The Marshals Came for an Underground City. RFK Jr. Still Wants a President Who Can Say No

Lex Fridman records the episode on the Fourth of July, 2023, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a Democratic candidate for president. Before the guest speaks, Fridman plants a flag. He loves science and thinks it cannot flourish without epistemic humility and public debate. Calling Kennedy a conspiracy theorist and dismissing him, he says, damages trust in science; dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on the pandemic is just as dishonest. He asks listeners to read Kennedy and also Vincent Racaniello, Dan Wilson, Paul Offit, and Eric Topol. “It is disagreement, not conformity, that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom.”

Asked what he loves about the country, Kennedy reaches for the old “exemplary nation” line and tries to pry it loose from the neoconservatives who, in his view, turned it into a justification for exporting American systems at gunpoint. His father and uncle used it differently. In 1780 the United States was the only democracy on earth; by 1865 there were six; today he counts about 190, all modeled in some way on the American experience. He quotes John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” warning not to be seduced by real estate, then the deist framers who thought wisdom, a knowledge of God’s will, would speak through the collective in a way it could not through a tyrant.

Fridman offers Hunter S. Thompson: freedom is something that dies unless it is used. Kennedy agrees, then tightens the definition. Freedom does not mean chaos or anarchy. It has to be accompanied by self-restraint if it is going to live up to its promise. In practice it is the capacity of human beings to exercise their creative energies, as unrestrained by government as possible. Jefferson’s tree of liberty, he says, has to be watered with the blood of each generation: between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died for the Bill of Rights, and the moment those rights were signed, forces inside the society began chipping away. Safeguarding them cannot be inherited. It is every generation’s job.

Fridman then quotes Camus from *The Myth of Sisyphus*: the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your existence is an act of rebellion. Kennedy reads Camus with the Stoics. Life is an absurd, insurmountable task; the way to get back at the gods is to embrace it, enjoy it, and do your duty. Sisyphus never wins. The last line of the book, as Kennedy remembers it, is that we can picture him smiling, because he put his shoulder to the stone. Service to others is “the key to the lock.” The image will come back at the end of the conversation, attached to making the bed.

Kennedy was born nine years after the end of World War II, into a generation that treated the Holocaust as a German problem: a people uniquely susceptible to demagoguery and to industrializing cruelty. His father disagreed. Robert F. Kennedy told his children this was not a German defect. It could happen to anyone. “We’re all just inches away from barbarity.” What keeps Americans safe, in that telling, is not human nature but institutions and a constitution, plus self-restraint. Nature has to be restrained or it collapses into the thing the war had just shown.

The household question was more intimate. If Anne Frank came to the door, would you hide her and risk your life, or turn her in? Every child said of course they would hide her. The question never left him. If a totalitarian system arrived in the United States, which his father thought was quite possible because he saw how fragile democracy actually is, would he resist, or would he be the person at the train station in Kraków or Berlin who put his head down because talking would wreck his career, his freedom, even his life. Fridman adds the honest half: a lot of us would like to believe we would resist. Most of us would not.

Kennedy’s coda is a line he will reuse when the conversation reaches Anthony Fauci. People have a capacity to deceive themselves. “We all tend to kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.” The slip is the point: intentions are what we grant ourselves; actions are what the world gets. The rest of the interview sits on that premise. He does not trust human nature, and he does not trust institutions to run on autopilot. He trusts daily choices, which is why the same man can sound careful about an adversary’s motives and then, a few minutes later, sound sure that an entire upper bureaucracy does not believe in democracy.

Before she was Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier was a newspaper columnist doing pithy interviews. She asked then-Senator John F. Kennedy what he thought his strongest virtue was. She expected courage. He was a war hero, the only president who would receive the Purple Heart, and the author of *Profiles in Courage*, a Pulitzer-winning book about politicians who chose principle when it wrecked their careers. He said curiosity. Looking back, his nephew thinks the answer was exact. Curiosity is what let Jack put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. He said peace required understanding their behavior in context, not just condemning the move.

That habit, Kennedy argues, is why a president two months into the job could tell the CIA and the Pentagon no when they wanted the aircraft carrier *Essex* sent in at the Bay of Pigs. He put himself in Castro’s and Khrushchev’s place and decided there had to be another solution. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the public narrative was that Khrushchev had dared to put missiles in the hemisphere. Jack and Robert Kennedy said wait: he is doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy, the Turkish ones on the Russian border. Of thirteen men on EXCOMM, eleven wanted to bomb and invade. The holdouts were the president, his brother, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

Moral courage, their father used to say, is rarer than courage on a football field or in battle, and it is the most important human quality. Empathy of this kind requires it, especially in wartime, when inertia says do not look from the other person’s point of view. That is exactly when you have to. Fridman takes the method and applies it to February 2022. If curiosity saved the world once, what does it say about why Russia invaded Ukraine?

Kennedy opens with a concession Fridman can use later. “Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal, it was unnecessary, and it was brutal.” Then he turns. Comic-book depictions of an insane leader restoring the Soviet empire, he says, are not analysis. He dates the provocation to 1997 and walks a public record: Gorbachev pulling 400,000 troops from East Germany; James Baker’s “not one inch to the East”; Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 blueprint to move NATO a thousand miles and take in fourteen nations; George Kennan calling it insane; Defense Secretary William Perry threatening to resign; William Burns, then ambassador and now CIA director, calling NATO in Ukraine a Russian red line.

He adds Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, a unilateral walk-away from intermediate-range nuclear treaties, U.S. involvement in the 2014 Kyiv change of government, 14,000 ethnic Russians killed, and a Donbas vote of 90 to 10 to leave that Putin, in this telling, refused because he wanted Ukraine intact under the Minsk accords. In April 2022, he says, Zelensky and Putin had already inked a peace deal that Boris Johnson and White House neoconservatives sabotaged. Biden, asked why America was there, said to depose Putin. Lloyd Austin in April 2022 said to degrade Russia’s capacity to fight anywhere. That is not a humanitarian mission. It is “a war of attrition that is designed to chew up, to turn this little nation into an abattoir of death, for the flower of Ukrainian youth.”

Fridman’s hardest pushback in the episode is not a document. He has been to Ukraine. In Kherson in August 2022, a year before this taping, morale was high. Everybody he talked to was proud to fight and die for the country; the war had taught people what it meant to be Ukrainian. Kennedy agrees, and says that valor is why his own son went to fight. It makes the episode more tragic, not less. Zelensky won in 2019 with 70 percent of the vote as a comedian on a peace platform, promising to sign Minsk, then pivoted. Kennedy’s guess is ultra-nationalists at home and pressure from neoconservatives such as Victoria Nuland. He thinks Ukraine cannot win: a claimed 7-to-1 kill ratio, Russian artillery outgunning NATO 10 to 1, a special-forces commander saying 86 percent of his men were dead or wounded. “It would be like Mexico beating the United States.”

He reads the Prigozhin mutiny the same way. Four thousand of 20,000 Wagner fighters followed him and were quickly stopped; nobody in the military, the oligarchy, or the political system backed it. American media, he says, billed it as the beginning of the end for Putin. The method is the family method: put the adversary back in history. Fridman lets the timeline stand as a set of checkable claims and refuses the slide from context into a story in which Ukrainian choices disappear. The invasion, Kennedy has already said, was still illegal.

Would he, as president, sit down with Putin and Zelensky, separately and together? “Absolutely.” Fridman then asks the Lord Acton question. Putin has been in power since 2000. Has he been corrupted? Kennedy will not pretend to know the man’s mind. The evidence he has seen is that Putin is homicidal, that he kills or poisons enemies, and that his reaction to those accusations is not denial but a laugh. “I think he’s a dangerous man,” and of course there is probably corruption in the regime.

The second layer is the one that opened the episode. “It’s not our business to change the Russian government.” Anyone who thinks regime change in a country with more nuclear weapons than the United States is a good idea is, he says, irresponsible. Putin’s line that Russia will not live in a world without Russia was, to Kennedy’s ear, about Putin himself, with his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon. “So why are we messing with this?” The war does not even appear to be weakening him. Russian polls Kennedy has seen put him around 89 percent; he grants the usual problems with polling and says the trend is consistent. America is not the policeman of the world, and choosing Russia’s leadership is illegal.

The method he wants is the Kennedy method in miniature: baby steps, a unilateral reduction in hostility, then watch for reciprocity. He claims at least 350,000 Ukrainians and 60,000 to 80,000 Russians dead, numbers he does not source on air, and he has no joy in them. Lindsey Graham on television saying that killing Russians is a good use of American money lands on him as a failure of compassion. Those are somebody’s children. The war, in his view, cannot end through military operations. Europe has no appetite to send men; Ukraine is filling ranks with press gangs; Russia has deployed only a tiny fraction of its force and now has China’s industrial base. Nuclear use, if Putin felt a Quisling being walked into the Kremlin, is the thing he will not treat as a dream that never happens.

His own memories of the thirteen days are a child’s. He was at Our Lady of Victory in Washington, crossing the Potomac from Virginia. Around day eight, with his father sleeping at the White House with EXCOMM, U.S. marshals came to take the children to White Sulphur Springs in the Blue Ridge, an underground city with a McDonald’s, built for the federal government and its families. He was excited. Schools were doing duck-and-cover weekly; the basement corridors were lined floor to ceiling with freeze-dried food. McNamara later called the shelter program mass psychosis. Robert Kennedy came to regret it as a psyop to teach Americans that nuclear war was survivable.

His father called and told him not to go. If the Kennedy children disappeared from school, neighbors would panic. “I need you to be a good soldier and go to school.” Then a sentence the son says he did not believe: if a nuclear war happened, it would be better to be among the dead than the living. The eight-year-old had already planned a dystopian survival, catching crawfish and cooking mud puppies in the woods. He wanted to see the bunker. He went to school instead.

The deal that ended the crisis, in this telling, was his father’s idea: ignore Khrushchev’s second, belligerent letter, answer the first, conciliatory one, and meet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the Justice Department. Missiles out of Cuba; within six months, Jupiter missiles out of Turkey; if Khrushchev told anyone, the deal was off. Both men kept it. Kennedy thinks this is a place where one leader actually changed history. The military wanted to go in while the United States still had superiority: 30 million Americans dead, 130 million Russians dead, “so we will win.” Jack Kennedy looked at the aerial photos himself, asked who was manning the sites, and asked whether killing Russians would force Khrushchev into Berlin. The brass said they did not think Khrushchev would have the guts. “That’s what you’re betting on?”

Thirty years later, at a Havana symposium, the Soviet side said the warheads were already in place and launch authority had been delegated to each gun-crew commander. About sixty people, in Kennedy’s memory, could have fired if they felt under attack. “You have to believe that at least one of them would’ve launched.” Eisenhower’s line, which he repeats, is that World War III will not be started by a soldier, because a man who has seen war knows how bad it is. Jack’s PT boat had been cut in half by a Japanese destroyer; three crewmen dead, one badly burned; he towed a man six miles with a lanyard in his teeth and hid for ten days. Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad, people eating dogs, cats, shoe leather. The CIA, Kennedy says, knew almost nothing about Khrushchev because a mole at Langley got every Kremlin spy killed. Langley saw a monolith, the way Washington now sees Putin. In fact both leaders were surrounded by men who wanted war, and did not know the other man was resisting too.

Jack Kennedy told Ben Bradlee he wanted “he kept the peace” on his gravestone. The principal job of the president, in that sentence, is to keep the country out of war. Eisenhower had wanted a peace summit too; Kennedy says the CIA torpedoed it by sending a U-2 over the Soviet Union, then telling Eisenhower to deny the program, not knowing the Soviets had Francis Gary Powers. Vienna went badly. The back channel that followed ran through Georgi Bolshakov, a GRU and KGB man who came to Hickory Hill, did rope-climbing and push-up contests with Robert Kennedy, and taught the children Cossack dancing. After the Berlin crisis, Khrushchev sent a letter, folded in a *New York Times*, saying they were all on one ark. They installed a hotline. At the Cape there was a red phone the children knew would reach Khrushchev.

Kennedy wants that phone back, and not only for tanks. He does not claim to understand AI, but he can see how the systems become “key totalitarianism,” misused to enslave, to fight, to kill. Elon’s joke that it will steal our jobs and then kill us is, to him, not hyperbole if the technology follows the math of evolution. Regulation has to include Russia, China, and Iran. He also claims governments are working on ethnic bioweapons, weapons that could kill Russians or people without Chinese genes, and that a verifiable biological-weapons treaty would be the easiest lift in the world. Nobody in the 2024 race, he says, is talking about this. They are fixated on little wars and comic-book good versus evil while the military-industrial complex gets rich on the road to perdition.

Fridman underlines the unintentional half. A lot of AI and bioweapon risk is not a strategic plot; it is what happens when you release a system into the wild and nobody has a channel honest enough to say they do not know the worst case. Companies fear regulatory overreach; governments fear being manipulated by tech. Trust has to be built the way the red phone built it. Kennedy’s practical suggestion is to bring the tech community in and ask them what the rules should look like, so innovation can be milked without walking into traps nobody on Capitol Hill understands.

Fridman asks the question the Cuba story makes inevitable. To what degree was the CIA involved in John F. Kennedy’s death? Kennedy’s answer is not hedged. He says the evidence that the CIA was involved in the murder, the cover-up, and a cover-up that continues, with 5,000 documents still unreleased sixty years later, is “beyond any reasonable doubt,” including “dozens of confessions.” He says it recently surprised most Americans to see the press acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, recruited in 1957 at Atsugi, a U-2 base, by James Jesus Angleton, then sent on a fake defection to Russia. The Church Committee, a decade after Warren, concluded there was a conspiracy; Senator Richard Schweiker, in Kennedy’s telling, said straight out that the CIA was involved. The book he tells people to read, rather than taking his word, is James Douglass’s *JFK and the Unspeakable*.

How does an agency amass that kind of power? Not, he says, because the whole institution is corrupt. His daughter-in-law spent her career in CIA clandestine services on weapons-of-mass-destruction work in the Middle East and China. Of about 22,000 people, he guesses 20,000 are patriotic public servants. The institution is corrupt because of the higher ranks. Mike Pompeo, a former director and secretary of state, told him he had not done a good job of cleaning the agency, and that “the entire upper bureaucracy of that agency are people who do not believe in the institutions of democracy.” Kennedy does not know if that is true. He notes that a man who ran the place said it.

The history, as he tells it, is no mystery. Before 1947 the United States had no peacetime secret spy service. The wartime OSS was disbanded because Congress said a secret spy agency was incompatible with democracy, a KGB or Stasi thing. Truman signed the CIA into existence as an information-gathering shop. Allen Dulles then opened a “plans division”: dirty tricks, black ops, fixing elections, “executive action,” small wars, bribery, blackmail. Cold War presidents found it seductive because they did not want to commit troops. Both parties warned it could become a monster. Today nobody knows the budget. In-Q-Tel, in his figure, has made about 2,000 Silicon Valley investments; many CEOs have signed state-secrecy agreements that can mean twenty years in prison for revealing they signed. Operation Mockingbird, exposed in 1973, put at least 400 leading journalists at the *Times*, the *Post*, ABC, CBS, and NBC secretly on the agency’s side. He says the CIA, through USAID, is still the biggest funder of journalism worldwide, and that in 2016 Obama changed the law to make propagandizing Americans legal. He cannot look at the Ukraine narrative and say the CIA had nothing to do with it. The mechanism, pressed by Fridman, is direct funding: he names the Daily Beast, *Rolling Stone* editor Noah Shachtman, Salon, Daily Kos.

Fridman’s objection is professional. A journalist’s job is integrity; an opinion should not be for sale. Kennedy agrees, then says the whole field has shamed itself. His childhood house was full of Ben Bradlee, Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin. After his father died, the family created the RFK Journalism Awards for integrity and courage. That generation’s creed, as he remembers it, was fear-skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government. People in authority lie. The job is to speak truth to power and guard the First Amendment.

The pandemic, in his account, inverted that. Major press organs became propaganda arms of government agencies and censored dissent. He names the Trusted News Initiative, started by the BBC, signed by the *Washington Post*, AP, UPI, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, an agreement not to print stories that departed from government orthodoxy, including on COVID and on Hunter Biden’s laptop. He says he is litigating this, that the documentation is on his site, and that he has a public letter to *Washington Post* reporter Michael Scherer, who called him a conspiracy theorist while, in Kennedy’s telling, participating in a real conspiracy to suppress departure from official lines.

Fridman grants the intention. In a catastrophe, untrue statements carry real risk. He also names the slope: once you start, journalistic integrity is sacrificed and it is hard to get back to truth. Kennedy agrees, then quotes what he says is an internal TNI leader’s statement, a woman he names Jennifer Cecil: outsiders think these outlets are competitors, but the real competitors are alternative sources on the network, hurting trust and the business model, and they have to be choked off. The method is an agreement with social platforms: label it misinformation, and the platforms deplatform, throttle, or shadow-ban, destroying the economic model of the alternatives. Many of the journalists, he thinks, did not know the TNI agreement and sincerely believed they were doing right. That is the more cutting claim. Once you appoint yourself arbiter of true and false, “there’s really no end to the power that you have now assumed.” The job is no longer to inform the public. It is to manipulate it. In collusion with powerful entities, that becomes an instrument of authoritarian rule, the inverse of journalism in a democracy.

Running as a Democrat, what are the strongest left values? He lists them without a culture-war detour: the commons that cannot be reduced to private property, air, water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands; protection of the vulnerable, including children and minorities; restoration of the middle class and decent pay; bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, and a right to refuse unwanted medical procedures; peace; a refusal to use fear as a governing tool, FDR’s “only thing we have to fear”; and ending the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Corporations, in his picture, are commoditizing people, poisoning children, strip-mining the middle class, and running America like a business in liquidation. The result is a Latin American-style feudal model, huge wealth above and widespread poverty below, too unstable to support democracy.

The foreign-policy half is his uncle’s. Jack Kennedy, he says, did not want people in Africa, Latin America, and Asia to picture America as a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted a Peace Corps volunteer. He refused to send combat soldiers to their deaths abroad. He resisted in Laos in 1961 and Berlin in 1962; the military wanted 250,000 in Vietnam and got 16,000 advisers, fewer than the 16,000 National Guardsmen sent to put James Meredith into Ole Miss. On October 2, 1963, after a Green Beret died, an aide told him 75 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. “That’s too many.” National Security Action Memorandum 263 ordered them all home by 1965, first thousand by December 1963. He was killed in November. A week later Johnson remanded the order. A year later the Tonkin Gulf resolution sent the 250,000 Jack had refused. Nixon took it to 560,000. Fifty-six thousand Americans never came home, including cousin George Skakel, dead in the Tet Offensive. A million Vietnamese killed, “and we got nothing for it.”

His uncle’s favorite presidential trip after Ireland was Colombia: two million people in Bogotá. President Alberto Lleras Camargo asked if he knew why they loved him. “Because they think you’ve put America on the side of the poor, against the oligarchs.” There are more avenues, hospitals, schools, and statues for John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America, Kennedy Jr. says, than for any other American president, probably more than the rest combined. Alliance for Progress and USAID were supposed to build middle classes instead of arming anti-communist juntas. In the same years America spent $8 trillion on Iraq and the wars that followed in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China spent $8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities. Iraq is worse than under Saddam, a proxy for Iran, ISIS a U.S. creation, two million refugees into Europe, French riots and Brexit as aftershocks. Mohammed bin Salman cuts oil in an American inflation spiral, makes peace with Iran, and says he no longer cares what Washington thinks. The security state costs $1.3 trillion a year, and America is “unsafer and poorer than it’s ever been.”

Jordan Peterson, via Fridman, wants to know when the left goes too far, meaning culture and identity. Kennedy laughs it off as an agenda. Peterson tried to get him to badmouth the left the whole time they talked; David Remnick tried to get him to badmouth Trump and Alex Jones. There are plenty of bad things he could say. His campaign, he says, is the opposite: find the values that hold the country together rather than the disputes that drive it apart. Sitting on a podcast dumping on the left or the right does not advance the ball.

Fridman asks him to steelman Anthony Fauci. What is the biggest positive thing Fauci did for the world? Kennedy says he cannot think of anything, then catches himself: he does not want to be unfair; perhaps a drug was licensed in fifty years at NIH that helped people. On the principal AIDS and COVID programs, “the harm that he did vastly outweighs the benefits.” Does Fauci believe he is doing good? Kennedy will not look inside his head. The Fauci book is about 250,000 words; every factual assertion, he says, is cited to government databases or peer-reviewed papers. He will not speculate about motives he cannot prove. Then Fridman asks whether the job itself is the flaw, a centralized scientific-policy figure. Kennedy drops the restraint. “I think he was a genuinely, a bad human being,” who ran out NIH scientists such as Bernice Eddy and John Anthony Morris for telling the truth. He knows that sounds bitter. Read the book, he says; he tried not to call names.

Big Pharma, he says, can look like a criminal enterprise if you look at the history. The four largest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and GSK, make all 72 vaccines he says are effectively mandated for American children, and have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade, about $79 billion since 2000. Serial felons, in his phrase: Merck’s Vioxx memos, in litigation he was part of, had bean counters writing that they would kill a certain number of people and still make money, then a $7 billion penalty and the same year a move to Gardasil. The opioid makers knew oxycodone was addictive, got the FDA to tell doctors it was not, and this year, he says, 106,000 Americans died, twice the American dead of twenty years in Vietnam. Capitalism is not the villain. He admires it as the greatest economic engine ever devised. It has to be harnessed to a social purpose or it ends in oligarchy, environmental destruction, and killing people. Almost 50 percent of FDA’s budget, in his figure, comes from pharmaceutical companies; about 45 percent goes to fast-track approval. Money may not buy your integrity. Population-wide, he quotes Upton Sinclair: it is very difficult to persuade a man of a fact if that fact will diminish his salary. NIH, he says, collects royalties on drugs it helps invent; it owned 50 percent of the Moderna vaccine, and at least four to six NIH scientists hold marching rights worth $150,000 a year for life, children and grandchildren included, paying boats and mortgages for people the taxpayer hired to find problems before a drug ships.

Can he name a vaccine he thinks is good? Some live-virus vaccines, he says, probably avert more problems than they cause. Then: “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Fridman calls that big words and asks about polio. Kennedy says the polio vaccine contained SV40, used in labs to induce tumors, given to 98 million people, and that his generation’s explosion of soft-tissue cancers killed many more than polio. Effective against polio? Yes. Did it cause more deaths than it averted? He does not know; there is no data. He then tells the DTP story: so many injuries that the manufacturer told Reagan it was paying $20 in liabilities per dollar of profit and would leave the business without permanent immunity. Reagan asked why they did not make it safe. Because vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,” language he says is in the statute and in the Supreme Court’s Bruesewitz case. A Danish-funded West African study led by Peter Aaby, in this telling, found the vaccine prevented the three target diseases while vaccinated girls were ten times more likely to die in the next six months of malaria, pneumonia, and other infections, a ruined immune system. Fridman says that kind of causal chain is nearly impossible to prove. Kennedy grants you cannot prove it for any one death. You can show a statistical excess. Then the claim he has been repeating for years: unlike every other medicine, none of the 72 mandated childhood vaccines had a placebo-controlled trial prior to licensure.

Fridman has heard the other side, including on polio. Pre-licensure placebo-controlled randomized trials against saline, he says, are exactly what the polio vaccine received. “So I’m confused why you say they don’t go through that process. It seems like a lot of them do.” Kennedy says he said it for years because he could not find any; in March 2016 Trump ordered Fauci and Francis Collins to meet him; Fauci, with a tray of files, could not produce one and promised to send it and never did. A FOIA suit against HHS, after a year of stonewalling, produced a letter saying there was no pre-licensing safety trial for any of the 72, posted on the Children’s Health Defense site. He then clarifies: polio may have had a saline trial for efficacy, not for safety. Fridman zooms out and names the people to read against Kennedy: Dan Wilson of *Debunk the Funk*, Vincent Racaniello of *This Week in Virology*, Paul Offit, Eric Topol, Peter Hotez. Kennedy says read both; Offit published a Substack against the Rogan conversation and they published a debunk of the debunk. On Hotez refusing Rogan’s debate, he will not guess at motives, then says a scientist making public, evidence-based recommendations ought to defend them against all comers, and that in an old emailed exchange Hotez once sent sixteen studies on thimerosal that were all about MMR, which contains none. Does he worry about the drug of martyrdom? He does not consider himself a martyr or a victim. The only guardrail is fact. Show him a pre-licensure polio safety study with real saline, and he will put it on Twitter and say he was wrong.

At seventy he looks, Fridman says, in great shape. The protocol is short and intense because that is what fifty years of training taught him will last: intermittent fasting, first meal around noon, done by six or seven; a 12-step meeting first thing; a mile and a half up and down with the dogs and a meditation; 35 minutes in the gym, never relaxed, four rotating days, first set to failure at twelve, fourth set a strip set; “a ton of vitamins”; an anti-aging protocol that includes bioidentical testosterone, no anabolic steroids. He is not an expert on hormone therapy. He has heard good things. The point of the detour is that the man talking about nuclear war and God is the same man who still trains to failure.

Fridman reads Kennedy’s own sentence: God talks through wise people, organized religion, scripture, art, music, poetry, but nowhere with such detailed grace and joy as through creation, and when we destroy nature we diminish our capacity to sense the divine. What is God? “God is incomprehensible.” We are inside the mind of God, so we cannot understand the form. He was raised in a thick Catholic world: sometimes two masses a day in summer, prayers before and after meals, rosaries at night, Bible stories in bed when his father was home, nuns, Jesuits, a Quaker school. A year after his father was killed, at about fifteen, he became a drug addict. The addiction lasted fourteen years. Living against conscience, he says, pushes God to the periphery. God recedes and gets smaller.

Willpower, which had been iron, did nothing. At twelve he gave up candy for Lent and did not eat it until college; the next year, desserts. Addiction was cunning, baffling, impervious. A friend of a brother who had died of the disease became a follower of Sun Myung Moon and lost the compulsion even when Kennedy used in front of him. Kennedy would rather have been dead than a Moonie, but he wanted that power without becoming “a religious nuisance.” Carl Jung’s *Synchronicity* gave him a scientist who was also spiritual: the scarab beetle tapping the Zurich window while a patient described one in a dream, God breaking his own physics to tap a shoulder. Jung could not prove God in card-guessing experiments. What he could show, anecdotally, across thousands of patients, was that people who believed in God got better faster, and the recovery lasted. That was more useful than a proof Kennedy would not have believed. If belief raised the odds of never using by one percent, he would take it. Jung’s formula: act as if. Fake it till you make it.

He started pretending a God was watching, and that life was a series of tiny moral tests. Alarm: lie there ten minutes or get up. Make the bed, the most important decision of the day. Hang the towels. Wire hangers on the closet floor: shut the door because you are too important, or pick them up. Water in the ice tray. Shopping cart back in the corral at Safeway. Get those right and you stay in a posture of surrender, open to a higher power. Addiction, at bottom, is abuse of power, looks, connections, education, family, turned toward self-will instead of the community. Do it right and the old gnawing anxiety goes; you put down the oars and hoist a sail. The later temptation is to tell God thanks, I have it from here, and drive off the cliff. His desire for drugs and alcohol was lifted, he says, as much a miracle as walking on water, after a decade of earnest failure on his own power. Fridman ties it back to Camus. Adding a moral dimension to every action is how he won the battle against the absurd. “It’s all the same thing. It’s the battle to just to do the right thing.” Fridman closes with John F. Kennedy: do not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right one; do not fix the blame for the past, accept responsibility for the future. The man who said that still has thousands of files unreleased. The man answering is his nephew.