RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer

The leading third-party presidential candidate—a lawyer and environmental activist, the son and nephew of legendary liberal Democratic politicians—has just dropped out of the race and announced that he is joining the campaign of the most anti-environmental president and presidential candidate in recent history, the leader of a Republican Party he has transformed into a right-wing, anti-democratic, proto-fascist cult of personality.

I could go on and on, listing the contradictions and abandonments of principles, all of them astonishing.

But Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve called Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met as freshmen at Harvard—have always had much in common. Both are the sons of well-to-do playboys from the wealth of the Northeast; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) had “the grace to fail” as ill-behaved, underachieving teenagers admitted to Ivy League universities through “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both have been reckless teenagers all their lives, both attention-seeking, lying womanizers, both fools. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was about as meandering and full of lies as any average hour of Trump’s speech.

As for teenage entitlement, I have a story about Bobby Kennedy. But it really has to do with his support for Donald Trump for president and his apparent expectation of joining a second Trump administration.

In his speech today, Kennedy spoke at length about federal drug regulation and chronic disease programs. “I’m going to change that,” he said, promising to “staff” health agencies with very different people. “Within four years, America will be a healthy nation … if President Trump is elected and keeps his word.” Trump, he added, “told me he wants that to be his legacy.”

My story with Bobby Kennedy is about pharmaceuticals, not the legal, life-saving ones like the vaccines he made a career out of lying about, but the recreational ones.

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As a candidate, Kennedy received a lot of media coverage for his years of drug use, as he is a drug addict, having used heroin from ages 15 to 29. He stopped when he was arrested after overdosing on a flight from Minneapolis to the Black Hills and found by South Dakota police in possession of heroin; he pleaded guilty and received only probation. Kennedy, as Joe Hagan wrote in a recent article Vanity Fair profile, “made his addiction story a part of his campaign pitch.”

As a teenager in Nebraska, I had smoked pot and taken acid before entering Harvard in 1972. My freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to get a gram. A friend told me about a kid in our class who sold coke.

The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I had never met him. I contacted him; he said okay, come to his room in Hurlbut, his dormitory, which I had never been to, a five-minute walk away. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan, with whom, like Kennedy, I remained friends throughout his life. He left when I did. I wondered if he still did that when Bobby had customers.

“Hi Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. Another young man, tall, thin, and handsome, was in the room. “This is my brother Joe.” He was Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years his senior and a future six-term congressman from Massachusetts.

Bobby Kennedy wasn’t famous, but he was the most famous person I ever met.

He poured me a line of liquid so I could taste it and handed me an inch-and-a-half-long plastic straw. I snorted. We talked for a minute. I paid him, I think, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Brother Kennedy—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.

Back in my room 10 minutes later, I received a phone call.

“Good morning?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You took my straw!”
I realized that it was, and I hadn’t been paying attention. Because… it was a nasty piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was furious.
“There is crystals inside, man, growth. You took he.”
Growth? The residue of powdered cocaine mixed with mucus formed crystals Over time? What did I know about it. It reminded me of a science fair project.
“So… do you want to get the straw back?”
“Yeahman.”
I walked him back to his room. He didn’t smile or thank me. That was the last time I ever bought Coke for anyone.

A rich and famous boy selling a hard drug that could have gotten to him – or, more precisely, someone who was not him—a multi-year prison sentence. His almost fetishistic obsession with a piece of plastic trash. His little bout of greedy anger disguised as virtue. His belief that he was growing valuable cocaine crystals. In retrospect, it seemed to me to be a small illustration of the child as father of the man he became: a fantastical pseudo-scientific crusader, a middle-aged preppy asshole who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks on roadkill teddy bears he didn’t have time to eat.

But I decided to share this story because of a criminal justice policy advocated by the presidential candidate he just endorsed. It’s another one of those many spectacular contradictions I mentioned earlier.

In other words, Donald Trump, if he becomes president as Kennedy is trying to do, wants to start executing drug traffickers. He said in a speech as president in 2018: “These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on them, because… if we’re not tough on drug traffickers, we’re wasting our time… And that toughness includes the death penalty… We’re going to solve This problem… We will solve it firmly… This is what they fear the most.

He repeated it in 2022 when he announced his current candidacy: “We are going to ask (Congress to pass a law that) anyone who sells drugs, who gets caught selling drugs, (is) sentenced to death for their heinous acts.”

Elizabeth Bruenig: Trump dreams of a faster death penalty

At a campaign rally last April, he laid out at length his plan to kill drug dealers: “The only thing they understand is force. They understand force – and all this will stop.” Our policy, he explained, should be the same in the country he otherwise demonizes the most. “When I met with Chinese President Xi, I said to him, ‘Do you have a drug problem?’ ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘we don’t have a drug problem.’ ‘Why?’ ‘A speedy trial!’ I said, ‘Talk about a speedy trial.’ When they catch the drug pusher, the drug supplier, the drug dealers, they immediately put them on trial. It takes a day. One day. At the end of that day, if they are guilty, which they can’t be, they will be tried. always “…in one day, this person is executed. They execute drug traffickers. They have no drug problem. Zero.”

So one question reporters might ask Trump’s new campaign manager and potential Trump administration official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is something like this: The candidate you are campaigning for, and whose government you apparently intend to run, wants to rewrite our laws so that drug traffickers, especially those who sell narcotics, are punishable by death. Given that you sold cocaine as a young man, what do you think of his advocacy of a regime that could have resulted in your own execution at age 19?

Editor’s Note: The Kennedy campaign did not respond to requests for comment on this article.