More than 30 years ago, my own father was a victim of profit-centered health care, when a doctor told us “the corporation didn’t intend for this equipment to be used this way.” To keep him alive.

(Our last Christmas with my father, lower right, 1992. He died 5 months later, when his HMO repeatedly mismanaged his healthcare.)

The tragic killing of the CEO of United Health Care earlier this month ripped apart a health care corporation—and a broader, private health care system—that, for more than three decades, has put profits ahead of patient-centered care.

The cold-blooded, intentional murder of anyone—corporate executive or Palestine child— is a terrible, violent act, far outside any moral universe which rightfully condemns the denial of life, or life-saving healthcare, to any human being.

My father, a 78 years old, World War II Veteran, was a member of an HMO, once among the largest in Southern California. He has been dead for 31 years, and that specific company has been been out of business for decades, but its’ practices of prioritizing profits over patients, are more pernicious than ever before in the private healthcare industry.

My father’s case is illustrative of many others like it, with which families without wealth or influence can identify. It should be taught as a case study to healthcare executives, and medical school students, as a glaring example of the worst medical & business practices to avoid at all costs. It should serve as a guide to understanding why so many Americans are incensed at the spreadsheet-driven, corporatization of care for those we love. As the late US Senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote, “healthcare should not be a commodity.”

In the late winter, 1993, my father was experiencing difficulty urinating and began complaining of a pain in the middle of his back. A gruff, overweight Italian man, my father rarely went to “the doctor” or complained about his health. One of the rotating crop of HMO physicians who finally agreed to see him in person, said that at his age, “it wasn’t unusual to experience difficulty urinating, and that the back pain was probably the result of a draft you caught.”

He had been given the brush off by the HMO’s “gatekeeper”—a title designed to communicate the message that only certain patients made it past the gates of admission to the healthcare system. My father accepted the physician’s cursory diagnosis. After all, he was a “doctor,” my father said.

As the weeks went on, his urinary problems and back pain worsened. He began to wet himself during the night, and the pain in his back was making it difficult for him to rise up out of his reclining chair during the day. After much coaxing, we persuaded my father to see a urologist. Our family became insistent for the HMO to schedule an appointment with an urologist, and the corporation finally relented.

The HMO-assigned urologist diagnosed my father as having a bladder infection and recommended that he drink lots of cranberry juice to “clear it out of his system.” He was also prescribed an antibiotic and the pain in his back was again dismissed as nothing serious.

I described my father’s symptoms to an Oncologist friend of mine in New York who urged that we immediately get my father tested for Prostate cancer. We insisted that the HMO’s urologist see my father again, administer a PSA blood test, and do a DRE (digital rectal exam)—two simple and standard tests which, considering my father’s age and his symptoms, should have been done routinely during his first visit.

The results of the PSA test confirmed our fears: my father had an aggressive tumor that had already advanced beyond his prostate. The HMO’s urologist informed me by phone—some 2700 miles away—that my father’s cancer had not yet advanced into my father’s bones.

“What about the persistent pain in his back?” I asked.

The urologist continued to cling to his theory that my father may have caught a draft in his back.

Within one week’s time, the HMO’s urologist—who had spent a total of 30 minutes with my father during two office visits—told him that he had prostate cancer, and recommended surgical removal of my father’s prostate and testicles. For a street tough guy from Brooklyn, this was a lot to process.

I pointed out to the HMO’s urologist that my father had a low Gleason Count, and a high PSA—usually red flags for prostate cancer. I asked if he had an abnormal bone scan. The Urologist informed me he had not.

Increasingly, the evidence was building that my father’s healthcare was not being properly managed by his, so-called, “managed care” provider.

“Couldn’t hormone therapy be sued to decrease my father’s testosterone level, as long as his bone scan was not abnormal?’ I asked.

Yes, it could, the HMO’s urologist told me.

“Was it too much trouble to have explored such a possibility in the first place, “ I asked, “before immediately jumping to the conclusion that surgery was necessary? What about radiation therapy?”

The HMO’s urologist informed me that my father could be given a combination of injections, pill, and alpha blockers—which would have the side effect of lowering my father’s blood pressure.

I asked the HMO’s urologist if he was aware that my father was already taking medication to lower his blood pressure. The urologist told me he wasn’t aware of that.

“I have not seen your father’s record from the other physician, “the HMO’s urologist told me.

When my father did not respond to the hormonal therapy, and the pain in his spine became more intense, I insisted that he be given a new CAT Scan. The new CAT scan—which the HMO balked about doing—discovered a spot on his spine; in the exact location where my father was complaining about pain; the exact same spot where the HMO’s initial physician “gatekeeper”—who managed my father out of immediate care— told him he had “probably caught a draft.”

One week later, unable to breathe fully to clear his lungs because the pain in his back was now unbearable, my father was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia and placed in the ICU on a respirator.

During the first week of my father’s hospitalization, the cancer spread so rapidly into his spine he became paralyzed from the middle of his back down. The rapidly deteriorating condition of his lungs made a milogram and radiation therapy impossible—procedures which could have reduced the size of his spinal tumor had it been detected earlier. The HMO “gatekeeper’s” mismanagement of my father’s early care, coupled with a misdiagnosis by the HMO’s urologist, who initially wasn’t aware of my father’s patient record, his blood pressure levels, nor his PSA score, limited my father’s options for prolonging his life.

Four days before my father’s death, the attending physician at the HMO-owned hospital informed me that my father—whose mind and eyes were alert as he battled for each breath—was “terminal” and would not live out the week.

“You ought to give thought to taking your father off the respirator,” the HMO attending-physician told me, out of earshot from my father. “The corporation never intended for this equipment to be used this way.”

I stared at the man in the white coat, a garment considered almost sacred by my father.

“Doctor,” I said, staring directly at him, and speaking clearly and deliberately. “ I don’t care what the corporation intended. In my family, we consider life to be sacred, and we’ll do everything we can to preserve it.”

My father’s condition quickly worsened. He began to bleed internally, receiving 11 pints of blood over two days; his eyes turned from alert, to angry.

Unable to speak because of the tubes down his throat, my father signaled to me that he wanted to end his life. I tried to ignore what he was struggling to say. He pointed at the clock on the wall opposite his bed, and mouthed the words, “time to go,” I told him he was too ill to go home, and he shook his head in disgust. He pointed at all of the high-tech machines keeping him alive and turned his palms up as if to say, “what’s the use.”

I walked out of my father’s hospital room, found the HMO’s attending physician and asked him what death would be like for my father if we unplugged the respirator. His answer was flippant.

“I don’t know,” he snapped. “I’ve never experienced it.”

My questions, like my father, had become a burden for the corporation, which had mismanaged his care.

My father died the following day, refusing to breath into the respirator when the respirator technician instructed him to, taking that terrible decision off of the shoulders of those he loved.

My father never intended to continue living that way, as an extension of expensive machines designed to keep him alive, regardless of what inhumane reason “the corporation” gave for rationing their resources.

My father died with great dignity, on his own terms, while the healthcare “corporation” which mismanaged his care, killed the trust and confidence placed in them by patients and their families.

Thirty years later, that callousness, and the placing of profit-making over patient-mending, has brought the decades-deep rage against corporate medicine to a dangerous boil.

The E Street Band member and Springsteen’s friend, Tony Soprano’s pal Silvio, an activist fighting for the Arts, and the subject of a new HBO Max Documentary “Disciple”, raises some basic questions.

(Little Stevie Van Zandt, Age 74)

With minivan-sized, unidentified flying drones darkening the skies over parts of New Jersey and New York this season, it took Rock Star, actor and activist, Stevie Van Zandt to raise the most fundamental question:

“I only have one question,” Van Zandt asked MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and her other “Nightcap” panelists on her show “The 11th Hour, on Friday, December 13.

“Why are drones legal?” Van Zandt said. “ Are they not a terrorist act waiting to happen?”

Van Zandt, who turned 74 last month, and identifies himself as “an independent law & order liberal,” was pretty blunt.

“I don’t care how big it is,” Van Zandt added. “It could be a bomb. All drones should be illegal.”

Steven Van Zandt, born into a working class family with a Goldwater-supporting, military man of a father, is no fear-monger, nor technological troglodyte. He’s still making music, after 50 years of performing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band; still acting, after his Emmy winning role as Silvio in the HBO “Sopranos” series; still advocating for inserting the “Arts” into STEM education, to bring back a commitment to innovation and creativity in schools across the nation, and still a global activist fighting for human and civil rights.

HBO Max is airing a new documentary this month about Van Zandt’s life as a social justice and educational activist. The documentary is called: “Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple.”

Suddenly, Stevie is all over the place again, and, in the aftermath of Trump’s re-election, speaking his trademark “Little Stevie” common sense as much as ever. He is a tough critic of both the Democratic Party and of Donald Trump. Here are a few things he said about the 2024 Presidential election on “The 11th Hour:”

SVZ: “The Democratic Party did all they could to help Trump. The “Trans” policies in that commercial that ran every 30-seconds started under Trump, but the Democratic Party didn’t address the truth.

SVZ: “Trump was what the American people voted for. This guy (Trump) could not be more openly corrupt. How does a former DA lose to a convicted felon?’

Van Zandt added that “We’re not really in a democracy, but we’re in the ballpark,” and went on to call Trump’s Cabinet nominees “an insane group.”

Everything he said on Stephenie Ruhle’s MSBC show was a headline, but what grabbed me most was his unvarnished view of drones: “Why are drones legal?”

Little Stevie’s statements got me scurrying through by archives, back 10 years to when I wrote a article on my website (socialvisionproductions.com) predicting the very drone dangers that are happening right now. I wrote it when drones were our newest technological toy, at the same time Apple introduced it’s first Apple Watch.

My 2014 article, went like this:

“Drones, those darting, dive-bombing Deus Ex Machinas, are finally facing a few flimsy regulations, after one landed on the White House lawn in the middle of the night, because its operator was drunk. Fortunately, that DWI delinquent drone was not carrying a nuclear payload or deadly chemicals.”

As a way of holding Drone owners directly accountable for their potentially dangerous devices, I didn’t go as far as Van Zandt in calling for their outright banning, but in marrying Apple’s I-Phone and I-Watch technologies: creating a sort of “Drone-Phone,” which would be required to come back to the wrist or pocket of its operator after every use.

I wrote:

“In the spirit of Apple’s new Watch, I’ve got a creative solution to these techie mind-twisters, putting responsible limits on drones by holding “droners” directly accountable for their operation. My solution is called, the “CellDrone,” and I’m offering my idea to Apple or China’s DJI Technology Company, the world’s biggest maker of drones.”

“My CellDrone would work something like this:

Designed to fit in your pocket like an Iphone, the CellDrone, is twice the thickness of your average mobile phone. Once turned on, the CellDrone can be used as a normal Iphone to make phone calls, send texts, scan social media, find pizza places, play music, search contacts, or take photos.

“However, here’s where the CellDrone soars!

A new button on top of the phone, when pressed three times, transforms it into a small, Optimus Prime-like Drone before your very eyes. In order to operate the CellDrone, you’ve got to turn on your matching CD (for CellDrone) WristWatch—way cooler than the Apple Watch– and press the “activation” button three times as well. Multiple, coordinated button-pressing is required to avoid accidental activation, like “butt droning” especially if the CellDrone user is in a tightly enclosed space, like a subway car, bus, bathroom stall, or a micro-apartment.

Once the CD Watch is coordinated with the CellDrone, the user can give voice commands to the CellDrone through a microphone in the CD Watch. The new voice recognition system in the CellDrone/CD Watch is highly sophisticated and precise, able to distinguish a Brooklyn accent from a Southern Drawl, or Mandarin Chinese from Farsi, as well as the slurred speech of inebriated or stoned users.

When the CellDrone user wants to take a “selfie” photo from a distance greater than arms-length, he or she simply activates the CellDrone, sets the distance on his CD watch (cannot exceed 10 feet) and speaks into the CD Watch the word “Photobomb.”

The CellDrone then snaps multiple photos of the user and others with the user. Unlike the Spazzatura (garbage, in Italian) “Selfie Stick” which can poke people in the eyes, puncture art canvases or knock over statues, the CellDrone is programmed with a remarkably sensitive sonar field which can “feel” the presence of any object within a few inches. Upon sensing a strange object within its field of “photobombing,” the CellDrone will, bat-like, automatically land and attach itself back to the CD Watch, which acts as its control tower.

If the CellDrone user tries to move more than 10 feet from the device, the CellDrone will not fly, regardless of the volume or number of voice commands. If the CellDrone user tries to abuse the CellDrone for other than “photobombing” purposes—like dropping real bombs, or poisonous chemicals— the CD Watch is pre-programmed to immediately contact 9-1-1, and give the operators location and name.

While the CellDrone is intended for close, personal photographic use only, and not for the delivery of packages, bombs or anthrax, nor intended to cross the flight paths of commercial jetliners potentially causing deadly air collisions, the CD Watch will be required for ALL Drone users, commercial or personal, and for ALL Drone purchasers and users to be registered in a national data bank—something which we still don’t require of purchasers, users and owners of Assault Weapons.

What the CD Watch technology would mean for every “droner”, is that ALL drones, regardless of size or payload, once activated, will automatically return to the wrist of the user. (NB: That requirement would rule out mini-van sized drones, unless the user wants to be crushed by his own drone when it returns to it’s launch pad.) The used drone can only be removed from the CD Watch at a fully licensed Drone Removal Clinic (or, DR. Clinic), where a full history of the usage and user of the Drone will be taken, along with the user’s picture. Once you purchase a drone, the CD Watches becomes a mandatory accessory—kind of like an ankle bracelet for people under house arrest —and can never be removed from users’ wrist until the drone is deactivated and destroyed.”

I re-read my dissertation-like droning on about drones written back in 2014, and decided that I liked Stevie Van Zandt’s far simpler and cleaner proposal, requiring no cumbersome regulations, nor bureaucracy to implement it:

“ALL DRONES SHOULD BE ILLEGAL.”

Thanks, Stevie. I am now a Van Zandt “Disciple” on drones.

There is much more to this story than meets our own eyes. The writer Joyce Maynard has opened mine, inspiring me to write this poem about what I found in Luigi Mangione’s eyes.

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,

Are telescopes,

Peering deep into our souls,

Past all that’s phony,

Seeing through the masks

We wear, when we are most alone.

The eyes of a killer?

The eyes of a seer?

Eyes abandoned by love?

Hollowed by fear?

Eyes searching for meaning?

And just one, true thing to be clear?

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione

Are not a hero’s eyes.

But pools of terror,

Filled by the pain and surprise

Of how things can quickly fall apart,

Even for those rich, or smart,

“With everything to live for,”

As if those who are poor, do not.

Did pain push him into despair,

Or, was it somehow there,

Hidden deep from his family’s success

Waiting to be unleashed

By excruciating stress

So deep it tore the skin off

What he spent years struggling to suppress?

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,

Alone, alone, so cornered and cut to the bone,

Carved out by difference, and indifference,

Or rejection, or isolation,

At odds with family expectations,

And the casual cruelty of a soulless nation.

A young Werther for a broken age,

Each day drenched in so much violence,

That individual acts become blurred

With mass murders, or maimed children;

And acts of complicity are reflected in silence,

Even when life’s denial, kills humans softly, over time.

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione

Cry out to us for help, to save him from despair.

Does anybody care? Does no one feel his pain?

How could a parent give up on their child?

Let demons destroy that perfect body,

Or eat away his beautiful brain?

We can focus on the life Luigi took,

And, not or, on the one we took from him.

We can say, without much depth,

That murder is murder, or death is death.

But then we miss that moment of attunement,

To gift those we love, and others, one more breath.

***

(The writing of Joyce Maynard on December 10, 2024, inspired me to look deeply into Luigi Mangione’s eyes, and examine beyond the headlines, the social media memes and the polarized positions that have already framed this human tragedy. The piece from her personal Facebook posting is reprinted in full below, with Joyce Maynard’s permission).

By Joyce Maynard:

Sometimes an individual I read about in the news captures my attention in a particular way that seems to go beyond the scope of the news story itself. This probably has something to do with the odd ways that The Big Story touches issues or experiences in my own life. Sometimes it may be nothing more than a photograph that calls out to me—a particularly compelling image. Often this has to do with the person’s eyes.

It happened again this week, when an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized the young man bent over his laptop having a hamburger as the person of interest sought by law enforcement officials across the nation for the murder of a health insurance executive in Manhattan last week. It’s hard to grasp how the McDonald’s employee recognized this young man—who was wearing a face mask at the time—as the object of a nationwide manhunt, but having studied the photographs of him that were everywhere for a few days leading up to this event, I think I understand.

The eyes of Luigi Mangione—the young man in question, now incarcerated in a jail cell in Pennsylvania, charged with murder in the first degree—are deep and dark. He’s not simply handsome; his face has a haunting quality. Without wanting to read too much into a story whose bare outlines I know only from a handful of news story, I get the impression, from studying this photograph, that Luigi Mangione is a tormented individual, and a person suffering from an extraordinary measure of pain.

What I’m saying here should not be misinterpreted as any kind of defense of murder. The actions of a victim—including one who presided over a massive corporation that denied insurance coverage to thousands of people who then suffered immeasurable sorrow and pain, possibly loss of life—in no way justify the act of taking the law in one’s own hands and putting a bullet into that person as he headed into a board meeting.

If the young man captured by police yesterday committed that act, he deserves punishment, and will surely receive it. While it’s evidently true—and not surprising—that vast numbers of Americans who have been victimized by the insurance industry are celebrating him as an outlaw hero, his actions speak to a kind of lawlessness we’ve been witnessing plenty of, among certain political leaders of the right, in recent years.

I can no more endorse shooting an insurance executive because you despise his company’s policies than I can excuse the violence of the rioters who desecrated our nation’s capital back in January of 2021 because they were unhappy with the election results.

But there’s no way I can look at the face of Luigi Mangione without thinking about my own two sons (now 40 and 42, both fathers, caring for wives and children, trying to do the right thing in the world). Like Luigi Mangione, my sons were the beneficiaries of great educational resources that included private school and four years at a fine (and expensive) university, in the case of one.

Although I supported my children as a single parent, and my financial resources were probably far less than those of the Mangione family (who have been described in news stories as “a prominent Maryland family”), I made sure my sons and daughter never lacked for books, art supplies, music lessons, tennis lessons, summer camp. Most of all, an abundance of love.

I don’t know the details of the Mangione family’s relationship with their son, but I’m willing to bet he was a well-loved person, when he cut off communication with them some months back and disappeared from view. Until this week, when his photograph was suddenly everywhere.

With the exception of a couple of driving violations when they were young, and an incident in the college career of one, involving a middle-of-the-night plan to scale the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, neither one of my sons ever got into trouble with the law.

But trouble takes many forms. I’ve known a few of these.

I’ve come to know, and care about, a great many young people who aren’t my own children, in my years of life on this planet, in this country, and in the world of generation X and Z: these include the friends of my children, and the sons and daughters of my friends, and more recently, the unlikely but deeply rewarding friendships I made with individuals far younger than my own children, when I returned to college at age 65, and spent my days in the company of 18, 19 and 20 year olds. Theirs is a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which I came of age, filled with forms of influence, danger, confusion and seduction virtually unknown to a person born in 1953.

As much as it matters, still, that a parent loves and cares for her child the very best she can, I no longer believe that it is within the power of any parent, any more, to ensure that her child will make his way safely and healthily into the world of adulthood. So many factors are outside of our control now. They come at children from their cell phones and tablets, the bullying of classmates, news of the world and perceptions (not inaccurate) that the future is filled with uncertainty. And worse.

You can love a child with your whole heart—send him off to a good school, sit there among your fellow parents, listening to him deliver a valedictory address – and still, there he is at McDonald’s, with a gun in his backpack, and a manifesto concerning plans to wreak vengeance on the actions of those he perceives (not necessarily inaccurately) as corporate criminals.

Maybe now is the moment to mention that the faces of not one but two handsome young men occupied the news over recent days. In addition to Luigi Mangione, I read a great deal about Daniel Penny, the 24-year old Marine Corps veteran and architecture student—white—who also chose to take the law into his own hands, when a homeless schizophrenic man named Jordan Neely entered a train on which Penny was traveling, in Manhattan. When Neely began ranting and (according to some) threatening passengers on the train, Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and kept him there, long after he’d ceased to move (also according to witnesses), to the point where Jordan Neely stopped breathing and died.

Unlike the actions of the killer who shot the United Health Care C.E.O., those of Daniel Penny were not premeditated. Penny leapt to action spontaneously. Some call him a murderer. Some call him a hero. The jury found him not guilty on all charges. He’s a free man now.

Unlike the eyes of Luigi Mangione, those of Daniel Penny, entering and leaving the courtroom, were hard to read. Reportedly, he has expressed no remorse for his actions on the train that day. If he suffers torment, and he may well do so, it remains a mystery. For whatever reason, his story does not haunt me as the one of Luigi Mangione does.

Daniel Penny will go on with his life. What happened on the train that day will alter its course. But he will carry on. He may well earn his architecture degree. He may even publish a book. This won’t be the case for Luigi Mangione.

Suicide has reached epidemic proportions among young people, including young people of privilege, those who have experienced all kinds of advantages many of us once believed might shield them from pain or danger. Fewer of us suppose this now.

What Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done last week represents another kind of suicide. By taking the life of a man who stood for everything he believed to be corrupt and evil, he was destroying his own future as well. At the age of 26, in possession of so many of the gifts and advantages that might have ensured an exceedingly good life, it appears he may have chosen to commit an act that could lock him up forever.

If convicted, he could receive the death penalty. If in fact he is the person who pulled the trigger that day, I am guessing he understood this, as well as any 26 year old can. Which is to say: Not all that well. He could not understand fully, at 26, all that he was taking away, all that he stood to lose, himself.

There is one fact about the life of Luigi Mangione that occupies considerable significance for me, as I read the few scraps of information we know, so far, about this person whose story we’ll be hearing a great deal more of, in the weeks and months to come.

In addition to being a star student, he was evidently a gifted and highly disciplined athlete at school –a runner and a soccer player. Sometime in the last year or so, it appears he suffered a serious injury to his spine which made even simple movement excruciatingly painful. He tried to overcome this –gingerly attempting to work out at a climbing gym. He tried surfing, resisted pain medication.

One small detail from his biography, recounted by one of the friends from whom he recently severed contact from his biography stands out for me: That the back pain suffered by this young man was so great, and so crippling, that it made intimacy with a partner impossible.

Maybe that doesn’t sound so heartbreaking, to a person who has lived a long, full life of love. But when I read that, I imagined a handsome 26 year old soccer player, concluding that simple human touch was no longer a part of his future.

Close one door, burst through into another. One that heads straight to life in prison.

These are my thoughts today, about Luigi Mangione. And I am thinking, too, oddly enough, about the two young men to whom I gave birth, working hard at their jobs, off with their wives and children today, getting ready for a big holiday. Presents. Songs. A big meal, shared around the table with those they love. I won’t be with either of them this year for that day –or with my equally well-loved daughter. But they remain in my heart.

So I am also thinking today about the parents of the young man who sits in an Altoona Pennsylvania jail. And about parents everywhere, who lovingly send their children—our children—out into the world, launching them like little paper boats on rough and swirling waters. Maybe they keep afloat. Maybe they get pulled under. Maybe they pull others under along the way.

I say a prayer for us all.

Robert F. Kennedy, the father, speaks from the grave to his son RFK, Jr., at a time when everything he gave up his life for–Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Human Decency–is at risk.

(Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Age 14, in the foreground, stands by his father’s casket in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in early June, 1968. TV Talk Show Host Jack Paar, a Kennedy family friend, stands behind the casket.)

(NB: In the aftermath of RFK,Jr., abandoning his own campaign for President, supporting Donald Trump, and Trump’s nomination of him to head HHS, I’ve revived this letter from a father to a son, which I first drafted back in June of this year, on the 56 anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy from New York.

Since this letter was first published, several significant things have happened: first, Ethel Kennedy died, at 96 years old, amidst RFK, Jr’s failing campaign and bitter disagreements between all of her children about his deranged & damaging candidacy. Secondly, the New York Times published a scathing indictment of RFK, Jr, last week—by three first-rate reporters— carefully examining how his father’s murder, contributed to the son’s spiral into heroin addition, sexual abuse, and crazed conspiracy theories. Here is the link to that astonishing story, immediately followed by my letter from father to son, written six months earlier:)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/kennedy-rfk-profile-trump.html?smid=url-share)

Dear Bobby:

I know life has been hard for you since I was murdered 56 years ago, after I just won the California Democratic Presidential Primary. I’m sure it’s been difficult for the entire family.

But, I’m writing to you now, because I believe you’ve taken your grief over my being taken from you at such an early age, in some incomprehensible and unconscionable directions. It’s time for you to reflect on the enormous damage you are doing.

I was glad you weren’t there to witness me being shot in the head. It was bad enough your mother had to see it. The fact that you were asleep in your dorm some 3,000 miles away at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., and had to be awakened in the middle of the night by a priest to hear the news, has always been of some comfort to me. For a 14-year old to have watched such gun violence in person, being perpetrated against his father, would have been traumatizing.

I can only imagine how terrible it was to be rousted from a sound sleep to learn the news. I will be forever grateful to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for flying you, Kathleen, and Joe out to LA on Air Force Two, so you could all be at my bedside in Good Samaritan Hospital. Hubert personified what being a “good samaritan” means.

Even though Last Rights had already been administered to me, I felt you grab my hand tightly and pray for me to survive and for my soul. I shall also never forget how brave you were to stand by my casket, day-after-day, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, while millions of Americans were able to come by and pay their respects. I felt you trembling, but still, you stood there, strong and erect like a soldier of Jesus Christ. For that courage, I shall always be grateful.

However, in pursuing the path of public service, to which many in our family have devoted themselves, you seem to have gotten lost along the way. So, as a deep believer that eternal change for the better is possible, I am offering you the kind of guidance I wish I was able to give you in person:

First, you’ve harmed millions of children with special needs—the same children whose lives our family championed in the Special Olympics, and to whom you Aunt Eunice, your cousin Maria, and I dedicated our lives to serving—with your decades long laundry list of lies about the link between Vaccines and Autism.

Those bold-face lies — disproved by dozens of medical studies — resulted in the loss of the medical license by Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who originated and propagated the destructive anti-vaxxer propaganda. You knew that at the time you started peddling that pernicious propaganda, and you certainly know it now. To continue to spread those lies, and grotesquely try to repeat them concerning COVID-19—a disease which killed 1.2 million Americans—is unconscionable. Stop it.

I am ashamed that you knowingly disseminated and profited from peddling such widely disproven, and damaging, lies about a non-existent link between standard, childhood MMR vaccines and autism, blocking legitimate research and treatment for autism for many years. By intentionally spreading such ignorance, you personally caused direct harm to many of the same marginalized communities — communities of color, the poor, and the disabled — that I spent my lifetime championing. Didn’t you learn anything from our dining room table conversations about the special responsibilities we had?

Secondly, your candidacy for President is of grave concern to me, as it it to every other member of our family, who have all solidly backed Joe Biden. Biden, a good, fair and compassionate man, has governed in a conciliatory, pragmatic progressive tradition to benefit working families—much as I would have done—and, right now, he is a necessary bulwark against the anti-democratic, nationalistic, nihilistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-women, anti-gay, and reactionary forces in this country and around the world. He may well be the last best hope for Democracy, and for decency. How could you undermine that, and play into the hands of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn—all convicted felons, by the way—and of Vladimir Putin?

Your mother and I taught you respect for the Rule of Law, for Democracy and for the dignity of every human life. How could you not see that by taking even one-vote away from Joe Biden, you are pushing this country into the abyss of darkness, and turning it over to the forces of Fascism your Uncle John and I gave up our lives fighting? Why are you trashing all the good work we tried to do during our brief time in public office?

And, while I have your attention, that choice you made for your running mate is completely looney-tunes. She met a billionaire at a Yoga Retreat, had his baby, took some of his money and then dumped him when she had sex with another billionaire? And she used her multi-millions to spread more lies about vaccines, and to purchase a place on your national ticket? Really, Bobby? What are you doing? I can understand your wanting to act out a bit of a subconscious Oedipal plot aimed at me for abruptly leaving you at such a tender age, but do you really want to send your 96-year old mother to her grave? Snap out of it!

Third, that cringe-worthy book for which you wrote the forward, entitled, “The Real Anthony Fauci”, has been adopted as gospel by the John Birch Society, Q-Anon, and every other anti-government wacko on the extreme Right Wing, including the Republicans running the present House of Representatives. Do you really believe that the life-saving work of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates was meant to “ put humanity under totalitarian rule,” and “must be stopped? Who ARE you?

The Craig Newmark Center’s Poynter Institute—which has done some outstanding work in public health and public policy I would have strongly supported— reported that you are “one of the biggest sources of anti-vaccine rhetoric today.”

Worse, McGill University’s Office of Science & Society —at one of Canada’s leading Medical Universities—has called you “one of the princes of the anti-vaccine movement, if not its king.” What have you become?

As if all of this deeply damaging behavior on your part wasn’t enough, Bobby, you gutted me when you testified before the Louisiana House Oversight Committee during the height of the COVID pandemic, and opposed a proposal requiring public school students to be vaccinated. Your reckless actions took by breath away: my son, my namesake, crusading against a proven public-health measure that has historically protected people of color.

You had to know that more than 50% of the public school students in Louisiana are students of color — precisely the demographic that had the highest rates of COVID infections, and death. Were you consciously undermining everything your mother and I taught you to fight for? Everything shred of public service and the public good that the Kennedy family has stood for?

Didn’t it matter to you, Bobby, that the rabid Right Wing groups you are now working with are the very same pernicious people who have always opposed more funding for health care for the poor, for working families, for mental health services, and for the disabled? Doesn’t it matter to you that those actions are costing the lives of the most vulnerable among us?

I know you have questions about whether Sirhan Sirhan acted alone in murdering me, Bobby, but whether he did or not, your unhinged actions and life-threatening lies against the people for whom I fought, are doing a far more thorough job of assassinating my legacy than Sirhan ever could.

I will always love you, my son, and will always believe in the power of redemption, and in your ability to turn toward the light, instead of pulling the country down into a wormhole of darkness and despair.

Love,

Your father.