Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shakes Donald Trump’s hand after suspending his own presidential campaign and endorsing Trump, August 23, 2024, at a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona.
The strangest thing happened to me about 15 years ago. I got a voicemail from someone identifying himself as Robert Kennedy, expressing admiration for my book Nixonland. RFK Jr’s voice was not nearly as raspy then, and for a surreal instant I felt like one of the book’s subjects—RFK Sr.—was speaking to me from the grave.
Which is unusual, but not that unusual. Dead Kennedys are always speaking to living Americans. As the punk band of the same name explained why they chose it: “When JFK was assassinated, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, when RFK was assassinated, the American dream was assassinated … Our name is actually a homage to the American dream.”
Many readers might not be old enough to remember, but it used to be a quadrennial ritual: Democrats seeking a young, handsome “heir to Camelot” as their presidential nominee. First it was actual Kennedys: Bobby, then Teddy. Though Teddy chose not to run in 1972, Richard Nixon’s paranoia that he might was so suffusing that it was one of the driving forces of Watergate.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s campaign portrait was lit to make him look like John F. Kennedy. In 1980, when Teddy did run, a handsome young senator from Delaware supported the incumbent instead. All the same, Joe Biden made himself out to be Camelot’s proper successor, not JFK’s youngest brother: “If you’re looking for an Irish Catholic Democrat to support,” he said in a lukewarm speech for Carter during the Pennsylvania primary, “wait until 1984 and one of us will be back.”
The actual Kennedyesque contender that year was Gary Hart, but by 1988 Biden did run, vying with Hart for the vaunted sobriquet. In 1992, a picture of a 16-year-old Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK, destiny written in his eyes, helped manufacture the legend of the first president born of the new generation of Americans, to whom Kennedy famously passed the torch.
No such luck in 2004 for John Forbes Kerry, who a prep school classmate recalled “signed his papers JFK,” as a way of “telling people that he’s going to be president.”
Sixteen years later, the baby boomers of the Democratic establishment were still at it, backing Joseph Kennedy III for Senate in Massachusetts, even though a perfectly competent Democrat already held the seat. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee even broke its cardinal rule to protect incumbents, but was unsuccessful. A Kennedy served in every Congress from 1947 to 2021 except one; Ed Markey’s defeat of Joe III in Massachusetts broke the cycle.
This is a cult, and it is bipartisan. Even now, JFK is the only former president with an approval rating almost as high among Republicans—89 percent—as among Democrats. Kennedy worship encompasses High Church Republicanism (silly arguments that if only time had stood still, people would properly understand that JFK was a conservative) to Low Church Republicans (the QAnon faith that JFK Jr. faked his plane crash in 1999 and is secretly Donald Trump’s right-hand man). Dead Kennedys even spoke during the 1988 vice-presidential debate. Forty-one-year-old Sen. Dan Quayle, questioned about his experience, said he had just as much as JFK when he ran for president. Lloyd Bentsen, famously, shot him down: “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
By 2024, however, I presumed the cult had lost its magic. I was wrong. And thereby hangs a tale.
WHEN ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. DROPPED OUT of the Democratic primary race in late 2023 to announce a run as an independent, he started attracting a lot of interest among touts who pointed out that his polling—as high as 20 percent—was higher than Ross Perot’s ultimate vote share in 1992. I chose not to pay attention, thinking of that 20 percent as a statistical artifact of mere “name recognition” that would soon fade.
Soon after, however, I read a Substack piece by one of my favorite young political analysts, Ettingermentum, aka Joshua Cohen, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. RFK Jr. taking center stage in American politics makes no sense, according to the old rules. But I’ve become convinced that the raspy-voiced lunatic is not just one of MAGA’s myriad sideshows, but a tentpole: something that we can use to understand the thinking that holds the whole weird thing up.
Ettingermentum’s theory begins with the insight that the reason I wanted to dismiss RFK Jr.—“his last name is probably the main, if not sole, reason for his strength in the polls”—was actually the reason we should pay more attention. It was that “Kennedyesque” business all over again.
AP Photo
John F. Kennedy, right, stands with Lyndon Johnson before the Texas delegation caucus in Los Angeles, July 12, 1960, prior to the Democratic Convention. Behind Sen. Kennedy is his brother Robert F. Kennedy, his campaign manager.
This reverence owes little to what JFK accomplished in office, which was very little. To be blunt, it has more to do with how he died. When I needed to get across the Kennedy assassination’s impact in my first book, I chose unadorned brevity: “The bottom had dropped out of the United States of America.” Had I chosen to elaborate, I might have documented all the ways that baby boomers, who were children when the trauma was visited upon them, remain in the denial phase of their mourning to this day. Their failure to mourn became a species of magic thinking. As Ettingermentum, who is 22, puts it: Boomers came to “believe that Kennedy was going to do something that some people really didn’t want him to do, that those people took drastic action to prevent it, and that this was followed by the end of the American Golden Age.”
The kernel of truth behind that was two great things Kennedy did do shortly before his death. First, he gave a televised speech, against the advice of temporizing aides and after breaking every campaign promise he’d made on the subject, introducing a bill to end racial segregation as a moral imperative “as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” Second, another speech outlining his progress toward an (eventually successful) ban on aboveground testing of nuclear weapons, which soaringly proclaimed America and the USSR’s intertwined fates, that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
So, obviously, that made him such a threat to the powers that be that they had to kill him.
THE BEST HISTORIAN OF THE CULTURE OF CONSPIRACY that almost immediately followed November 22, 1963, is Kathryn S. Olmsted, in her book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Retired prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi took a staggering 1,648 pages to methodically demolish every existing conspiracy claim in his 2007 book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Olmsted does an effective job in a single 38-page chapter. She does so by examining the conspiracist culture in its political context.
The community that sprang forth on the left to get to the bottom of the assassination plot believed their government was lying to them. As Olmsted writes, they “had the advantage of being partly right.” It was a time when government lies were profligate, but when it was not fashionable to believe the government lied. They were ahead of their time—and their broader suspicions, as the ’60s marched on, kept on getting confirmed, and gaining more and more adherents.
They were even right that the government was lying to them about the Kennedy assassination. But most of the lies were easily attributable to Cold War panic, not an assassination conspiracy. J. Edgar Hoover, for example, closed the case quickly once it became clear that the gunman was a Communist, because he was “worried that a real investigation might prompt the excitable public to demand war with Russia—a war that could quickly go nuclear.”
Other lies involved FBI and CIA concealment of all the times the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, showed up in their files. That had more to do with the routine passion of bureaucracies to hide their own incompetence. As for the Warren Commission’s systematic incuriosity concerning certain, shall we say, investigatory loose ends: There were plenty of nasty government conspiracies they did want to hide—like the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro—that had nothing to do with Dealey Plaza.
From this messy record arose myriad opportunities for extremely motivated reasoners to keep the whole thing on boil for decades.
The community Olmsted profiles is like the argument for the existence of a Supreme Being that religious skeptics criticize most: “the God of the gaps.” As in, If there’s no God, how come scientists can’t explain X? Then, once scientists master the mysteries of X, God-of-gappers move on—Well, what about Y?—ad infinitum.
They pointed out that November 22, 1963, was a sunny day in Dallas. So how do you explain the guy by the Grassy Knoll with an umbrella? Everyone knows the CIA had guns disguised as umbrellas! Though by the 1970s most had forgotten, right-wingers were always trolling Kennedy by identifying him with Neville Chamberlain, the Nazi-appeasing British prime minister, whose symbol was an umbrella. This was a double-troll, tying JFK to his Nazi-appeasing father, and his own alleged appeasement of the Communists.
Explain the provenance of the umbrella, and a conspiracist might ask about a boom from a police radio that congressional investigators were sure was evidence of a fourth shot, which couldn’t have come from Lee Harvey Oswald. A porno magazine attached a flexi disc to its issue in 1978 with that recording. (“Girlie magazines,” Olmsted notes, “had historically provided a forum for Kennedy assassination theories, which were seen by most of the mainstream media as political pornography.”) A rock drummer in Ohio was so fascinated that he listened to the recording obsessively for four months—“until he heard something that the experts had missed,” Olmsted notes, “the faint echo of a voice picked up from another radio channel” of a cop securing the crime scene well after Kennedy was shot.
But what about …?
You get the point.
The reason this culture was so impervious to serial evidentiary disappointments was because it was motivated by a myth: If only the threads of this dastardly crime could be unraveled, it would finally reveal what kept America from becoming a land of milk and honey. A lot of apparently sophisticated people succumbed to that silly temptation. “Members of his own government felt he must be eliminated,” Martin Sheen confidently blurbed in a 2010 book, JFK and the Unspeakable, that did a great deal to keep that myth alive. Said Yoko Ono: “I cried all night reading it, and didn’t sleep a wink.”
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination midwifed its own culture of conspiracy. During his 1968 run for the presidency, he was in many ways who the mythologists imagined the actually centrist JFK to have been. He embraced the movement in California to establish a militant farmworkers union. He spoke with radical bluntness about the grievances driving urban riots. (“There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes the law is the enemy.”) And, most importantly, he came out foursquare against the Vietnam War, likening its present-day architects to a quote from Tacitus: “They made a desert, and called it peace.” This was quite a bold thing to do, considering his older brother was its original architect, sending the 21,000 American troops that turned Vietnam from a proxy skirmish into an American war. So supposedly he had to die, too.
Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP Images
A crowd awaits then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will announce that he is dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary and will run as an independent, October 9, 2023, in Philadelphia.
Of course, a key part of the mythos is that John F. Kennedy would obviously have ended that war in his second term. The latest scholarship thoroughly debunks that faith, but conspiracists remain stubbornly unmovable, precisely because the assumption that lies behind it—there is way too much deception and secrecy in government—is so very true. By 1976, 81 percent disagreed with the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, believing that JFK’s death was an elite conspiracy. Olmsted called her book Real Enemies, and draws her epigram from Delmore Schwartz: “Even paranoids have real enemies.”
In the 1970s, it felt like half the movies coming out of Hollywood were Kennedy conspiracy allegories. The Parallax View, about a corporation that trains patsies to take the fall every time they kill a leader who is out to take away elite power, was the most blatant, but its logic was everywhere, in movies like Serpico and The China Syndrome: stories about the innocence that was lost when bad men systematically killed off the good ones.
The apotheosis of the genre—and an emblem of its staying power—was Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Tom Hayden, a pallbearer at RFK’s funeral, blamed criticism of Stone’s ridiculous fantasy that Lyndon Johnson was behind the vast conspiracy to end Kennedy’s life on “the fear that a new generation will be infected with a radical virus that was supposed to have been eradicated,” what “lives would have been like if J.F.K. had not been murdered.”
The irascible Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn responded that this notion “that virtue in government died in Dallas, and that a ‘secret agenda’ has perverted the national destiny” speaks to a “yearning for the ‘father-leader’ taken from the children-people by conspiracy”: a “truly fascist yearning.”
And these days, when it comes to fascist yearning, Donald Trump can never be far behind.
LAST YEAR, LONGTIME FOX NEWS PERSONALITY Judge Andrew Napolitano (born 1950) interviewed conspiracy-minded economist Jeffrey Sachs (born 1954), who claimed that Trump confirmed to him one of the most fantastical articles of faith of this cult: that he would have a hard time releasing the full records of the JFK assassination, because “if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.”
“What did they show him?” Judge Napolitano marveled. “JFK’s brains blown out?”
The legend: “They” do this for every incoming president, to keep them in line. Sachs affirmed, “You know, it was said by one person that after the Kennedy assassination there has been no president: They have only been factotums of the system since then.” That makes Donald Trump quite the hero, standing up to them: no “factotum of the system” he.
This is not rational stuff. And this is where Josh Cohen’s dynamite insight comes in. The Kennedy cult has always had two wings. There’s the “inoffensive … we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon” wing— the people who keep slating Kennedys for offices, even if they’re not the best people for the job. (Cohen points out that RFK Jr. himself, long after he started down his anti-vax rabbit hole, “received serious consideration as a potential replacement for Hillary Clinton” as senator when she became secretary of state.) The second wing is the conspiracy stuff.
Cohen points out how all the other Kennedys, save Robert Jr., steered clear of that malign folderol about their relatives’ assassinations. That gifted RFK Jr. with a powerful monopoly, as the only bearer of the sacred name able to harness its terrible energy; he alone possessed the power to attract all those who believed in the Deep State monsters out to destroy everything good and true. That nestles him within the MAGA worldview with the neatness of a jigsaw puzzle piece popping into place.
Normal people noted with satisfaction that all the Kennedys got together to denounce their relative for his conspiracism. For those inclined to believe in things like QAnon, that’s RFK’s best feature—not a bug. Those other Kennedys were frauds. RFK Jr., the only one with the courage to keep the faith, was Camelot’s true heir. That is his Kennedy magic: that he alone can defeat the Unspeakable.
All that unspeakable, peer-reviewed science. All those unspeakable vaccines, which he calls a “holocaust.” The unspeakable scourge of 5G, a plot to “control our behavior”; the “plandemic”—RFK Jr. now proudly admits that he helped fund the film claiming that there was no COVID epidemic, until mad scientists conjured it up in order to control the sheeple. I mean, they’re just evil that way: Look at how they killed his uncle and dad.
In his Substack article, Cohen posts a bookstore display of Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which features on its cover the UNICEF-like logo of Kennedy’s “Children’s Health Defense” organization. Next to the pile of books is a picture of JFK and the quotation “The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”
I NEVER CALLED RFK JR. BACK, way back when; already, I thought the guy who used to be a respected warrior for environmental justice, whose show on the liberal radio network Air America I had once enjoyed, was a conspiratorial creep. Cohen notes that Kennedy first edged into the anti-vax stuff in 1998, and by the mid-2000s “was publishing articles on alleged connections between vaccines and autism,” eventually labeling vaccination itself as a “holocaust.”
Joan Walsh movingly apologized for publishing one of those pieces as an editor at Salon. She incisively pointed out, as a Catholic from a family that revered them, how “the Kennedy magic” played a role in her errant judgment. Good word, that. “Magic bullets,” magic charisma, magic powers to reverse the Cold War, the magic RFK exercised to stop a riot in Indianapolis. The magic RFK supposedly possessed to join together the Black and white working-class wings of the Democratic Party that the chaos of the 1960s had torn asunder (another myth). The magic powers the baby boomer generation was supposed to possess to “change the world,” the birthright they were supposedly cheated out of. Magic thinking turns up everywhere and always, whenever Kennedys are around.
Donald Trump might agree with some of this mumbo jumbo, or he might not; it’s more likely that his embrace of Kennedy is just a function of how a celebrity worshipper with an authoritarian streak born in 1946 would respond to having a Kennedy following his orders: no bigger trophy than that. Imagine Trump’s pleasure at hearing a “Yes, sir” that sounds almost like it came out of a black-and-white TV in 1962.
Trump knows all about magic thinking. He knows that this is what his followers crave most. Kennedy charisma and Trump charisma have a family resemblance, as this episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy brilliantly lays out. That is what makes RFK Jr. so terrifyingly powerful. He alone of his name harnesses the power of the Dark Side of that charisma’s force.
