Liberal who grew up in Massachusetts here (Longmeadow, MA to be specific). Can't emphasize enough how much the Kennedy love is generational as opposed to Lib vs. Con. If you look at RFK jr.'s approval, I suspect of the Democrats who are currently supporting him are likely older Democrats (and outside of the Sacks/Musk ratf**ckery the Republicans who support him are probably older too).
Given where I grew up and where I went to school (government major at William & Mary, so had classes and was friends with a lot of political nerds who were decidedly left of center), you would think there would be a lot of Kennedy love. I'm proud to say nope! I'd say among my group of friends (again mostly a left of center bunch), if you were to ask who the most overrated President is, I suspect the answer will to a person be JFK*.
Two anecdotes to serve my point. Do you remember the movie Chappaquidick? I actually thought it was quite good. But I remember the directors had an interview I listened to where they remarked upon that generational divide. I'm not sure if it was whether they were talking about speaking to older producers or just general public. But they said they were baffled by the number of older people trying to defend Ted Kennedy's actions***. You don't have to buy in the right-wing conspiracy theories to believe a) Ted did something untoward that night even if it wasn't murder and should have resulted in the end of his political career b) the Kennedy name and specifically his dad is what kept him out of further trouble**.
Second, see the movie JFK. Oliver Stone is (famously) a pretty left-wing person and yet of all the most ludicrous things he tried to argue in the movie, the idea that JFK was this superhero who was going to keep us out of Vietnam is perhaps the most ludicrous (that's saying something). The man was basically fully on board with a military coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. This is the guy who was going to keep us out of the conflict? Puh-leeze!
* You actually left out some stuff! And maybe some of the most egregious. Namely, that there is a pretty credible accusation that JFK pimped a 19 year old intern to aides and tried to pimp her to perform sexual acts with Ted Kennedy. https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/mimi-and-the-president
** I loved the fact that they made the "big bad" in the last season of Peaky Blinders Jack Kennedy. Of course, in the show he's named "Jack Nelson" because there's no way the Kennedy clan would be on board with a show that made Jack Kennedy out to be the mob boss of Boston. But to me it makes it even better as there's no need to tiptoe around family sensibilities and instead the writers had free reign to just let the Jack Kennedy character just essentially be 1930s classic gangster. Two side notes on this. The show went as far as to directly quote a real letter Kennedy wrote to FDR to basically highlight "hey we may not fully know the extent of Kennedy's right-wing sympathies and mob connections, but we know there is something there". Last and most important side note. WATCH PEAKY BLINDERS! Loved this show.
***I will semi defend Ted Kennedy as a senator in that he really was quite influential in getting a lot of progressive policy passed that I think has done an enormous amount of good for this country and policy that may not have passed without him. Of course, he has a key role to play in US not getting some version of universal health care, a role that he acknowledged and regretted in later years.
I agree with the generational thing. My mom is 73 and LOVES the Kennedys. She thinks JFK Jr. hung the moon. She texted me about RFK when he first announced, and she thought it was cool he was running (despite that she loves Joe Biden), but also doesn't really know anything about him except that he's a Kennedy (we haven't talked about it since then, so I'm not sure if her position has changed at all in recent weeks). I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who gives a shit about the Kennedys one way or the other.
Secondly, I think a lot of the people excited about RFK's run are disgruntled ex-democrats. I know some of these people personally - they always voted democratic and considered themselves liberal, but COVID broke their brains. They became anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers, and then, of course, because none of them can really think for themselves, super anti-trans and anti-CRT, and now feel somewhat homeless politically. They aren't a huge group of people, I don't think, but they are loud, and very righteous in their cause. I suspect this is his base, and he will gain some traction simply from their noise and support.
I distinctly remember doing field work in Maine for ACA summer of 09. Talking to an elderly woman who after our conversation patted me on the shoulder and said “I know you think Obama is great. But you know who was actually a great President? Jack Kennedy”. She was quite sweet and given my role I just nodded politely. But in my head I wanted to exclaim “what are you talking about?! Kennedy was a terrible person and pretty crap President all things considered!”
My question is, are there enough of those people to influence a general election? My concern is that the relatively small percentage of traditional Democratic voters who have gone anti-vax and/or anti-supporting Ukraine might be significant if they don't vote/vote 3rd party/hold their nose and vote for Trump.
I do not think this article quite eclipses "Gavin Newsom is gross and embarrassing" as my favorite Barro article ever--as someone still barely under the age of 40, I simply don't give a shit about this Kennedy or that Kennedy or any Kennedy, and I find it bizarre and inscrutable that anyone does.
I think there's a not entirely crazy liberal nostalgia for Bobby Sr. There's the idea that if he hadn't been killed, he would have been nominated, beaten Nixon, and bent the arc of history leftward. I think the decline of liberalism had already started by 1968 and was driven by the rise in crime and urban poverty in the 1960s, not something he could have reversed. To liberals who see history in terms of stories about Great Men however, his assassination was the great horrible crux of the era, arguably more important than his brother's assassination.
Came here to ask about RFK. I agree that he probably could not have lived up to the hype, but my (uninformed) understanding was that he was less of a sleazeball and more competent than his brother was (or his sons turned out to be).
RFK Sr. was an aid to Joe McCarthy when red baiting got you ahead in politics and he became a liberal crusader when that was the way to fuck Lyndon Johnson over. His justice department was very sleazy but he maybe had less of a substance problem than JFK and (his admirers will tell you) he was a more serious Catholic than his brother so he sometimes felt bad about constantly cheating on his wife.
Yes, that’s what a lot of liberals believe about RFK, but if you read the history of the 1968 primaries, it is very possible that RFK would not have had the delegates to defeat Humphrey at the convention, even after his win in the CA primary. And then also LBJ would have been doing everything in his power behind the scenes to make sure RFK didn’t become the nominee.
However, I will say that I have multiple friends who were GOP-side Senate staffers in the '00s, and to a person, they all speak highly of Senator Ted Kennedy as collegial, generous, and a hard-working legislator. And just yesterday, I heard a long-serving-but-low-profile former GOP Representative brought up T. Kennedy as an example of bipartisanship and generousity.
The family is awful, but one of them was a solid statesman for his last 20 years.
It’s sort of a shame. He did manage to turn into a competent, hard working legislator and a worthwhile human being by the end of his career. One can be cynical about these things, but I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But it was always hard for the public at large to give him credit for it. His transformation seems entirely incidental to everything else about him. He really was the entitled, worthless, drunken shithead his detractors made him out to be in the 70s and 80s. The problem is that few people make the reformed man case for him. His defenders are nearly all dyed in the wool Kennedy worshipers.
I will give JFK credit for getting through the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was an intense and potentially disastrous situation. You can argue about how much credit he personally deserves but at the end of the day it resolved.
Political parties have a hard time with introspection. This is obviously a huge problem with the Republicans right now but the Democratic party has been far from immune. Obama strongly considered appointing RFK Jr. as his head of the Environmental Protection Agency and if you look at the old articles, the biggest hang-up was his previous admissions of using cocaine. Not that he was an election denying conspiracy theorist, not that he maintains the CIA killed his dad despite the fact that Sirhan Sirhan has admitted and apologized to RFK Jr., not any of the crazy policy positions he espoused. Fucking cocaine use. RFK Jr. is getting his current treatment because he is suddenly inconvenient to the Democratic party when he should have been kicked to the curb years ago.
I've seen compelling cases made that JFK damn near brought us to the brink of war rather than steering us away from it, and that his performance in the whole saga could probably be summed up as "arrogant, dumb, and lucky". I'm not enough of a historian to try to restate that case.
The one thing I'll definitely give JFK credit for is serving his country. I'm sure the family had enough strings to pull to keep him out of combat, if not out of uniform entirely.
I've read a fair number of accounts of the JFK presidency and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and my strong impression is that JFK (and RFK) handled it very well. JFK was under immense pressure to launch missile strikes on Cuba from the majority of the 20 or so members of the so-called Executive Committee that JFK assembled for the crisis. That would almost certainly resulted in a nuclear exchange. I don't think JFK was unique among presidents at being able o defuse the crisis. I'm sure FDR and Ike would have handled it fine. Probably Nixon, Bush41, and Obama too. Trump would have a cut deal, selling out our allies as much as necessary. LBJ was strongly pushing for missile strikes at the time. Truman would likely have screwed it up, probably W too. Reagan was a hawk, but also turned to be less insane than I thought when I lived through his presidency as a teenager. Carter could have gone either way, depending on whether he listened to Bryzinski (sp?) or the other guy, whose name I forget at the moment.
In any event, the Cuban Missile Crisis posed the greatest threat to the human race to date and under JFK's watch it was averted. That alone is arguably enough to offset the rest of the Kennedy family's malfeasance.
I'll give this some thought, but my perspective on LBJ was informed particularly by The Passage of Power -- see https://www.amazon.com/Passage-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson-ebook/dp/B0062B0844 - the 4th in the series of LBJ biographies by Robert Caro. Also, The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam, which takes a close look at the JFK aides that took the country into the Vietnam War, and their relationship with LBJ after JFK was killed. My takes on FDR, Ike, Truman, and Nixon come from any number of books I've read about WWII, the Cold War, as well as various biographies of the presidents and others. I read a good biography of Eisenhower a few years ago - I'll see if I can remember who was the author. The historian Garry Wills has written books and/or essays on Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, and probably others too. Rick Perlstein's books on the Nixon and Carter administrations are informative on their respective approaches to foreign policy and national security. I'm old enough to have followed events fairly closely for presidents since Carter (and I have some memory of the Carter years).
As I get older I find that I have a lot more grace for the difficult foreign policy considerations of the Cold War presidents. For all the rhetoric about the United States being an imperial power (and Lord knows that we do not have entirely clean hands on this,) the Soviet Union was the most imperialistic power of the 20th century with outright invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan and control over the Warsaw Pact countries in a way that was considerably more controlling than the NATO alliance. These expansionary aims of a nuclear power was dangerous. The fact that we got through it with only two large proxy wars was quite an accomplishment.
They weren't paid though, which is why it's not explicitly over the line. They were still very obviously corrupt, but tax dollars didn't pay their salaries, at least.
Well, they certainly were paid indirectly, through gaining business they otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten because their father (or father-in-law) was President. Just as Trump himself didn't take his presidential salary--he had enough other income flowing in as a result of his position. And just to be even-handed, yes, Hunter Biden's "job" was just as suspect...
Chappaquiddick was obviously a huge moral failing in a personal sense, but the thing that bothers me about Ted Kennedy as a public figure is his challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980. Granted, all of this happened before I was born and I have the benefit of looking at everything in retrospect. But it seems as though Carter, whatever else you want to say about him, could grasp that the climate was moving away from New Deal/Great Society-style liberalism and was trying to adapt to that, whereas Kennedy was just delivering the old time religion. Then he indulges in petty silliness like refusing to raise arms with Carter at the convention. Carter had so much going against him in 1980 that he probably would have lost even if Kennedy hadn't challenged him, but everything Kennedy did put him in a far worse position, and if Carter had lost by a smaller margin than he did in real life, a handful of Democratic senators probably could have squeaked by and been reelected instead of a bunch of them losing.
I was here back then and you are absolutely correct about all of that. Carter’s worst political enemies during his presidency weren’t Republicans, but the liberal wing of his own party, led by Ted Kennedy. Kennedy’s primary challenge to Carter killed any chance Carter might have had in the general election.
There’s a Kennedy-adjacent murder that you didn’t mention. Two weeks after the Warren Commission report was released, Mary Pinchot Meyer (who had a longtime affair with JFK) was murdered execution style in Washington. Shortly after her murder, a high-ranking CIA official broke into her apartment to steal her diary! No one was ever convicted of the murder.
"Did I mention that RFK Jr.’s cousin, Patrick, while he was serving as a congressman, crashed his Ford Mustang into a barrier near the Capitol at 2:45am while under the influence of prescription drugs and probably also alcohol? He told police he was late for a vote. Again, do not let these people drive you anywhere."
As I recall, Patrick Kennedy's case was one of the first media-reported instances of Ambien-induced "sleep driving." I don't think you can necessarily chalk this one incident up to substance abuse.
Seriously, very funny. Long-time lefty Democrat here who has always found it grotesque that so many liberal Democrats/feminists have repeatedly excused the negligent, selfish, stupid, dishonest, often criminal behavior of the Kennedys, especially in regard to their many female victims. And yeah, do not get in the car (or plane), they clearly think - despite repeated evidence to the contrary, that even the normal rules of physics do not apply to them.
This might be my favorite thing you've ever written, Josh. As someone else who is mystified by the enduring love of the Kennedys, today's post speaks to my soul.
I used to be astonished and ashamed that Republicans fell for the cult of Trump until I remembered for two generations the Morning Joe left was salivating for the probity, character and grace under pressure exhibited by the Chappaquiddick Kid.
And that dinner party exchange you describe reminded me of David Frum blasting his opposition on Left, Right and Center back when you were moderating.
This is on par with the Gavin Newsom takedown, and is Barro prose at its best. It was also a self-diagnosing read as I found myself guilty of subscribing to almost single piece of Kennedy lore that is, upon any level of inspection, rooted in nothing more than glamorous nostalgia of a time I wasn't even alive in.
This is my favorite thing you have ever written. I wish every Trump fan would read the two paragraphs towards the bottom about JFK and take a long hard look in the mirror...
Josh - you almost got a body count because I was laughing so hard reading this I had trouble breathing. Well done!
Agreed, Josh is in top form here
Liberal who grew up in Massachusetts here (Longmeadow, MA to be specific). Can't emphasize enough how much the Kennedy love is generational as opposed to Lib vs. Con. If you look at RFK jr.'s approval, I suspect of the Democrats who are currently supporting him are likely older Democrats (and outside of the Sacks/Musk ratf**ckery the Republicans who support him are probably older too).
Given where I grew up and where I went to school (government major at William & Mary, so had classes and was friends with a lot of political nerds who were decidedly left of center), you would think there would be a lot of Kennedy love. I'm proud to say nope! I'd say among my group of friends (again mostly a left of center bunch), if you were to ask who the most overrated President is, I suspect the answer will to a person be JFK*.
Two anecdotes to serve my point. Do you remember the movie Chappaquidick? I actually thought it was quite good. But I remember the directors had an interview I listened to where they remarked upon that generational divide. I'm not sure if it was whether they were talking about speaking to older producers or just general public. But they said they were baffled by the number of older people trying to defend Ted Kennedy's actions***. You don't have to buy in the right-wing conspiracy theories to believe a) Ted did something untoward that night even if it wasn't murder and should have resulted in the end of his political career b) the Kennedy name and specifically his dad is what kept him out of further trouble**.
Second, see the movie JFK. Oliver Stone is (famously) a pretty left-wing person and yet of all the most ludicrous things he tried to argue in the movie, the idea that JFK was this superhero who was going to keep us out of Vietnam is perhaps the most ludicrous (that's saying something). The man was basically fully on board with a military coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. This is the guy who was going to keep us out of the conflict? Puh-leeze!
* You actually left out some stuff! And maybe some of the most egregious. Namely, that there is a pretty credible accusation that JFK pimped a 19 year old intern to aides and tried to pimp her to perform sexual acts with Ted Kennedy. https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/mimi-and-the-president
** I loved the fact that they made the "big bad" in the last season of Peaky Blinders Jack Kennedy. Of course, in the show he's named "Jack Nelson" because there's no way the Kennedy clan would be on board with a show that made Jack Kennedy out to be the mob boss of Boston. But to me it makes it even better as there's no need to tiptoe around family sensibilities and instead the writers had free reign to just let the Jack Kennedy character just essentially be 1930s classic gangster. Two side notes on this. The show went as far as to directly quote a real letter Kennedy wrote to FDR to basically highlight "hey we may not fully know the extent of Kennedy's right-wing sympathies and mob connections, but we know there is something there". Last and most important side note. WATCH PEAKY BLINDERS! Loved this show.
***I will semi defend Ted Kennedy as a senator in that he really was quite influential in getting a lot of progressive policy passed that I think has done an enormous amount of good for this country and policy that may not have passed without him. Of course, he has a key role to play in US not getting some version of universal health care, a role that he acknowledged and regretted in later years.
I agree with the generational thing. My mom is 73 and LOVES the Kennedys. She thinks JFK Jr. hung the moon. She texted me about RFK when he first announced, and she thought it was cool he was running (despite that she loves Joe Biden), but also doesn't really know anything about him except that he's a Kennedy (we haven't talked about it since then, so I'm not sure if her position has changed at all in recent weeks). I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who gives a shit about the Kennedys one way or the other.
Secondly, I think a lot of the people excited about RFK's run are disgruntled ex-democrats. I know some of these people personally - they always voted democratic and considered themselves liberal, but COVID broke their brains. They became anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers, and then, of course, because none of them can really think for themselves, super anti-trans and anti-CRT, and now feel somewhat homeless politically. They aren't a huge group of people, I don't think, but they are loud, and very righteous in their cause. I suspect this is his base, and he will gain some traction simply from their noise and support.
I distinctly remember doing field work in Maine for ACA summer of 09. Talking to an elderly woman who after our conversation patted me on the shoulder and said “I know you think Obama is great. But you know who was actually a great President? Jack Kennedy”. She was quite sweet and given my role I just nodded politely. But in my head I wanted to exclaim “what are you talking about?! Kennedy was a terrible person and pretty crap President all things considered!”
My question is, are there enough of those people to influence a general election? My concern is that the relatively small percentage of traditional Democratic voters who have gone anti-vax and/or anti-supporting Ukraine might be significant if they don't vote/vote 3rd party/hold their nose and vote for Trump.
My guess (and hope) is this small group of ppl voted Trump already in 2020 and were counteracted by ppl like Josh.
I hope you're right, although in 2020 there was no publicly available COVID vaccine and nobody in America could locate Bakhmut on a map...
I do not think this article quite eclipses "Gavin Newsom is gross and embarrassing" as my favorite Barro article ever--as someone still barely under the age of 40, I simply don't give a shit about this Kennedy or that Kennedy or any Kennedy, and I find it bizarre and inscrutable that anyone does.
But it is in contention.
The Newsom article definitely takes the award for "Best and Most Disturbing Image" used in a Josh Barro post!
I think there's a not entirely crazy liberal nostalgia for Bobby Sr. There's the idea that if he hadn't been killed, he would have been nominated, beaten Nixon, and bent the arc of history leftward. I think the decline of liberalism had already started by 1968 and was driven by the rise in crime and urban poverty in the 1960s, not something he could have reversed. To liberals who see history in terms of stories about Great Men however, his assassination was the great horrible crux of the era, arguably more important than his brother's assassination.
Came here to ask about RFK. I agree that he probably could not have lived up to the hype, but my (uninformed) understanding was that he was less of a sleazeball and more competent than his brother was (or his sons turned out to be).
But is that true?
RFK Sr. was an aid to Joe McCarthy when red baiting got you ahead in politics and he became a liberal crusader when that was the way to fuck Lyndon Johnson over. His justice department was very sleazy but he maybe had less of a substance problem than JFK and (his admirers will tell you) he was a more serious Catholic than his brother so he sometimes felt bad about constantly cheating on his wife.
Yes, that’s what a lot of liberals believe about RFK, but if you read the history of the 1968 primaries, it is very possible that RFK would not have had the delegates to defeat Humphrey at the convention, even after his win in the CA primary. And then also LBJ would have been doing everything in his power behind the scenes to make sure RFK didn’t become the nominee.
Not one word of this is wrong.
However, I will say that I have multiple friends who were GOP-side Senate staffers in the '00s, and to a person, they all speak highly of Senator Ted Kennedy as collegial, generous, and a hard-working legislator. And just yesterday, I heard a long-serving-but-low-profile former GOP Representative brought up T. Kennedy as an example of bipartisanship and generousity.
The family is awful, but one of them was a solid statesman for his last 20 years.
It’s sort of a shame. He did manage to turn into a competent, hard working legislator and a worthwhile human being by the end of his career. One can be cynical about these things, but I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But it was always hard for the public at large to give him credit for it. His transformation seems entirely incidental to everything else about him. He really was the entitled, worthless, drunken shithead his detractors made him out to be in the 70s and 80s. The problem is that few people make the reformed man case for him. His defenders are nearly all dyed in the wool Kennedy worshipers.
I will give JFK credit for getting through the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was an intense and potentially disastrous situation. You can argue about how much credit he personally deserves but at the end of the day it resolved.
Political parties have a hard time with introspection. This is obviously a huge problem with the Republicans right now but the Democratic party has been far from immune. Obama strongly considered appointing RFK Jr. as his head of the Environmental Protection Agency and if you look at the old articles, the biggest hang-up was his previous admissions of using cocaine. Not that he was an election denying conspiracy theorist, not that he maintains the CIA killed his dad despite the fact that Sirhan Sirhan has admitted and apologized to RFK Jr., not any of the crazy policy positions he espoused. Fucking cocaine use. RFK Jr. is getting his current treatment because he is suddenly inconvenient to the Democratic party when he should have been kicked to the curb years ago.
I've seen compelling cases made that JFK damn near brought us to the brink of war rather than steering us away from it, and that his performance in the whole saga could probably be summed up as "arrogant, dumb, and lucky". I'm not enough of a historian to try to restate that case.
The one thing I'll definitely give JFK credit for is serving his country. I'm sure the family had enough strings to pull to keep him out of combat, if not out of uniform entirely.
I've read a fair number of accounts of the JFK presidency and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and my strong impression is that JFK (and RFK) handled it very well. JFK was under immense pressure to launch missile strikes on Cuba from the majority of the 20 or so members of the so-called Executive Committee that JFK assembled for the crisis. That would almost certainly resulted in a nuclear exchange. I don't think JFK was unique among presidents at being able o defuse the crisis. I'm sure FDR and Ike would have handled it fine. Probably Nixon, Bush41, and Obama too. Trump would have a cut deal, selling out our allies as much as necessary. LBJ was strongly pushing for missile strikes at the time. Truman would likely have screwed it up, probably W too. Reagan was a hawk, but also turned to be less insane than I thought when I lived through his presidency as a teenager. Carter could have gone either way, depending on whether he listened to Bryzinski (sp?) or the other guy, whose name I forget at the moment.
In any event, the Cuban Missile Crisis posed the greatest threat to the human race to date and under JFK's watch it was averted. That alone is arguably enough to offset the rest of the Kennedy family's malfeasance.
Can you present/share any further reading? This is a fascinating perspective.
If I meant to type "you're full of shit", I would just type that, so please believe that I'm asking earnestly.
I'll give this some thought, but my perspective on LBJ was informed particularly by The Passage of Power -- see https://www.amazon.com/Passage-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson-ebook/dp/B0062B0844 - the 4th in the series of LBJ biographies by Robert Caro. Also, The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam, which takes a close look at the JFK aides that took the country into the Vietnam War, and their relationship with LBJ after JFK was killed. My takes on FDR, Ike, Truman, and Nixon come from any number of books I've read about WWII, the Cold War, as well as various biographies of the presidents and others. I read a good biography of Eisenhower a few years ago - I'll see if I can remember who was the author. The historian Garry Wills has written books and/or essays on Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, and probably others too. Rick Perlstein's books on the Nixon and Carter administrations are informative on their respective approaches to foreign policy and national security. I'm old enough to have followed events fairly closely for presidents since Carter (and I have some memory of the Carter years).
As I get older I find that I have a lot more grace for the difficult foreign policy considerations of the Cold War presidents. For all the rhetoric about the United States being an imperial power (and Lord knows that we do not have entirely clean hands on this,) the Soviet Union was the most imperialistic power of the 20th century with outright invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan and control over the Warsaw Pact countries in a way that was considerably more controlling than the NATO alliance. These expansionary aims of a nuclear power was dangerous. The fact that we got through it with only two large proxy wars was quite an accomplishment.
Much obliged, thank you sir.
While I don't disagree with anything in your (as usual) excellent article, I (sort of) take issue with this:
"How would you have reacted if Donald Trump had named a member of his immediate family to the cabinet?"
Well, I would say he kind of did for several of his immediate family members, just not formally...
They weren't paid though, which is why it's not explicitly over the line. They were still very obviously corrupt, but tax dollars didn't pay their salaries, at least.
Well, they certainly were paid indirectly, through gaining business they otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten because their father (or father-in-law) was President. Just as Trump himself didn't take his presidential salary--he had enough other income flowing in as a result of his position. And just to be even-handed, yes, Hunter Biden's "job" was just as suspect...
We just paid to have them carted all over the globe.
Chappaquiddick was obviously a huge moral failing in a personal sense, but the thing that bothers me about Ted Kennedy as a public figure is his challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980. Granted, all of this happened before I was born and I have the benefit of looking at everything in retrospect. But it seems as though Carter, whatever else you want to say about him, could grasp that the climate was moving away from New Deal/Great Society-style liberalism and was trying to adapt to that, whereas Kennedy was just delivering the old time religion. Then he indulges in petty silliness like refusing to raise arms with Carter at the convention. Carter had so much going against him in 1980 that he probably would have lost even if Kennedy hadn't challenged him, but everything Kennedy did put him in a far worse position, and if Carter had lost by a smaller margin than he did in real life, a handful of Democratic senators probably could have squeaked by and been reelected instead of a bunch of them losing.
I was here back then and you are absolutely correct about all of that. Carter’s worst political enemies during his presidency weren’t Republicans, but the liberal wing of his own party, led by Ted Kennedy. Kennedy’s primary challenge to Carter killed any chance Carter might have had in the general election.
There’s a Kennedy-adjacent murder that you didn’t mention. Two weeks after the Warren Commission report was released, Mary Pinchot Meyer (who had a longtime affair with JFK) was murdered execution style in Washington. Shortly after her murder, a high-ranking CIA official broke into her apartment to steal her diary! No one was ever convicted of the murder.
TIL! Wow. (James Jesus Angleton - what wasn't that guy involved in!)
Yes it was. He was quite a guy.
This was a phenomenal read on a Friday afternoon.
"Did I mention that RFK Jr.’s cousin, Patrick, while he was serving as a congressman, crashed his Ford Mustang into a barrier near the Capitol at 2:45am while under the influence of prescription drugs and probably also alcohol? He told police he was late for a vote. Again, do not let these people drive you anywhere."
As I recall, Patrick Kennedy's case was one of the first media-reported instances of Ambien-induced "sleep driving." I don't think you can necessarily chalk this one incident up to substance abuse.
Seriously, very funny. Long-time lefty Democrat here who has always found it grotesque that so many liberal Democrats/feminists have repeatedly excused the negligent, selfish, stupid, dishonest, often criminal behavior of the Kennedys, especially in regard to their many female victims. And yeah, do not get in the car (or plane), they clearly think - despite repeated evidence to the contrary, that even the normal rules of physics do not apply to them.
This might be my favorite thing you've ever written, Josh. As someone else who is mystified by the enduring love of the Kennedys, today's post speaks to my soul.
I used to be astonished and ashamed that Republicans fell for the cult of Trump until I remembered for two generations the Morning Joe left was salivating for the probity, character and grace under pressure exhibited by the Chappaquiddick Kid.
And that dinner party exchange you describe reminded me of David Frum blasting his opposition on Left, Right and Center back when you were moderating.
This is on par with the Gavin Newsom takedown, and is Barro prose at its best. It was also a self-diagnosing read as I found myself guilty of subscribing to almost single piece of Kennedy lore that is, upon any level of inspection, rooted in nothing more than glamorous nostalgia of a time I wasn't even alive in.
This is my favorite thing you have ever written. I wish every Trump fan would read the two paragraphs towards the bottom about JFK and take a long hard look in the mirror...