From RFK, Jr., the brain worm guy, the strange stories keep coming. Kennedy has told the story of a 1974 rafting trip in Peru where he and his companions were attacked by a group of indigenous people, an attack that he's apparently exaggerated greatly, or flat made up:
"Kennedy’s account of the incident, which is detailed in the 1984 book “The Kennedys: An American Drama,” describes how one of his friends was nearly hit in the leg with an arrow, which penetrated a canteen nearby. Kennedy said he and his cousin, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, retaliated by picking up a stick of dynamite they found, lighting it and throwing it at their attackers. [snip]
It’s a wild story from Kennedy, who is currently running for president as an independent — and it also appears to be wildly exaggerated or entirely made up.
Lawford, who died in 2018, offered a brief and far less dramatic account of this incident in his 2005 memoir, ”Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption.” He made no mention of a near-miss arrow strike or dynamite.
He wrote only: 'We floated by Indian villages, once having to avoid the arrows being shot in our direction by a drunken tribe on the shore.'
A longtime Kennedy friend who was also on the rafting trip, Blake Fleetwood, said as soon as the 1984 book came out that the incident never happened." (our emphasis)
Kennedy struggled with drug addiction in the 1970s and early 1980s, which might account for his apparently fictional story of the attack. Now that he's running for President, after gaining notoriety for his years-long campaign against vaccines, his honesty as well as his policy positions are under increased scrutiny.
(photo illustration: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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