My friend’s brain decayed in front of my eyes
by Greg Palast
This is painful. This is horrible and feels a bit like a betrayal. But I have no choice. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was my friend and co-author. We wrote stories together for
Rolling Stone. Bobby introduced my
New York Times bestseller and wrote a chapter for
Billionaires and Ballot Bandits. And, with Jesse Jackson, we co-authored the Number 1 selling adult single issue comic book of all time,
Steal Back Your Vote.
But then, Bobby lost his mind.
It was truly scary. In 2012, Bobby had arranged a press conference about the
Deepwater Horizon explosion. Eleven oil rig workers were incinerated in the blow-out of a British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Palast investigations team discovered that, 17 months before that oil rig blew out in the Gulf, British Petroleum suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea. The oil company—with the connivance of then-Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice—covered it up.
It was a hell of a story, which I broadcast on prime time in Britain and Europe. I wrote a book about it,
Vultures’ Picnic.
Here’s where Bobby comes in—and it gets weird. On the second anniversary of the blow-out, Bobby, a professor of environmental law, arranged for a major press conference to expose this story of BP’s blood-encrusted perfidy.
But then, Bobby cancelled the press conference, saying he heard the story had been told previously. Well, yes it had.
You told it.
Bobby, I was on the radio with you for an hour discussing the blow-out and its cover-up. Bobby had a national radio/TV show,
Ring of Fire. He reviewed my book about the story. And strangest of all,
Bobby was on my Democracy Now!
Report about the blow-out. That Bobby had forgotten all these things was frightening—as if Leonardo DiCaprio had forgotten he was in a film about the Titanic.
Our investigator Leni Badpenny was listening in and she began making frantic cut-off gestures, to end a call with him. End it
now! “Something’s wrong with him, or he’s just a jerk. I don’t know. But something’s really wrong and you don’t want your reputation destroyed by standing next to him when it goes wrong in public. Promise me we will never work with him, never see him again. I think he’s dangerous. I really do.”
This was difficult for her to say as she never got over being a bit star-struck in his presence. “Look,” she said, “I’m just a little kid from the Swiss Alps and I got to tell my dad I just had dinner with a Kennedy!”
But she insisted, “Stay away from him. He’s become untrustworthy and he’s getting crazier and crazier.”
This was not the first incident. Bobby was a strong guy in his late fifties talking like a 92-year-old in a nursing home trying to remember his first date.
Since then, we’ve found out that Bobby had a worm in his brain—a real, live physical critter that somehow got inside his skull. I’m not sure about the connection because I’m not a brain surgeon and I don’t speak worm.
That year, 2012, his wife, Mary Kennedy, after a call to him, hung herself. That could mess with anyone’s head—but in this case, the New York tabloids were blaming her suicide on him, a cruel and unjustified attack that had to make it an even heavier psychological burden.
What I liked about Bobby
What I liked about Bobby—and Bobby about me—was that we were always skeptical of “official” stories. After all, his own dad famously admitted to making up cockamamie lies about Vietnam to waltz us into that war. We bonded over rejecting bullshit from the government and its servile punditocracy.
But there was a big difference between us. He thought
every official story was bullshit. But I needed to see the bull. I was, and remain, a big-time believer in
show-me-the-facts. But facts didn’t seem to get in the way of Bobby’s attraction to plain whacko conspiracy theories.
Example: We co-authored articles for
Rolling Stone about racial vote suppression. In my book
Armed Madhouse, my chapter “Kerry Won” described the physical evidence of ballots disqualified—enough rejections of Black voters’ ballots in Ohio to re-elect George W. Bush. This is hard evidence.
But Bobby jumped into an evidence-free crazy-world in a cringeworthy article for
Rolling Stone speculating about voting machines that magically switched Kerry votes to Bush. I checked these stories to a fare-thee-well. Nothing to them. Bobby mistook the “potential” to cheat with actual evidence. I bit my tongue and said nothing.
Later, his knee-jerk reaction against Covid vaccines was the result of the attack on his reasoned questions raised in the film
Vaxxed about MMR vaccines laced with mercury. The film successfully got Big Pharma to remove the mercury. But Bobby, having been savaged by the industry, now became Mr. Anti-Vax, opposing anything injected by a needle (except, it appears, steroids to build muscles). Sorry, I’m no fan of Big Pharma—
but I need proof before I tell people not to wear a mask during a pandemic. I need the proof—and his only proof was to accuse Big Pharma and the FDA of being liars. They are. Still, that’s not proof.
"Destroy Hamas"
It was heartbreaking to hear Bobby refer to his father as “daddy,” just like a little boy of 14 years—his age when his father was shot dead. I am told by psychologists that people often use phrasings of their childhood frozen on the day of a trauma—and in this case, that’s more than understandable. It did creep me out that he thought “daddy” was watching his every action and could still reward or punish him like a parent. But, like I say, who couldn’t forgive that?
And that led him into his first dive into the world of weird. His father was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who assassinated Bobby Senior because of RFK’s vociferous, militant support of Israel. Sirhan committed the killing on television. The murder is right there on film. Yet, Bobby Jr. could not believe his own eyes and that of a million horrified witnesses. To this day, he insists Sirhan did not kill his dad. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism—having to watch your own father’s head blown apart. I don’t know, I’m a scribbler, not a shrink.
Now it gets weirder. Bobby recently said, “Hamas must be destroyed.” He opposes a cease fire in Gaza and is channeling his father’s rage that Arab nations are trying to bring back the Holocaust. Is this a sincere view or an attempt to finally confront the killers who celebrated the murder of his father? Like I said, I’m not a psychologist. I’m just a guy concerned that my friend’s imbalance may choose our President.
The last time I heard from Bobby, it was after midnight on Election Day 2016. “Greg, what happened? When my plane left JFK, Hillary had won. I’ve landed in LA and Trump won. What happened?”
What happened? Bobby, WE WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT. I had re-issued an updated version of my book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which included his intro and a chapter he’d written. The book, which was on the Times bestseller list, detailed exactly how Trump would take the election from Hillary through vote suppression trickery in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Did he forget his own book?
I admit, I feel terrible about revealing these things. But our democracy truly is in the balance. Bobby, as expected, has dropped out of the race today in favor of Trump. Is it the brilliant environmental law professor who is endorsing Trump—or the worm?
