The Kennedy family has been a unit since long before I was born. No matter what any of them did, the Kennedys stuck together — even when they were doing some pretty bad things.
A lot has changed. The Democratic Party has evolved from the party of the working man to the party of the man who thinks he’s a woman. It is now funded by billionaires and Wall Street, and in that regard anyway, they are now everything they used to accuse Republicans of being.
At the same time, the Kennedy family has transitioned from a unified and loyal unit to an appendage of the Democratic Party. The decision by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s family to attack his character for endorsing a candidate they don’t like shows the world that whatever the outfit was before, it’s now just a group of truly shameless people.
The more you look at the Kennedy family of the 20th Century, the more you realize it is what the Biden family would look like if everyone in it were Hunter Biden.
John F. Kennedy seemingly never met a woman he wouldn’t cheat on his wife with. According to reports, both he and Robert F. Kennedy had affairs with Marilyn Monroe. Bobby reportedly had an affair with JFK’s widow, beginning just months after JFK was assassinated.
Uncle Teddy Kennedy was notorious for his drunken womanizing. Where John and Bobby kept their exploits behind the scenes (and their wives didn’t seem to mind, as long as they weren’t embarrassed publicly), Ted flaunted his excesses. According to eyewitnesses, he and another drunken Democratic senator assaulted waitress Carla Gaviglio in 1985, in front of their own dates, at a now-closed Washington restaurant in what became infamously known as the “waitress sandwich.” This is no urban legend, but an event reported repeatedly and corroborated in 1990 in graphic detail in the pages of GQ. Neither Kennedy nor his companion, former Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), ever suffered any consequences.
And that’s just the tip of the Teddy iceberg. Not to bury the lede, but he killed Mary Jo Kopechne. He was present and wasted when his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, credibly accused of rape in 1991. Smith beat the rap after the judge at the criminal trial refused to let the jury hear testimony from three other women he had allegedly assaulted.
RFK Jr. was just one Kennedy among others to close ranks dutifully around Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin who served 11 years in prison for a 1975 rape and murder. Skakel’s conviction was overturned in 2018.
John, Bobby, Ted and the others were never abandoned by the family, despite outrageous misconduct. They were never smeared as misogynists, which they all pretty clearly were. And the family didn’t give up on even the next generation of Kennedys — including Smith, Patrick Kennedy and RFK Jr. — over their substance abuse scandals, infidelity to spouses and alleged criminal behavior.
But that was when they were all loyal Democrats. Back then, decency was never really a consideration so long as family was involved. Today, however, party loyalty has overtaken family loyalty. It’s as if they’re saying they can overlook rape and driving under the influence causing someone’s death, but an endorsement of Donald Trump is just beyond the pale.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first mistake was to challenge the Democratic Party establishment and run a primary challenge against President Biden. This, however, was no worse than Uncle Teddy. But then Bobby, hampered at every turn by Democratic officials trying to prevent a real contest, announced he would instead run as an independent. For this, his own sister Kerry assailed him, writing that his decision “is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”
I can’t recall any time a Kennedy was publicly critical of another Kennedy, even for driving under the influence, as Kerry Kennedy did in 2014.
But that criticism was mild compared to what has happened now. Last week, RFK Jr. stepped on the headlines of the Democratic convention by dropping out and endorsing Trump. The women, the deaths in their wake, the abuses of every imaginable kind — those were all brushed aside in real time. But thinking differently from the party that had made their family name? That’s another matter altogether.
Kerry again led the pack with a denouncement of her own brother. “We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” she wrote. “We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
The words “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear” is really telling.
What are those values? Could it be Tim Walz’s commitment to chemical castration and mutilation of pre-teen children, even against their parents’ consent? Harris’s new, hilariously disingenuous interest in building a border wall? I didn’t realize that was a thing in the 1960s. Abortion on demand up to the moment of birth? Again, an odd flex for a family of supposedly devout Catholics being raised together 60 years ago.
The real issue is that the cult of the Democratic Party demands absolute fealty. Ronald Reagan used to say that an 80 percent friend was not a 20 percent enemy. But for today’s Democrats, a 99.9 percent friend is a 100 percent enemy, even if he happens to be your brother. Not even the Kennedy clan gets a free pass on that one.
The Kennedys were never role models for the American public, but they at least acted like a family. They still do, although now it’s more like the Corleone family, where everyone is advised against taking sides against them … or else they get Fredo’d.
Disgusting.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).