YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

lines on the record: 159
first: 2023-07-06
most recent: 2023-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So for them, you know, it was an incentive to kill $130 million Russians and 30 million Americans, but my uncle, he had this correspondence with Khrushchev. They were secretly corresponding with each other. And that is what saved the world, is that they had that both of them had been men of war. Eisenhower famously said it will not be a man of war. It will not be a soldier who starts World War III because a guy who's actually seen it knows how bad it is. And my uncle, you know, had been in the heat of the South Pacific.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to believe that at least one of them would have launched and that would have been the beginning of the end. And if anybody had launched, we knew what would happen. My uncle knew what would happen because he asked again and again, what's going to happen? And they said, 30 million Americans will be killed. But we will kill 130 million Russians. So we will win. And that was a victory for them. And my uncle said later said he told Arthur Singer and Kenny O'Donnell. He said, those guys, he called them the salad brass, the guys with all of this stuff on their chest. And he said, he said, those guys, they don't care because they know that if it happens, that they're going to be in the charge of everything. They're the ones who are going to be running the world after that.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we learned then was that from the Russians who came to that event, it was like a symposium where everybody on both sides talked about it and we learned a lot of stuff and never nobody knew before. One of the insane things, the most insane thing that we learned was that the weapons were already, the nuclear warheads were already in place. They were ready to fire. And that the authorization to fire Was made, was delegated to each of the gun crew commanders. So there were sixty people who at all had authorization of fire if they felt themselves under attack.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the military perhaps said to my uncle, oh, we don't think you'll have, you know, we don't think he'll have the guts to do that. So my uncle was like, that's what you're betting on. And they all wanted him to go in. They wanted him to bomb the sites and then invade Cuba. And he said if we bomb those sites, we're going to be killing Russians and it's going to force, it's going to provoke Russia into some response. And the obvious response is for them to go into Berlin. But the thing that we didn't know then that we didn't find out until I think, you know, there was like a 30-year anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or ask the CIA and he asked, Adallis was already gone, but he asked the CIA and he asked his military brass because they all wanted to go in. Everybody wanted to go in. And my uncle said, my uncle asked to see the aerial photos and he examined those personally. And this is why it's important to have a leader in the White House who can push back on their bureaucracies. He um, and then he asked them. You know, who's manning those missile sites? And are they Russians? And if they're Russians and we bomb them. Are they isn't it going to force Khrushchev to then go into Berlin? And that would be the beginning of a cascade effect that would highly like to end a nuclear confrontation.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's one of the, you know, because that, of course, is the perennial question, right? History kind of an automatic pilot and human decisions, decisions of leaders. Really, only have a marginal or incremental bearing on what is going to happen anyway. But I think that is the, and historians argue about that all the time. I think that that is a really good example of a place in human history that literally the world could have ended if we had a different leader in the White House. And the reason for that is that there were, as I recall, 64 gun emplacements, missile emplacements. Each one of those misemplacements had a crew of about 100 men. And they were Soviets. Oh, and we didn't know we had a couple of questions that my uncle asked.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father had the idea, let's just pretend we didn't get the second letter and reply to the first one. And then he went down to Dobrennan. And who was he met Dubren in the Justice Department? And Dubren was the Soviet ambassador. And they proposed this settlement, which was a secret settlement. Vera Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev had put the missiles in Cuba because we had put missiles, nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. And my uncle's secret deal was that if Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba within six months, he would get rid of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. But if Khrushchev told anybody about the deal, it was off So if news got out about that secret deal, it was off. That was the actual deal. And Khrushchev complied with it. And then my uncle complied with it.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that if a nuclear war happened, it would be better to be among the dead than the living, which I did not believe. Okay, I mean, I had already prepared myself for the dystopian future, and I knew I spent every day in the woods. I knew that I could survive by catching crawfish and, you know, cooking mud puppies and doing whatever I had to do. But I felt like, okay, I can handle this. And I really wanted to see the setup down in this underground city. But anyway, that was part of it for me. My father was away. And the last days of it. My father got this idea because Khrushchev had sent two letters. He sent one letter that was conciliatory. And then he sent a letter that after his joint chief sent the warmongers around him, saw that letter and they disapproved of it. They sent another letter that was extremely belligerent.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He later called it mass psychosis, and my father deeply regretted participating in the bomb shelter program because he said it was part of a psychological psyop trick. Treat them to teach Americans that nuclear war was acceptable, that it was survivable. My father, anyway, when the Marshals came to our house to take me and my brother Joe away. And we were the ones who were home at that time. My father called and he talked to us on the phone and he said, I don't want you going down there because... Because if you disappear from school, people aren't going to panic. And I need you to be a good soldier and go to school. And he said something to me during that period, which”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“where they would tell you when the alarms go off, then you put your head under the table, you take the, you remove the sharps from your desk, put them inside your desk, you put your head onto the table, and you wait, and the initial blast will take the windows out of the school, and then we all stand up and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we're going to be for the next six or eight months or whatever in the basement where we went occasionally in those corridors were lined with free-sried food canisters up to the ceiling from floor to ceiling. So people were, you know, we were all preparing for this. And it was Bob McNamara, who is a friend of mine and, you know, was my father, one of my father's close friends as secretary of defense.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an underground city, essentially a bunker that was like a city and apparently it had McDonald's in it and a lot of other, you know, it was a full city for the US government and their families. U.S. marshalists came to rouse to take us down there, and I was very excited about doing that. And this was at a time, you know, when we were doing the drills, we were doing the duck and cover drills once a week at our school.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the middle, I was going to school in Washington, DC to, um, Our lady of victory, which is in Washington, DC. So we were, I lived in Virginia across Potomac, and we would cross the bridge every day in D.C. And during the crisis, U.S. marshals came to my house to take us, I think, around day eight. My father was spending the night at the White House. He wasn't coming home. He was staying with the excom committee and sleeping there. And they were up 24 hours a day. They were debating and trying to figure out what was happening. But we had U.S. marshals come to our house to take us down. They were going to take us down to White Sulfur Springs. In southern Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where there was a”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Cuba had, you know, and nobody in this country, there's a lot of people in Washington, D.C. who at that point thought that they very may well may wake up dead, that the world may end at night. 30 million Americans killed 130 million Russians. This is what our military brass wanted. They saw a war with Russia, nuclear exchange with Russia as not only inevitable, but also desirable because they wanted to do it now We still add up the superiority.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason it's not. It's just because people seem to be in this kind of dream state about that will never happen. And yet, you know, it can happen very easily and it can happen at any time. And, you know, if we push the Russians too far, I don't doubt that Putin, if he felt like his regime was or his nation. in danger that the United States was going to be able to place a quizzling on into the Kremlin that he would use nuclear torpedoes. And these strategic weapons that they have, and that could be the end. Once you do that, nobody controls the trajectory. By the way. I have very strong memories of the Cuban missile crisis and those 13 days. When we came closer to nuclear war, you know, and particularly, I think it was when the U-2 got shot down over.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had no political experience, and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote. Why? He won on a peace platform. Anyone promising to sign the Minsk Accords, and yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot. And, you know, I think. It's a good guess what happened. I think he was, you know, he came under threat by ultranationalists within his own administration. And the insistence of neocons like Victoria Newland and the White House that we don't want peace with Putin. We want a war.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To defend this land, you know, I would agree with that, and I should have said that myself at the beginning. That's one of the reasons. My son went over there to fight because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine. And he found a stone wall of Ukrainians, whether ready to put their... Their lives and their bodies online, but that to me makes the whole episode even more tragic is that I think that the US role in this Has been, you know, that there were many opportunities to settle this war and the Ukrainians wanted Vladimir Zelensky when he ran in 2019. Here's a guy who's a comedian. He's an actor.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was that insurgency, which wasn't even an insurgency. He only got 4,000 of his men to follow him out of 20,000. And they were quickly stopped, and nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it, you know. And we're being told, oh, yeah, it's the beginning, at the end for Putin. He's wounded. He's on his way out. And all of these things are just lies that we are being fed.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that Ukraine can beat Russia in a war. It would be like Mexico beating the United States. It's impossible to think that it can happen. And, you know, Russia has deployed. A tiny, tiny fraction of its military so far. And, you know, now it has China. With its mass production capacity, supporting its war effort, it's just a hopeless situation. And we've been lied to. The press in our country and our government are just, you know, promoting this lie that the Ukrainians are about to win and that everything's going great. Luton's on the run, and there's all this wishful thinking because of the Wagner group, the Pagosian and the Wagner group that this was an internal coup and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin and none of that is true.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think it's possible to win. And anybody, you know, I saw, of course, I've studied World War II history exhaustively, but I saw a, there's a new, I think it's a Netflix series of documentaries that I highly recommend to people. They're colorized versions of the black and white films from the battles of World War II, but it's all the battles of World War II. So I watched Ollingrad. The other night, and the willingness of the Russians to fight on against any kind of allies and to make huge sacrifices. The Russians themselves were making the sacrifice with their lives, the willingness of them to do that for their motherland is almost inexhaustible. It is incomprehensible”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of their offenses have died. They've now killed the head of the Ukrainian special forces, which was probably, arguably, by many accounts, the best elite military unit in all of Europe. The commandant, the commander at Special Forces Group gave a speech about four months ago saying that 86% of his men are dead or wounded and will cannot return to the front. He cannot rebuild that force. And the troops that are now filling the gaps of all those 350,000 men who have been lost are scantily trained and they're arriving green at the front. Many of them do not want to be there. Many of them are giving up and going over the Russian side.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had firefights with Russians mainly at night, but he said most of the battles were artillery wars during the day and the Russians now outgun the NATO forces 10 to 1 in artillery. They're killing at horrendous rate now. My interpretation of what's happened so far is that the Putin actually went in early on. With a small force because he expected to meet somebody on the other end of a negotiating table that once he went in. And that when that didn't happen, they did not have a large enough force to be able to mount an offensive. And so they've been building up that force up to now, and they now have that force. And even against this small original force, the Ukrainians have been helpless”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, I don't think there's any way in the world that the Ukrainians can beat the Russians. I don't think there's any appetite in Europe. I think Europe is now in having severe problems in Germany, Italy, France. You're seeing these riots. There's internal problems in those countries. There is no appetite in Europe for sending men to die in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians do not have anybody left. The Ukrainians are using press gangs to fill the ranks of their armies, men, military age men. Trying as hard as they can to get out of the Ukraine right now to avoid going to the front, the front of the Russians apparently have been killing Ukrainians that have a seven to one ratio. My son fought over there and he told me an artillery he had.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who have died at least in this war? And there's probably been 60 or 80,000 Russians, and that should not give us any joy. It should not give us any, you know, I saw. Lindsey Graham on TV saying, you know, anything we can, something to the extent than anything we can do to kill Russians is a good use of our money. That it is not. You know, those are somebody's children. We should have compassion for them. This war is an unnecessary war. We should settle it through negotiation, through diplomacy, through statecraft. And not through weapons.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the US can play. A really important role, and a US president can play a really important role by reassuring the Russians that we're not going to consider them an enemy anymore, that we want to be friends. And it doesn't mean that you have to let down your guard completely. The way that you do it, which was the way President Kennedy did it, is you do it one step at a time. You take baby steps. We do a unilateral move. Reduce our hostility and aggression and see if the Russians reciprocate. And that's the way that we should be doing it. And we should be easing our way. Into a positive relationship with Russia. We have a lot in common with Russia and we should be friends with Russia and with the Russian people. And apparently there's been 350,000 Ukrainians.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they support him as an individual. And I understand there's problems with polling and, you know, you don't know what to believe, but the polls consistently show that. And it's not America's business to be the policeman of the world and to be changing regimes in the world. That's illegal. We shouldn't be breaking international laws. We should actually be looking for ways to improve relationships with Russia, not to destroy Russia, not to destroy and not to choose its leadership for them. That's up to the Russian people, not us.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“could bring armagain to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime. And we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating them as an enemy. Now we've pushed him into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, What we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. Putin now, you know, if you believe the poles that are coming out of Russia, they show him the most recent polls that I've seen, show him with an 89% popularity that people in Russia support the war in Ukraine.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, I don't know exactly. I can't say because I just don't know enough about him or about the evidence that I've seen is that he is homicidal. He kills his enemies or poisons them. And the reaction I've seen to those accusations from him have not been to deny that, but to kind of laugh it off. I think he's a dangerous man and that, of course, there's probably corruption in his regime. But having said that, It's not our business to change the Russian government and anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia which has more nuclear weapons than we do. Is I think irresponsible and Vladimir Putin himself has said we will not live in a world without Russia and it was clear when he said that he was talking about himself and he has his hand on a button.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we're there to bring a humanitarian relief to the Ukrainians. But that is the opposite. That 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 in order to advance a geopolitical ambition of certain people within the White House. And, you know, I think that's wrong. We should be talking to the Russians the way that Nixon talked to Brazil, the way that Bush talked to Gorbachev, the way that my uncle talked to Khrushchev. We need to be talking with the Russians. We should and negotiating. And we need to be looking about how do we end this and preserve peace in Europe.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, they say it this is the model. Let's use the Afghanistan model that was said again and again to get the Russians to overextend their troops and then fight them using local fighters and U.S. weapons. And when President Biden was asked why are we in the Ukraine, he was honest. He says to depose Vladimir Putin regime change for Vladimir Putin and when his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, was asked, you know, why are we there? He said to degrade the Russians' capacity to fight anywhere in the field, to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world. That's not a humanitarian mission. That's not what we were told. We were told this was unprovoked invasion.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ethnic Russians and the Minsk Accords did that. It left Ukraine as part of Russia. It left them as a semi-autonomous region that could continue to use their own language, which is essentially banned by the coup, by the government we put in in 2014. And we sabotage that agreement. And we now know in April 2022 Zelensky and Putin had inked a deal already to another peace agreement and that the United States sent Boris Johnson, the neocons in the White House, sent Boris Johnson over to the Ukraine to sabotage that agreement. What do I think? I think this is a proxy war. I think this is a war that the Neakons and the White House wanted. They've said for two decades they wanted this war. And that they wanted to use Ukraine as a pawn in a proxy war between United States and Russia the same as we used Afghanistan”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the Donbass region voted 90 to 10 to leave and go to Russia, Putin said no. We want Ukraine to stay intact, but we want you to sign a Minsk Accords, the Russians were very worried because of the US involvement in the coup in Ukraine in 2014. Then the oppression and the killing of 14,000 ethnic Russians. And Russia hasn't had the same way that if Mexico What Aegis missile systems from China or Russia on our border and then killed fourteen thousand expats American, we would go in there. Oh, he does have a national security interest in the Ukraine. He has an interest in protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, All of us have been taught that we won the war, but we didn't win the war. The Russians, if anybody won the war against Hitler, it was the Russians. Their country was destroyed. All of their cities, and he said, imagine if all of the cities from the east coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble and all of the fields burned, all of the forests burned. That's what happened to Russia. That's what they gave so that we could get rid of Adolf Hitler. And he had them put themselves in their position. And today there's none of that happening. We have refused repeatedly to talk to the Russians. We've broken up. There's two treaties, the Minsk agreements, which the Russians were willing to sign. And they said, we will stay. The Russians didn't want the Ukraine. They showed that.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a red line. If we go into, if we bring NATO into Ukraine, that is a red line for the Russians. They cannot live with it. They cannot live with it. Russia has been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time it was invaded, we killed, or the Germans killed one out of every seven Russians. They destroyed my uncle described what happened to Russia in his famous American university speech in 1963. 60 years ago this month, or last month, 60 years ago in June, June 10th, 1963, he told that speech was telling the American people, put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. We need to do that if we're going to make peace.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put those mysticisms back there, and then we walk away unilaterally, walk away from the two nuclear missile treaties, the intermediate nuclear missile treaties that we had with the Soviet Union, with Russia, when neither of us would put those missile systems on the borders. We walk away from that and we put ageous missile systems, which are nuclear capable. They can carry the tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads. So the last country that they didn't take was the Ukraine and the Russians said, and in effect, Bill Perry said this, or William Burns said it, this is now the head of the CIA.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“William Perry, who was then the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, threatened to resign. He was so upset by this plan to move NATO to the ease, and William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who is now at this moment, the head of the CIA, said at that time the same thing. If you do this, it is going to provoke the Russians toward a military response. We moved it all around Russia. We moved to 14 nations a thousand miles to the east, and we put aegis missile systems in two nations in Romania and Poland. So we did what the Russians had done to us in 1962 that had provoked an invasion of Cuba.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was the architect of the containment policy during World War II. And he said, this is insane and it's unnecessary. And if you do this, it's going to provoke the Soviet, I mean, the Russians to a violent response. And we should be making friends with the Russians. They lost the Cold War. We should be treating them the way that we treated our adversaries after World War II, like with a Marshall Plan to try to help them incorporate into Europe and to be part of the Brotherhood of Man and of Western nations. We shouldn't continue to be treating him as an enemy and particularly surrounding them at their borders.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will not move, Nado, we will not move NATO one inch to the east. So then five years later in 1997, Zabig New Brzezinski who was kind of the father of the neocons, who was a Democrat at that time served in the Carter administration. He said he published a paper, a blueprint. Removing NATO right up to the Russian border, a thousand miles to the east and taking over 14 nations. At that time George Cannon, who was the kind of the deity of American diplomats, he was”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Russians moved out of East Germany, and they did that, which was a huge concession. And they had 400,000 troops in East Germany at that time, and they were facing NATO troops on the other side of the wall. Gorbachev made this huge concession where he said to George Bush. I'm going to move all of our troops out and you can then reunify Germany under NATO, which was a hostile army to the Soviet Union. It was created to, with hostile intent toward the Soviet Union. And he said, You can take Germany, but I want your promise that you will not move NATO to the east. And James Baker, who was his Secretary of State, famously said,”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vladimir Putin could have avoided the war in the Ukraine. His invasion was illegal. It was unnecessary and it was brutal. But I think it's important for us Move beyond these kind of comic book depictions of this insane, avaricious. Russian leader who wants to restore the Soviet Empire and that that's why, and it was who made it unfocused, unprovoked. Invasion of the Ukraine, he was provoked. And we were provoking him and we were provoking him since 1997. And it's not just me that's saying that. I mean, before Putin never came in, we were provoking the Russians in this way unnecessarily. To go back that time in 1992 when the Russians moved out of when the Soviet Union was collapsing.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly. Requires moral courage too to act on it. And particularly, you know, in You know, anytime that a nation is at war, there is kind of a momentum or an inertia that says, okay, let's not look at this from the other person's point of view. And that's the time we really need to do that.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was Jack. And then later on, my father, and then Bob McDermare, who are the only people who were with him, because he was able to see the world from Khrushchev's point of view, he believed that there was another solution. And then he also had the moral courage. My father, you know, to get back to your question famously said that moral courage is the most important quality and it's more rare than courage on the football field or courage in battle than physical courage. It's much more difficult to come by, but it's the most important quality in a human being.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was able to do when the narrative was, okay, Khrushchev acted in a way as an aggressor to put missiles in our hemisphere. How dare he do that? And Jack and my father were able to say, well, wait a minute, he's doing that because we put missiles in Turkey and Italy that were right on, you know, the Turkish ones right on the Russian border. And they then made a secret deal with Dobren and with Ambassador Dobrennan and with Khrushchev. To remove the missiles in Turkey, if he moved the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, if so long as Khrushchev removed them from Cuba, there were 13 men on the, what they call the ANCON committee. Which was the group of people who were deciding what the action was, what they were going to do to end the Cuban mesh. And virtually, and of those men, 11 of them wanted to invade and wanted to bomb and invade.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put himself in the shoes of his adversaries. And he always said that if the only way that we're going to have peace is if we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries, understand their behavior and their contact, that contacts. And that's why he was able to. He was able to resist the intelligence apparatus in the military. During the Bay of Pigs, when they said you've got it sent in the Essex, the aircraft carrier, and he said, no, even though he'd only been two months in office, he was able to stand up to them because he was able to put himself in the shoes of both Castro and Khrushchev and understand there's got to be another solution to this. And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who received the purple heart? And, you know, he had a very kind of famous story of him as a hero on World War II. And then he had come home and he'd written a book on moral courage among American politicians and won the Pulitzer Prize. That book profiles encourage, which was a series of incidents where American political leaders made decisions to embrace principle, even though their careers were at stake and in most cases were destroyed by their choice. She thought he was going to say courage, but he didn't. He said, curiosity. And I think, you know, looking back at his life that the best, that was true, and that was the quality that allowed him.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I'll say this about my uncle because, you know, I'm going to apply that question to my uncle and my father. My uncle was asked when he first met Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy. She was a reporter for a newspaper and she was doing, she had a kind of column where she'd do these kind of pithy interviews with both famous people in man in the street interviews. And she was interviewing him, and she asked him. What he believed is best quality was isn't his strongest virtue, and she thought that he would say courage because He had been a warrior hero he was the only president who, and this one he was senator, by the way.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we also, you know, we have the capacity to deceive ourselves And all of us tend to kind of judge ourselves by our intentions and our actions.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, we would all say, of course, we would hide Anne Frank and take the risk. But, you know, that's been something kind of a lesson, a challenge that has always been near the forefront of my mind, that if a totalitarian system ever... Occurs in the United States, which my father thought was quite possible. He was conscious about how fragile democracy actually is. Or would I be one of the people who... Went along with it. Would I be one of the people who was at the train station and Krakow or even Berlin and saw people being shipped off to camps and just put my head down and pretend I didn't see it because talking about it would be destructive to my career and maybe my freedom and even my life. So that has been a challenge that my father gave to me and all of my brothers and sisters Something that I've never forgotten.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“has to be restrained and it and that comes through self-restraint but it also you know the beauty of our country is that we develop we devise these institutions that are designed to allow us to flourish But at the same time not to give us enough freedom to flourish, but also create enough order to keep us from collapsing into barbarity. So, you know, one of the other things that my father. Talked about from when I was little, you know, he would ask us this question. If you were the family Anne Frank came to your door and asked you to hide her, would you be one of the people who hid her at risk your own life, or would you be one of the people who turned her in?”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was born nine years after the end of World War II. And I grew up in a generation that was, you know, with my parents who were fixated on that and what happened. And my father. At that time, the kind of resolution in the minds of most Americans and I think people around the world is that there had been something wrong with the German people, that the Germans had been particularly susceptible to this kind of. demagoguery and to following a powerful leader and to industrializing cruelty and murder. And my father always differed with that. My father said, this is not a German problem. This could happen to all of us. We're all just inches away from barbarity. And the thing that keeps us safe in this country are the institutions of our democracy, our constitution. It's not our nature. Our nature.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we can bring meaning not only to our own lives, but. We can bring meaning to the universe as well. We can bring some kind of order to life. And the embrace of those tasks and the commitment to service. Resonates out from us to the rest of humanity in some way.”
2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source