RFK jr. went from one end of the political spectrum to the other. That was a bit of a family tradition.

If you're interested enough in politics and history to read this post, you should definitely take a few minutes and check out this bit by Mort Sahl on the Hollywood Palace (sort of a poor man's Ed Sullivan Show, but not without its notable moments).

Listen for the Reagan reference at the beginning, "even the New York Times" around two and a half minutes, Mitt Romney's dad, and lots of other familiar names, but mainly pay attention to the way Vietnam had become the issue that defined left and right, especially when it came to Bobby Kennedy.

The story is complicated, particularly when you factor in Roy Cohn, Trump's mentor and RFK's bitter rival. I don't have any big point to make, just provide an ironic bit of context.

Larry Tye excerpted in the Boston Globe.

Senator McCarthy dated Kennedy sisters Patricia and Eunice in Washington when they visited Jack, and on Cape Cod, where Eunice thought it fun to push McCarthy out of her father’s boat until she learned he couldn’t swim. The Wisconsin senator played shortstop for the Barefoot Boys, the Kennedy family softball team (McCarthy was benched after making four errors). And he cracked a rib during one of the storied touch football games on the lawn in Hyannisport.

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Months later, it was Bobby’s turn to get a boost from McCarthy, who had been reelected and elevated to chair the powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. One of the first calls McCarthy took, when searching for a chief counsel, was from the other Joe. This time the senior Kennedy was plugging Bobby, whom he’d once described as the runt of his litter of nine — the lamest athlete, most tongue-tied, and least likely to matter. He now understood that Bobby was the most like him of his children, in everything from his capacity to hate as well as love, to his hard-as-nails single-mindedness (in Joe’s case it was to make money so his kids wouldn’t have to, while Bobby’s three totems were, in descending order, the Kennedy family, God, and the Democratic Party).

During his undergraduate years at Harvard in the late 1940s, Bobby had shown where he stood on McCarthy’s soon-to-be holy war against Communism when he defended the senator in impassioned debates with friends. In a law school paper, he argued that President Franklin Roosevelt had sold out US interests in his agreement with the Soviets on the configuration of postwar Europe. His first job after law school in 1951 was investigating Bolsheviks at the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department. And as manager for his brother Jack’s Senate campaign, he attacked Senator Lodge for being soft on Communism.

Now, as McCarthy weighed his options for chief counsel, Bobby said he was almost as alarmed as the senator about the “serious internal security threat to the United States,” adding that “Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” The lawmaker and the newly-minted lawyer both had the whatever-it-takes instincts of alley fighters, which Bobby believed they’d need in a Cold War where the enemy fought dirty. “Joe’s methods may be a little rough,” Bobby once told a pair of journalists, “but, after all, his goal is to expose Communists in government, and that’s a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?”

There was one last reason why a job with McCarthy was so appealing to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby knew his father admired McCarthy, and he saw the senator as a reflection of much that he loved in his dad. Working for a tough-minded jingoist like McCarthy also was Bobby’s way of trying to erase the public’s lingering memory of Joe Kennedy as a Nazi apologist and, as many British still saw FDR’s early-war ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a coward. What Bobby failed to see was that his father — an isolationist who believed that Communists, like fascists, could be accommodated until their regimes collapsed from within — was far less of a cold warrior than McCarthy was. Less even than Bobby himself was on the way to becoming.

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Both Bobby and Jack understood McCarthy’s magnetism as well as the menace that turned his name into an “ism” personifying character assassination and fear-mongering. How they responded to that spoke volumes about the brothers’ own differences in temperament and outlook. The silky-smooth and highbrow Jack wanted little to do with McCarthy; the more gut-trusting, free-spirited Bobby embraced the Wisconsinite as a friend. The public may have thought McCarthy a “monster,” but he actually “was just plain fun,” Bobby’s widow, Ethel, told me. “He didn’t rant and roar, he was a normal guy.”

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Bobby was quicker to grasp the immorality but was more loyal than his big brother, and even his father. While he’d worked for McCarthy for just seven-and-a-half months, Bobby stayed his friend till the end, making his last visit to the senator just before McCarthy died. His job with Joe launched Bobby’s career, injecting into his life passion and direction glaringly absent before then. His relationship with the Wisconsin senator became, too, a paradox he couldn’t escape, serving for some as a testament to his fidelity and patriotism, and for others as a measure of his youthful misdirection.

Senator McCarthy died at the age of 48 in 1957, liquor having eaten away at his liver. Jack stayed away from the funeral and urged his brother to do the same, but Bobby insisted on being there. At the church in Appleton, Wisconsin, however, he sat in the choir loft where nobody would see him; at the graveside, he stood apart from other Washington officials. And when the service was done, he begged journalists not to mention his being there for fear of embarrassing himself and his brother, the man who would become president of the United States in just three years.