robert f. kennedy essay

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I Was There For Robert Kennedy’s Electrifying Speech about MLK’s Murder

By: Mary Evans

Updated: August 31, 2018 | Original: April 20, 2018

Mary Evans was in the Indianapolis crowd the night Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech just after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968. Here she recounts the emotion of that night in a special story to go along with the latest installment of  History Flashback , a series that looks at historical “found footage” of all kinds—newsreels, instructional films, even cartoons—to give us a glimpse into how much things have changed, and how much has remained the same.

I was 16 years old in April 1968, living in Indianapolis, and I was very interested in politics. When I was 12, I had read a book of essays called  The Vietnam Reader  and had become passionately opposed to the Vietnam War , which was a minority opinion in Indianapolis at the time.

I believed in social justice, and I wanted to stop the war. So, in 1968, I volunteered for the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, a poet/senator (there aren’t too many of those today) who was the first anti-war candidate to join the presidential race.

On April 4, I spontaneously traveled with a small group of my high school classmates to go down to what is now known as the Kennedy-King neighborhood to hear another candidate, Robert F. Kennedy , speak during a routine campaign stop.

Although I had lived in Indianapolis almost all my life, I had never been to that neighborhood, and I didn’t really know where it was. One of our parents dropped us off, and we joined the mostly African-American crowd. In my memory, I was one of only a few white people there that night.

At first, everything was normal. Kennedy was very late, which wasn’t unusual for political rallies, and people started to get restless. Then, a rumor began circulating that someone had tried to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. , but that he had survived.

There was a growing feeling of agitation. In a neighborhood in which I knew no one, and clearly stood out, I felt nervous. I thought about leaving, but I didn’t know the neighborhood, and I realized I was stuck. There was real ambiguity as to what reality was at that moment, no one knew for sure what had happened.

And then Kennedy came out. The minute he started talking, it was like the laying on of hands. Every word out of his mouth was a balm. The whole crowd was swept up in the emotion, and I stopped being scared.

He announced that King had been murdered, and the news was like wham, wham, wham. He said the words, but I couldn’t understand the context. It was like in the cartoons—canaries and stars were flying in and out of my cranium just from the impact of what he had said. You could feel the shock go through the crowd.

Afterwards, everyone dispersed and we waited for our ride. I remember, I had one friend who had a father from the South. The father was there to pick someone up, and he said he had a machete in his car, that it would be safer that way. That scared me even more than being in the crowd.

The following week was spring vacation, and I was scheduled to visit my grandmother in Chicago. I was excited about the trip, and I got on the plane the day after RFK’s speech as planned. As we were flying into O’Hare, the pilot said, “Those of you on the left, look out your windows.” I looked out mine and saw the south side of Chicago in flames with plumes of smoke spiraling into the air. It felt like everything was coming to a head.

I am convinced Indianapolis didn’t riot because of the words Robert Kennedy said. We were dealing with the assassination of King at a time when everyone had a flashbulb memory of November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. These events reverberated in a way that was more profound than I think people today can even realize.

My experience in 1968 had a deep influence on my life. On my father’s side, I come from an old political family in Indiana descended from abolitionists and the Republicans who started the party with Abraham Lincoln . My father ran for office when I was young and one of my great grandfathers was the governor. That summer, I felt like I had stumbled across my political DNA, but in a 20th century context.

Later that year, I attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a volunteer for the McCarthy campaign, and I saw firsthand people getting beaten up during the clashes between the Vietnam War protestors and the police . After the convention, I had to go back to Indiana to start my junior year at an all-American, Midwestern public high school.  That  was my 1968.

As told to Allison McNearney

Mary Evans lives in New York and runs the Mary Evans  Inc ., a literary agency representing both fiction and non-fiction writers.

Watch RFK: The Kennedy Family Remembers, a new HISTORY special about the life of Robert F. Kennedy.

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Michael's essay: What the world lost when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated

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On the night of April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy stood atop a flatbed truck before a largely black audience in Indianapolis, and told the crowd that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated that day.

Ignoring warnings of his security detail and speaking without notes, Kennedy talked about hatred, about love, about the need for compassion in the worst of times.

He understood the pain of African Americans and the urge for revenge.

He said, "I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man."

In the days that followed, riots broke out in more than 100 cities. Nearly 50 people were killed. National guardsmen and federal troops were called in to restore order across the country. Of all the major cities in the U.S., only Indianapolis stayed calm.

Sixty-three days later, Robert Francis Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died a few hours later. He was 42.

Fifty years on, it is hard to explain to the current generation who Kennedy was and what his death meant to the U.S. and to the rest of us.

By the spring of 1968, the United States was well underway to tearing itself apart. Domestically, angry African Americans in their united might were forcing the government to confront racism and finally deal with civil rights in a concrete and meaningful way.

Young baby boomers coming of age were upending the academic conventions of U.S. universities by turning the campuses into free-for-alls of angry debate.

The young seemed bent on war with their parents. They were also fearful of the military draft. Escalation of the Vietnam War by presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson saw more than 500,000 young Americans fighting in the marshes and rice paddies of a country few of them could locate on a map.

Nobody was ever neutral about Bobby Kennedy. He was hated as much as he was admired and feared, and later loved. The left could never forgive him his work with Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious subcommittee on investigations. Both of them were Irish Catholics, both of them hated communism.

After only five months, Kennedy quit McCarthy and his committee, sickened by the senator's tactics and the appalling figure of Roy Cohn, the senator's lead counsel. RFK later wrote a report calling for senate sanctions of McCarthy's behaviour. Yet in 1957, he attended McCarthy's funeral.

Bobby Kennedy was tough, mean-minded, vengeful, a schemer and yes, ruthless when he had to be. - Michael Enright

Bobby Kennedy was tough, mean-minded, vengeful, a schemer and yes, ruthless when he had to be.

He was a man who knew how to hate.

To Kennedy, there was no higher or more important human value than loyalty. His view of the world was essentially Manichaean — divided by good and evil, heroes and villains, right or wrong. For him there was no middle ground; you were either for or against.

The post-assassination Bobby was a very different figure from the cutthroat JFK attorney general. The death of his brother somehow triggered in him a sense of his own mortality, and a burning need to set aright the balance of the world. Where before civil rights sat at the lower end of Kennedy's priorities, after November 1963, it became a matter of all-consuming urgency.

After the murder of  Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy became black America's greatest tribune. As senator, he pushed to have poverty at the top of the government's social agenda.

Unlike other politicians, he went into the backwaters of Appalachia and the hollows of Eastern Kentucky and the Ozarks to sit and talk to poor families about their every struggle to stay alive. He reached out and spoke to young people around the world. In South Africa, he preached freedom to the apartheid regime. In Japan and the Philippines, he talked about freedom from want.

Huge crowds were drawn to him by his passionate embrace of those who suffered from poverty, racism or ignorance. TIME Magazine said he had "the capacity to make the past seem better than it ever was, and the future better than it can possibly be."

He was popular in the great cities of New York and Los Angeles and Boston, but he was idolized in the poor black areas of places like Watts, Harlem and East Chicago. At the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, he was given a standing ovation that lasted 22 minutes.

I was Washington correspondent for a Canadian newspaper in 1968, and I remember the comments of John Lindsay, who covered the senate for Newsweek Magazine.

Kennedy is not going all the way. The reason is that someone is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it. - John Lindsay, Newsweek Magazine

"Kennedy is not going all the way," said Lindsay. "The reason is that someone is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it."

To watch the footage of Bobby Kennedy's last campaign tears at the heart not only for the death of a young, dynamic leader. We also mourn for what the United States and the world lost after he turned, smiling, from the microphones and walked into that hotel kitchen, 50 years ago.

Click "listen" at the top of the page to hear Michael's essay.

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The Conspirituality of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“God talks to human beings through many vectors,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted on April 19th, 2023, the day he announced his primary challenge to Joe Biden. “But nowhere with such detail, and grace and joy, as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.”

The pious opening signals how carefully Kennedy has navigated his journey to the national stage. Because it’s not the name recognition, or his reputation as an avenging environmental lawyer that puts him in the game. It’s not that he helped found the Waterkeeper Alliance (a global network that lobbies to protect water sources) or built a solid record in defending Indigenous peoples from industrial land-grabs and pollution. It’s not his muscular Catholicism .

One important reason Kennedy is polling at around 15% in the nascent race is because he leads a juggernaut of antivax misinformation that attracts a swarm of conspiracy theorists, from far-right radio host Alex Jones, to left-leaning New Age “COVID-dissident” Charles Eisenstein, who is now serving as his Director of Messaging .

Read More: Inside the Very Online Campaign of RFK Jr.

It’s not hard to see how Kennedy became the darling of broken thought leaders. He openly doubts the official account of his uncle John F. Kennedy’s assassination , which claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He’s also convinced that Sirhan Sirhan was part of a larger operation when he supposedly killed his father Bobby Kennedy in that Los Angeles hotel kitchen in 1968.

In addition to these mythic-scale stories, a more sinister strategy drew Kennedy deeper into the twilight of conspiracism: medical libertarianism. As Kennedy recounts in a 2017 forward to a third edition of The Peanut Allergy Epidemic by Heather Fraser, his son Conor needed 29 visits to the emergency room for severe allergies and anaphylactic shock before the age of three. That relentless stress started Kennedy down the road of questioning the difference between industrial and pharmaceutical crimes.

While Fraser’s book falsely argues that childhood vaccines cause deadly food allergies, Kennedy took a different angle through his Children’s Health Defense nonprofit. Since its founding in 2016, CHD has pushed the false idea that the mercury compound thimerosal makes vaccines unsafe, even though thimerosal had been largely phased out in 2001. It was a plausible equation for Kennedy, who as an environmental lawyer was obsessed with mercury poisoning in water systems and food chains.

By 2019, Kennedy was the leading buyer of antivax ads on Facebook , and was implicated in a measles outbreak in Samoa that infected 5,700 and killed 83. The outbreak followed the tragic deaths of two children who had received contaminated vaccines. Kennedy traveled to Samoa, and was pictured with a local antivax advocate. This was followed by Children’s Health Defense sending a letter to the Prime Minister of Samoa, urging him to question the general safety of the Measles, Mumps, & Rubella (MMR) vaccine. This tragedy echoed the measles outbreaks in Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota in 2011 and 2017.

The Somalis had been specifically targeted by the antivax propagandist Andrew Wakefield, whose falsified 1998 study started the still-lingering conspiracy theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism. More than a year before Kennedy lost his Instagram account for spreading medical misinformation, he used it to sing Wakefield’s praises , dubbing him “among the most unjustly vilified figures of modern history.” In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate linked Kennedy on their list of the 12 influencers responsible for up to 73% of all antivax content on Facebook, and 65% of all digital antivax content overall. (Kennedy was reinstated to Instagram on June 4, 2023, on the grounds that he’s running for president.)

Today, Kennedy is trying to keep this record on the down-low, in favor of a more mainstream vibe on the stump. He wants to be known as an eco-prophet, and as an anti-corporate, anti-interventionist truth-teller. His Twitter feed blends eco-spirituality with Catholic-icon-style photos of his assassinated uncle, John F. Kennedy, and quotes that lean hard into his passion for free speech and fearlessness in the face of “ unpleasant facts .”

And so far, it’s working. He hasn’t yet faced any tough, prime-time questions about Samoa, Wakefield, or the support he has from right-wing extremists who use antivax rhetoric as a recruitment tool.

Why does Alex Jones think Kennedy is “awake” ? Why did Donald Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon urge him to run for—or disrupt—the Democrats? Why does conservative political consultant Roger Stone think that Trump-Kennedy would be a 2024 dream ticket?

This MAGA-tinged, medical libertarian fanbase is hard to reckon with for anyone who associates the Kennedy name with the Camelot era of governmental idealism. In 1960, JFK’s New Frontier called for the expansion of unemployment benefits, a new Housing Act, the Clean Air Act, and the establishment of the Peace Corps. It foregrounded equal rights for women. It proposed a Medicare plan—and called for a new Vaccination Assistance Act.

JFK also famously pushed an ambitious Civil Rights agenda, with anti-racism proposals and early attempts at affirmative action. But his nephew has twisted this portion of his family’s political capital into a bizarre inversion of social justice, paid out in a risk of heightened vaccine hesitancy in Black communities . He’s formed opportunistic alliances with fringe Black leaders like Tony Muhammad to exploit the historical trauma of medical racism in the U.S., and provide the (largely white) antivax movement with sprinkles of diversity. Muhammad is a minister in the Nation of Islam, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a Black nationalist hate group that promotes antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Since 2015, he has been repeating the false claim that the C.D.C genetically modified MMR vaccines to harm Back and Latino boys.

In speeches and in his 2021 docsploitation film Medical Racism: The New Apartheid , Kennedy repeatedly raises the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, implying that COVID mitigations constitute a similar medical atrocity. The study ran from 1932 to 1972, and recruited Black men afflicted with the syphilis so that government researchers, who were mostly white, could study its long-term effects. The researchers did not disclose the men’s diagnosis to them and only treated their symptoms with placebos. The ghoulish aim was to document what would happen as the disease progressed.

But Black pro-vaccine activists reject the Tuskegee comparison , because it involved withholding medication without consent. Rejecting Kennedy’s racial opportunism, they explain that whatever vaccine hesitancy exists in their communities stems from sustained structural racism, producing impacts like unequal access to care—an issue that Kennedy and other white anti-vax activists gloss over.

Kennedy’s co-optation of Black liberation efforts in community health distorts a nuanced history. We never hear from him, for example, about how in the 1970s the Black Panthers made access to free, evidence-based health care a pillar of their revolutionary vision. They established 13 free health clinics in communities across the country, offering physicals, gynecological and dental exams, and cancer screenings. They sponsored pioneering research. They also provided free vaccinations.

On January 23rd, 2022, Kennedy brought his COVID-era antivax conspiracism to new heights. He took the stage as a speaker at the Defeat The Mandates march in Washington, D.C., shouting out that over the past two years America had witnessed “a coup d’etat against democracy and the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” He railed against the censorship of free speech—while, ironically, speaking to thousands through a microphone from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and into a livestream hosted by fellow antivax tycoon Del Bigtree.

The blueblood bona fides, the Harvard degree, and the leftward tilt make Kennedy an outsider to this mainly right-wing crowd. But his rhetoric makes him right at home.

“What we’re seeing today,” Kennedy bellowed, “is what I call turnkey totalitarianism.” Every totalitarian state, he explained, has sought to control every aspect of life, and been unsuccessful, until now. “None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity.”

Kennedy went on to say that soon, Bill Gates would be spying on everyone with his 65,000 satellites. That the 5G wireless system would control all cash, and the food supply. That once vaccine passports were issued, there would be no escape. “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

A swift outcry forced Kennedy to apologize for the offensive comparison.

How does conspiracy theory bingo pour out of Kennedy so easily? Social psychologists have shown that believing in one theory predicts believing in others—even if they contradict each other. They also know about “apophenia,” or the capacity some have for seeing patterns where none exist. But political scientist Michael Barkun argues that the conspiracy theorists also seek power over their worlds by obsessing over three anxious laws: nothing is as it seems, everything is connected, and nothing happens by accident. It’s a galaxy-brained orientation, and it allows a figure like Kennedy to cosplay as a warrior-sage who can peer through all lies, in all sectors of society, and to feel the grim satisfaction of every horrible thing fitting together.

Read More: Robert F Kennedy Jr. Is Dead Wrong About Vaccines

The three laws do something else as well—they provide a sense of “conspirituality, ” in which political anxieties merge with spiritual hopes, and instill not only a sort of reassurance, but also a mission: every cruel plot point begets the necessity for spiritual warfare and renewal. The battles are fought on individualistic terms, which turns innocuous phrases like “bodily sovereignty,” and a directive like “do your own research” into an anxiom for contrarian thinking that rejects expertise in a harmful mantra not just for discourse surrounding vaccines, but in virtually every discipline.

Kennedy isn’t wrong when he’s said that industry lies about pollution and Big Pharma extracts odious profits while neoliberal bureaucrats shrug. But there’s a difference between seeing connections and building real-world solutions. After rejecting scientific evidence on viruses and vaccines, what’s Kennedy’s actual plan?

It’s another mystery, which is why it wasn’t surprising that amid the mania of the pandemic, Kennedy turned deeper to religion . On Sept 2, 2021, he gave a keynote address at the Autism Recovery in the Age of Covid-19 conference hosted by AutismOne at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California.

“We are in the last battle,” he said. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”

Still, Kennedy’s focus has always been more on Eden than on the End Days. Children are his perennial fixation. What went wrong with the children, with their allergies and asthma, what could still go wrong? How can he defend them all in a world of confusion and assaults, where all the strong fathers have disappeared? And this is where his campaign will attract at least some scattered remnants of QAnon, where a deluded concern for children is sacrosanct. “Imagine RFK Jr. redpilling the hell out of libs on the vaccine,” as one QAnon poster put it on Truth Social.

But with a brain addled by fever dreams, it’s unlikely Kennedy can offer the safety of Camelot to anyone. When asked to comment from the campaign trail on the horror of the mass shooting in Allen, Texas, he pulled that antivax logic out of the air , opting for the least scientific answer possible. “Almost every one of these shooters were on SSRIs, or some other psychiatric drug,” he said.

This article has been adapted from Chapter 23 of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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RFK's Youngest, Born After He Was Assassinated, Says His Killer Is 'Not Deserving of Parole'

Ethel Kennedy was three months pregnant with Rory Kennedy when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan

Digital News Writer, PEOPLE

Robert F. Kennedy 's daughter Rory Kennedy, who was born after his 1968 assassination, wrote an emotional essay this week pleading with officials to deny Sirhan Sirhan's parole for the murder.

Sirhan, 77, was granted parole last week during his 16th parole hearing, when two of Kennedy's sons — Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — supported his release.

Officials found that Sirhan, who has been behind bars for 53 years, showed remorse and rehabilitation and was not a threat.

A majority of the late Sen. Kennedy's children, however, opposed the parole decision, which is subject to review before it takes effect.

In her essay for The New York Times on Wednesday, Rory, 52, slammed some of her relatives who believe Sirhan is suitable for freedom.

"I never met my father. When Sirhan Sirhan murdered him in the kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel in front of scores of witnesses, my mother [Ethel Kennedy] was three months pregnant with me," the documentary filmmaker began. "I was born six months after my father's death."

Rory continued, "My mother and the majority of my siblings agree with what I now write, although a couple do not. But I will say, for myself, while that night of terrible loss has not defined my life, it has had impact beyond measure."

Detailing that impact, she wrote, "My father's murder was absolute, irreversible, a painful truth that I have had to live with every day of my life; he was indeed taken forever."

"Because he was killed before I was born, it meant I never had the chance to see my father's face and he never had the chance to see mine," she continued. "He never tossed me in the air, taught me to ride a bicycle, dropped me off at my freshman dorm, walked me down the aisle."

In her view, "Mr. Sirhan is not someone deserving of parole."

"I believe this despite last week's recommendation by the Los Angeles County parole board's two-member panel to consider his release," she wrote.

She cited examples of Sirhan's previous parole board hearings in which he was "not willing to accept responsibility for his act and has shown little remorse" for her dad's death. (He continues to say he doesn't remember the assassination.)

Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder in 1969 and was sentenced to death — which became moot when the California Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972.

In her essay, Rory also cited her uncle Ted Kennedy, a former senator, for his comments during a 1969 hearing for Sirhan in which her uncle sent a "five-page handwritten letter to the district attorney in a last-minute plea to save the condemned assassin's life."

"The letter invoked my father's beliefs: 'My brother was a man of love and sentiment and compassion. He would not have wanted his death to be a cause for the taking of another life.' "

While Rory wrote that those qualities are something she "greatly admires" about her dad, she questioned, "Was Mr. Sirhan not already shown compassion when his death sentence was commuted to life in prison?"

"It is a high-minded notion, after all, the belief that everyone — everyone — deserves a chance for rehabilitation and, after having served enough time in prison, even parole," Rory wrote in her Times essay. "Did Uncle Teddy ever imagine, in asking the court for compassion, that the man who killed his brother might one day walk free? I do not think so."

She continued, "I know that prisons are overcrowded, and I realize that it is expensive to keep an older man behind bars."

But, she wrote, she worried what Sirhan would do out of prison and her heart still ached over the murder he committed.

"It is true that Mr. Sirhan has been incarcerated for a long time. For 53 years, to be exact. That is, after all, an easy number for me to track. It is the same number of years that my father has been dead. It is the age that I turn on my birthday this year," wrote wrote.

California parole officials now have 120 days to review the ruling before it is passed on to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his 30-day consideration.

"I ask them, for my family — and I believe for our country, too — to please reject this recommendation and keep Sirhan Sirhan in prison," Rory wrote in the Times .

Rory and five of her siblings — Kerry Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Courtney Kennedy, Christopher G. Kennedy and Maxwell T. Kennedy — previously released a joint statement hours after Sirhan was granted parole and said they were "devastated" by the decision.

Maxwell, 56, also wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times , arguing like his sister that Sirhan "should not be released."

Their brothers Robert Jr., 67, and Douglas, 54, have been vocal that they believe Sirhan should be freed.

Sirhan's attorney Angela Berry told PEOPLE , "They spoke for about three hours, and Robert Kennedy has been outspoken about his support for Sirhan over the years."

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE 's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

"The two sat together. They held hands. I mean, they were face-to-face. Sirhan cried. Robert Jr. accepted his apology. ... At that point, Robert Jr. was convinced that there is way more to the story than what came out at trial and that there could be a second gunman, and he has been on Sirhan's side since," Berry recalled.

She added, "The law says if somebody is no longer a danger to society, they must be released. So if we stick to the law, then the governor should go along with it."

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The Candidates on Key Issues

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Third party

• Robert F. Kennedy
• Cornel West

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the 70-year-old heir to the famed political family, launched his presidential campaign in April 2023. But the longtime environmental activist announced in October he would drop his Democratic bid and re-enter the race for the White House as an independent. The junior Kennedy has called the traditional two-party system “rigged” for Americans and is campaigning on a platform targeting institutions such as pharmaceutical and tech companies.

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Climate change

Kennedy spent more than 20 years as an environmental lawyer, with his advocacy focusing on clean water, the environment and human rights. His campaign’s environmental policies focus on shifting agricultural subsidies to encourage more sustainable practices. He has also proposed incentivizing industries to use clean energy sources in an effort to reduce toxic waste, industrial poisons and pesticides. Kennedy has said he also wants to reduce corporate connections with federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to allow them to focus on protecting the environment.

Crime & policing

Kennedy is campaigning on “transforming” the police, rather than defunding them. He has said he wants to incentivize police to prevent violence and avoid making unnecessary arrests. Kennedy is also campaigning on training police officers in de-escalation techniques and mediation skills and establishing partnerships with local organizations to create a new relationship with the public that is not adversarial. With Kennedy's platform on crime, police will focus on serious crimes instead of targeting a larger pool of Americans.

Kennedy has several proposals for reducing student loan debt. His platform would allow students to refinance their student loans at lower interest rates to reduce monthly payments. He is also urging Congress to pass legislation to abolish interest on new and existing student loans. The junior Kennedy is campaigning on placing the responsibility on schools, instead of loan institutions and banks, when it comes to loan defaults in an effort to incentivize universities to lower tuition costs. Additionally, Kennedy backs expanding higher educational opportunities related to trades – like electricians, plumbers and mechanics — and explore funding opportunities to students who are pursuing this work.

Kennedy says Americans need a president who cares about their personal economy — not an economy centered around war or Wall Street. He campaigns on America’s current economic system making expenses unaffordable for most Americans. He also advocates for prosecuting union-busting corporations so labor groups can organize and negotiate fair wages. Kennedy wants to raise the minimum wage to $15, expand free childcare programs and drop housing costs by $1,000 per family. Kennedy has proposed cutting some military expenses, barring corporate bailouts and other proposals to fund his economic platform.

Foreign policy

Kennedy’s foreign policy looks to bring troops home, stop racking up the nation’s debt in conflicts and put an end to what he calls proxy wars. In Ukraine, Kennedy wants to end the suffering of Ukranian people by helping them defend their country. However, he supports finding a diplomatic solution to bring peace to Ukraine while bringing home U.S. resources. For example, Kennedy has questioned whether current American efforts in the war-torn nation serve to help Ukrainians or use the country’s people as a “pawn to weaken Russia.”

Health care

Kennedy has come under fire for false medical claims, particularly that vaccines are linked to autism. He received backlash, even being banned on Instagram, for criticizing governmental COVID-19 restrictions and spreading misinformation about the virus. He started the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit organization that focuses on anti-vaccine messaging. Kennedy champions lowering chronic disease rates in children, saying he would not want to be reelected if he has not significantly reduced disease among children by the end of his potential first term.

Immigration

Kennedy views the situation at the southern border as a humanitarian crisis. If elected, he would focus on securing the border with a goal of ending illegal immigration while expanding America’s lawful immigration system. His immigration policy looks to first get the border under control and then work with other countries to stem the tides of migrants. Kennedy also wants to fund and prioritize immigration infrastructure, which includes further funding services like courts and border agencies to handle asylum cases

Reproductive rights

Kennedy’s stance on abortion has been unclear throughout his campaign. The independent presidential contender said he would support a federal abortion ban after the first three months of pregnancy at the Iowa State Fair in Summer 2023. He later walked back the comments, and his campaign released a statement that Kennedy supports a woman’s right to choose and does not support legislation banning abortion. He previously told USA TODAY he feels the government should not be telling people what to do with their bodies, and it should be up to the woman during the first three months of pregnancy.

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How R.F.K. Jr. Got on the Michigan Ballot, With Only Two Votes

The independent candidate persuaded a tiny party to give him its line on the ballot in a key 2024 battleground state, sparing him a costly, arduous organizing effort.

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By Rebecca Davis O’Brien

In January, when Doug Dern, the state chairman of the Natural Law Party of Michigan, got an email from a top strategist for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, he sensed it could be a star turn for his tiny political group.

For 22 years, Mr. Dern, a bankruptcy lawyer with a small practice outside Detroit, has almost single-handedly kept the Natural Law Party on Michigan’s ballot. Each cycle, the party runs a handful of candidates in obscure state races to meet Michigan’s minimum polling requirements for minor parties.

“Keep that ballot access,” Mr. Dern, 62, said in an interview on Friday. “Because someday, a candidate is going to come along who’s going to be perfect for it. Someday, the third parties are going to be hot.”

That day may have come.

In gaining access to the ballot in Michigan, a critical swing state in the 2024 election, Mr. Kennedy has injected new uncertainty into what promises to be one of the most closely contested presidential races in history. And he did it without having to gather a single signature, avoiding a costly and arduous organizing effort, not to mention the possibility of having to fight court challenges to those signatures.

Mr. Kennedy was formally nominated at a brief convention held Wednesday morning in Mr. Dern’s law office. The only two attendees were Mr. Dern and the party’s secretary.

Stefanie Spear, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy campaign, confirmed the timeline of the campaign’s outreach and said simply that Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, had been “duly nominated by the Natural Law Party.”

Third parties have drawn increasing attention in recent elections — and arguably have swung some of them — by allowing voters to express discontent with major-party candidates. Mr. Kennedy is counting on a particularly strong showing in this election as polls show voters are highly dissatisfied with their options.

The Natural Law Party was founded in 1992 on a platform that included promotion of transcendental meditation, responsible gun use, flat taxes and organic farming. But it has dwindled over the years. Heading into the 2024 election, Michigan’s was its only state chapter.

These days, the party is more like an empty vessel for independent candidates, which Mr. Dern sees as a virtue in itself — a commitment to giving voters more choice. Every presidential cycle, independent candidates reach out to Mr. Dern, seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan. In 2008, the spot went to Ralph Nader, who had been seen as a spoiler in the 2000 election.

Mr. Dern, who has worked as a stage magician and also has a law practice for drunken-driving arrests, has made it his personal mission to keep the party active. “I’ve just been plugging away, year after year, making sure there are people on the ballot,” he said.

Natural Law candidates, who have frequently included Mr. Dern himself, have run for secretary of state, seats on Michigan’s Supreme Court, lieutenant governor, state university boards and others. Their mission is simple: Secure enough votes in the general election to keep the party on the ballot for the next cycle.

In Michigan, minor parties can retain their ballot access only if their top vote-getting candidate — for any statewide office on the ballot — receives a total vote equal to at least 1 percent of the total votes cast for the winner of the last secretary of state race.

In January, Cornel West’s independent presidential campaign reached out to Mr. Dern, he said. Under normal circumstances, Mr. Dern said, Mr. West would have been a great candidate for his party.

But the very next day, a better offer arrived in the form of an email from Nicholas Brana, a campaign consultant for Mr. Kennedy — whose ideals, Mr. Dern noted, align with much of the Natural Law Party’s original platform, including its emphasis on health. Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and a scion of a storied political family, is also a leading figure in the anti-vaccine movement and a critic of the Covid pandemic response.

The party affiliation is crucial for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign. Independent candidates without any party backing face a daunting path to getting on the ballot in Michigan, requiring between 12,000 and 60,000 signatures, including 100 signatures from each of at least half of the state’s congressional districts.

Candidates can skip all that if they are nominated by a minor party with ballot access. The party just has to hold a convention, nominate a candidate and submit a certificate to the Michigan Department of State. There are a few other legal niceties — for example, presidential candidates need to submit a list of electors — but that is basically it, Mr. Dern said.

So, on Wednesday morning, Mr. Dern said, he and Kathleen Oakford, the party’s secretary, held their convention in a low-slung office building in Hartland, Mich.

The proceedings were brief.

“She came in, I took my gavel and tapped it on my desk.” He called the state convention to order, they signed the proposed certificate of nomination, he closed the meeting, “And I took off for Lansing and filed it.”

Since Mr. Kennedy’s campaign announced his place on the ballot, Mr. Dern has fielded calls and emails from other states and candidates. A resurgence of interest in the Natural Law Party is underway, Mr. Dern said.

“There’s even talk of reviving the national chapter,” he said.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien covers campaign finance and money in U.S. elections. She previously covered federal law enforcement, courts and criminal justice. More about Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

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President Biden has homed in on an infamous moment  of Trump’s, which crystallized the chaos of the Trump presidency, by trolling his political opponent.

Other Key Races

With the 2024 primary season entering the homestretch — and the presidential matchup already set — hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians  cast their ballots  in Senate and House contests  as well as for president and local races. Here are the takeaways .

David McCormick  won an unopposed Republican primary for Senate  in Pennsylvania, securing the party’s nomination two years after former Trump torpedoed his first Senate run by backing his primary rival, the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Representative Summer Lee, a first-term progressive Democrat, won her primary contest  in western Pennsylvania, fending off a moderate challenger in a race that centered on her stance on the war in Gaza .

RFK Jr.’s quintessential campaign position: The blockchain budget

If you are curious how the government spends its money — about half of which comes from income taxes — there are lots of ways to investigate. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posts data on receipts (incoming money) and expenditures (outgoing money) broken down by government agency and over time. There are 58 different spreadsheets over there, so dive in.

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The Government Publishing Office also offers a slew of budget documents, including presidents’ budget proposals (which are generally only implemented in piecemeal fashion). Or head over to USASpending.gov — a website maintained by the government — to review the budgets for individual government agencies.

It is true that you cannot easily see line-item spending by government agencies. Given that the federal government spends (doing some quick math based on the OMB numbers) $220,000 a day, that would be hard to do.

Oh, sorry. Not per day. Per second.

Some of that is on things such as military aircraft, which are expensive. A lot of it, though, is on things like copy paper, which isn’t — except at the scale of the federal government. It’s easy to see, then, how cumbersome it is to review federal spending.

There are processes in place to do so, however. Standing House committees are tasked with oversight of federal departments. Whistleblowers are encouraged to come forward and report on potential wrongdoing. (Here’s the House Budget Committee’s page for whistleblower complaints , for example.) It’s an imperfect system, certainly, but it empowers the people closest to the spending — federal employees — to keep an eye on things even as it leverages the partisanship and desire for visibility of political actors.

Speaking at a rally over the weekend, though, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a different idea .

“We’re going to put the entire U.S. budget on the blockchain,” he said in Michigan, “so that every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget any time they want, 24 hours a day.”

The crowd cheered.

“We’re going to have 300 million eyeballs on our budget,” he continued, “and if someone is spending $16,000 for a toilet seat, everybody’s going to know about it.”

This is a bad idea. It is also one that aligns so perfectly with Kennedy’s approach to politics that it’s hard to believe no one predicted this is where he would end up.

The blockchain — or more accurately here, a blockchain — is a distributed, public database. Think of it like a secure, shared Google spreadsheet to which you can only add new lines of information. Blockchains became popular alongside cryptocurrency, with transactions in bitcoin, for example, being recorded on such a database.

So why doesn’t this make sense for the federal budget? Well, first of all, it’s not really clear what the proposal is. Does Kennedy want to take budget information that’s already publicly available and put it on a blockchain? If so: okay? Feel free.

If, however, he wants to put every transaction on the blockchain, that’s far harder. It’s harder just as a function of scale, with the regional office of the Social Security Administration in Tallahassee now having to record its $250 Staples office supply purchase in a digital record. It’s also harder because the government spends lots of money on things that it doesn’t want to have public, for good reason — like counterintelligence efforts in foreign countries or the development of new weapons. A public blockchain entry of “Black Ops — Kyrgyzstan” would neither help Americans understand the government or help the government serve Americans.

None of this would dissuade Kennedy, certainly. It’s an idea that, first and foremost, implies that the federal government is too inept or corrupt to police itself and that average Americans would be better able to watchdog federal spending. It’s the sort of view of complex systems that might lead a person to think that established, proven vaccination programs are, in fact, suspect and that individual observers can reach better assessments of the safety and efficacy of vaccines than can doctors and scientists. You know, as Kennedy does.

The entire cryptocurrency industry is built, to some extent, on a similar skepticism, on a belief that governmental monetary systems are dubious and imperfect. Thanks to his credentials, Kennedy has been effective at appealing to the crypto community; his blockchain idea is an offshoot of that. (That cryptocurrency’s most well-established use case is “crime” does not appear to be a deterrent.)

The let-everyone-see-the-budget idea is just the federal government version of do-your-own-research, an understandable impulse in the modern era but an undeniably fraught one .

Back in 2009, Lawrence Lessig wrote an essay for the New Republic that offered prescient warnings about making public information broadly available.

“I fear that the inevitable success of this movement — if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness — will inspire not reform, but disgust,” he wrote. “The ‘naked transparency movement,’ as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

His expectation was that, given a giant pile of information, people would cherry-pick pieces to form narratives that might not reflect the truth and might be based on inaccurate assumptions. Think of the period after the 2020 election and the surfeit of nonsensical claims about election fraud that were rooted in misleading or misunderstood data points. Claims that were fundamentally about finding evidence that could be framed as bolstering a political position.

Now extrapolate that to the scale of the federal budget or to every single purchase made by the government. Since you’ve been reading this, the government’s spent millions of dollars. Did you find any pricey toilet seats in the mix? And even if you did, do you have the context for that spending, or is it just the combination of “expensive” and “funny” that some politicians find so appealing ?

It is admittedly awkward to sit here as a journalist and make any sort of case against opening up the government's books. The Washington Post would like to remind whistleblowers that they can also come to us , if they want, and that providing a line-item delineation of all government spending would be appreciated. The difference is that, for all of our admitted flaws, our reporters — like government representatives — have institutional checks in place aimed at accuracy and fairness. Three hundred million Americans (at least 38 million of whom would be under the age of 18, but whatever) eyeballing spending, many of them hoping to justify paying lower taxes, would have different motivations and guardrails.

But this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the guy whose entire candidacy is predicated on the idea that systems are less capable than individuals. And here we are.

StarTribune

Readers write: caucus system, state sen. nicole mitchell, voting for rfk jr..

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here .

Self-described "longtime Republican activist" Annette Meeks, bemoaning the increased partisanship and general deterioration of our political system, has plenty of company ( "Get rid of precinct caucuses, go to primary elections up and down the ballot," Opinion Exchange, April 24). Polls suggest that most Americans dread the coming presidential election contest between two very unpopular candidates. It will get ugly here; if I lived in a "swing state" I might have to burn my television. But bizarrely, Meeks tries to blame precinct caucuses, dominated, she claims, by extremists.

I've been attending precinct caucuses for almost 60 years, and while I've seen an occasional extremist or two, they've always been in the minority at the caucuses I've attended. Plus, Minnesota is one of only nine states using a caucus system, not merely enough clout to determine the presidential candidates. Clearly, the problem lies elsewhere. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, millions of Americans, including prominent Republicans like John McCain, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, etc., expressed alarm. But in the end, most Republican leaders decided that their personal careers were more important than their values, and either caved to Trump or slid meekly out of sight; and have been replaced by people that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush would not have taken seriously. And this, not caucuses, are why Republicans can't win a statewide election in Minnesota. The Democrats, unfortunately, are scarcely better. I think Gov. Tim Walz has done a decent job overall, but I was furious when he told Rep. Dean Phillips to "stay in [his] lane." Phillips has dropped out, and it seems unlikely that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Jessie Ventura is going to win.

The root of our problem is the duopoly of our two-party system. If this fall's election fiasco results in the collapse of both the Republican and Democratic parties, we'll all be better off down the road.

John K. Trepp, Minneapolis

In her recent commentary, Meeks is correct that precinct caucuses are a major contributor to angry political division. But she doesn't go far enough. In the caucus system, much less than 10% of citizens often decide who the rest of the voters can vote for. That's not democracy. But we should scrap not only precinct caucuses for statewide and local elections, but also jettison primaries. Like caucuses, primaries also result in a small subset of voters deciding who the rest of us can vote for.

A better system would be a general election with multiple qualified candidates in which voters can rank them according to their preference. Qualification requirements might include a minimum number of signatures to get on the ballot, for example. A broader range of candidates and a vote ranking system would mean that every voter would impact who is elected, not just a select few. Political parties could still endorse, of course. And qualified candidates on the general ballot could self-describe the party they "belong to." But let's engage the electorate. Let's give them tools to participate. Voter participation will increase. Candidates will have to listen to all citizens, not just the polarizing litmus-test edges of left or right. So, let's scrap both caucuses and primaries, and give elections and our democracy back to our citizens.

Alan Arthur, Wayzata

Meeks' essay derogating the Minnesota political caucus system fails on three counts.

First, Meeks conflates the perceived authority of caucuses with the endorsement power of political conventions. However "hyperpartisan" (her word) caucus attendees may be as a group, they remain individuals with free will to vote as they deem appropriate during the subsequent political conventions, where candidates have the opportunity to make their cases and contend for party endorsements.

Secondly, Meeks insists caucuses and political primary elections are and must be mutually exclusive for the political parties to effectively represent the public will. To the contrary, Minnesota's layered system, including caucuses, endorsing conventions and primaries, provides arguably the best of each system, with our primary elections either confirming or overruling the endorsements of the respective political conventions.

Finally, Meeks complains that the DFL has elected two governors and an attorney general without convention endorsement in the past 14 years, while Minnesota Republicans have failed to select any winning statewide officials since 2006. It appears that Meeks' true intent, in proposing to eliminate the political caucus system, is to find a way to rehabilitate the moribund Republican Party of Minnesota.

Peter Hill, Minnetonka

I hardly could disagree more with Meeks' commentary on Minnesota elections.

First of all, candidates (such as I once was) come and go, but issues are always here for discussion, hopefully in a civil atmosphere. While participation in caucuses, alias town meetings, has decreased, this largely is due to the manner in which politics in this country has developed into prioritizing party ideology over national/international concerns. "Politics," incidentally, derives from the Greek "politikos" and refers to being involved in the larger community reaching beyond one's self. Thus, peaceful, meaningful grassroots engagement is to be promoted to help connect members of the community.

It behooves us to understand from where Meeks is coming. She was the deputy chief of staff for Newt Gingrich. Also, her organization, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, is conducting a misguided and misinformed opposition to ranked-choice voting in our state.

Richard Laybourn, Bloomington

The writer was a Citizens Party candidate for Congress in the Third District.

STATE SEN. NICOLE MITCHELL

Ethics suddenly matter to the gop.

There is a high degree of irony in Minnesota Senate Republicans' current efforts to push for the expulsion of DFL Sen. Nicole Mitchell after her recent arrest ( "Session upended by state senator's arrest," April 25). While Michell's actions are concerning, Republicans are set to nominate as their candidate for president a man who has been charged with dozens of felonies in the past year. Given this context, it's hard to see Senate Republicans' action as anything more than a partisan effort to weaken the DFL's political power.

Sam Benson, Minneapolis

PRESIDENTIAL RACE

I've had it with dems. rfk it is..

Why am I ending my support for the Democratic Party? When compared to all the other ills of the world, there is none worse than war. War is hell. It is the ultimate evil that must be avoided. Take for example one snapshot into the lives of the people of Gaza. Yet, my Democratic U.S. representatives continue to fund war against Palestine, against Russia and a ramping up of war tensions with China.

I believe in protecting the environment, upholding women's reproductive rights and funding public education. But I will tolerate any backsliding in progress in those areas rather than continue to vote for a party that has become the party of war. A party that doesn't unequivocally stand against war and doesn't advocate for peace is not a moral authority and cannot be trusted to govern. Like Martin Luther King Jr., I condemn "any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality." Given the choice between the party of war or the party of Donald Trump, the party of Trump is the lesser evil. However, my vote will go to the candidate who is willing to take on the military-industrial complex, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That's a vote against a duopoly that repeatedly tears apart countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.) for its own profits and global dominance.

Mark Robinson, St. Paul

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