advisers solidly in front of him, urging him to send in American troops and confront Soviet expansionism in Southeast Asia.” Presumably, JFK also “reluctantly” authorized US aerial bombardment missions in Vietnam, shrouded by the publicly-disseminated falsehood that the US military personnel were merely “advisors.” He also must have “reluctantly” approved the use of napalm to destroy Vietnamese crops, and “reluctantly” went along with forced population transfers.

The fatuous certainty with which it’s believed that JFK was on the verge of ending the Vietnam war, only to have been thwarted by the assassin’s bullet, would take another long article to do anything close to full justice. In the meantime, simply listen to JFK himself adamantly denying any plans to withdraw from Vietnam, shortly before his death. Or read the undelivered speech JFK was to give in Dallas on November 22, 1963, boasting of the success of the Vietnam campaign he’d escalated, and urging that Americans “dare not weary of the task.”

Alternatively, consult the words of RFK Sr. in the years after JFK’s death. After he won a New York Senate seat on the strength of his venerated surname (what else is new), RFK Sr. spent his time fulminating against the concept of withdrawing from Vietnam, denouncing advocates of withdrawal as partaking in a lamentable “repudiation” of his brother’s passionate pro-war commitments. Indeed, RFK Sr. himself said that Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent escalation was merely a continuation of JFK’s past war policy, and praised it as such.

This JFK record would only be relevant as a historical footnote — yet another instance of systematic US government deception — if not for RFK Jr. resurrecting it for his current blinkered political project, spinning it out into a self-aggrandizing dynastic mythology, and using it in turn to burnish the electoral appeal of his newfound Republican allies.

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At the time it was published, the biggest critics of Hersh’s book were mainstream liberals who took great umbrage at his audacity to degrade their cherished Kennedy fables with original reporting; today, the liberals are being replaced by vaguely right-wing types who have bought into the dimwitted idea that RFK Jr. is joining forces with Trump, “Avengers” style, to dismantle the “Deep State.” Which I suppose in practice means that Trump might deign to offer RFK Jr. some obscure position at the Food and Drug Administration — surely sending shivers down the spine of the National Security State and “military-industrial complex,” both of which Trump otherwise pledges to further empower, just as he did in his first term. (As previously pointed out by RFK Jr. himself.)

Trump, as it happens, also pursued a policy of assassination — albeit more openly and boastfully than JFK — when he and Mike Pompeo orchestrated the drone strike homicide of Iran’s top general, Soleimani. Trump’s obsession with Iran, which now includes threatening to blow the entire country to “smithereens,” does make for a potent parallel with JFK’s Cuba obsession and the disasters that subsequently ensued. Like JFK, he escalated all the wars he inherited, whether it be in Afghanistan, Yemen, or Ukraine. Trump also pursued an abortive regime change policy in Venezuela that brought back fond JFK memories.

Tens of millions of ordinary Americans are going to be voting for Trump in the coming weeks. I have no real quarrel with any of them individually. What I do have a problem with are professional hucksters and propagandists, especially those who run “Independent” campaigns on false pretenses, bamboozle countless people along the way, and then become ardent proponents of the very thing they were previously purporting to repudiate — using their distortions of history and familial pedigree to aid in the hustle. So that’s my problem with RFK Jr.

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