Dear Joe Biden: Bobby’s Life Is in Your Hands

Why on earth does the Biden administration continue to deny Kennedy Secret Service protection?

By David Talbot, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

Joe Biden’s presidency is full of contradictions. 

He wants to be known as the environmental president, but he’s alienated many young climate activists with his greenlighting of the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline in West Virginia and the massive Willow oil drilling project in Alaska’s Arctic wilderness. He finally pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, only to become the West’s main military and intelligence supplier in the Ukrainian meat grinder and now in the Gaza slaughterhouse. To make matters worse, this foreign policy “wise man” is risking nuclear Armageddon by escalating tensions in the Middle East.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden called the Saudi regime led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a “pariah.” Now he fist-bumps MBS, shakes his bloody hand and cozies up to him diplomatically. The president shows up at a UAW picket line touting his pro-labor credentials. At the same time, he bends his knee to Wall Street financiers, telling an elite New York fundraising party this summer, “The reason I’m standing here is in large part because of you all.”

Yet as frustrating to his base as they are, these Biden two-steps have a realpolitik logic. What I can’t fathom is the cold reasoning behind another fraught presidential decision.

Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic like JFK, loves all things Kennedy. He displays a bust of the martyred Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. His U.S. Navy just launched a fueling ship named after the assassinated leader. (Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attended the San Diego ceremony.) Biden employs several Kennedys in his administration, including RFK Jr.’s sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who works for the Labor Department; and his cousin Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Australia.

And yet President Biden refuses to provide Secret Service protection to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading candidate for the White House. Refuses to guard his life. Let’s drill down on this perverse decision. It seems twisted, it seems inhumane. It seems to contradict Joe Biden’s reputation as a nice guy. Does it make political sense?

The Kennedys who operated outside of the country’s political parameters — like JFK, who challenged Cold War orthodoxy, and RFK, who campaigned against a sitting Democratic president to end the war in Vietnam (and planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s assassination) — took great personal risks. The Kennedy brothers knew how endangered they were. President Kennedy convinced his friends – director John Frankenheimer and actor Kirk Douglas – to make Seven Days in May, as a warning to the American people that a military coup was possible in this country. JFK talked to friends and even joked darkly in a speech about his potential assassination. When Bobby Kennedy announced his run for president in 1968, his sister-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy, grimly told Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian and family friend, “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack.”

As RFK Jr. knows, his father was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the decisive California primary – not by “Palestinian extremist” Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the crime – but by a gunman posing as a security guard who worked for CIA contractor Robert Maheu. In 2021, the junior Kennedy wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Sirhan Sirhan Didn’t Kill My Father,” confirming what the Los Angeles coroner who performed the autopsy on his father, multiple witnesses and physical evidence concluded. RFK Jr., who met with Sirhan in prison, advocated for his release, a decision made by the California parole board but overruled by Governor Gavin Newsom.

And now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., too, has a big target on his back.

RFK Jr. has antagonized all the power centers in the U.S., from Wall Street to the military-industrial complex, to Big Oil, to Big Pharma. Like his father and uncle, he’s had the courage to denounce the CIA, correctly charging agency officials with complicity in their assassinations. Responding to a Washington Post article, Kennedy also recently charged that the agency is risking an expansion of the war in Ukraine by targeting pro-war figures in Russia. As he rises in the polls and becomes a serious contender for the White House, Kennedy has become a major challenge to many powerful – and dangerous — forces.

In September, a heavily-armed man posing as a federal marshal – Adrian Paul Aispuro – was arrested at a RFK Jr. campaign event in Los Angeles, not far from the hotel site where Kennedy’s father was gunned down.

Last week, another man, Jonathan Macht, was cited by the Los Angeles Police Department for climbing over a fence at Kennedy’s home in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. After Macht was released by the LAPD, he went back to RFK Jr.’s home the same day and trespassed again. The Los Angeles police — which concealed and destroyed key evidence, sabotaging the investigation into the assassination of Kennedy’s father — seemed lax again. Or is the LAPD’s “ineptitude” equally sinister this time?

Both Aispuro and Macht appear mentally incompetent. But assassinations are often seemingly carried out by fanatics or crazies. It’s only upon deeper inquiry that these lethal events are exposed as well-executed operations with political motives. Whether Aispuro and Macht turn out to be unwitting players in a larger plan remains to be seen. But Kennedy is clearly at risk and should be given the best protection that presidential candidates deserve as they climb in the polls. Especially a candidate who’s confronting the most formidable foes in the country. Especially a Kennedy.

So far, RFK Jr. has been ably protected by Gavin de Becker & Associates, a private security firm that has guarded everyone from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to Beatle George Harrison as he quietly slipped this mortal coil, seeking to avoid a media circus. And we know that Secret Service agents are far from perfect. The agency betrayed President Kennedy in Dallas, and they performed less than diligently at times for President Obama. But private security is costly and it’s hard to provide 24-by-7 protection. The Secret Service would give Kennedy the round-the-clock monitoring that he and his family need.

As I commented, it’s hard to understand Joe Biden’s reasoning. Yes, Kennedy is a political opponent. And yes, the president probably reasons, bleeding his campaign financially by forcing him to pay for protection makes sense. There is still something ice-cold about this logic. What if RFK Jr. is hurt? What if he is killed? Biden would share the blame for his vulnerability. Even the mainstream media, which has been so hostile to Kennedy, would shower Biden with abuse – as they should.

Does the president really want to risk this? If Kennedy is shot because Biden denied him Secret Service protection, the president will be portrayed as heartless and cruel. He will go from lovable (if often clueless) Joe to a conniving pol, a wily Lyndon Johnson instead of an upbeat Franklin Roosevelt.

After all, it will be said, President Biden provided Secret Service protection to his sleazy son Hunter, paying $30,000-a-month in taxpayers’ money to house federal agents in fashionable digs near the younger Biden’s Malibu mansion. If he can do that, surely he could protect a popular contender for the White House.

RFK Jr. — who is suing the Department of Homeland Security, seeking records related to his repeated requests for Secret Service protection — commented recently on Biden’s glaring hypocrisy.

“It’s not right for the president to provide protection to his family and political favorites while denying it to political rivals,” Kennedy told The American Spectator in an email. “During his first week as attorney general, my father assembled all the (Justice Department’s) senior prosecutors to tell them that he would not tolerate any politicization of law-enforcement. President Biden displays a bust of my father in the Oval Office, but he seems to have forgotten this critical tenet of American democracy. During his administration, we’ve seen the wholesale cooption of federal law-enforcement agencies to censor criticism of White House policies and to serve other political ambitions.” 

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is assassinated, like his uncle and father, his blood will be on President Biden’s hands. Perhaps he’ll shrug it off. But the voters won’t.