The Kennedys Can Handle Scandal—But Draw the Line at RFK Jr.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Bobby Kennedy, the secretary of health and human services, testified in Congress last week. And he met a barrage of criticism from the Democrats, very personal ad hominem. And he gave back as good as he took.

He’s a very controversial figure. We all know that. He’s a man of the Left that President Donald Trump welcomed into the MAGA fold. He endorsed Trump, I think, on Aug. 23 or 22, 2024, right before the election—a few months before.

But here’s my point, that the entire Kennedy family now has blasted him as an embarrassment. His first cousin, Caroline Kennedy—we remember her, the young girl of John F. Kennedy and Jackie—called him “a predator.”

And what’s behind this? Well, what’s behind this is that his checkered life—earlier, Bobby Kennedy had been a heroin addict for 12 or 13 years. His second wife committed suicide. He had a long history of—I don’t know what would be the word—promiscuity with women, not his wife. Everybody knew that he had a checkered history. That didn’t seem to bother the Kennedys. What’s bothering the Kennedys is this high-profile association with Donald Trump.

Now, a lot of things that he says at the Department of Health and Human Services we can all disagree with. But there is one general point that I think he has validity, and that is we spend more money per person—about $13,000 or $14,000—than any country in the world. The next is Switzerland at $9,000. And yet, when you look at longevity, we’re down at about 40, 78, 79 years, when a lot of countries are 84-, 85-, and 86-year life expectancies.

Now, a lot of that has to do with, we have more immigrants coming into the United States than any other country. Many of them are from poorer countries. They don’t have good health care. They come in ill, etc.

But he’s onto something that we need to address: diet, we need to address Big Pharma, we need to address all these things. And that, apparently, makes him an embarrassment.

You know what—but this is the irony. What is an embarrassment to the Kennedy family was not Bobby Jr. working for Donald Trump. It really wasn’t. It was Ted Kennedy in 1969: a U.S. senator driving off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne, allowing her to drown in the car, and then, for 24 hours, trying to fabricate a narrative that was completely a lie so he could get out of responsibility. And then using the Kennedy money and leverage in Massachusetts to get off with this, with no criminal exposure at all.

A woman was killed. And yet, no one—none of the Kennedys said that he was a predator or he embarrassed them.

We all know that JFK and Robert Kennedy were serial philanders. Nobody was embarrassed.

As you know, Caroline Kennedy was thinking about running for Senate when Hillary Clinton was stepping down to become President Barack Obama’s secretary of state in 2009. She gave a series of interviews, and they were a disaster. She knew nothing. Almost every word she said was “you know.” I’m thinking of politics, “you know,” “you know,” “you know.” And so, she shortly dropped out. And I think Gov. David Paterson, at the time, appointed Kirsten Gillibrand instead.

Part of the anger, then, against Bobby Kennedy is this illustrious family that’s huge—50, 60, 70 cousins. Not one of them is an elected official. Not one that I know of. And how do they stay in politics? By appointments. They’re ambassador of Austria. They’re ambassador of Australia. They’re ambassador to Northern Ireland. But they don’t have political viability.

You know what else is an embarrassment right now that Caroline Kennedy should be worried about? Her son, Jack Schlossberg. What has he done? He gets on social media, he made fun of Melania Trump’s voice the other day and tried to wear a wig and ridicule her. He went on just this week and tried to talk as if he was Darth Vader and make fun of Bobby Kennedy’s dysphonia—that problem he has with his voice. He suggested that he would like to impregnate Vice President JD Vance’s wife. He’s completely out of control. I haven’t heard any of the Kennedys say, “We have to distance himself.”

So, what I’m getting at is this is a bankrupt family. And Bobby Kennedy is no angel. And he says a lot of things that are crazy. But the central thesis: Too much money is being spent for too little returns. And we’re not a healthy country. We better look at ways—has merit.

And it’s not something that the family, given all of their skeletons in the closet, should completely distance themselves from because we know what the real reason for the embarrassment is: He’s talking and allied with Donald Trump. That’s it.

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