I was at a 70th birthday party for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the night of Jan. 25, eight days after his real birthday, which is Jan 17.
Although it took place in the Georgetown manse where the young congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy first encountered photographer Jaqueline Bouvier in the kitchen—what you might call the very birthplace, spiritually anyway, of Page Six—it wasn’t as lah-dee-dah as all that.
That earlier one was mocked online because celebrities (or aging celebrities) Dionne Warwick and Martin Sheen were touted to be attending and then, evidently fearing some pathetic form of embarrassment in front of their highly conventional entertainment industry colleagues, publicly announced that they wouldn’t be there and were supporting President Joe Biden.
As one who spent years in Hollywood, I was relieved to not see their likes at the event I attended. Celebrity endorsements in politics are almost always motivated more by self-promotion and groupthink than any serious policy insight.
People of all sorts attended the Georgetown party, from noted vaccine-dissenting doctors to students from community colleges I had never heard of, all crammed into a gathering that could be described as convivial and not the least bit snobbish.
The birthday boy/presidential candidate—looking quite fit for a man his age; he works out assiduously—gave a speech that, in many ways, resembled what I have heard him deliver on the stump and then posed for endless pictures with supporters.
Two things hovered over the occasion.
One was the odd secrecy from the public of Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy. To some degree, it almost appears to not be happening despite all his articulate speeches and genuine interest in policy that might improve the country.
The reason is obvious. The mainstream media (MSM) have, for the most part, hidden or ignored the RFK Jr. candidacy deliberately because it threatens their favorite, President Biden, and therefore even more, ultimately, themselves.
After all, Mr. Kennedy could remind the public of what the Democratic Party once was, both the good and the bad, not the current woke-infused version that has, for all intents and purposes, gone off the deep end into virtually delusional leftist autocracy.
Whether you wax nostalgic for touch football in Hyannis or not, compared to the current variety, the Kennedy version of the Democratic Party was positively Jeffersonian.
Recall that JFK, like former President Ronald Reagan, actually reduced taxes for the benefit of the economy. He was also, much like former President Donald Trump, determined to avoid global war.
At the birthday party, RFK Jr. recounted the lengthy clandestine correspondence, behind the backs of the CIA that JFK had come to revile, between his uncle and then-Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev that apparently helped avoid the near nuclear armageddon of the Cuban missile crisis.
And then, of course, there has been the yeoman work RFK Jr. has done in exposing the perilous, one could even say monstrous, activities of Dr. Anthony Fauci and big pharma, writing about it all in an impactful manner that was no Bill Clinton-style doorstopper but an exhaustive and meticulously researched book.
This isn’t to say I agree with everything RFK Jr. espouses. He seems, for example, still to regard anthropogenic global warming as an imminent danger of some sort, although perhaps I’m not being fair.
He appears, like most of us (and this is a good thing), to be a work-in-progress, gradually weaning himself from old Kennedy-style statism that probably emerged in its worst form in his uncle Edward Kennedy, both personally and professionally.
But that leads me to the second feeling hovering over the occasion—nostalgia.
I believe that was felt by many of us in attendance who were old enough to remember the Kennedy years of his father and uncle, as well as the unforgettable national tragedies that occurred.
(I interrupt this article to express my outrage that President Joe Biden is still denying RFK Jr. Secret Service protection. What kind of a human being does that?)
We had feelings of nostalgia for an America of our youths, an optimistic America, that no longer exists.
I remember my college roommate on graduation joined JFK’s Peace Corps in, of all places, Afghanistan. (I got letters from him describing a relatively modern Kabul that seemed a far cry from the Taliban horror show of today.)
Many of us wanted to do it, to serve in that way, and felt guilty if we didn’t. I know I did.
As a young man, I saw his father, Robert F. Kennedy, speak in East Los Angeles a day before he was shot. He was a unique combination of charismatic and thoughtful. I had decided to vote for him.
But that was a long time ago, and now many of us are more skeptical of government as a solution. President Reagan explained and embodied that very well.
The neocon wars put the final kibosh on our ability to turn places like Iraq into Denmark. We can only do our best to set an example and even that we are having a hard time with lately.
Which brings me to the mainstream media and their consistently malign influence.
I didn’t take a survey—there were too many people—but the only media folks I ran into at the party were us, meaning The Epoch Times.
Senior editor Jan Jekielek, who has interviewed RFK Jr. several times, and a few others who have written for Epoch or appeared on our sister television outlet NTD were there.
Were we the only ones interested in this event? It would appear so.
Where did this code of silence begin and who appointed them, the legacy/mainstream media, the guardian class?
I have a theory.
It began in earnest with Watergate when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were turned into national heroes, played in the movies by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, for little more than answering the phone from Deep Throat and others and then essentially recapitulating, with some embellishments, what they said for The Washington Post.
Since then, generations now of aspiring journalists think of themselves potentially as similar “intellectual” heroes able to bring down presidents and, Columbia Journalism School diploma in hand, proceed to tell us, the great unwashed, how to think and live.
They see themselves as stars in their own movies, and don’t you dare rewrite them.
To call this getting a swelled head is the understatement of understatements.
I prefer the old days—before my time really—when journalism was a blue-collar job and people like Ernest Hemingway, who never went to college, plied the trade.
Would you rather read Hemingway or Woodward?
Not a fair comparison, is it?
Similarly, would you rather see a Democratic Party led by RFK Jr. or Joe Biden?
Or how about what some consider a dream team of Donald Trump and RFK Jr.? Their policies are not all that dissimilar, although it is highly unlikely they would or could join forces, this adamant Trump supporter has to admit. (Trump is the only one I trust to truly get us out of our fix.)
Nevertheless, as pointed out to me by Mr. Jekielek as we drove home from the party, in this unbelievably crazy year of 2024, almost anything can happen.
