Robert Kennedy Jr….As I See Him

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert F. Kennedy’s second son, feeling the need to pay homage even if it’s not altogether complimentary.

  I had said in an earlier post, that as a presidential candidate he scares me, and he does, believing it’s his goal…

but why?

  He was 14 years-old when his father at 42, was killed in June of 1968.

  He and his elder brother Joe and sister Kathleen saw their father win the California primary. His younger brother David (13), was upstairs in one of the rooms at the Ambassador Hotel watching Bobby give his acceptance speech on TV.

 He then saw him fatally shot. 

 David may have been the first family member besides his mother, to know his father lay mortally wounded on the hotel’s kitchen floor. 

 Earlier that day, when he and his father were swimming in Malibu, Bobby rescued David from an undertow. It’s no wonder he had so many problems, survivor’s guilt perhaps one of them, ending up overdosing sixteen years later in a Palm Beach hotel at the age of 29. 

 But back to his big brother.

 Bobby Jr. too was traumatized when post traumatic stress was not as recognized as it is today. His mother also in shock, rather than tend to her eleven children, hid behind her Catholicism delegating her parental responsibilities to others.

  We now know how that went: nannies, housekeepers, helpers all mowed down by the inherited Kennedy hubris even in the very young.

 Who they needed was their father, a wonderful dad who, alas, was no more. 

  Bobby became a young addict followed by years of alcoholism. Though his many relatives tried helping him, there was no use; you can’t help someone who refuses to be.

 In 1983, at 29 he got arrested for heroin possession in South Dakota. Though their drug laws were steep, a two year prison sentence if convicted, he luckily was released. But he continued to drink and drug, going in and out of various treatment centers until he decided, as many of us do, he had had enough.

 As a former addict, I respect him for this, but the rest of what he does…his avid conspiracy theories, how he rages like an Irish dictator, those icy stares, all leave me cold and bewildered.

 I loved his dad, so it makes me sad I’m unable to support him.

But hurt people, hurt people, and what Robert F. Kennedy Junior went through in June, 1968, one can see has never been thoroughly healed. 

 And it’s a real shame.

SB