Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388

1. 0:00 – 3:18

   Introduction

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.0:00

      It's not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, um, is, I think irresponsible. And, you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said, w- you know, "We will not live in a world without Russia." And it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself. And I... And he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet. So, why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime. And, and we should be making f- friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy. Now we've pushed them into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country and by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:56

      The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author, who has challenged some of the world's most powerful corporations, seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me, the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I've ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science. But science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long-form conversations. Agree or disagree, I believe Robert's voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says, without addressing it, diminishes the public's trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics, like the pandemic, is equally, if not more dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Racaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk The Funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol and others, who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert. It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity towards truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

2. 3:18 – 7:34

   US history

   1. LFLex Fridman3:18

      It's the 4th of July, Independence Day, so simple question, simple big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America?

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.3:27

      I would say, there's so many things that I love about the country, uh... You know, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera. But on the kind of, you know, the higher level, you know, people argue about whether we're an exemplary nation, and the- that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the Neocons, the actions of the Neocons in, in recent decades, who have turned that, uh, that phrase into kind of a justification for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the- at the barrel of a gun. Um, but my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the ex- exemplary nation in- in- in a sense that we were an example of democracy all over the world. When we- when we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. A- and by, there was civil war by 1865, there were six democracies. Today, there's probably 190. And all of 'em, in one way or another, are modeled on- on the American experience. And it's kind of extraordinary because sort of our- our first contact with- our first serious and sustained contact, uh, with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop c- came over with his Puritans in the sloop Arbella, and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, "This is- this is gonna be a city on a hill. This is gonna be an example for, you know, all the other nations in the world." And he- he warned th- his fellow Puritans, they were, you know, sitting at the- this great expanse of land, he said, "We can't, um, be... We can't, uh, uh, be seduced by the- the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land. We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into a- uh, uh, an example for the rest of the world of- of God's love, of God's will, and- uh, uh, and wisdom." And then, you know, 200 years later or 250 years later, they, uh, a- a different generation, they're mainly deists, they were people who, um, had, uh, a- a belief in God, but not...... uh, so much, um, uh, a- a love of particularly religious cosmologies. You know, the framers of The Constitution, um, believed that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world, and that it was an example... It would... In democracy, there would be this kind of wisdom from the collective, you know, that. And the word "wisdom" means the knowledge of God's will. And that somehow, God would speak through the collective, in a way that, um, that he or she could not speak through, you know, through totalitarian regimes. And, um, you know, I think that that's something that even though, uh, uh, Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them, uh, kind of adopted that belief. And I know my family when, you know, our... My family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848, during the potato famine, and they saw this country as unique in history, as something that, you know, that was, uh, uh, that was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission. And so I- I'd say that, uh, from a 30,000-foot level, that, uh, you know, that's... I- I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world, and for those reasons.

3. 7:34 – 9:28

   Freedom

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.7:34

   2. LFLex Fridman7:34

      Well, I immigrated to this country, and one of the things that really embodies America to me is the ideal of freedom. Hunter S. Thompson said, "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." What does freedom mean to you?

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.7:47

      To me, freedom does not mean, you know, chaos, and it does not mean anarchy. It means that it- it- it has to be accompanied by restraint if it's going to, uh, live up to its promise, um, and self-restraint. Uh, what it means is the capacity for human beings to, um, to exercise and to fulfill their, uh, their creative energies u- unrestrained as much as possible by government.

   4. LFLex Fridman8:20

      So, this point that Hunter S. Thompson made is, "dies unless it's used."

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.8:25

      Yeah, well-

   6. LFLex Fridman8:25

      Do you agree with that?

   7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.8:26

      (laughs) Yeah, I do agree with that, and I... You know, I... He- he was not unique in saying that. You know, Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty has to be, uh, had to be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that it's- it's, uh, you can't live off, we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution. That, you know, we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights. And that, but those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society, um, that began trying to chip away at them. A- and that, you know, happens in every generation, and it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms.

   8. LFLex Fridman9:26

      The blood of each generation.

4. 9:28 – 12:51

   Camus

   1. LFLex Fridman9:28

      You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Albert Camus, of, uh, Stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe in The Myth of Sisyphus, "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." What do you think he means by that?

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.9:49

      I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world, um, and the way that the Stoics did, and a lot of the existentialists was that it was, uh, that it was so absurd and that the, uh, (laughs) the- the- the problems and the tasks that we're given just to live a life are so insurmountable, that the only way that we can kind of, um, get back at the gods for giving us this, you know, (laughs) this, uh, this, uh, impossible task of- of living life w- was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our- our best at it. I mean, to me, I... You know, I read Camus and the, particularly The Myth of Sisyphus as a, um, as kind of a, as a parable that... Uh, and it's the same lesson that I think he, uh, he writes about in The Plague, where we're all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives but, um, that, uh, by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos, and we can bring order to the universe. And, you know, Sisyphus was a- was kind of the- the iconic hero of the Stoics and he was a man because he did, uh, because he did something good, he delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll down. When he got to the top, it would roll down and he'd spend the night going back down the hill to collect it, and then rolling it back- back up the hill again. And the task was absurd. It was insurmountable. He could never win. But the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is, uh, which is something to the extent that, you know, I can picture Sisyphus smiling. Uh, because Camus' belief was that even though he- um, his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man. And he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. He took his duty. He embraced the task and the, you know, and the- the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill.... and that if we do that, and if we, you know, we find ways of being of service to others, that is, you know, the ultimate. That's the key to the lock. That's the solution to the puzzle.

   3. LFLex Fridman12:21

      Each individual person, in that way, can, uh, rebel against absurdity by discovering meaning to this whole messy thing.

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.12:28

      Right, and we can bring me- meaning not only to our own lives, but we can bring meaning to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life, um, and, uh, you know, that, those, th- the embrace of those tasks, and the, and the commitment to service, resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some, in some way.

5. 12:51 – 22:03

   Hitler and WW2

   1. LFLex Fridman12:51

      So you mentioned The Plague by Camus. 'Cause there's a lot of different ways to read that book, but one of them, especially given how it was written, is that the plague symbolizes, um, Nazi Germany, and, uh, the Hitler regime. What do you learn about human nature from a figure like Adolf Hitler, that he's able to, uh, captivate the minds of millions, rise to power, and take on, pull in the whole world into a global war?

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.13:24

      I was born nine years after the end of World War II, and I grew up in a generation that was fi- you know, with my parents, who were fixated on that. Um, o- on, you know, what happened, and my father. You know, at that time, the, you know, the kind of the, the resolution in the minds of most Americans, and I think people around the world, is that there was, there had been something wrong with the German people. That, you know, the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of, uh, demagoguery, and to following a powerful leader, and, um, and just industrializing cruelty, and, and, and, uh, and murder. And my father always differed with that. My father said, "This is not a German problem. This could happen to all of us. We're all just inches away from barbarity, and the thing that keeps us safe in this country are the institutions of our democracy and our Constitution. It's not our nature. Our nature, uh, has to, um, has to be restrained, a- and it, and that comes through self-restraint, but it also..." You know, the beauty of our country is that we devo- we devised these institutions that are designed to allow us to flourish. Uh, but at the same time, uh, not to, gi- give us enough freedom to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So, um, you know, one of the other things that my father talked about from when I was little, you know, he would ask us this question, "If you, if you were the family, and Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hid her, like, risked your own life, or would you be one of the people who turned her in?" And of course, we would all say, "Of course we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk." Um, but, you know, that's been something, uh, kind of a lesson, a challenge, that has been, uh, that has always been near the forefront of my mind. That if a totalitarian system ever occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible. He, he was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is. Um, that would I be one of the ones who would resist the totalitarianism or would I be one of the people who, who went along with it? Would I be one of the people w- who was at the train station in, you know, Krakow or, uh, or, um, or, you know, even Berlin, and saw people being shipped off to camps, and just put my head down and pretend I didn't see it, because talking about it would be, uh, destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and e- even my life? Um, so, you know, that, that's been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers and sisters, and it's something that I- I've never forgotten.

   3. LFLex Fridman16:39

      A lot of us would like to believe we would, uh, resist in that situation, but the reality is most of us wouldn't, and that's a good thing to think about, that, uh, human nature is such that we're selfish, even when there's an atrocity going on all around us.

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.16:57

      And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves, and all of us tend to kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.

   5. LFLex Fridman17:08

      What have you learned about life from your father, Robert F. Kennedy?

   6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.17:12

      First of all, I'll say this about my uncle, 'cause, you know, I- I'm gonna apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy. She was a reporter for a newspaper and she was doing, she, she had a kind of column where she'd do these, these kind of, um, uh, pithy interviews, uh, with, with both famous people and kind of man in the street interviews. And she was interviewing him and she asked him, um, what he, she thought what he believed his best quality was, his, his strongest virtue. And she thought that he would say courage, because he had been a war hero. He had, he was th- the only, uh, president who, and this is when he was senator, by the way, uh, who received the Purple Heart. And, you know, he had, uh, a very kind of famous story of, of him as a hero in World War II, and then he had come home and he had written a book on c- on moral courage among American politicians, and won the Pulitzer Prize.... that book, Profiles in Courage, and, um, which was a series of incidents where, um, American political leaders made decisions to, uh, to embrace principle even though their careers were at stake, and in most cases were destroyed by their choice. She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't. He said curiosity. And, um, I think, you know, looking back at his life that the best, that that was true. And that was the quality that allowed him to put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. And he always said that if you, if, uh, the only way that we're going to have peace is if we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior and their contact not context. And that's why he was able to, um, you know, during the... Uh, he was able to resist the intelligence apparatus in the military during the Bay of Pigs when they said, "You've got to send in the Essex," the aircraft carrier, and he said no. Even though he'd only been in mon- two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because of, because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there's got to be another solution to this. And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was able to do it when the narrative was, "Okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere. How dare he do that?" And Jack and my father were able to say, "Well, wait a minute. He's doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy that were right on, you know... and the Turkish ones, right on the Russian border." And they then made a secret deal with Dobrynin, with Ambassador Dobrynin and, you know, with Khrushchev, um, to, uh, to remove the missiles in, in Turkey if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Tur- Turkey, if, if, uh, so long as Khrushchev removed them from, from Cuba. Every... There were 13 men on the executive, on the end- what they call the End Con Committee, which was the group of people who were deciding, you know, what the action was, what, what they were gonna do to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. And virtually... Uh, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade. And it was Jack and then, uh, later on, my, my father and, and Bob McNamara who were the only people who were with him. But because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev's point of view, uh, view, he believed that there was another solution, and then he also had the moral courage. So, um, my father, you know, to get back to your question, famously said that moral courage is the most important quality, and it's more, it's more rare than courage on a football field or courage in battle than physical courage. It's much more difficult to come by, but it's the most important quality in a human being.

   7. LFLex Fridman21:33

      And you think that kind of empathy that you referred to, that requires moral courage?

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.21:37

      Uh, i- it certainly requires moral courage to, to act on it.

   9. LFLex Fridman21:44

      Hmm.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.21:44

       You know, and particularly, you know, in, you know, any time that a nation is at war, there is kind of a momentum or an inertia that says, "Okay, let's not look at this from the other person's point of view." And, um, that's the time we really need to do that.

6. 22:03 – 45:24

   War in Ukraine

   1. LFLex Fridman22:03

      Well, if you can apply that style of empathy, style of curiosity to the current war in Ukraine, what is your understanding of why Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022?

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.22:16

      Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. The w- his invasion was illegal, it was unnecessary, and it was brutal. Um, but I think it's important for us to move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of a... Uh, you know, of this insane, uh, uh, avaricious Russian leader who wants to, you know, restore the, the Soviet Empire. And that that's why, and it was... uh, and who made an unvoked, unprovoked, um, invasion of the Ukraine. Well, he was provoked, and we were provoking him, and we were provoking him for, for... since 1997. And it's not just me that's saying that. I mean, when, when and th- and before Ru- before Putin ever came in, we were provoking Russia, Russians in this way unnecessarily. And to go back to that time in 1992 when the Russians moved out, when the Soviet U- Union was collapsing, the Russians moved out of East Germany and they did that, which was a huge concession then. They had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops on the other side of the wall. So Gorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush, "I'm gonna move all of our troops out and you can then reunify Germany under NATO," which was a hostile army to the, to the Soviet... It was created to, you know, uh, with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union. And he said, "You can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO to the east." And James Baker, who was his Secretary of State, famously said, "I will not move NATO... We will not move NATO one inch to the east." So then, uh, five years later in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the father of the Neocons, who was a Democrat at that time, served in the, in the, uh, Carter administration. He said... He published a paper, a blueprint.... for moving NATO right up to the Russian border, 1,000 miles to the east, and, and taking over 14 nations. And at that time, George Kennan, who was the, kind of the deity of American dip- diplomats. He was probably, arguably the, arguably the most important diplomat in American history. He was the architect of the cont- containment policy during World War II. And he said, "This is insane, and it's unnecessary, and if you do this, it's gonna provoke the Soviet, uh, I mean, the Russians to a violent response, and we should be making friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating them the way that we treated the, our adversaries after World War II, like with the Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the, the brotherhood of, you know, of man and of Western nations. We shouldn't continue to be treating them as an enemy, and particularly surrounding them at their borders." William Perry, who was then the Secretary of St- of, uh, Defense under Bill Clinton, threatened to resign, he was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the east. And William Burns, who was then the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, who's now, at this moment, the head of the CIA, said at that time the same thing, "If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response." And the- the, we, we, we moved it. We moved all around Russia. We moved it 14 nations, 1,000 miles to the east, and we put Aegis missile systems in two nations, in Romania and Poland. So we did what, (laughs) you know, what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that had provoked, would have provoked an invasion of Cuba. We put those missile systems back there, and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away from the two, um, nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with the Soviet U- with Russia, when neither of us would put, um, those missile systems on the borders. We walk away from that and we put Aegis missile systems, which are nuclear capable. They can carry the Tomahawk m- missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last, uh, country that they didn't take was the Ukraine. And the Russians said, and, and in fact Bill Perry said this, or, or William Burns said it, who's now the head of the CIA, "It is a red line. If we go into ... if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians. They cannot live with it. They cannot live with it." Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed, one out of every seven Russians. They destroyed my... Uncle described what happened to Russia, um, in his famous American University speech in, in, uh, in 1963, 60 years ago this month, or east- or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10th, 1963. He told... That speech was telling the American people, "Put yourself in the shoes of the Russians." We need to do that if we're gonna, if we're gonna make peace. And he said, "All of us have been taught, you know, that we won the war, but we didn't win the war. The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians. Their country was destroyed. They, they, all of their cities..." And he said, "Imagine if all of the cities, from the East Coast to Chicago, were reduced to rubble, and all of the fields burned, all of the forests burned. That's what happened to Russia. That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler." And he had them put themselves in their position. And, you know, today there's none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to, uh, to talk to the Russians. We've broken up ... there are two treaties, the Minsk Agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign, a- and they said, "We will stay out-" but the Russians didn't want the Ukraine. They showed that when they ... when the Donbas region voted 90 to 10, to leave and go to Russia, Putin said, "No. We- we want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign the Minsk Accords to, to ..." you know, they, the Russians were, were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and then the oppression and the, and the, you know, and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians, and Russia has an ad- ... the same re- the same way that if Mexico put Aegis missile systems from China or Russia on our border and, and killed 14,000, uh, expats American, we would go in there. Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine, the ethnic Russians, and the Minsk Accords did that. It, it left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semi-autonomous region that could in- uh, continue to use their own language, which was essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in in 2014. Um, and, uh, and we wouldn't have ... we, we sabotaged that agreement, and, and in ... we now know, in April of 2022, Zelensky and, uh, Putin had inked a deal already, to another peace agreement, and that the United States sent Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White House sent Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. So, what do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a, you know, this is a war that the neocons in the White House wanted. They've said for two decades they wanted this war, and that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between, uh, United States and Russia, the same they- as we used Afghanistan. And they, in fact, they say it, "This is the model. Let's use the Afghanistan model." That was said again and again, and to f- to, to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local, uh, fighters and US weapons.And when President Biden was asked, "Why are we in the Ukraine?" He was honest. He says, "To depose Vladimir Putin, regime change for Vladimir Putin." And when his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022 was asked, you know, why are we there? He said, "To degrade the Russian's capacity to fight anywhere... To exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world." That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were- we were told this was an unprovoked invasion. Uh, but... And that we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians, but that is the opposite. That is a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, turn this little nation into an abattoir of death for the flower of Ukrainian youth, in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House. And I... You know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the Russians the way that, you know, Nixon talked to Brezhnev, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev. We need to be talking with the Russians, we should, and- and- and negotiating, and we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe?

   3. LFLex Fridman31:58

      Would you, as president, sit down and have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy separately and together-

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.32:06

      Absolutely.

   5. LFLex Fridman32:06

      ... to negotiate peace?

   6. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.32:07

      Absolutely.

   7. LFLex Fridman32:09

      What about Vladimir Putin? He's been in power since 2000. Uh, so as the old adage goes, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Uh, do you think he has been corrupted by being in power for so long? If you think of the man, if you look at his mind.

   8. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.32:27

      Listen, I don't know exactly. Um, I can't say because I just- I don't know enough about him or about... You know, I- my- the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal. He kills his enemies or poisons them. And, you know, the reaction I've seen to that, to hi- those accusations from him have- have not been to deny that, but to kind of laugh it off. Well, I think he's a dangerous man, and that, of course, you know, um, there's probably corruption in his regime. But having said that, uh, it's not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, um, is, I think irresponsible. And, you know, Vladimir Putin himself has said, "We- we'll not live in a world without Russia." And it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself, and, uh... And he has his hand on a button that could bring, you know, Armageddon to the entire planet. So, why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime. And- and we should be making f- friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy. Now, we've pushed them into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, you know, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Putin now, you know, if you believe the- the polls that are coming out of Russia, they show him, you know, the most recent polls that I've seen, um, show him with an 89% popularity, that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine and that... Uh, and they support him as an individual. So- um, and I understand there's problems with polling and, you know, you don't know what to believe, but- but the polls consistently show that. And, um... And I- you know, it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world or to be changing regimes in the world. That's illegal. We're not- we shouldn't be breaking international laws. You know, we should actually, uh, be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia, not to... You know, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy... Not- and not to choose his leadership for them. That's up to the Russian people, not us.

   9. LFLex Fridman35:00

      So, step one is to sit down and em- empathize with the leaders of both nations to understand their history, their concerns, their hopes, just h- to open the door for c- conversation, so they're not back to the corner.

   10. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.35:12

       Yeah, and I think the US can play a really important role, and a US president can play a really important role by r- reassuring the Russians that we're not gonna consider them an enemy anymore, that we want to be friends. And it doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely. The way that you do it, which was the way President Kennedy d- did it, is you do it one step at a time. You take baby steps. We do a unilateral move, reduce our, you know, our- the- our hostility and aggression and see if the Russians reciprocate. And, um... And that's the way that we should be doing it. And, you know, we should be easing our way into a positive relationship with Russia. We have a lot in common with Russia, and we should be friends with Russia and with the Russian people. And, you know, apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians who have died, at least, in this war. And, uh... And there's probably been, uh, 60 or 80,000 Russians, and that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any... You know, I saw Lindsey Graham on TV saying, you know, "Anything we can..." Something to the extent that, "Anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money." That... It is not. You know, those are- those are somebody's children. They're... You know, we should have compassion for them. Um, this war is an unnecessary war. We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through statecraft.... and not through weapons.

   11. LFLex Fridman36:50

       Do you think this war can come to an end purely through military operations?

   12. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.36:55

       No. I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. I don't think there's any appetite in Europe. I think Europe is now, you know, uh, uh, in having severe problems, in Germany, Italy, France. You're seeing these riots. There's internal problems in those countries. There is no appetite in- um, in, uh, in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians do not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using press gangs to- uh, to, you know, to fill the ranks of their armies. Men, military age men, are trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now, to avoid going to the front. The front, you know, the- the Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians at a seven to one ratio. My son fought over there and he told me, it's an ar- you know, an artill- he had- um, he had firefights with the Russians, mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day. And that the Russians now out- uh, uh, outgun the NATO forces 10 to one in artillery. They're killing, um, at a horrendous rate. Now, you know, my interpretation of what's happened so far is that the- Putin actually went in early on with a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of the negotiating table that once he went in... And- uh, and that- when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force to be able to mount an offensive. And so, they've been building up that force up till now, and they now have that force. And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been, uh, hope- helpless. All of their offenses have died. They've now killed, you know, the head of the Ukrainian, um, special forces, which was the- probably, arguably by many accounts, the best, uh, elite military unit in all of Europe. The- the com- commandant, the commander of- of the, uh, that special forces group a- gave a- a speech about, uh, four months ago saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded and will- cannot return to the front. He cannot rebuild that force. Um, the- uh, and, you know, the- the- the troops that are now headed- uh, that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who have been lost are- uh, are scantily trained. And they're arriving green at the front. Many of them do not want to be there. Many of them are giving up and going over to the Russian side. We've seen this again and again and again, including platoon-sized groups that are defecting to the Russians. And, um, I don't think it's possible to win. And anybody (laughs) ... You know, I saw- I- I, of course I've studied World War II history exhaustively, but I saw a- um, there's a new, I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly recommend to people. They're- it's- they're colorized versions of the black and white-

   13. LFLex Fridman40:10

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.40:11

       ... um, films from the battles of World War II, but it's all the battles of World War II. So I watched Stalingrad the other night and, uh, you know, the- the willingness of the Russians to- um, to fight on against any kind of odds, and to s- make huge sacrifices. Of Russians- the Russians themselves were making the sacrifice with their lives. The willingness of them to do that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible. It is incomprehensible to think that the- uh, that Ukraine can- can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico beating the United States. It- it's just, it's impossible to think that it can happen. And, you know, Russia has- has deployed a tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far, and, uh- uh, you know, now it has China with its mass production capacity supporting its war effort. It's just- it's a- it's a hopeless situation and we've been lied to. You know, we're- the- the press in our country and our government are just- are- are just, you know, promoting this lie that the- the Ukrainians are about to win and- and everything's going great and that Putin's on the run. And there's all this wishful thinking because of the- the Wagner Group, you know, the- uh, the-

   15. LFLex Fridman41:31

       Prigozhin.

   16. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.41:32

       ... Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, that this was an internal coup and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin and none of that is true. That was a- that- that insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency, only got 4,000 of his- of his men to follow him out of 20,000, and they were quickly stopped. And nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it, you know? And but we're being told, "Oh yeah, it's the beginning of the end for Ploo- Putin." He's weakened, he's wounded, he's on his way out, and all of these things are just lies that we are being fed. And-

   17. LFLex Fridman42:07

       To push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied. So I've traveled to Ukraine and one thing that I should say similar to the Battle of Stalingrad, it is just not- it is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think Ukrainians are very-

   18. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.42:23

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman42:23

       ... willing to fight to the end and the morale there is quite high. I've talked to nobody, this was a year ago in August with her son, everybody was proud to fight and die for their country. And there's some aspect where this war unified the people, to g- gave them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and I will fight to the death to defend this land.

   20. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.42:46

       Yeah, I- I- you know, I would agree with that and I- I should have said that myself at the beginning. But, you know, that's one of the reason-... my son went over there to fight, because the, you know, he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people, and the, you know, this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine, and he found, you know, a stone wall of, of Ukrainians. Whether, ready to put their, their lives and their bodies on the line. But that, to me, makes the, the whole episode even more tragic is that, you know, um, I don't beli- I, I, you know, I, I think that the US role in this, um, has been, uh, has, you know, that there, there were many opportunities to settle this war, and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it. Vladimir Zelensky, when he ran in 2019, here's a guy who's a, a comedian. He's a, he's an actor. Um, he had no political experience, and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote, why? He won on a peace platform. And he won, promising to sign the Minsk Accords. And yet, something happened when he got in there, that made him suddenly pivot. And, you know, I think it's a good guess what happened. I think he was, you know, he came under threat by ultra national- nationalists within his own administration. (laughs) Uh, and the insistence of Neocons like Victoria Nuland in the White House that, you know, "W- we don't want peace with Putin. We want a war."

   21. LFLex Fridman44:20

       Do you worry about nuclear war?

   22. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.44:22

       Yeah, I worry about it. It's, uh-

   23. LFLex Fridman44:25

       It seems like a silly question, but it's not. It's a serious question.

   24. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.44:29

       Well, the reason it's not, uh, you know, the reason it, it, uh, might, it's not, is just because people seem to be in this kind of dream state about that it'll never happen. And yet, you know, we're, um, it can happen very easily and it can happen at any time. And, you know, if we push the Russians too far, you know, I- I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime was in, uh, or his nation was in danger, that the United States was gonna be able to place, you know, a- a Quisling on, you know, into the Kremlin, um, that he would use nuclear, you know, torpedoes. Um, and, uh- uh, you know, these, uh, these strategic weapons that they have and that could be the be i- once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory.

7. 45:24 – 1:10:31

   JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.45:24

      By the way, you know, I have, I have very strong memories of the, uh, Cuban Missile Crisis and those 13 days when we came closer to nuclear war. You know, and particularly, I think it was when the U2 got shot down over, uh, Cuba that, you know, and nobody in this co- there's a lot of people in Washington DC who at- at that point thought that they very mel- may well, may wake up dead. That the world may end that night, 30 million Americans killed, 130 million Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw war with Russia, nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable, but also desirable because they wanted to do it now, while we still had a superiority.

   2. LFLex Fridman46:14

      Can you actually go through the feelings you've had about the Cuban Missile Crisis? Like what- what are your memories of it? What- what are some interesting kind of-

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.46:20

      Well, I, you know, in the middle... I was going to school in Washington, DC, to, um, to sit, well, or to, um... Our Lady of Victory, which is, uh, in Washington, DC. So we were... I lived in Virginia across the Potomac and we would cross the bridge every day into DC. And during the crisis, uh, US Marshals came to my house, to take us, I think around day eight. My father was spending the night at the White House. He wasn't coming home. He was staying with the ExCom committee and sleeping there and they were up, you know, 24 hours a day, they were debating and fi- trying to figure out what was happening. And, um, but we had US Marshals come to our house to take us down, they were gonna take us down to, um, uh, White Sulphur Springs, in, uh, in Southern Virginia, in the, in the Blue Ridge Mountains where there was a, um, there was an underground city essentially, a bunker that was like a city and apparently it had McDonald's in it and a lot of other, you know, it had, it was a full city for the US government and their families. Uh, US Marshals came to our house to take us down there and I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time, you know, when we were doing the drills, we were doing the duck and cover drills, um, once a week at our school. Where they would tell you if they, that when the alarms go off, um, then you- you put your head under the table, you take the sh- remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head under the table and you wait and the initial blast will take the windows out of the school and then we all stand up and- and file in an orderly fashion into the basement, where we're gonna be for the next six or eight months or whatever. But in the basement, where, you know, we- we went occasionally and those corridors were lined with, uh, freeze-dried food canisters up to the cei- from floor to ceiling. So people were, you know, we were all preparing for this and it was, you know, uh, Bob McNamara who was my, who was a fr- friend of mine and, you know, is my father, one of my father's close friends, the Secretary of Defense. He later called mass psychosis and my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb shelter program because he said it- it was part of a- a, you know, a psychological psyop trick to treat a- to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable, but my father... Anyway, when the, when the marshals came to our house to take me and my brother Joe away and we- we were the ones who were home at that time.... um, "My father called and he talked to us on the phone, and he said, 'I don't want you going down there because, um, because if you disappear from school, people are gonna panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school.'" And that wa- and, and he said something to me during that period, which was that if a nuclear war happened, it would be better to be among the dead than the living, which I did not believe. Okay? I mean, I, I had already prepared myself for the, you know, for the, for the dystopian future. And I knew I could... I spent every day in the woods. I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish and, you know, cooking mudpuppies, and I'll do whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay, I can, I could handle this. Uh, and I really wanted to see the setup down in, you know, this underground city. But anyway, that was, you know, part of it for, um, me. My father was away and, you know, the last days of it. My father, um, got this idea because Khrushchev had sent two letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory, and then he sent a letter that after his joint chiefs and the warmongers around him saw that letter and they disapproved of it, they sent another letter that was extremely belligerent. And my father had the idea, "Let's just p- pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply to the first one." And then he went down to Dobrynin, and who was... He met Dobrynin in the Justice Department and Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador and they, you know, they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement. Where Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba 'cause we had put missiles, you know, nuclear missiles, in, in Turkey and Italy. And my uncle's secret deal was that if he... if Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba within six months, he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. But if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off. So if, if news got out about that secret deal, it was off. That was the actual deal. And Khrushchev complied with it, and then my uncle complied with it.

   4. LFLex Fridman51:25

      How much of that part of human history turned on the decisions of one person?

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.51:31

      Uh, I think that's one of the... You know, 'cause that, of course, is the perennial question, right? (laughs) What i- is history kind of on a, on a, on automatic pilot? And, you know, uh, human decisions, d- decisions of leaders really only have, you know, a, a marginal or incremental bearing on what is gonna happen anyway. But I think that is the... And historians argue about that all the time. I think that that is a really good example of a pla- of a, a place in human history that, uh, that literally the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House. And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, you know, missile, missile emplacements. Each one of those missile emplacements had a crew of about 100 men. And they were Soviets. So, um, they were... And they... We didn't know whether the... Uh, we, we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked Allen Dul- or asked the CIA, and he asked... Dulles was already gone, but he asked the CIA and he asked, um, his military brass 'cause they all wanted to go in. Everybody wanted to go in. And my uncle said... My uncle asked to see the aerial photos, and he, and he examined those personally. And this is why it's important to have a, a leader in the White House who can push back on, on their bureaucracies. He, um, and then he asked them, you know, "Are those... Who's manning those missile sites? W- who... And are they Russians? And if they're Russians and we bomb them, uh, are they... isn't it gonna force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin?" And that would be the beginning of a cascade effect that would, you know, highly likely end in nuclear confrontation. And the, the, uh, the military brass said to my uncle, "Oh, we don't think he'll have the... You know, we don't think he'll have the g- uh, uh, the guts to do that."

   6. LFLex Fridman53:37

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.53:38

      So he wa- my uncle (laughs) was like, "That's what you're betting on?" And, uh, you know, they all wanted him to go in. They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba.

   8. LFLex Fridman53:48

      Mm-hmm.

   9. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.53:49

      And he said, "If we bomb those sites, we're gonna be killing Russians, and it's gonna force, it's gonna provoke Russia into some response, and the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin." So, the, but the thing that we didn't know then, that we didn't find out until I think, uh, you know, there was a... It was like a 30-year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana. And what we learned then was that from the Russians who came to that event, it was like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it and we learned a lot of stuff then, and never nobody knew before. One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned, was that the, the weapons were already... The, the nuclear warheads were already in place. They were ready to fire, and that the authorization to fire was made, was delegated, to each of the gun cr- uh, gun crew commanders. So there was 60 people who had, all had authorization to fire if they felt themselves under attack. So you have to believe that at least one of them would have launched and that would have been the beginning of the end. And, you know, if they... if anybody had launched-... you know, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen, 'cause he asked again and again, "What's gonna happen?" And they said, "30 million Americans will be killed, but we will kill 130 million Russians, so we will win." And that was a victory for them. And my uncle said, later said, he told, he told Arthur Schlesinger and Kenny O'Donnell, he said, "Those guys," he called them the salad brass, the guys with all of the stuff on their chest. And he said, he said, "Those guys, they don't care, 'cause they know that if it happens, that they're gonna be in the charge of everything." They're the ones who are gonna be running the world after that.

   10. LFLex Fridman55:50

       Mm-hmm.

   11. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.55:51

       So for them, you know, it was, there was an incentive to, to kill 130 million Russians and 30 million Americans. But my uncle, (laughs) he had this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other, and that is what saved the world, is that they had the... Both of them had been men of war. You know, Eisenhower famously said, "It will, it will not be a man of war. It will not be a soldier who starts World War III," 'cause a guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is. And my uncle, you know, had been in the heat of, of the South Pacific. His boat had been cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Um, his, uh, many of his, three of his crewmen had been killed, one of them badly burned. He, he pulled that guy with a lanyard in his teeth, six miles to an island in the middle of the night, and then they hid out there for 10 days, you know, and, um, and you know, he came back. Like I said, he was the only, uh, president of the United States that earned the Purple Heart. Um, meanwhile, Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, which was the worst place to be on the planet, you know, probably in the 20th century, other than, you know, in Auschwitz or one of the death camps. It was, uh, you know, it was, it was the most ferocious, horrific war, with people starving, people, you know, committing cannibalism, um, you know, eating the dogs, the cats, eating their shoe leather, f- freezing to death, um, uh, by the thousands, et cetera. Uh, Khrushchev did not want... The last thing he wanted was a war, and the last thing my uncle wanted was a war, and they... But the C- the CIA did not know anything about Khrushchev.

   12. LFLex Fridman57:28

       (laughs)

   13. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.57:28

       And the reason for that is the C- there was a mole in Langley, so that every time the CIA got a spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately be killed, so they had no eyes in the Kremlin. You know, there were literally hundreds of Russ- of Russian spies, who had, who were, who had defected to the United States and were in the Kremlin, who were killed during that period. They had no idea anything about Khrushchev, about how he saw the world, and they saw the Kremlin itself as a monolith, you know, that it, this, uh, this kind of, you know... The, the same way that we look at Putin today, that, you know, it's all, they, they have this ambition of world conquest, and that's th- it's driving them, and there's nothing else they think about. They're, uh, absolutely single-minded about it. But actually, there was a big division between Khrushchev and, uh, and his joint chiefs and his intelligence apparatus, and they, and they both at one point discovered, they were both in the same situation. They were surrounded by spies and military personnel, who were intent on going to war, and they were the two guys resisting it. So when my uncle, my uncle had this idea of, you know, being the peace president, from the beginning, he told Ben Bradlee, his, one of his best friends, who, you know, was run- the publisher of The Washington Post, or the editor in chief at that time. He said, um... Ben Bradlee asked him, "What is, what do you want on your gravestone?" And my uncle said, "He kept the peace." He said, "The principal job of a president of the United States is to keep the country out of war." And, um, (coughs) and so when he first became president, he, he actually agreed to meet Khrushchev in Geneva, to do a summit. And by the way, Eisenhower had wanted to do the same thing. Eisenhower wanted peace, but his... Uh, and he was gonna meet in Vienna, but that peace summit was blown up. He was gonna try to do, um, you know, he was gonna try to end the Cold War. Eisenhower was, in the last year of his, of his... In May of 1960. But that was torpedoed by the CIA during the U-2 crash. You know, they sent a U-2 over the, over the Soviet Union and it got shot down, and then they told... And then Allen Dulles told Eisenhower to deny that we had a program. They didn't know that the Russians had captured Gary Francis Powers. And so when... And, and that blew up the peace talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and so, you know, they, and they... The, uh, there was a lot of tension. My uncle wanted to break that tension. He agreed to meet with, um, with Khrushchev in Vienna early on in his term. He went over there and Khrushchev snubbed him. Khrushchev l- uh, lectured him imperiously about the, you know, the, the terror of American imperialism, and, and rebuffed any... You know, they did agree not to go into Laos. They made an agreement that kept the United States, kept my uncle from sending troops to Laos. But, um, it, it had been a disaster in Vienna. So then, we had a spy that used to come to our house all the time, a guy called Georgi Bolshakovoy. He was this Russian spy my, my parents had met at the embassy. They had gone to a party or a reception at the Russian Embassy, and he had approached them, and they knew he was a, he was a GRU agent, and KGB. He was both.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:01:10

       Mm-hmm.

   15. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:01:11

       ... oh, he used to come around. They really liked him. He was very attractive. He was always laughing and joking. He would do rope climbing contests with my father. He would do push-up contests with my father. He was, uh, he could do the Russian dancing, the Cossack dancing. And he would do that for us and teach us that, and he would... And we knew he was a spy too. And this was at the time of, you know, the James Bond films were first coming out, so it was really exciting for us to have a r- an actual Russian spy in our house.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:01:40

       (laughs)

   17. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:01:41

       The State Department was horrified by it.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:01:43

       Yeah.

   19. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:01:43

       But, um, but anyway, when Khrushchev, after Vienna, and after, um, the, you know, the ba- pegs, um, Khrushchev had second thoughts. And he sent this long letter to my uncle, and he didn't want to go through his in- his State Department or his embassy. He wanted to Enron them. But... And he was friends with Bolshakov. So he gave Georgi the, the letter and Georgi brought it and handed it to Pierre Salinger folded in The New York Times. And he gave it to my uncle, and it was this beautiful letter which he said, you know, um, he... My uncle had talked to him about the children who were playing, you know? "Oh, we played 29 grandchildren," who were playing in his yard, and he's saying, "Oh, oh, uh, what is our moral basis for making a decision that could kill these children so they'll never write a poem, they'll never participate in an election, they'll r- never run for office? How can we make... How can we, can we morally make a decision that is going to eliminate life for these beautiful kids?" And on... He had said that to, to Khrushchev and Khrushchev wrote them this letter back saying that he was now sitting at his dacha on the Black Sea and, um, that he was thinking about what my uncle Jack had said to him at Vienna, and he regretted very deeply not having taken the olive leaf that Jack had offered him. And then he said, you know, "It occurs to me now that we're all on an arc, and that there is not another one, and that the entire fate of the planet, um, and all of its creatures and all of the children are dependent on the decisions we make, and you and I have a moral obligation to go forward with each other as friends." And immediately after that... This was... You know, they... He sent that right after the Berlin crisis in 1962. General Curtis LeMay tried to... Um, had tried to provoke a war with a- an incident at Checkpoint Charlie, which was the LeMay... The, the entrance, the entrance and exit through the Berlin Wall in Berlin. And the Russian tanks had come to the wall, the US tanks had come to the wall, and there was a standoff. And my uncle had, had, uh, sent a message to Khrushchev then through Dobrynin, saying, "My back is at the wall. I cannot... I have no place to back... Please back off and then we will back off." And Khrushchev took his word, backed his tanks off first, and then my uncle ordered LeMay to back, back. He had... LeMay had mounted bulldozer plows on the, on the front of the tanks to, to plow down the Berlin Wall.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:04:35

       Mm-hmm.

   21. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:04:35

       And that... And the Russians had come, so it was just... You know, it was the Ru- It was the... His generals trying to provoke a war. And, um... But they started talking to each other then, and then when he... after he wrote that letter, they agreed that they would s- uh, install a hotline so they could talk to each other and they wouldn't have to go through intermediaries.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:04:56

       Mm-hmm.

   23. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:04:57

       And so it... At Jack's house on the Cape, there was a red phone that we knew if we picked it up, Khrushchev would answer.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:05:05

       (laughs) Mm-hmm.

   25. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:05:06

       And there was another one in the White House.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:05:08

       Yeah.

   27. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:05:09

       And that... But they knew it was important to talk to each other, you know? And you just wish that we had that kind of leadership today. That can... Uh, I... You know, that just understands our job. Look, I know you know a lot about AI, right?

   28. LFLex Fridman1:05:24

       Yeah.

   29. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:05:24

       And you know how dangerous it is, potentially, to humanity, and what opportunities it also, um, you know, offers. But it could kill us all. I mean, Elon said first it's gonna steal our job then it's gonna kill us, right?

   30. LFLex Fridman1:05:39

       Yeah.
8. 1:10:31 – 1:20:06

   JFK assassination conspiracy

   1. LFLex Fridman1:10:31

      It seems like John F. Kennedy is a singular figure, in that he was able to have the humility to reach out to Khrushchev, and also the, uh, the strength and integrity to resist the, uh, what did you call them? The s- the solid, solid brass and institutions like the CIA, uh, so that, that makes it particularly tragic that he was killed. Uh, to what degree was CIA involved, or the various bureaucracy involved in his death?

   2. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:11:00

      The evidence that the CIA was involved in my uncle's, um, murder, and that they con- that they were subsequently involved in the cover-up, and, um, and continue to be involved in the cover-up, I mean, there's still 5,000 documents that they won't release, you know, 60 years later... Um, is, I think, so insurmountable and so, um, you know, mountainous and overwhelming, that I, it's beyond any reasonable doubt. Including, you know, dozens of confessions that people who in- were involved in the, in the, uh, in the assassination. But you know, all of, uh, every kind of document, and, um, and you know, I mean it came as a surprise recently to most Americans, I think, um, the release of these documents in which the, the, the press, the American media, finally acknowledged that, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, that he was recruited, you know, in 1957. Uh, he was a, a Marine, um, uh, working at the Atsui Air Force Base, and which was the CIA Air Force Base in, you know, with the U-2 flights, which was a CIA program. And that, uh, he was recruited by James Jesus Angleton, who was the Director of Counterintelligence, and then sent, uh, on a fake defection to Russia, and then brought back, you know, um, to, to, to Dallas. And people didn't know that, e- even though it's been known for decades, but the n- the ... It never percolated into the mainstream media because they have such a, um, you know, they're, they have such a, an allergy to anything that, that, uh, that challenges the Warren report. And when Congress investigated my uncle's murder in the, um, in the, uh, uh, in the 1970s, the Church Committee did, and they did, you know, two and a half year investigation, and they had many, many more documents and much more testimony available to them, uh, than the Warren Commission had, and this was, this was a decade after the Warren Commission, they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy.... and there was a division, where essentially one guy on that committee believed it was primarily the mafia. But Richard Schweizer, who was the senator, head of the committee, um, said, you know, straight out, "The CIA was involved in the murder of the President of the United States." Oh, and- and the, if, I've talked to most of the staff on that committee, and they said, "Yeah, um, and the CIA was stonewalling us the whole way through." And the actual people that the CIA appointed, George Johannides, uh, who had, who the CIA appointed as a liaison to the committee, they brought him out of retirement. He had been one of the masterminds of the assassination. Oh, uh, there's no... I mean, I, it's impossible to even talk about a tiny of the fraction of the evidence here. And what I- I suggest to people, there are hundreds of books written about this, that, you know, assemble this evidence and, um, mobilize the evidence. The best book to me, for people to read, um, is James Douglas's book, which is called The Unspeakable. And he, Douglas does this extraordinary, he's an extraordinary scholar, and he does this, just an amazing job of digesting and summarizing and mobilizing all of the, you know, the probably a million documents, and, you know, the evidence from all these confessions that have come out, into a coherent story. And it's riveting to read, and, you know, I recommend people who... Do not take my word for it, you know, um, and don't take, uh, don't take anybody else's word for it. Go ahead and do the research yourself. And one way to do that, is probably the most efficient way, is to read Douglas's book, 'cause he has all the references there.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:15:08

      So, if it's true that CIA had a hand in this assassination, how is it possible for them to amass so much power? How is it possible for them to become corrupt? And is it individuals, or is it the entire institution?

   4. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:15:22

      No, it's not the entire institution. My daughter-in-law, who's run, helping to run my campaign was a CIA, uh, you know, in the clandestine, um, um, uh, services, for all of her career. She was a spy in the weapons of mass destruction program in the Mid East and in China. And there's 22,000 people who work for the CIA. Probably 20,000 of those are, you know, are patriotic Americans and really good public servants, and they're doing important work for our country. Um, but the institution is corrupt. And- and because the higher ranks of the institution... And in fact, Mike Pompeo said something like this to me the other day. It was the director of the CIA, he said, "When I was there, I did not go to, do a good job of cleaning up that agency." And he said, "The entire upper bureaucracy of that agency are people who do not believe in the institutions of, uh, of democracy." This is what he said to me. So, I don't know if that's true, but I know that, you know, that's significant. He's a smart person and he ran the agency and he was the Secretary of State. Um, but it's no mystery how that happened. We know the history. The CIA was originally... First of all, there was great reluctance in 1947 that we had a, for the first time, we had a secret spy agency in this country during World War II, called the OSS. That was disbanded after the war because Congress said, "Having a secret spy agency is incompatible with a democracy." Secret spy agencies are things that, like the KGB, the Stasi in East Germany, SAVAK in Iran and, uh, PIP in Chile, what- whatever, you know, all over the world. They're all have to do with totalitarian governments. They're not something that you can have, that, um, it's- it's antithetical to democracy to have that. Uh, but, um, w- in 1947, we created, Truman signed it in, but it was, uh, an initially an espionage agency, which means information gathering, which is important. It's to get, to- to gather and consolidate information from many, many different sources from all over the world, and then put those in reports so the White House, so the President, um, can make good decisions based upon valid information. Evidence-based, you know, decision-making. Uh, but Allen Dulles, who was the, you know, essentially the first head of the agency, made a series of poli- of, uh, legislative machinations and political machinations that gave additional powers to the agency and opened up the, uh, what they called then The Plans Division, which is The Plans Division is the dirty tricks, it's the black ops, fixing elections, um, murdering what they call executive action, which means killing foreign leaders, um, and, you know, making small wars and, uh, and bribing and blackmailing people, stealing elections and that kind of thing. And the reason at that time, you know, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and Truman and then Eisenhower did not want to go to war. They didn't want to commit troops. And it seemed to them that, you know, this was a way of kind of fighting the Cold War secretly without, and doing it at minimal cost by, um, uh, by, uh, changing events sort of invisibly. And so it was seductive to them. But everybody, you know, Congress, when they first voted it in place, Congress, both political parties said, "If we create this thing, it could turn into a monster and it could undermine our, you know, our values." And today they, it's so, it's so powerful and then nobody knows what its budget is. Plus, it has its own investment fund.... In-Q-Tel, which has invested, you know, made I think, 2,000 investments in Silicon Valley. So it has ownership of a lot of these tech companies that, you know, and the- a lot of the CEOs of those tech companies have signed state secrecy agreements with the CIA. Which, if they even reveal that they have signed that, they can go to jail for 20 years and have their assets removed, etc. The influence that the agency has, the capacity to influence events at every level in our country, uh, are- is really, uh, frightening. And then for most of its,

9. 1:20:06 – 1:29:04

   CIA influence

   1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:20:06

      um, for most of its life, the CIA was banned from propagandizing Americans. But we learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the Church Committee hearings, we learned that the CIA had a program called Operation Mockingbird-

   2. LFLex Fridman1:20:24

      Mm-hmm.

   3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:20:24

      ... where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States press corps, on the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, who were secretly working for the agency and, um, and steering news coverage, uh, to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time to disband Operation Mockingbird in '73. Um, but there's, uh, there's indications they didn't do that and they still, the CIA today is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. Uh, mo- the, the biggest funder is through USAID. Um, the USA, th- the United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. You know, it owns newspapers, it, uh, has journalists on its thousands and thousands of journalists on its pr- payroll. They're not supposed to be doing that in the United States, but, um, you know, in 2016, President Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, you know, we can't look at the Ukraine war and how that was, you know, has been, how the narrative has been formed in the, in the minds of Americans and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:21:46

      Well, what is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it's indirectly?

   5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:21:51

      Oh, through the, through the press.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:21:52

      Indirectly through the press, or directly by funding the press?

   7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:21:55

      Directly through key me- I mean, there's certain press organs that have been linked, you know, to the agency, that the people who run those organs, uh, things like The Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, uh, you know, editor of No- Rolling Stone, No- Noah Shachman, has deep relationships with the intelligence community, uh, Salon, Daily Kos, um-

   8. LFLex Fridman1:22:19

      But I wonder why they would do it. So from my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought.

   9. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:22:30

      I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has, uh, has, uh, you know, really, uh, shamed itself in recent years because ju- it, it's become, you know, the, the principal newspapers in this country and the television station, the, the legacy media, have abandoned their, um, their traditional, their tradition of, of, you know, which was... When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time. People like Ben Bradlee, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamill, Jerry, Jack Newfield, uh, Jimmy Breslin, uh, uh, and many, many others. And after my father, after my uh, uh, father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and courage, you know, journalistic integrity and coura- courage, and for that generation of journalism, they, they thought, they believed that the, that, um, the function of journalists was to maintain this posture of fierce skepticism toward any aggregation of power, in-including government authority. That you always, that people in authority lie, and that we, they always have to be questioned. And, uh, and that their job was to speak truth to power and to be guardians of the First Amendment right to, to, uh, free expression. But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the, uh, the major press organs in this country, um, were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies, and they were actually censoring, um, the speech of a dise- anybody who dissents, of the powerless. Uh, oh, and in, in fact it was, it was an organized conspiracy, you know, and it was, the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative, and, you know, some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it, and they agreed not to print stories or facts that, um, that departed from government orthodoxy. So The Washington Post was a signature, the UPI, the AP, and then the, um, the four media or the four social media, um, groups, Microsoft, Twitter, uh, Facebook and Google, all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from government orthodoxy. The way it worked is the UPI, the AP, and the, which are the news services that provide most of the new, you know, news around the country, and The Washington Post would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter, um, Biden's laptops were- you- it was impermissible to suggest that those were real or that, you know, they had stuff on there that was compromising.... and, um, and we, you know... And by the way, I... This... What I'm telling, you know, is all well-documented and I'm litigating on it right now. So, I'm part of a lawsuit against the DNI, and so I know a lot about what happened and I have all this documented. And people can go to our website. There's a letter, on my Substack now, to, um, to Michael Sher of the Washington Post, that outlines all this and gives all my sources. Um, because Michael Sher accused me of being a conspiracy theorist when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who was departing from government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely or labeling them conspiracy theorists.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:26:26

       I, I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between, as we talked about. You can understand the intention of such a thing being good r- in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic, uh, there's a lot of risk to saying, um, untrue things. But that's a slippery slope that leads into-

   11. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:26:47

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:26:47

       ... a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about, is completely sacrificed, and then you can deviate from truth.

   13. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:26:55

       If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the, the leader of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name's Jessica, uh, Jennifer Cecil. Um, and I... You know, you can go on our website and see her statement. And she says, "The purpose of this is that we're now..." She says, "When people look at us, they think we're competitors, but we're not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now, all over the net with... Uh, and they're hurting public trust in us and they're hurting our economic model. And we have to... They have to be choked off and crushed. And, uh, and the way that we're going to do that is to make an agreement with the social media sites, that if we say... if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will, um, will de-platform it, or they will throttle it, or they will, uh, shadow ban it, which destroys the economic model of those alternative competitive sources of information." So that, that's true. But the point you make is an important point. Um, that the journalists themselves, who probably didn't know about the TNI agreement, certainly I'm sure they didn't. Um, they believe that they're doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge, you know, government proclamations on COVID. But, I mean, there's a danger to that. And the danger is that, you know, once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what's true and what's not true, uh, then there's really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself. Because, now your job is no longer to inform the public; your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public, uh, in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule, rather than the, you know, the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of journalism in a democracy.

10. 1:29:04 – 1:40:49

    2024 elections

    1. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:29:05

    2. LFLex Fridman1:29:05

       You're running for president as a Democrat. Uh, what to you are the strongest values that represent the left wing politics, uh, of this country?

    3. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:29:16

       Uh, I would say protection of the environment and t- the commons. You know, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, uh, you know, those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:29:29

       Mm-hmm.

    5. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:29:30

       You know, the landscapes, our purple mountain majesty. Uh, the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society. People, um, who, um... Which would include children and minorities. Uh, the restoration of the middle class, you know, the... And, uh, and protection of labor, dignity, and, you know, decent pay for labor. Um, uh, bodily autonomy. W- a woman's right to choose or an individual's right to endure, um, unwanted medical procedures. Um, peace. You know, the Democrats have always been anti-war. The refusal to use fear as a governing tool.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:30:19

       Mm-hmm.

    7. RJRobert F. Kennedy Jr.1:30:20

       FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," 'cause he recognized that tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking and, uh, and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. Um, the, uh, the freedom of government from untoward influence by corrupt corporate power. The end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is now, I think, dominating our democracy. It's what Eisenhower warned about, when he warned a- against the emergence of the military-industrial complex. And then I prefer to talk about kind of the positive vi- vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is... You know, I see that the corporations are commoditizing us, are poisoning our children, are, um, strip-mining the wealth from our middle class and, um, and treating America as if it were a business in liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible. And, you know, and, and creating or exacerbating-... this, uh, this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class and creating, you know, kind of a Latin American style feudal model. There's a- these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below. And that's a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably, you know? And we're supposed to be modeling democracy, but we're losing it. Um, and I, you know, I think we have, ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world. Restores, restores America as the embodiment of moral authority, in which it was when my uncle was president, and as a purveyor of peace rather than, you know, war-like nation. My uncle said he didn't want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia to think of, when they think of America, to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, and he refused to send combat veterans abroad, combat soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad. Um, and, uh, in, you know, into combat. Um, he sent 16,000... He resisted in, in Berlin in '62, he resisted in Laos, uh, in '61, he resisted, um, in, in Vietnam. You know, Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops, he only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer pu- fewer troops than he sent to get James Meredith into the, uh, into the univ- to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One Black man. Uh, he sent 16,000, and a month before he died, he ordered them all home. He actually, I think it was October 2nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died, and he asked his aide for a combat, um, for a list of combat fatalities. And the aide came back, and there was 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, "That's too many. We're going to have no more," and he ordered, he signed a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans home from Vietnam by, uh, 1965 with the first 1,000 coming home by December '63. And then, uh, in November, he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, President Johnson remanded that order, and then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And then... And it became an American war, and then Nixon, you know, topped it off at 560,000. 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin, George Skakel, who died at the Tet Offensive. Um, and we killed a million Vietnamese, and we got nothing for it.

Episode duration: 2:28:37