Original subtitles

-I am announcing today my candidacy

for the presidency of the United States.

I run to seek new policies,

policies to close the gaps

that now exist between black and white,

between rich and poor,

between young and old.

I run for the presidency

because I want the United States of America

to stand for hope instead of despair.

I have traveled and I have listened to the young people

of our nation and felt their anger

about the war that they are sent to fight

and about the world that they are about to inherit.

- Last week he criticized the Vietnam policy.

This week he focused attention on the plight of the poor.

These are not ordinary times

and this is not an ordinary election.

The fight is just beginning.

- Campaign '68, the Indiana primary.

This primary would offer the first toe to toe meeting

between Senators Kennedy and McCarthy.

- There's more that we have to accomplish.

I think the deep divisions

within our country are unacceptable.

I think that we can heal them.

I think that we can do better.

- Senator Robert Kennedy has won

the first primary test.

- He apparently will have all 23 votes

at the Democratic National Convention.

- And I intend to go on trying to do that

in the state of Nebraska and the state of Oregon

and the state of California.

- Well, it's a real horse race out in Oregon.

Senator Eugene McCarthy by a 6% victory margin

over Senator Robert Kennedy.

- Good luck to you, Mr. Kennedy.

Thank you very much.

- Get 'em, Bob-- good luck to you.

Thank you.

That war still goes on.

Of all of the presidential candidates,

I was the first one to speak out against

the way the war was being conducted.

I'm not going to be satisfied until that war is over

and American Soldiers are brought back here.

- An hour and a half after the polls have closed

in California,

the biggest primary of them all,

a slate of delegates pledged to Senator Eugene McCarthy.

It's a very tight race now.

McCarthy has 43%.

That small gain, Kennedy is pulling ahead.

The votes are all in now.

Senator Robert Kennedy claiming victory in California.

He's entering the ballroom

and you can hear the cheers from the supporters.

My thanks to all of you,

and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.

Kennedy has been shot.

- Robert, do you think there's a Kennedy curse?

I don't know if there's a curse

or whether there might be a gene

that disposes people in my family toward risk.

In the summertime during the Camelot years,

I was raised on Cape Cod and we lived almost communally

in a compound where each family had a house

that was next to each other.

All the kids, there were 29 cousins

and we ate together every night and we ate at a different house.

And then all the kids played together during the day.

We had a regimen.

We had to take tennis lessons, sailing lessons, boxing lessons.

- It's like summer camp. - Like summer camp.

We played baseball every day and we played football every day

and we all did that together.

So it was really like being raised

in one really massive family.

Did your mother ever hug you

or father ever hug you?

-Oh yeah.

There was affection.

-Yeah, there was lots of affection in our family,

lots of fights and lots of affection.

- I want to ask you now about your father.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy

paints a grim picture of the rise of lawlessness

under the Cosa Nostra or mafia.

This he describes as the government of organized

gambling, narcotics peddling, extortion, racketeering

and controlling of certain trade unions.

He says the income runs into billions.

- Bobby Kennedy,

I mean, he was a born investigator.

He was a fantastic investigator, senate investigator.

What did you do then Mr. Hoffa?

Did you say, "That SOB, I'll break his back."

- Who? - You.

You can't remember what you talked about

and you can't remember whether he was in your--

-Wouldn't have been anything of any importance, Mr. Kennedy

and I can't recall it.

- Tell me, does Bob ever strike you

as a seemingly mild-mannered man for a rackets investigator?

-Well, I'm awfully surprised most of the time

when he really keeps his temper,

when witnesses aren't telling the truth

and being quite frank

or when they take the Fifth Amendment so often.

-You knew this was going on for all this period of time.

Mr. Hoffa, it's just beyond the powers of comprehension

that you can't recall that.

- Just a matter of great self-control.

Is that right?

-I think so.

- Robert Kenny was definitely more conservative

than his brother initially

and saw the world in a little more black and white terms

than JFK did.

Bobby really didn't like politicians

and didn't want to have anything to do with politics

and was kind of dragged kicking

and screaming into supporting his brother

when he first ran for senator.

- My brother Bobby, who managed the campaign,

perhaps he could give us some idea more up to date

of what the final figures were.

-I think that what we got up to about 20 minutes ago,

you were winning by about 70,000.

- Well, I'm guess you're glad it's over,

aren't you Bobby?

- I am at that. - Okay.

It was not his choice.

Bobby had a nice job with the Department of Justice then

investigating communists and subversives

and he enjoyed that.

He was good at that.

He didn't want to get involved in politics.

-I am today announcing my candidacy

for the presidency of the United States.

- But he really came to believe in his brother

and his vision for the world

and what a really good leader could do for the world.

Now my wife and I prepare

for a new administration and for a new baby.

In the appointments I have made,

I have sought the most qualified men,

men of ability and a desire to serve their country.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the appointment

of Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General.

- That building across the street

there is the US Department of Justice.

You may be able to see lights burning

in the fifth floor office

of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

The late night work is a symbol

of the vigor of the Kennedy administration.

Then Attorney General Kennedy

declared his major mission--

hunting organized crime.

Some of these big time gangsters

corrupt the very system under which we live

and something has to be done about it

and the only thing that's going to be done

is by the American people

and those charged with authority,

taking some major steps and doing them now.

The Attorney General, Bobby,

is a very attractive human being,

but his greatest weakness,

the thing that I've worried about before he was appointed

is that when he's bent on what he thinks

is the right course,

he's rather ruthless in action.

- Mr. Hoffa, Robert Kennedy called

for a broader wiretap law.

-I say that if he can push through a wiretap,

he can have a greater police state

than he already has in this country.

-Have a couple of words with you, sir?

- An attorney general like Bobby Kennedy,

he has a personal desire

to destroy those who may oppose him.

- And was true.

He was a pretty ruthless guy.

He was taken on these, he was taken on mob figures.

- Would you tell us if you have opposition

from anybody that you dispose of them

by having them stuffed in a trunk?

Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?

-I decline to answer because I honestly believe

my answer might tend incriminate me.

Can you tell us anything

about any of your operations

or you just giggle every time I ask you a question?

I thought only a little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.

He was a crusader

that really didn't care who he stepped on.

- As the Kennedy presidency went on,

Bobby Kennedy had to take on more and more responsibilities.

He was in charge of civil rights.

-These students are going to attend

the University of Alabama.

- During the most increasingly hostile

and tense moments of the presidency.

- James Hood is the first of his race

to become a University of Alabama student.

- In fact, Bobby Kennedy was put

kind of in charge of the CIA in an informal way.

Bobby began each day driving from McLean, Virginia,

his estate, past Langley, the CIA's headquarters

and stopping to keep an eye on the CIA.

He was also in charge of Cuba.

President Kennedy gave him the Cuba portfolio

as part of his anti-communist task force.

Why was Bobby Kennedy compelled to take on

all this responsibility?

Because his brother, JFK,

couldn't trust his own State Department,

the Pentagon, and of course, the CIA.

- And my uncle and my father realized

that the CIA was a problem.

Dulles had lied to him about the Bay of Pigs.

Director Allen Dulles

was working on the plan to invade Cuba

and get rid of Fidel Castro

by enlisting right-wing Cuban exiles

who were living in Miami and hated Castro.

- My uncle, he didn't want to do it.

He thought we would look like a bully

if we had anything to do with an invasion of Cuba.

And Dulles persuaded him that the Cuban brigade

would not need US help.

- At a place called the Bay of Pigs,

a landing was made by a Cuban exile brigade.

The brigade recruited, paid, trained,

supplied by the CIA in perhaps the largest covert operation

in the history of subversion.

But the invasion of Cuba failed

and the Cuban exiles were caught,

a lot of them, and taken prisoner by Castro.

- The Bay of Pigs disaster was a military

and diplomatic defeat for the new president.

- President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy figured out

that Allen Dulles knew well in advance

that the Cuban brigade were not capable

of pulling off such a mission.

Castro could only be overthrown

if the full might of the US military came in.

- He had planned for the operation to fail

in the hopes that Kennedy would not want to fail

and send in the troops.

There were Navy ships positioned right off Cuba

ready to go in and support the operation.

Kennedy is just furious

and he fires Allen Dulles,

this legendary director who has served

every president since Woodrow Wilson.

But unbeknownst to the Kennedys

elements of the CIA and the military were rogue.

They were going off on their own in order to achieve

what they believed were the right objectives--

assassinate Castro, take him out.

And in fact, the CIA kept enlisting mafia figures

and they were the ones who were helping arrange

for these assassination plots against Castro inside of Cuba.

Bobby Kennedy was furious

when he heard that the mafia of all people

who he was going after--

Public Enemy Number One--

was working with the CIA.

He confronted the CIA about this.

He said with icy sarcasm,

I hope in the future that you will have the goodness

to tell the Attorney General if you're working with the mob.

- The Kennedys said the assassination plots

against Castro have got to stop, but they didn't stop.

- Even as Robert Kennedy is telling the CIA,

"Don't kill Castro,"

they had plots in motion to kill Castro

and so they just didn't tell him.

I mean, the insubordination of the CIA against

the Kennedy brothers is shocking to me.

- Good evening, my fellow citizens.

Unmistakable evidence has established the fact

that a series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on the island of Cuba.

The purpose of these bases can be none other

than to provide a nuclear strike capability

against the western hemisphere.

The world was on the brink

of a nuclear holocaust.

- Unfortunately, for JFK, all his other advisors,

every single one of them was advocating bombing Cuba.

- The Kennedy brothers were determined

not to push this to the brink as the generals

who just wanted to go in and bomb the missile sites,

Bobby was the only one who said,

we can't do that.

This is crazy going in and bombing Cuba.

If we blow them up, there will be retaliation from the Soviets

and this could quickly escalate to nuclear war.

It was really Robert Kennedy

who just took command of this situation.

- He had the moral clarity to see

that preventing nuclear war was the greatest good.

- Interestingly, Robert Kennedy Jr has recalled

that they wanted the Kennedy family,

all the kids, to leave the city of Washington

or Hickory Hill and go into a protected bunker

that had been set up for high officials

and they didn't do that.

Their father said, if I pull you guys out of school

and take you to that bunker, the country is going to panic,

so let's just go on and go to school as usual

and we'll solve this thing.

- It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba

as an attack requiring a full retaliatory response

upon the Soviet Union.

- Robert Kennedy had a channel to the Russians--

back channel to the Premier Khrushchev.

- There were two messages that came in back to back.

- Friday night, got a message from Khrushchev.

- First one was like, we will consider your terms,

and the second one was, we don't accept your terms

and Bobby's like answer the first letter,

don't answer the second one.

- Have to wait to see how it unfolds

and there's a good deal of complexities to it.

And through Bobby's diplomacy,

they worked out a deal.

- Which said that he would withdraw

these missiles and technicians

and so on providing we withdrew our missiles from Turkey.

- And we agreed also not to try to kill Castro,

not to invade the island.

But we don't plan to invade Cuba

under these conditions, anyway.

- The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world

closer to a nuclear holocaust than anything we've seen since.

- Across the world goes a long sigh of relief,

and with it, the world's first nuclear showdown is over.

- Without Bobby, if Bobby hadn't have been there,

there's no guarantee America would be here today

or any of us for that matter.

He was called ruthless.

But the fascinating thing about Robert Kennedy was that

he was willing to grow and change.

- And your father changed when, then?

- The day that his brother was killed.

- Hello?

- My father changed after my uncle's death.

- Ten years after his death,

Robert Kennedy's widow and children

and home are still very much together.

So little seems to have changed.

There still are dogs everywhere and children underfoot

or airborne and something happening almost all the time.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is 24 now,

a Harvard graduate and is entering law school.

- Do you think your father's career

will ultimately have an influence on where you go?

- Well, like I said before,

I think that really we've been raised the way we've been raised

and I think the way that most of my family thinks

is that his goals and a lot of his ideals

were really worth pursuing.

I didn't necessarily say I was going to go into politics.

I'd always wanted to be a veterinarian,

but I think I felt some pressure after my father died

to sort of change my career to try to do more of

the kind of thing that he was trying to do.

And I ended up, rather than going to veterinary school,

going to law school

and really followed his career path.

I went to Harvard and then to University of Virginia,

which he had done,

and then I became an attorney and a prosecutor,

which was kind of what my father had been doing.

- In the wake of your father's death,

you try to follow in his footsteps.

You're going to the same schools,

you become an attorney,

but it didn't seem to work out and at this time,

in this area, you have a drug addiction.

How does that play out?

- I started experimenting with drugs

when I was 15, so a year after my dad's death.

I never even had drank coffee by the time I was 15

and then I was at a party for the older brother

of a friend of mine in Cape Cod who had been drafted

and was being shifted off to Vietnam

and it was his goodbye party.

I was hitchhiking home from that party

and an older kid picked me up and he offered me LSD.

And LSD had just come to Cape Cod

with the Merry Pranksters that night.

I would not have taken LSD,

but the week before these older kids had eaten peyote

and they had taken a hallucinogenic trip

and it had brought them back in time

where they saw dinosaurs

and my favorite comic book

that I read every month was called Turok Son of Stone,

which is about these two Indians.

So I said to this kid,

"If I take LSD, will I see dinosaurs?"

And he said, "You might."

And I had a trip that lasted probably for ten hours,

extreme hallucinations

and I had a ball, I had a lot of fun,

but I was coming home in the morning

and I was crashing and I was feeling depressed

and remorseful and saying,

"I'm never going to do that again."

Plus, I had to go back and face my mom

and we had a curfew

and I was going to just be in misery

and I saw these boys in the woods,

they were all on LSD that night.

I said to them I'm really crashing on this

and feel miserable.

And they said, "Try some of this,"

and it was crystal meth.

And I took it so it was like I was in heaven

and it solved all my problems.

And that was the template

for my addiction for the next 14 years

of me constantly trying to stop

and telling myself I'm never going to do that again

and then finding myself doing it.

I ran away from home when I was 16 years old

and hopped freight trains across the country,

disappeared for three months.

I worked in a lumber camp in Colorado.

I hitchhiked and rode the trains all over the country

and had no contact with my mother.

- Is this because she was tough?

- My mother, I had a very troubled relationship

with my mother from when I was born.

She had a chemical reaction to me

and I had the same thing to her

and where my presence would get her agitated.

- Bobby, who are you named after?

- You, Bobby?

- Can you get up and tell the television

who you're named after, Bobby?

No.

Bobby, who are you putting over your head?

- Percy.

Percy his elephant.

And uh--

I knew him.

He ran away as a kid.

He was kicked out of the house so many times on his adventures,

but he loved his mother and his mother loved him.

He was always the favorite.

That's why when he screwed up so much,

she was so disappointed with him.

In the family at that point,

he was persona non grata

and ended up not just getting into drugs

like LSD or marijuana that were happening at the time,

but also heroin.

He went through law school,

heavily addicted.

He passed his bar exam after a few tries,

heavily addicted.

I think heroin for me,

it was self-medicating.

I had been so restless before.

I was probably ADHD.

Nowadays they'd probably give me,

put me on Adderall and stuff because I could not sit still

and the world was moving so fast for me.

And then heroin slowed it down and allowed me to focus

and read and concentrate.

I went from being really among the worst people in my class

academically to the top of my class.

But it works until it stops working

and it turns on you.

-Let's say hello to this remarkable young man.

-Absolutely.

-Mr. Robert Kennedy Jr.

Be right back.

Come on in here.

Who have you got there, Bobby?

- This is an American Golden eagle.

What do you think, Joey?

He was functioning,

I mean, I'm sure that he was not functioning

at his optimal level, but he was functioning.

He held a job and stuff like that.

I wanted to ask you about,

you think eventually you'll go into politics?

-I don't know.

That in itself is a pipe dream.

Through Robert Morgenthal

who'd known his father,

Bobby got a job with the DA's office

in New York.

- As an attorney, what were you doing?

-I was prosecuting criminals.

At the same time,

he would go up to Harlem and enter these tenements

in really rough neighborhoods and score heroin.

- He went to rehab about five times.

I drove him to rehab three or four times

and it never worked, the times I took him.

It would work for a while

and when he was trying to get off

and I would try and chase the drug dealers away from him

to keep them away from him, but eventually he relapsed.

- At that point, I really wanted to stop.

I was going out to Minnesota

to a rehab and I OD'd.

I took too much heroin and I nodded out on the airplane

and somebody saw it and they reported me

and then I got busted.

And when I got off the plane, the police were waiting for me.

It's probably the best thing that ever happened to me

because I had such a fear that my addiction

was going to get in the newspapers,

but at this point everybody knew I had the problem

so I could start talking about it

and that was the beginning of my recovery.

When he was sentenced,

part of his sentence was to go to rehab.

He had been through rehab a number of times,

but this was his final time

and he suddenly had an awakening.

- That was a real turning point for him

and it really saved his life.

I got sober in 1983.

And how old were you?

-I was 28.

-You were still working as an attorney?

-Yeah.

-And what happens then

after you go through this period of change?

-When I got sober, I realized

I need to be true to myself.

I wanted to be working with nature

and I wanted to be outside.

I decided to work for an environmental group.

- He started with the Natural Resources Defense Council,

which is the leading environmental group

in the country.

This is how he became an environmental lawyer.

- I took all the training that I had

as a district attorney, as an attorney and a prosecutor,

and started prosecuting environmental crimes

by taking polluters to court.

- That also awakened something deep inside him.

When he was an 8-year-old kid, he loved animals

and he loved the fishes

and all the animals in the wild,

and all of a sudden he had a chance

to have a career of this and that was thrilling for him.

When I was young,

nature to me was always something that was important.

It was a connection that I had with my father.

- Bobby's father used to organize

whitewater rafting trips starting when he was very young.

- All of these rivers in the United States

that we've traveled down,

I think it's a great natural resource

that I'd like to have the children see and enjoy.

What you like the best, Bobby?

- I liked it when we went on the hikes

and I caught a lot of reptiles.

Bobby caught a rattlesnake,

and put it in a bottle,

which was very nice for all of us.

- In 1966, his father had taken him

to the Hudson River

and his father was appalled at what he saw.

You couldn't eat the fish from the river.

Commercial fishermen had all been put out of business.

Oil spills from Exxon Mobil,

the pollution from the General Electric Company

and Monsanto.

I mean, it was just terrible.

- Well, he told me he was determined

to clean it up.

- Bobby ended up joining a new organization

called the Riverkeepers.

- Riverkeepers was started by a group

of commercial fishermen,

eager to protect their environment.

They decided long before

the word environmentalist was coined

that they were going to do something about

oil spills, sewage.

They were going to stand up and fight.

Then the Riverkeeper asked me

to come and work for them as their full-time attorney.

- And Bobby was there on behalf of the NRDC

and began to patrol the river with John Cronin.

They became partners and they would actually,

they'd really get out there and look for polluters

- And I found about 24 different polluters.

I photographed them.

I took samples and I then brought lawsuits

against all 24 polluters.

Bobby Kennedy was suing

under the Clean Water Act.

- It's illegal to pollute the waters

of the United States.

You have to pay a high penalty if you do pollute.

- And it outlawed things like dumping PCBs

into the Hudson River.

Soon after he joined Riverkeepers,

he was out gathering some fish with the nets

and I went out with him.

We had big boots on and stuff

and he told me we just won a $2 million judgment.

They had sued Exxon for polluting the Hudson River.

I realized that he was onto something big.

- In the face of enormous industrial pressure,

we've been able to save this river.

We came here in 1985.

We found it really a polluted cesspool,

but now it seems pretty clean

and there's a relative abundance of fish in it.

Today, the Hudson River is

one of the cleanest in the country

and you can eat the fish again.

And it was the efforts of Bobby and John Cronin

and Riverkeeper that made that happen.

- To travel up this magnificent river,

such a landmark throughout the United States

and see the amount of pollution that's taken place.

I think that we should do something about it.

Bobby was sober

and really dedicated to his causes.

This was the passion that he had.

This was his mission in life.

In those early years, he really was fearless.

Do you think the Spotted Owl

put a lot of people out of work?

- First of all, that is an exaggeration.

Okay, I just asked.

- He was lionized.

He wrote a book at the time.

It was a big bestseller.

- Crimes Against Nature is now out in paperback.

It's on the bookshelves now. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He was changing the world

and I think that he felt that and he was committed to that.

And by the early 2000s,

Bobby was the leading environmental lawyer

in the United States.

He was taking on Smithfield Foods

and suing them for dumping waste from their industrial hog farms.

There's no right to pollute.

The polluter pays.

This battle that we're all fighting for today,

this is the battle against ignorance and greed.

- 2004, he was asked at the Democratic Convention--

the Bush administration was in power

and he was taking them on.

He has put polluters in charge

of all the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect

Americans from pollution.

The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.

-Time magazine called him a Hero of the Planet.

-Please welcome Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

- Good to see you again, Mr. Kennedy.

- I took a lot of river trips with Bobby

and a small river was being poisoned by

a paper mill upstream.

All the animal life around the river

were being poisoned by mercury,

and I think he was very affected by that.

- Mercury, it's a very, very dangerous chemical.

In 17 states, it's now unsafe to eat

any fresh water fish because of mercury.

It's coming from coal burning power plants.

- We are the Saudi Arabia of coal,

are we not?

- I think I've got a good sense of who I am

and I'm very proud of my father, of my uncles,

but I don't feel competitive with them.

I love the gifts that I've been given

and feel like I want to use those in whatever way

that I'm supposed to,

like my father did with his gifts.

-Please welcome Robert F. Kennedy Jr to the program.

Robert, nice to see you.

-Likewise. -As we adjust our chairs...

Normally known more for environmental causes

and I guess to a certain extent this is apropos of that.

Most recently you're talking about the link between autism

and vaccinations.

Pretty controversial.

Back in the early 2000s,

Bobby was giving talks all over the country,

like 200 talks a year, just about.

And he began to find that there were all these women

showing up at his talks sitting in the front row,

and some of them began coming up to him afterwards and saying,

"What you're saying about mercury

"from coal burning power plants is true

"and it's all well and good, but...

"somebody has got to look into the fact

"that mercury in childhood vaccines

"in a preservative called Thimerosal

"is causing neurocognitive deficiencies in our kids,

including an outbreak of autism."

Bobby wanted nothing to do with this,

but they kept coming up to him.

And finally there was a woman named Sarah Bridges

whose son had autism.

So she came to Hyannis with a big box of evidence.

-Brought a banker's box.

I gave him an impassioned one minute--

I thought it was really compelling,

what happened to my son.

How he was a totally normal four month old

who received nine vaccines

and he had a two hour seizure.

The ER doctor pulled me aside and said,

"You've had a classic vaccine reaction"

and acknowledged that he had been brain damaged by his vaccines.

And Bobby looked at me and said, "I'm not interested."

And I said, "Would you just read some of these articles?"

And he said, "I will read a few."

And unbeknownst to me,

he sat up and read the majority of them that night.

He said, "Something's wrong here."

"I'm going to get involved in this. I'm in."

- In the beginning, he didn't want to do it,

but nobody was willing to take this on.

Who else was gonna do it?

-Between 1989 and 2003,

almost all of our vaccinations included a material

called Thimerosal,

which breaks down to form mercury.

It was a preservative,

it was unnecessary to add to the vaccines.

And we saw during that period a dramatic increase

in neurological disorders among American children

speech delay, language delay, Dyslexia, and autism.

- When he was born, my son was very alert.

He was born with a head full of hair

and then my son had been vaccinated for hepatitis B.

His hair fell out.

He was just not as alert.

I was trying to read everything I could get my hands on

to find out what happened to my son.

And there was a young lady in the hospital

who had given me a pamphlet on what the vaccines might contain

and the mercury just stood out.

-When we had our meeting with CDC

and we shared all of our concerns,

they sat and listened patiently

and then at the end of the meeting,

they handed us this one page paper

saying that they had looked at this already

and they found no evidence of harm.

Everything was fine.

So we decided to file FOIA documents

to get all of the records not only from CDC

but also from FDA at the time.

And it took a while to get those,

but when we did get them

it was obvious going through those records,

along with all their internal emails,

that Mercury is incredibly toxic.

And they were very concerned

and they had actually found statistically significant

associations between exposure

to Thimerosal and ADD, ADHD,

speech and language delays and also autism.

What I've been saying is

people are going to be frightened about vaccines

if they don't trust the federal regulators

to be honest with the American people.

There was one arm of the FDA

that dealt with over the counter products

and they had done all these investigations

back in the eighties

and found out that Thimerosal used in contact lens drops

and over the counter products actually wasn't safe.

And so, they had made a recommendation

that it be removed from over the counter products,

but CBER,

the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,

which is the ones who oversee vaccines,

they left it in.

So how can you have one arm of an agency

saying Thimerosal is toxic and we shouldn't be using it,

and another arm of the agency injecting it into our children?

- And this convinced Bobby that the agency, again,

that was supposed to be protecting people,

was in league with these pharmaceutical companies.

So it became a big part of what he began

to speak about publicly.

- If these vaccine makers are allowing

a certain compound into these vaccinations

that's causing autism and they now know it,

why are they fighting so hard?

-Well, how many of us would want to admit

that a decision we made had poisoned

a whole generation of American children?

- Now Thimerosal was taken out of vaccines

after this outcry began.

- I appreciate you getting the word out.

And I know parents of kids with autism truly appreciate it

and I know that it's a very difficult thing for them

to be dealing with, so I'm sure they appreciate the help.

- The NRDC was not happy

with his taking on this vaccine issue,

nor was these various groups that he had worked with

for many, many years

and people began to urge him to get away from this issue

and he refused to do it.

So he wrote a big article for Salon and Rolling Stone.

What Bobby discovered was back in 1986,

during the Reagan years, the vaccine manufacturers

were granted no liability from prosecution.

Pharma went to Congress

and worked out a deal where there would be a fund set up,

the vaccine injury fund, that pharma pays no money into.

So the government, they're handing out these

multimillion dollar awards to children damaged by vaccines,

but simultaneously saying they are unequivocally safe.

- There was a turning point

where Bobby Jr. and Sarah Bridges

went to a meeting at the New York Times

to try to get the New York Times into the vaccine issue.

- The main editor said, can't do it.

Not, you're wrong.

Not, let's look more deeply into this.

Said, "Can't do it."

"Big pharma is our biggest donor."

And that was the end of that.

- Suddenly he couldn't write op-eds anymore

and he couldn't even eventually get a letter

to the editor published

after writing op-eds

about environmental issues for the New York Times

and many, many places for years,

being declared a Hero of the Planet.

And then in 2011, Salon retracted the article

that he had written back, some years before.

- Suddenly the New York Times would be like,

these are crazy people.

And that's when the label of anti-vaxxer

and conspiracy theorists came about.

- And what Bobby's about is making vaccines safe.

And it's not about not having the vaccines.

That's a part of a conversation that always gets pushed aside.

-It's pretty stunning to see

how quickly Bobby moved from person of the year

on environmental issues, such a thought leader,

to a total pariah.

- It was the beginning of a very painful period.

- Just haven't decided what I'm going to do

in the future.

Well, I just don't know what I'm going to do

and I just have to leave it like that.

I just don't know what I'll do.

Oh, well, I might like to be associated with a university.

Teaching, maybe, going to school perhaps.

I don’t know.

After his brother's murder,

Bobby Kennedy's prone to great bouts of depression.

I think Bobby was suicidally depressed.

And during this dark time, he's asked again and again,

did Lee Harvey Oswald really kill your brother on his own?

Do you believe in the lone gunman theory?

And this has to be painful for Bobby Kennedy

because he alone knows that he's probably the only one

who can get to the bottom of what really happened

to his brother.

- Something has happened in the motorcade route.

Standby please.

- Bobby Kennedy got a call from J. Edgar Hoover,

the head of the FBI, who coldly informed him

that your brother's been killed.

That was it.

Hoover hung up the phone.

Immediately, Bobby Kennedy

realizes two things.

The man that he's deeply devoted to,

his brother who he loves dearly, is now dead.

And number two, whatever authority he has

as Attorney General is now disappearing by the minute.

He has only hours maybe

to get to the bottom of the crime.

Did you shoot the president?

-I didn't shoot anybody. No sir.

I'm just a patsy!

He immediately suspected

there was not a lone gunman

because the people there that day,

his closest aids who were World War II veterans,

knew the sound of gunfire

and told him we were riding into an ambush.

It was a crossfire.

So where did he look in trying to figure out

what had happened to his brother?

His first call was to the CIA

and said, "Did you guys kill my brother?"

Bobby was worried that they had pushed the CIA really hard

on not invading Cuba after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And that had been the response.

- Report that the president was hit in the head.

Bobby Kennedy also suspected

that the right wing anti-Castro exiles were involved somehow.

Exiles who were embittered

by what had happened with JFK during the Bay of Pigs

and then coming to an accommodation with Castro

during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

- And who was the third party that he suspected

in the assassination of his brother?

- There is Leo.

He's been shot.

Lee Oswald has been shot.

There's a man with a gun.

-I was standing in the White House

in the East Room

and we were standing next to my uncle's casket.

Lyndon Johnson came in and told my father and Jackie

and my mother who were standing there with me

that a man named Jack Ruby just killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

And after they absorbed that information,

I said to my mom, why did he do that?

Did he do it because he loved our family?

And so I think anybody who saw what happened with Jack Ruby

would have that same question.

Why did he do it in a police station wide open

when he was bound to be caught?

And of course he didn't have a love for our family.

He had the opposite.

- Who's Jack Ruby?

Bobby Kennedy puts people on this right away

and they report back to him within hours.

Jack Ruby is mobbed up.

He's a mob errand boy.

And Jack Ruby's phone records

on the month before the murder were many, many calls

almost entirely to people that my dad had indicted.

-I thought only little girls giggled Mr. Giancana.

- So Bobby Kennedy suspected the CIA.

He knew the mob was involved somehow

and of course in the Cuban exile underground,

all three of which were working closely together,

they were working together to kill a Fidel Castro in Cuba.

And of course Bobby Kennedy came to the conclusion

they turned their guns on his brother.

He has a lot of guilt about the assassination.

He thinks he should have protected his brother.

He thinks he should have seen this plot coming.

The family all convened at the White House

preparing for the funeral

and Bobby had said to the family that day in confidence

we know Jack was killed by a conspiracy.

We know there were very powerful forces.

It was a domestic political conspiracy,

but we can't do anything.

My plan is to run for public office

and eventually get back to the White House

and then I'll have the authority

to get to the bottom of the crime.

But imagine how difficult that path was for him.

He knew that was years away,

but he knew he had to be patient and bide his time

until he could bring official resources

to the investigation.

- Who actually fired the shots that killed Kennedy?

Was there a conspiracy?

The new president, Lyndon Johnson

ordered these questions answered.

- Here you have this blue ribbon commission

that's supposed to independently get to the bottom

of what really happened in Dallas

and right away, it's compromised.

- Basically the Warren Commission

was run by Allen Dulles of the CIA.

Dulles was still very angry

and bitter about his firing by President Kennedy.

-Fired by Kennedy, he becomes the most influential

member of the Warren Commission

investigating what happened to Kennedy.

-The Warren Commission makes these major findings.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy.

He did it alone.

- There is no credible evidence

that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy

to assassinate President Kennedy.

- And Bobby Kennedy knew if he said,

I suspect the story is bigger than that,

that powerful forces did it, all hell would break loose.

And he knew it would actually be traumatic for the country.

- It would have impeded his capacity

to participate in public life.

So you really, he didn't want to pick that fight

and he stayed silent about it.

- Can you tell us a few memories of Jack?

Was he warm with you?

- My Uncle Jack was part of my life

from when I was born.

He knew how to talk to children.

He was wonderful with children.

But for example, I sat next to him

on the way back from the convention in 1960.

I sat in the seat next to him on the airplane

and he talked to me the whole time

and he had a lot of other things to do at that point.

- Well, I think really he made

Americans feel young again.

I think that he gave all of us more confidence in the country

and that we were dedicated to certain principles and ideals

and that we would live up to them

and if necessary fight for them.

In the course of this,

Bobby is still trying to come to terms with

what do I do now?

What was I going to do with my life?

- Well, I've thought some of my future

over the period of the last few months

and some people from New York and elsewhere

have spoken to me about running in New York

and it's possibility that I'm considering

as I'm considering many other possibilities.

- Bobby Kennedy then stepped down

as Attorney General of the United States

and ended up running for the Senate in New York.

- In 1963, the people in the Plattsburgh area

paid $12 million in taxes for schools.

If my opponent had his way, your area would've lost...

I stumbled on it.

If my opponent had his way, stop it.

Go ahead. Tell me.

I need your help and support in November.

- He appreciates this tremendous reception,

but he has a message to give to you

and the American people.

- Chairman McCormick, I accept your nomination.

But the gladness of this high occasion

cannot mask the sorrow which shares our heart.

So let us keep burning the golden torch of promise,

which John Fitzgerald Kennedy set aflame.

Let us tomorrow turn to our new path.

Let us be on our way!

- And now it is my privilege and honor

to introduce Robert Kennedy.

Mister Chairman.

Mister Chairman.

- I request the delegates

to be seated

- My father was shattered after Jack's death.

And at that convention,

my father got this extraordinary outpouring of love

and he cried.

One of the few times anybody had ever seen him cry.

And he realized that, okay, maybe I have a future.

- We want Bobby! We want Bobby!

-President Kennedy said that we have the capacity

to make this the best generation in the history of mankind

or make it the last.

I think we can make it the best generation

in the history of mankind.

I think all of us joined together

can make that difference.

- He fights through the depression.

Am I a senator now?

- You will be.

I expect that, but...

- Reading poets and ancient Greeks

who give him kind of more perspective on life

and history and tragedy.

Parts of the Greek myths,

the flawed hero who gets meaning from life

by acting heroically even if everything fails

and the plays of Shakespeare.

And he began reading all of these

and incorporating them into his own cosmology.

And Senator Bobby Kennedy,

he also had a spiritual awakening.

- Bobby Kennedy became a truly compassionate individual

and that set him apart from other people running for office

and from the way he had been perceived when he was younger.

And it was true, he was a pretty ruthless guy.

That was no longer true

and he was a fighter for the people.

- I desperately needed that we raise

the minimum wage to $1.50 an hour here in the state.

To focus attention on the poisonous fumes

inflicted on the people who live in this area.

We've been discussing federal legislation governing rifles,

shotguns and hand guns, aftercare program

for narcotics addicts.

The average Indian income is $1,500,

75% below the national average.

We don't think that it's acceptable,

as I've said before,

with the gross national product that this country has,

with the great amount of wealth that this country has,

that we still have people who can't find jobs.

We still have children who don't have enough to eat

and don't have clothes to wear.

- The attribute he most admired in someone was

if they had moral courage,

if they were willing to stand on their ideals

against all odds sometimes.

- And he decided,

that he would buck the Democratic party,

the Democratic establishment

and the military industrial complex.

We had, we'd been waging this stupid war for so long

and 50,000 Americans died

and he didn't care what happened to him.

-A Southeast Asia dominated by communist power

would bring a third world war much closer to terrible reality.

Since I reported to you last January,

the enemy has been defeated in battle after battle.

- At this point in the Democratic party,

it was wrong to speak out against the Vietnam War.

- The war in Vietnam has escalated

at a fantastic rate.

- Do you see any immediate solution?

- There will be some who will become frustrated

and bothered and break ranks under the strain

and some will turn on their leaders

and on their country and on our own fighting men.

-Would you be inclined to oppose

further escalation of the war?

- I think first that we should make this major

kind of effort to find a peaceful solution,

and I think that's vital

no matter what the turn of events

might be in the next few months.

- The holiday was Tet--

the Lunar New Year.

The enemy, very deceitfully

has taken advantage of the Tet truce.

The Viet Kong had chosen

a number of strategic targets,

a suicide attack in the American Embassy.

The Tet Offensive in 1968

showed that we were not winning this war

as we'd been assured by the powers that be in Washington.

It was an awakening, especially for Bobby.

- There is no real dialogue about Vietnam.

We frequently won't let those who disagree with us speak.

I think it's a very, very bad mistake.

The whole country suffers and our society suffers.

- After the Tet Offensive,

the establishment was still behind Johnson

and trying to keep the party together.

We will stand firm in Vietnam.

- But Bobby quickly saw that the war

was turning into a disaster.

- This will make it necessary to raise

a monthly draft call from 17,000 to 35,000 per month.

Somebody wrote on the pyramids

at the time they were being constructed,

the words and no one was angry enough to speak out.

I think people should be angry enough to speak out.

if one feels involved in it,

that one should try to do something about it.

Our people and this nation

must be told the truth about this war

in all its terrible reality,

both because it is right,

both because it is right

and because the progress that we have claimed

toward increasing control over the country

and the security of the population

is largely illusionary.

The best way to save our most precious stake in Vietnam,

the lives of our soldiers,

is to stop the enlargement of the war.

And that the best way to end casualties

is to end the war.

This was an earthquake

that Bobby would come out so much against the war.

This sent shock waves through the establishment

and people were furious at him for speaking out about this.

-President Johnson said,

if you persisted in that line,

it would end your political career rapidly.

- All of it makes Bobby look like a great hero

and makes me look like a son of a bitch.

- Suddenly there was tremendous opposition

to the Vietnam policies that Johnson was advocating.

We don't say that we're never

going to disagree.

I think that there's much to disagree about,

and I think it's within the Democratic party

that we should have dissent.

I am at the moment reassessing what I should do

as not only as a member of the Democratic Party,

but more importantly as a United States citizen.

- And then Robert Kennedy announced

he was going to run for president.

-I run to seek new policies,

policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam

before it further saps our spirit.

- Civil rights, poverty in America,

the war in Vietnam.

That's why he's running mainly for the presidency.

Those major themes.

- Two weeks after Robert Kennedy announced

he was going to run for President,

Johnson saw the handwriting on the wall.

-I shall not seek

and I will not accept the nomination of my party

for another term as your president.

- Lyndon Johnson was bowing out of the race--

that opened it up.

- The Senator has spoken out often on Vietnam,

civil rights, and poverty.

And each time he has taken a minority position.

- I think we can find answers to these problems.

I think we can make progress.

- Robert Kennedy is the only man

that can do the job that we need done.

- Is there a second choice?

-There is no second choice as far as we're concerned.

Senator Robert Kennedy,

he was foreseeing a country that was leaving

a lot of people behind.

He was making alliances with small businessmen,

with farmers, with union members,

with Republicans.

- At the same time,

Bobby Kennedy took on the military industrial complex.

- I don't accept the idea of Vietnam

as just a military action,

that this is just a military effort.

Every time we have had difficulties in South Vietnam

and Southeast Asia, we have had only one response.

And that's to send more military men

and increase our military power.

And I don't think that's the kind of a struggle

that it is in Southeast Asia.

America was a great force in the world

with immense prestige

long before we became a great military power.

The generals in the army,

they knew him.

They didn't like him, they didn't trust him.

They felt he had a completely different agenda.

He wanted to end the war, bring our troops home.

And Bobby also saw that Bell Helicopter and Hughes

we're making a fortune selling helicopters

to the army in Vietnam.

And the CIA, they're running drugs,

they're trying out new tactics.

They're trying out expensive new weapons

like Monsanto's Agent Orange.

There is a ton of money being made off this terrible war

and the military industrial complex,

they didn't want it taken away.

Agent Orange was a defoliant,

one of those new weapons of war

supposed to turn the tide in Vietnam.

It was sprayed over 5 million acres of South Vietnam

from 1962 to 1970.

- It was one way we were going to win the war--

dump herbicides all over the jungle

so the Viet Kong would come out and fight.

Its use was restricted in 1970

because tests showed the ingredients in Agent Orange

caused cancer and birth defects.

- Newly-released court documents indicate

that the companies which manufactured Agent Orange

knew as far back as the 1960s that one of its ingredients

contained the toxic contaminant dioxin.

- A lethal ingredient in Agent Orange.

The government has now agreed

to pay $8 million a year to veterans.

Over the next six years,

the fund will pay out at least a quarter of a billion dollars

to veterans and their families,

including children not yet born.

Monsanto has been involved in

some of the worst environmental catastrophes in this country.

It was the creator of Agent Orange.

It was the creator of DDT.

I've been litigating against Monsanto

since I became an environmental lawyer 35 years ago.

- You have quite a long history with Monsanto.

I mean there's the Monsanto story in your life

seems to start because of Rachel Carson's book,

Silent Spring.

Was that the origin?

-You know, when I was a little kid,

I'd wanted to be a scientist or a vet.

I wanted to be like a field biologist like Rachel Carson.

One night, my uncle Jack and my father

had her over to Cape Cod.

I got to meet her and that was really important

because she really became my hero.

Biologist Rachel Carson,

worked four years in the preparation

of Silent Spring.

What she wrote has been called

the most controversial book of the year.

Up until that time,

nobody had any problem with pesticides like DDT.

- These insects can now be completely wiped out

by manmade fogs, loaded with DDT.

- Pesticides and the chemical industry

were putting us on top of the world.

We were going to have abundant food for everybody.

We were going to get rid of all the pests.

And Rachel Carson came along and said, yeah,

but actually pesticides, were imposing huge costs

that we're not seeing.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in '62

and it alerted people for the first time

that DDT is killing not just the predatory insects,

it's killing all the insects, killing the worms.

The fish are dying,

the songbirds are disappearing.

The spring is going to be silent

because there's going to be no bird song.

She became an enormous threat to the pesticide industry.

Monsanto, which was the manufacturer of DDT,

they mounted a nationwide campaign against Rachel Carson

to discredit her.

They had Life Magazine, Time Magazine all write attacks,

vicious attacks on her.

They used the same talking points.

She's a quack.

She's anti-science.

- This courageous woman had taken on

the powers that be showing the dangers of DDT

and was just vilified and taken apart by Monsanto.

-They had scientists going around the country

doing speeches condemning her.

- The major claims in Ms. Rachel Carson's book

are completely unsupported by scientific evidence

are gross distortions of the actual facts.

This became the blueprint

for all the other industries for how do you discredit

and destroy your critics.

Rachel Carson never defended herself

because she was dying of cancer at the time.

And my uncle commissioned a group.

He got Jerome Wiesner, who is a scientific advisor

to bring together a group of scientists

to actually read her book line by line.

The administration announced

that the government pesticide program

would be reviewed by a panel

of the President's Science Committee.

-I think particularly, of course

it's Ms. Carson's book,

but they are examining the matter.

-She gave three references for virtually every fact

in her book.

So she really...

-So she knew the stakes. -Yeah.

She knew she was going to be attacked

and they went through her book line by line

and they issued a report that validated everything.

And it exonerated her.

And Silent Spring became one of the greatest bestsellers

in history.

And then my uncle planned an Earth Day.

He was going around the country to talk about,

to promote the first day Earth Day,

and it was his last big campaign.

I'm very proud that my uncle vindicated Rachel Carson.

- Because of her book, Silent Spring,

DDT was banned.

She didn't live long enough to see that,

but it was outlawed in 1973 in this country.

Monsanto, they needed something after DDT got outlawed.

So they came up with glyphosate, which is now a known carcinogen,

and they began using this in their Roundup herbicide.

It was jarring to see

that there was this chemical, glyphosate,

that was causing cancer

because it was a pesticide that was so commonly used.

It was so pervasive in our agriculture

and our food systems and residential uses.

And no one's being warned about it.

-Even though over the years we saw this propaganda

where they'd say "Roundup is safe enough

to drink, basically."

There was this commercial

where this guy’s walking around in shorts

and a t-shirt shooting weeds on his driveway,

like fun little western-style commercial.

-Home gardeners, and they're wearing shorts and flip flops

and they're spraying Roundup.

They're going to get it on their skin

and it's going to be absorbed by their skin.

- So then in 2017 there was a groundskeeper,

Dewayne "Lee" Johnson,

he had the glyphosate Roundup Ready on his back.

I was applying the herbicide

and the hose snapped and it started to funnel out.

And the stuff was going everywhere,

it got on the outside of my suit,

it got inside my suit, it was on my face,

it was everywhere.

And that's where I got exposed.

And he ended up suffering

and almost dying from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma,

which is a form of cancer that's very deadly.

Glyphosate was responsible,

so he was one of the first clients

that this legal team took on Monsanto.

- Our lawsuits were about proving that

Monsanto knew and their failure to warn.

- Monsanto for years and years

and years since Agent Orange,

they're very involved in politics and lobbying

and so they just had an attitude in the United States

that they were untouchable.

- We really didn't have the resources

to take on a company like Monsanto.

So we started calling people that we knew

could help us fight this fight.

Because we knew we were outgunned and outmanned

and out moneyed for sure.

One of first people we called was Bobby

because he had gone up against Monsanto before

and he had known a lot of their tactics.

He'd known just how nasty they could be

to individual scientists,

particularly in water contamination

and his work with the Waterkeeper.

So he joined us right from the very beginning

and helped us develop this strategy and the process

through which we'd actually prosecute this case.

- For 40 years, Monsanto knew

that Roundup was carcinogenic and it made great efforts

to hide that from the American public.

The relationship with the EPA,

particularly as it relates to Roundup, is a tortured one,

to say the least.

- The EPA initially we're going to classify

glyphosate as a class C carcinogen,

and that's when Monsanto kicked the lobbying into high gear

and really fought that classification.

-And the political will to oppose Monsanto disappeared.

-Interactions between Monsanto scientists

and people actually within the EPA

is really how glyphosate got approved.

When I first got involved,

I believed in the EPA, just naively as I may have been.

I thought, oh, well, they must be mistaken.

And it was Bobby who explained to me,

no, they know what's going on.

You cannot litigate this case as though

the EPA is ignorant or mistaken.

You have to litigate this case as though the EPA is in cahoots,

and he was right.

- We came across discovery documents

that showed that it was an email exchange

between the executive officers of Monsanto Corporation

with the head of the pesticide division EPA for over a decade.

So the head of the EPA pesticide division

was actually under Monsanto's control,

and they were telling him, you have to kill this study,

you have to falsify this science.

- Bobby was really good at understanding the nuances

through which corporate America manipulates science.

Monsanto denies any link between

the active ingredient in Roundup and cancer.

- In court, Monsanto would just come in

and take an absolute position, no evidence at all whatsoever.

-Monsanto didn't warn because glyphosate-based products

don't cause cancer.

But in one of the emails,

Donna Farmer, one of the head scientists from Monsanto said,

we can't say it doesn't cause cancer

because we just haven't done the studies to prove that.

Of course, that was a dynamite document.

- Monsanto chose to tell the world

that this product is as safe as table salt.

If Monsanto had warned our client, Lee Johnson,

we wouldn't have had a case.

-Late today, a California jury awarded nearly $300 million

to a former school groundskeeper who sued Monsanto

claiming its weed killers, including Roundup,

gave him non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

- The unanimous jury here in San Francisco

has told Monsanto - enough,

you did something wrong and now you have to pay.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

who was in the courtroom for today's verdict.

-And I'm so glad that this jury held them accountable.

- It's kind of amazing that this one groundskeeper

from Northern California has essentially brought

this venerated institution to its knees.

- I want to say one last thing,

which is that this case was personally gratifying to me.

My hero, Rachel Carson,

was under a vicious sustained assault by Monsanto.

I watched that happen as a little boy,

and I was so happy that I got to be

part of this historic trial,

which once and for all brought Monsanto

finally to justice in front of an American jury.

- We've heard the benefits of pesticides,

but very little about the hazards,

very little about the failures,

the inefficiencies.

And yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals,

was being asked to acquiesce in their use

and did not have the whole picture.

So I set about to remedy the balance there.

- Along came COVID,

and this is when Bobby began taking on

the pharmaceutical industry

and its connections to the CDC,

the Food and Drug Administration and big media

When it comes to COVID,

what is it that they got wrong in your opinion?

-The fact that we mismanaged COVID is indisputable,

and the best evidence of that is that for 50 years

there's been protocols for managing global pandemics,

and they all say--

the WHO, the European Medical Agency,

CDC, et cetera,

they all say in a pandemic

what you do is you isolate the sick,

you take care of the vulnerable,

but you don't lock down a population

for a respiratory virus

because it's more likely to spread indoors.

The lockdowns actually end up killing more people,

so they were violating their own protocols.

- Bobby was talking early on

about the fact that this virus most likely escaped

from a lab in Wuhan, China,

which had been funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institutes of Health.

But now we know that that's pretty much what happened.

During the pandemic,

it was very clear that there was one narrative

that anyone was allowed to discuss

and anything counter to that narrative

we were made to believe was dangerous,

uninformed.

- I knew back in May of 2020

that the COVID vaccine was not going to prevent transmission.

I went through the evidence, I read the monkey studies.

They were basing the whole study on a handful of monkeys

and they were giving half of them the vaccine

and half of them a placebo,

and they were exposing them to COVID

and the vaccinated monkeys had the same amount of COVID

in their nasal pharynx as the unvaccinated monkeys.

And when I said the monkey study

showed the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission,

I was called a conspiracy theorist

and silenced for it,

taken off of Instagram.

- He was removed from Facebook, Twitter.

He was just blackballed, basically.

- It's scary that the pharmaceutical companies

have grown into 70% of the advertising on television.

- Seventy-five percent of evening news

from pharmaceutical companies

and I can't get on any of the networks,

so all they hear about me is the defamations

and the pejoratives and insults

and the name calling,

and you know, he's a racist,

he's an antisemite, he's got a brain worm,

he eats dogs.

He's anti-vaxx.

I did a quick Google search

and only saw very negative articles about Bobby,

and I realized that there was something going on

with the media trying to censor what he was trying to say.

What he was pointing out was

a lot of people died from side effects of these vaccines,

or at least their illnesses were exacerbated

by taking the vaccine rather than cured.

We now know when President Biden came into office,

he and Mark Zuckerberg got together

and Biden requested that they take Bobby Kennedy off

their social media.

-These people from the Biden administration pushed us

and said,

anything that says that vaccines might have side effects,

you basically need to take down.

Our government is telling us

that we need to censor true things.

It's like, this is a disaster.

-It's terrible what they did to suppress Bobby's free speech.

His family broke with him, a lot of people broke with him.

Hate speech has consequences.

Distortion of the truth has consequences.

-You don't have the right to a platform

to promote idiotic bigoted messaging.

This is not the kind of free speech that I know of.

- Mr. Kennedy, do you think it was easy

for Jewish people to escape systematic slaughter of Nazis,

yes or no?

- Absolutely not.

- Okay, good.

Do you think it was just as hard to wear a mask during COVID

as it was to hide under floorboards

or false walls so you weren't murdered

or dragged to a concentration camp?

-Of course not. That's ridiculous.

-That's a comparison that you made.

I did not make that comparison.

Mr. Kennedy, the measures taken--

The time is mine. I'm reclaiming it.

Please ask the witness to stop talking.

You asked me a question.

-Protective measures were taken

to take down disinformation about vaccines,

and no matter what you may think, Mr. Kennedy

and I revere your name,

you're not here to propound your case for censorship.

No.

It's an opportunity to have a conspiracy theory

and it makes me profoundly sad.

I began my political interest with your father

and it brings shame on a storied name that I revere.

- I just want to respond-- - Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair.

- May I, Mr. Chairman?

- You may not, you may not.

- I don't think-- - Time's out.

We're done.

- I want to say this while I'm on the record,

while I'm under oath.

I've never been anti-vaccine, but everybody in this room

probably believes that I have been

because that's the prevailing narrative.

I believe vaccines should be tested with the same rigor

as other medicines and medications,

and my views are constantly misrepresented.

I spent 30 years trying to get mercury

out of the fish in this country,

and nobody ever called me anti-fish.

At that time we were trying to get mercury out of vaccines.

Mothers were coming and saying,

my child was injured by the vaccine,

and they said, nobody's listening to us.

And I felt like I should listen to them

and actually read the science.

And that is what got me down into the--

- Time.

-And by the way, it's the worst career decision

I have ever made.

We have to stop trying to destroy each other,

to marginalize, to vilify,

to gaslight each other.

We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light,

of empathy, of compassion,

and above all, we need to elevate

the constitution of the United States,

which was written for hard times,

and that has to be the premier compass

for all of our activities.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you. - Mr. Chairman.

- We stand in recess.

We stand in recess.

We'll be back in and right back at it.

Thank you all.

Do they know about Martin Luther King?

Ladies and gentlemen,

I'm only going to talk to you

just for a minute or so this evening

because I have some very sad news for all of you

and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens

and people who love peace all over the world,

and that is that Martin Luther King was shot

and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

For those of you who are tempted to be filled with hatred

and mistrust of the injustice of such an act,

I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart

the same kind of feeling.

I had a member of my family killed.

But we have to make an effort to get beyond

or go beyond these rather difficult times.

What we need in the United States

is not division,

what we need in the United States is not hatred.

What we need in the United States

is not violence and lawlessness,

but is love and wisdom

and compassion toward one another.

A feeling of justice toward those

who still suffer within our country,

whether they be white or whether they be black.

Let us say a prayer for our country

and for our people.

Thank you very much.

- I think that Bobby Kennedy himself knew

in early 1968 when he fatefully decides

that he must run for president,

that he was doing so under a great cloud,

that he was doing so at risk to his own life.

And imagine the courage that it took for Bobby Kennedy

to plunge into the crowds during the 1968 campaign,

again and again putting himself in danger.

And why does he do this?

Because he thinks the country

is so mortally wounded at this point,

is in such a suffering place after years of war,

and rioting in its inner cities, of racial strife,

that he alone knows that he's probably the only candidate

who can heal the country,

so he takes this burden on his shoulders.

- When Robert Kennedy came into the race,

people didn't really give him a chance

and there was a lot of resentment and opposition,

but he began to win the primaries.

For example, he went to South Dakota

and there he spent time with the Lakota Sioux

on the Pine Ridge reservation.

- My father took us to Indian reservations

everywhere we went.

-Because he wanted you to see the poverty

or he wanted to see a different way of life?

-He was just interested in Indians

and he felt, he really believed America was an exemplary nation,

that we were the world's exemplary democracy.

But that we'd never live up to the promise of our nation

if we didn't go back and redress the original sin of America,

which was the genocide of the Native Americans.

So he was concerned about the way that they lived

and the poverty.

- That these conditions can be allowed

to prevail among a people uniquely entitled

to call themselves the First Americans.

A people whose civilization flourished here for centuries,

before the name America was thought of,

this is nothing less than a national disgrace,

-And he's bestowed upon him

an honored chief of the American Indians.

- When he was on that Sioux reservation in 1968,

there was 20,000 white people waiting for him in Rapid City,

and they waited for about eight hours

and his aides kept saying, you got to go there.

The Indians don't vote anyway.

And my father was saying, I'm staying here.

And he spent the day at the reservation

and didn't get to Rapid City until the evening,

and he won the state of South Dakota

and he largely won because it was the first time

there was a massive Indian vote

and he got almost a 100% of the vote.

So he won the most rural state in the country,

which was South Dakota and the most urban state.

So he had succeeded in bridging the divide.

- Bobby Kennedy had a brief and shining moment

where if he had won,

if he'd been elected,

he could have brought the country together.

During the campaign he would tell people,

yes, I don't believe the Warren Report.

Yes, I'm going to reopen the assassination case.

- Would you welcome a reopening of the investigation

into President Kennedy's death?

-Well, I don't see that

if there isn't any new evidence to consider,

you'd ever get away from the idea

that maybe there was a plot.

We just didn't find any traces of it.

- All the forces he felt had killed JFK

could not allow Bobby Kennedy to become president

because he was going to be coming after them then,

with the full power of the federal government.

- This meant that Kennedy had to go.

- Senator Kennedy is going down now

to address his supporters as McCarthy did a short while ago.

Rafer Johnson, the Olympic decathlon winner,

is on one side of him there.

He's been acting as a bodyguard.

Now he's advancing towards the ballroom

where he will talk to his campaign workers

from California.

- Here he is now, he's entering the ballroom

and you can hear the cheers from his supporters.

- So Bobby Kennedy,

I'm sad to say, his days are numbered

from the moment he announces for president.

In fact, Jackie Kennedy told him this.

Jackie Kennedy told him she was crushed by his decision

and she said, "Bobby, the same people who killed Jack

are going to kill the you."

Kennedy has been shot.

They think Kennedy has been shot,

appeared to be gunshots

in a little room off to the side.

I was near the Senator.

What appeared--

what appeared to be gunshots

coming from inside this room in here.

I'm not... Keep me plugged in.

There's a great deal of blood.

Keep me plugged in.

We don't know what--

- Move back, please!

- Oh, someone else was shot.

Someone else was shot.

We had another person who was next to Kennedy

who was shot in the forehead.

She's bleeding badly.

Another person is shot near Kennedy.

It's mass chaos here.

We did hear gunfire from in the hallway,

there are people running everywhere.

- The individual we have in custody

is Sirhan Sirhan.

I don't know how many times

the Senator was shot.

His blood is still here on the floor.

Senator Robert Francis Kennedy

died at 1:44 AM, today

June 6th, 1968.

Now, I want to ask you

about your father's assassination.

And what do you make of it?

- I always assumed that my dad's murder

was pretty straightforward

because Sirhan confessed to the murder.

There were 77 eyewitnesses

and many people, at least a dozen,

testified that they'd seen him firing the shots at my dad.

Paul Schrade, who was a very close friend of my father,

a very, very compassionate, determined labor organizer.

He was standing beside my father,

maybe a foot behind him

as they walked into the Ambassador Hotel kitchen.

And the first of the shots at my father

had hit Paul Schrade and he had fallen down.

He survived.

It's a great personal tragedy

because Bob Kennedy was a very close friend of mine

and I, not only as a friend,

but expected him to be a great president.

And then probably 15 years ago,

Paul Schade, he called me and he said,

"I want you to come to my house

and read your dad's autopsy report."

And I said, "That's the last thing in the world

that I want to do."

And he said, "I'm asking you and I need you to do this."

And because of the role that he played in my father's life

and because he had taken a bullet for my father,

I felt like I couldn't say no to him.

So I went to his home and I sat at his kitchen table

and I read that autopsy report

and it was transformative for me

because anybody who reads that report

will understand that Sirhan could not have killed my father.

- Final totals will be Kennedy 48%,

Senator McCarthy 41%.

- The mainstream narrative of June 4th

is that Kennedy wins the primary.

He goes down to the embassy ballroom

and gives his acceptance speech.

My thanks to all of you.

And now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.

Thank you very much.

- At that point,

he walks off the back of the stage

and walks through the pantry.

The cameras are all off at this point

because the event is over.

There are busboys in the pantry.

There are some campaign hangers on, there's staff.

And Sirhan steps out, pulls out a gun,

starts firing at Kennedy.

-And Syrian fired two shots of my dad.

And then he was grabbed by Rafer Johnson,

Rosie Greer, and four other guys.

So six people altogether.

And I talked to Rafer about this.

Rafer was a gold medal decathlon champion in 1960.

Very close friend of my father.

Rafer told me they bent Sirhan over the steam table.

- I'm right here.

Rafer Johnson has a hold of a man

who apparently has fired the shots.

He has fired the shots. He still has the gun.

The gun is pointed at me right at this moment.

That's it, Rafer, get it!

Get the gun Rafer!

Okay, now hold onto the guy!

Hold onto him!

Take a hold of his thumb and break it if you have to!

Get his thumb!

Rafer took the gun hand

and pointed the gun away from my father.

And Sirhan then was able to fire off six other shots

in the opposite direction from my father

and emptied the magazine.

- Hold him Rafer! We don't want another Oswald!

Hold him, Rafer, keep people away from him!

- And the witnesses again,

who saw them both

and were in a good position to judge distance,

put the gun muzzle about three feet in front of Kennedy.

Then we cut to the autopsy report

and the coroner, Thomas Noguchi,

a very competent coroner

who'd done many famous cases including Marilyn Monroe

and Natalie Wood and other celebrities.

He was given the body of RFK

and it was clear to him immediately

as it was to the police because they saw the body.

Kennedy had been shot from behind the right ear.

He had not been shot from the front.

The shots that hit my father--

there were four,

all of them were from behind.

One of them went harmlessly

through the shoulder pad of his jacket.

Two of 'em went into his back

and one of 'em went into the back of his head,

which was the shot that killed him.

And Noguchi says that all of those shots

were contact shots,

meaning they left a carbon tattoo

on my father's skin,

which means that the barrel

could not have been more than a half an inch from his body.

The muzzle distance would be

one inch from the right ear

and no more than three inches.

- And the Sirhan was never behind him

and never got that close to him.

- So how do you reconcile three feet from in front

with an inch and a half from behind?

And you don't.

-My father appears to have known

that he was being shot from behind

because the last thing he did was twist around

and tear off the tie of the security guard behind him.

The early pictures of my father

show my father lying on the ground

with the clip on tie.

From day one from moment one,

Sirhan claimed he did not know what happened in the pantry.

The police asked him questions like, is this your car?

He's like, I don't know.

They said, what's your name?

He was completely silent.

And so as one of the DA's assistants is talking to him,

he stops himself midsentence, he's like,

do you know where you are?

Do you know what you've been charged with?

He knew Sirhan wasn't processing

like a normal person would process.

Do you remember anything?

-No, no, no.

I don't remember much what happened after that.

- You don't remember much about that.

I don't remember.

- And there are 12 points of entry

for the eight bullets Sirhan's gun could have held.

Two bullets were removed from Kennedy.

Five other people had bullets removed from them.

- Five people, including Paul Schrade.

- But there are still at least five more bullet holes

pictured from FBI photos and an AP photo.

- And in the chaos of what happened there,

people didn't initially question the fact that there was

a recently-employed security guard

standing behind Robert Kennedy.

- Thane Eugene Cesar had joined a security company

only a week earlier who were running security

for the event that night at the hotel.

And Thane Cesar also was moonlighting for Lockheed,

who was also working as a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.

And I went through some public records databases.

The only employer Cesar ever listed was the CIA.

So you've got this CIA guy at Kennedy's elbow.

He's six foot two.

He's stocky.

And he's literally holding Kennedy's right arm

with his left hand if he's right-handed,

and he is, no one is in a better position to shoot Kennedy

under the arm than Thane Cesar.

He's right there.

- Cesar steered to my father into the kitchen,

and when he was shot,

my father fell on top of Cesar and Cesar fell as well,

and then pushed my father off him and stood up.

And he had his gun drawn,

which was visible to numerous witnesses.

And Cesar later suggested

that maybe he had pulled his gun

to shoot at Sirhan,

but the gun was never taken by the police.

- At the time, Bobby had planned

to go to the Philippines

to speak with than Eugene Cesar,

who quite possibly fired the shots

that assassinated the senator.

And Cesar said, "Yeah, I could do that,

but you're going to have to pay me--"

I don't know, I think it was $30,000,

something like that.

It didn't happen.

Cesar backed out at the last minute

and he has since died.

-It's a dirty story.

But you went to see Sirhan.

- Yeah, it's occurred to me,

although I don't have evidence,

definitive evidence for this, that Sirhan was a distractor.

He believes that he was hypnotized.

-I don't remember aiming at any human being.

I don't remember any of that.

I've said that from the get-go.

The doctor said that I was in a dissociated state.

- During the course of my own investigation,

I got a hold of the CIA training manual for MK Ultra.

It was about developing a Manchurian candidate

and using hypnosis and psychoactive drugs.

And one of the interesting things it says in there is

it says it's very difficult

to reliably train somebody

to be an unwilling assassin

and that it may take years of training,

but that you can train a distractor

within a couple of months.

And a distractor would be the person

who would be visibly firing the shots

while the real killer was actually firing the kill shots.

-If that isn't the template for what happened in the pantry,

I don't know what is.

So again, they didn't have time to train Sirhan

to be a skilled assassin in that short of time,

but they did have time to train him to be a patsy.

- I don't remember.

I'm not saying that to be dismissive of my responsibility,

but that is really what happened.

- When you're in the hypnotic state,

sometimes the memory is not being recorded

or it's recorded, but it's locked away

and you can only retrieve it in a hypnotic state.

And so Sirhan's own defense team had hypnotized him

to try to get him to remember what happened in the pantry.

- And it turned out that what Sirhan remembered

from that night in hypnosis was meeting

a very attractive girl in a polka dot dress.

He remembers her taking him

to the center in the pantry.

- The choking is almost killing him.

So that almost brings him out of hypnosis.

No recollection of Robert Kennedy at all there.

There were witnesses who saw this girl

that Sirhan remembered seeing under hypnosis.

One of them was Sandy Serrano.

Everybody was in the main room,

you know, listening to him speak,

and it was too hot.

So I went outside and I was out on the terrace.

Then this girl came running down the stairs in the back.

I can remember what she had on and everything.

She had on a white dress with polka dots.

She came running down the stairs and said,

"We've shot him, we've shot him."

And I said, "Who did you shoot?"

And she says, "We’ve shot Senator Kennedy."

- Sandy's obviously distressed.

So what did the police do?

Hank Hernandez and Manny Pena were the two people

at the LAPD charged with the conspiracy investigation.

However, both of them had former intelligence backgrounds

and ties to the CIA.

They interviewed her multiple times

and she wasn't changing her story.

So Hank Hernandez runs what can only be called

psychological warfare against her.

- Eventually she's like, I don't know.

Maybe I misheard.

And that's how they shut down that angle.

However, the topic of hypnosis and mind control was so powerful

and so sensitive that when Nixon fired Helms

after the whole Watergate debacle,

Helms on his way out of the agency,

the one thing he asked them to destroy

was all the MK Ultra files.

That leads you to conclude what?

-My opinion is really irrelevant.

What's important is what the facts say.

I've asked for a reinvestigation of the murder.

- Six of Senator Robert Kennedy's, ten children

had been with him in California.

They were flown back late today aboard a government plane.

The tragedy and senseless violence

of Robert F. Kennedy's death

casts a deep shadow of grief across America

and across the world.

The presidential proclamation went on to declare Sunday

as a national day of mourning

over the death of Senator Robert Kennedy.

- The senator's body was flown back to New York,

and then there was a train ride that took him

to Arlington Cemetery to be buried beside his brother.

And Bobby Jr. said that he would never forget

looking out that train window

at the thousands of people gathered

to pay homage to his father.

Bobby Jr. spent some time in the office

that his father sometimes used,

and he looked around at the walls

and there were all these photographs of Kennedys

and Kennedy relatives,

including his Uncle Joe, who he never knew

because he was killed during World War II.

An Aunt Kick that he never knew either

because she was killed in a plane crash

in the late 1940s,

and he realized they're all dead.

My brother need not be idealized

or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,

to be remembered simply as a good and decent man

who saw wrong and tried to right it,

saw suffering and tried to heal it,

saw a war and tried to stop it.

As he said many times in many parts of this nation,

some men see things as they are and say, “Why?”

I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?”

- My father, he would give me things to read

all the time and poems

and books, et cetera.

It was about a couple of weeks before he died

and he said to me, with this unusual intensity,

I want you to read this book called The Plague.

The book is about a doctor who is in a quarantine city

in North Africa,

and there's a plague raging through the city,

and nobody can go in or out

and it doesn't tell what the name of the plague is,

and nobody knows, but everybody is dying.

And a lot of the beginning of the book

is a conversation that this doctor is having with himself

about whether he should venture out of his apartment

because he knows that if he goes to help people,

he's highly likely to die

and very unlikely to be able to help anybody

because nobody knows how to help.

In the end, he goes out and does his duty

and consoles people,

does the best he can to bring comfort to people.

And so after he died, I read the book several times

trying to unlock the key

of what message he had been trying to tell me.

This doctor, he accepted his burden

and he did his duty.

And it brings a sense of wellbeing

that you're doing what you're supposed to do.

And for me, it makes sense

because I find that the best way for me to live

is to make the effort to do the next right thing,

to get up every morning, say reporting for duty, sir,

and then let go of the results,

that the outcome’s in God's hands.

We do what we're supposed to do.

But if the boulder needs to roll back on us,

then that's okay. We'll push it up again.

- I've come here today to announce my candidacy

for the Democratic nomination

for President of the United States.

It is very painful for me

to let go of the party of my uncles, my father,

but I'm here to declare myself an independent candidate.

Each time that our volunteers

turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed

to get on the ballot,

the DNC dragged us into court in state after state

attempting to erase their work.

- Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country

and our children is if we choose to love our kids

more than we hate each other.

- The first thing I've done every morning

for the past 20 years is to get on my knees and pray to God

that he would put me in a position

to end the chronic disease epidemic

and to help America's children.

Ours has always been a family

that has been involved in public service,

and I look forward to continuing that tradition.