The former presidential candidate has had more theatrically morbid adventures with deceased wildlife than we thought.
Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me in the practice of law, I thought I would write a little and see the political side of the world. Little did I know when I threw in with the jaunty pirate crew at National Review that I would find myself, a mere year and a half after that fateful decision, contemplating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s theatrically morbid adventures with deceased wildlife.
Readers may already know that the son of the slain New York senator is quite the outdoorsman, the sort of man who thinks nothing of grabbing a freshly road-killed bear cub to later skin and eat, a man intimately conversant with the state’s game-tagging laws. Now comes a “new” story that isn’t really new at all; it originates from a “resurfaced” interview that Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy gave to Town & Country magazine more than a decade ago. You’re only hearing about it now, via outlets such as the New York Times, because RFK Jr. endorsed Donald Trump recently. And thank God for the media’s sudden interest in digging up every crazy RFK story out there, else we might have remained ignorant of what I now call “Ahab’s Revenge.”
Yes, it’s true: In a wholly unintended own goal by the mainstream media, I no longer think of RFK Jr. as a pampered Kennedy with extremist environmentalist views and a propensity for vocally embracing all manner of conspiracy theories. No, now I envision Bobby “Bubba” Kennedy as a gravel-gargling hillbilly, a crack falconer unnervingly dedicated to collecting fresh and exotic kills. Because folks, if you thought The One about the Dead Bear in Central Park was a dispatch from the annals of classic television comedy, then let me briefly divert you from the drudgeries of campaign season with an authentic whale of a tale.
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Somewhere back in 1994–95, when young Kick Kennedy was but six years old, a dead whale washed ashore in Hyannis Port, Mass., near the famous Kennedy-family compound. Who was Johnny-on-the-spot when word of it spread? None other than RFK Jr., of course, with his two young children in tow. It’s understandable enough; if a giant cetacean washed up on the beach near where I live, I’d probably go check it out as well — certainly before it got too rank. Once there, Kennedy proceeded to do what, to be fair, most of us would do: He gazed upon the enormous dead beast, held his nose at the smell, and walked away.
And then returned with a chainsaw. And then mounted the whale with that chainsaw, bloodily sawing through flesh, blubber, organs, bone, and gristle until the whale’s head was completely severed from its body. And then, after sufficiently evulsing the remaining gore from the sawed-open neck cavity, he dragged the enormous severed head back to the family minivan and lashed it to the roof with a bungee cord. And then drove five hours from eastern Massachusetts to Westchester County, N.Y.
Okay, maybe you wouldn’t have done some of those last few bits, but, then again, that’s why he’s RFK Jr. and you’re not. His daughter would certainly know: Her memory of the family all wearing plastic bags around their heads to fight off the overwhelming stench of rotting sea flesh, as more and more “whale juice” (her words) poured into the car through the open windows, seems like the sort of detail one doesn’t invent.
Kick says that “people on the highway were giving us the finger,” and it’s easy enough to imagine the sort of impatient, characteristically rude “Massholes” who would get road rage over something as petty as being trapped behind a roof-mounted whale head on the highway while the wind constantly whips fetid liquids and offal onto their windshields. I, instead, love the image of the Kennedy clan with bags over their heads, which must have been quite the horror-movie surprise for other drivers: Picture yourself pulling alongside to flip off the “whale van” only to find all three occupants staring back at you with sackheads like the family in The Strangers. (If that ever happens to me, I’m telling you right now, my only thought will be Don’t look back keep driving.)
Because you are presumably a well-adjusted person, you might be asking yourself a question right now: Why? Yes, one can accept that this happened, because RFK Jr. has been living a life of insanity both public and private since he became a heroin user at age 15. But why would someone want a severed whale head as a trophy? The answer is — and it is amazing how Town & Country mentions this with remarkable casualness, as if it’s just a Known Thing — RFK Jr. “likes to study animal skulls and skeletons.”
Why, that’s not even the slightest bit alarming, this casual interest in the skeletons of living creatures from a nonscientist! I try not to judge the weird hobbies of others too harshly — I really like krautrock, after all — but given certain Kennedy-family priors, I am now envisioning RFK’s private collection of animal bones and hoping it doesn’t resemble Carcosa. “That was just normal day-to-day stuff for us,” Kick Kennedy concludes at the end of her whale story, leading one to immediately imagine all the other days.
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Some at National Review are justifiably concerned about the fact that RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, in conjunction with the endorsements of similarly disaffected outsiders such as Tulsi Gabbard, openly ushers a dark and conspiratorial element into the Republican Party. (Trump’s seating of both RFK Jr. and Gabbard on his transition team may be a purely nominal gesture, but it inspires no confidence regardless.) Others are worried that Trump’s lifelong obsession with Kennedy-family media glamour (he was 17 years old when JFK was assassinated) has clouded his judgment and that he secretly wishes RFK Jr. was his running mate instead of boring old, veteran, working-class, self-made man J. D. Vance.
As for me? I am left with the same thought I suspect many readers have after reading this story: “So this is how he got the brain worm, right? It totally has to be.”