Name: The Childhood of a Kennedy | Theo Von and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Uploaded: 2020-11-13T21:37:25.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Childhood of a Kennedy | Theo Von and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Childhood of a Kennedy | Theo Von and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-13. Transcript available.

And did it feel like you guys were like so separate from the world of your
parents?
Because they were living in like a more of like a political world.
No, everything was, you know, we felt, we were included in everything.
I was, you know, the first time that I came to California was for the 1960
convention.
And I saw my uncle get inaugurated and then I flew back on the airplane with
him
and sat next to him on the plane.
But my father would, you know, my home was in Virginia, but at that time
you could get to the Justice Department in about eight or nine minutes if you
were driving fast.
And so my father would come home at night and he would talk about integrating
the University of Alabama
or, you know, whatever the issues of the day was.
And he, you know, we were always included and we visited him.
And at the Justice Department, I, one day my uncle invited me to spend the
morning with him
in the White House in the Oval Office.
We were, you know, we were part of all of the, I sat behind a couch during the
Cuban Missile Crisis
and, you know, listened to my, our house was kind of a satellite White House
because my father was the Attorney General and he was the President's Chief
Advisor.
We were a mile away from the CIA headquarters in Langley
and my father at that time was, you know, was involved with trying to get the
CIA to behave.
And so all of that, you know, there were Green Berets at our house.
There were Cuban refugees.
There was, you know, the entire milieu of that period was...
Damn.
What a damn DMV it sounds like, you know?
I mean, it just has, you know, it's like, it just sounds like so much going on.
It was every Friday when we were at the Cape, there would be three helicopters
that would land,
marine helicopters that would land on our lawn every Friday.
And my uncle would get off President Kennedy, my father, who was the Attorney
General,
my uncle, Sarge Driver, who was the Director of the Peace Corps,
my uncle, Ted Kennedy, who was in the Senate already at that time,
and my uncle, Steve Smith, who was Chief of Staff.
And the White House would move to our house for the weekend.
And, you know, there was always interesting people there.
And we had, after 1962, my uncle developed this very close relationship with Khrushchev.
And the CIA was baffled by Khrushchev because they had never been able to get a
spy into the Kremlin.
There was a mole in the CIA, and to this day, they don't know who it was.
And every time they got a high-level spy in the Kremlin, he would immediately
be killed
because the mole at Langley was telling him who it was.
So they really had no clue what Khrushchev was like or whether it was a monolithic,
whether the Kremlin was monolithic, and everybody was thinking the same,
which was kind of the assumption.
And so he came to visit you guys.
He never visited us, no, but he exchanged letters with my uncle secretly.
He didn't want the KGB or the GRU to find out he was writing my uncle.
And my uncle was, again, they both figured out that they were both at war
with the military and intelligence apparatus with which they were surrounded.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
So it's like they didn't know they could trust.
And Khrushchev had been a war hero.
He had run the defense of Stalingrad under Stalin.
Stalin had actually tried to purge him at one point,
and the only reason he didn't was because Khrushchev was running the defense of
Stalingrad,
and he couldn't reach him.
You know, when Hitler was trying to attack Stalingrad,
which was one of the worst battles, one of the most brutal battles in human
history,
and one of the most expansive battles in terms of human life.
And Khrushchev had no desire to go to war.
His first meeting with my uncle was about a month after my uncle took office,
and they met at Geneva.
And my uncle went into that meeting with very high hopes that he could make
peace,
and they could begin dismantling the nuclear arsenal on both sides.
Khrushchev had met him very pugnaciously and had been bombastic and had given
him a lecture about imperialism
and said that he was ready for war, and he was really kind of in his face.
And my uncle went home from that meeting very depressed.
And then a year and a half later, there was a confrontation when the Soviets
were building the wall in Berlin
because they were hemorrhaging people.
Everybody was trying to get out of East Germany and come onto the western side,
which the U.S. controlled.
And Khrushchev built a wall there, and his Joint Chiefs of Staff saw this as an
opportunity.
They wanted to go to war with the Russians.
They believed that at that point in history, we had the nuclear advantage.
The Russians would soon catch up with us.
So the President's Chief of Staff wanted to go to war.
Well, his Joint Chiefs did, which was the military, and the leaders of the CIA
wanted to –
they wanted – they saw war as inevitable and that the sooner the better
because the U.S. was at a big military advantage in terms of its nuclear
arsenal at that time.
And my uncle – and Khrushchev's Joint Chiefs were basically in the same
position.
They were spoiling for a war.
My uncle, who was also a veteran and had seen his men die,
had three of his men on his PT boat killed when it was run over by a Japanese
destroyer,
and then he had been lost at sea for 10 days hiding out on a little island with
the Japanese searching for him.
And he mistrusted the brass.
He had been lied to by Alan Dulles at the very beginning.
He knew Dulles had lied to him and fired Alan Dulles and fired the top three
guys at the CIA
and no longer trusted his military.
And he realized that he was in the same boat with Khrushchev.
Oh, in 1962, Khrushchev built the wall.
And one of Jack's generals, Lucius Clay, mounted bulldozer plows on the front
of tanks
and went to push down the wall.
And the Russians met him on the other side at Checkpoint Charlie with their own
squadron of jet tanks.
And my uncle sent a secret message to Khrushchev at that point saying,
you know, please withdraw your tanks.
And I promised that when you do that, we will withdraw ours within 20 minutes.
And he said, my back is against the wall.
I have no place to retreat.
And my uncle and father believed that there would be, that they're, they lived
for a lot of their
administration believing that the military may commit a coup against them.
That their own military.
Yes.
Because they couldn't trust the CIA.
Because they, yeah, they believe that, yeah, right, exactly.
Their military, you know, was Daniel Ellsberg, who was working in the Pentagon
at that time,
said that it was, you know, that at the, the atmosphere in the Pentagon when it
was one of
coup d'etat, of rebellion, that they believe that the fact that my uncle had
not gone into
Cuba and bombed Castro during the Bay of Pigs, which was two months into his
administration,
and then he did not bomb Khrushchev during the, during that confrontation at
Berlin.
Like checkpoint Charlie?
That was evidence that he was committing treason against the United States.
So they were really war happy at that time, huh?
Yes.
And your uncle came in and your, and that's when your father was attorney
general and they
were a little bit more on the peaceful side of things, huh?
Right.
Or the hopeful side of peace.
Well, they didn't want to go to war.
I, in fact, my uncle said, when he was asked by Ben Bradley, who was one of his
best friends,
who was the editor of the Washington Post, what he wanted on his, as his epithet
on his
tombstone, he said he wanted, he kept the peace.
And he often said that the president's principal job was to keep the nation out
of war.
Who was a better peacekeeper, you think, your uncle or your father, when you
look back,
even just like in there?
Well, they were working together at that time.
I mean, my uncle really did not want to go to war.
And my father ran against the Vietnam War.
And, you know.
Yeah, there's a lot of famous pictures of him and stuff when he was running.
Yeah.
Oh.
You want to talk about the Pfizer vaccine?
Yeah.
Good evening, good afternoon, and other times.
Thanks for watching that video you just saw.
I mean, it was okay.
But the next video you could watch could be way better.
What if you watch a video right now that changes your life?
Well, you could.
Watch this one.
Or, watch this one.
Watch this one.
Watch this one.
Watch this one.
Ah!
Ah!