Europeans
can no longer snicker about the American puritanical streak, the old litmus
test for our politicians. Bill Clinton had an affair, and while Republicans
were convulsed, America, after the initial shock, basically yawned. But then
came Donald Trump, who proved the point conclusively. Billy Bush’s hot mic and
the election of the pussy-grabber to the presidency exploded the myth. Today,
even a guilty verdict in a sexual assault case doesn’t deny a man the
leadership of one of the two political parties.
And
this year, we have new proof that puritanism is dead. Coverage of Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.’s candidacy suggests that problematic behavior with women as an
electability issue is apparently a thing of the past for American men running for
office.
No
reporter has yet asked the candidate or his campaign about stories of rampant
womanizing, behavior that some believed contributed to his troubled wife Mary’s
2012 suicide. “Mary was a fabulous mother
and, like all of us, a flawed adult whose problems stemmed from her husband’s
conduct and her drinking, caused by specific stimuli, with Bobby—who could anger,
frustrate, belittle her into taking a drink—as provocateur,” her divorce lawyer
told The Daily Beast in 2017.
Feminist writers, such as the terrific
political journalists Rebecca Traister and Michelle Goldberg, have written
extensively about Bobby Junior but not about his history with women. (Traister
mentioned the issue in one sentence in a New York magazine cover article.) Even The New York Times, winner
of a well-earned Pulitzer for the #MeToo Harvey Weinstein takedown, produced a
story about Kennedy’s current wife, beloved Larry David co-star Cheryl
Hines, apparently without asking about the elephant in the room. New York published a standard-issue political
wife article
with no mention of the sordid side. “And it seems clear he will need Ms. Hines,”
the Times wrote, “who is in the unique position of being more
recognizable to some voters than her candidate husband, to help soften his
image for those put off by his crusade against vaccines and history of
promoting conspiracy theories, such as the false narrative that Bill Gates champions vaccines
for financial gain.”
While
her husband raves about the United States pushing “the Ukraine” into war, Hines
has always stayed on message. “We share the same values. Family first,” she told
the New York Post before they got married.
The
Post matters here. The Murdoch paper is the
chief source on details of the womanizing, and journalists tend to steer away
from its reporting unless verified elsewhere. Occasionally, though, it produces
actual tough journalism, and it did so shortly after Mary Kennedy died, when a
friend of hers gave the tabloid two
diaries,
dated 2001, kept by Bobby.
The
documents—which neither Kennedy nor his lawyer ever denied were his—total 398
pages, each with a “ledger” in the back, on which he listed 37 women by first
name only and ranked them with numbers one through 10. Like a kid in high school,
Kennedy used the numbers to represent “how far” they had gone toward sexual
intercourse. One entry logged three women in a day.
A
source who has seen the diaries said: “What was interesting was that he
portrays himself as a victim in all of the encounters with women. He was ogling
after women in the environmental movement.”
He blamed the women, calling the sex acts “muggings.” In one entry, he recorded he “narrowly escaped
being mugged” by a team of two women. “It was tempting but I prayed and God
gave me the strength to say no,” he wrote. In a May 21, 2001, entry, according
to the Post, he wrote that he “got mugged on my way home” from Manhattan
and included the name of a woman with a 10 next to it.
The
diaries served as a kind of confessional for the Catholic scion, heir to the
family sex-addiction gene. “My greatest defect,” he wrote, was “my lust
demons.” He had decided to “avoid the company of women. You have not the
strength to resist their charms.”
Kennedy
spent a month in prison in Puerto Rico (after an arrest for trespassing on
American military grounds in a protest against Navy bomb exercises). He consoled
himself by recording that being locked up prevented further womanizing. “I’m so
content here,” he wrote in a July 2001 diary entry quoted in the Post.
“I have to say it. There’s no women. I’m happy! Everybody here seems happy.
It’s not misogyny. It’s the opposite! I love them too much.”
His
campaign did not reply to a request for comment.
Besides
the diary, Mary Kennedy also shared her husband’s phone contacts with the same
friend, with the names of 43 women stored under the letter “G,” which his
late wife believed stood for Goomah, an Italian idiom for mistress. The women
were far-flung. Paris, Miami, Toronto, Aspen, Montreal, Cleveland, and Pensacola.
Junior
was a tragic, fatherless 14-year-old pallbearer at his father’s funeral in
1968. He succumbed to a heroin addiction, which he conquered, to graduate into libertine adulthood occupying himself with boating, falconry, playing
capture the flag on sweeping lawns, and women.
Now entering American politics with a storied name at a critical moment, with the nation
desperate for responsible leaders, he says whatever the hell comes to mind, from
suggesting Covid-19 was ethnically targeted to spare the Chinese and Jews to praising
Putin, to promoting medically unsound advice and conspiracy theories about
vaccines.
RFK
Jr. doesn’t appear to have inherited the political savvy of his father or
uncles, but he does carry a common trait with respect to women. Bobby Jr. was
the third of Robert F. Kennedy’s children. His father was known as the most straitlaced
of the Kennedy men, but even he found time to stray from Ethel, with whom he had 11 children. He burned through lovers, including
actresses Kim Novak, Lee Remick, and most famously Marilyn Monroe.
Uncle
Jack—JFK—was what psychology might today call a sex addict. White House aides shuttled interns, movie
stars, and Washington socialites in the White House front door and out the back in time
for the next one. His lovers included East German spy Judith Campbell
Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer (about whom I wrote a book), a plethora of interns,
friends of his wife, and, yes, Monroe.
In
RFK Jr.’s own generation, cousin Michael Skakel served more than 11 years in
state prison after he was convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley in 2002. She
was 15 and had been flirting with his older brother the night she was
bludgeoned and stabbed to death with a broken golf club. Skakel, freed on an
appeal in 2013, used as his alibi that he was peeping in windows and
masturbating at the time of the murder.
Months
before his cousin was released, Bobby Jr. wrote an article for The Atlantic
proclaiming Skakel’s innocence. Under the headline, “A
Miscarriage of Justice,”
he blamed an “inflamed media” and suggested his cousin’s tutor was a more
likely suspect.
RFK
Jr. never mentions his own womanizing in his 2018 memoir, American Values:
Lessons I Learned From My Family. The sad disaster of his first marriage
doesn’t get much ink either.
Mary
Richardson was a brunette beauty who bore him four children, then fell apart
over his philandering, exacerbated by depression and drinking. They were still
married but living apart in May 2012, and he was already dating Cheryl Hines
when Mary hanged herself in a barn on her property in Bedford, New York.
RFK
Jr. was first
on the suicide scene after a housekeeper, despite a court order in the pending divorce case
declaring the property hers, not his. This is relevant because he was legally
not the owner of the property when he
oversaw the police removal of her laptop and phone. Mary’s family hired a
private investigator, but they never saw her electronics again nor a suicide
note.
Her
family also objected to burying her at the Kennedy cemetery in Hyannis Port at
the Kennedy compound. They wanted her buried in New York, but Bobby prevailed.
A few weeks after the burial, he had her body disinterred and moved to a
different corner of the cemetery. He said he wanted her body in a newer part of
the graveyard, but like Trump’s burial of Ivana on his golf course, the
episode has sparked wild theories.
“It’s
another shady Kennedy mystery,” said a source who has seen the diaries. “It
could be just as he said; he wanted her to be closer to a nice hill. People in
Westchester are still shaking their heads about that.”
Actor
Billy Baldwin, a friend of Mary’s, unleashed a Twitter rant at RFK Jr. in
April, when he announced his candidacy. “If Bobby were half a man,” Baldwin
wrote, “she would still be alive today. It will all come out. His campaign will
be over in weeks. If these walls could talk.”
So
far they haven’t. Or rather, they have, but no one seems to care. There are a
few reasons why the media hasn’t paid much attention to the womanizing. First
is the scion’s spew of bizarre positions and wacky statements, so Trumpian it
constitutes a form of the Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy. Who
cares about his private life when the man is comparing vaccine cards to
regulations in Nazi Germany, calling the Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine
ever made,” blaming “chemicals in water” for gender dysphoria, loving on Putin,
and promoting the popular theory that the CIA killed his uncle JFK?
The
second reason for ignoring the alleged womanizing is the blasted, world-weary landscape
with respect to candidates and women. In JFK’s time, of course, no journalist
in Washington would have reported on a candidate’s sex life, even one as
notorious as President Kennedy. That omerta had evaporated by the 1980s, with
Gary Hart’s Monkey Business, followed by Bill Clinton’s Gennifer Flowers,
Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress, and finally, the pussy-grabber’s election and his subsequent conviction in a civil sexual assault case. After the Borgian
levels of depravity, the Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein cases revealed—Leon Black facing three rape accusations (which he denies), Jes Staley and Bill Gates humiliated, etc.—half the country
is blasé and the other half takes on faith that powerful men rape and eat
infants.
Last but probably not least, many journalists distrust the New York Post. But
the reporter who acquired the diaries and other material, Isabel Vincent, is a
serious investigative journalist who covered the Medellín cartel as South
America bureau chief for Canada’s Globe and Mail. She is the author of
seven nonfiction books, one on the trafficking of early twentieth-century Jewish
women that won the National Jewish Book Award, and another on Hitler and Swiss
bankers that won the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Award.
The
diaries are old, and so is the man who wrote them: Who knows, it’s possible
that Bobby Junior is a reformed man. But any other man at any other time would
certainly be asked about this past. And so should he.