I HAVE been meaning, ever since I watched this a month ago, to broadcast far and wide Robert Kennedy Jr’s remarkable foreign policy speech given in New Hampshire. I have been hampered by my failure to find or get a transcript of it to print at the same time, so my ‘instruction’ to readers is please listen carefully! In fact it is so compelling no instruction is needed.
Both the delivery and content are riveting. Within minutes you forget his ‘spasmodic dysphonia’ speech problem – interestingly, much less pronounced here than when he is interviewed. Most important is that, so unusually for a politician, he comes across as authentic.
If there was no teleprompter, which it seems to be the case by the way he looks at the audience all the time and unless I am not au fait with some kind of hologram technology, the speech was nigh on Churchillian given the number of quotations he remember and delivered. I cannot remember any such performance by any politician in the last 30 years. I have no doubt readers will correct me if my knowledge is at fault, but he looks to me to be genuinely and unaffectedly talking to his audience. Many of the quotes are from his uncle and father, beginning with John F Kennedy’s 1963 peace speech. It is a powerful evocation of the stand taken in the 1960s by JFK and his brother Robert, RFK Jr’s father, against the powerful military industrial complex of the time, the most likely reason they were assassinated, that Kennedy believes we need to take again today with regard to the war in Ukraine. In other words, that the West trying to destroy Russia is disastrous and wrong.
