Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cocaine dealing enterprise while at Harvard left a bad taste in at least one customer’s mouth.
Author Kurt Andersen told The Daily Beast Podcast’s Joanna Coles about what happened after he went to Kennedy’s college dorm room to buy the drug from the “Kennedy brat” more than 50 years ago, as well as other stories about the future Health and Human Services boss.
With $40 to spend, Andersen and a friend met Kennedy to make a purchase. After showing them a backgammon case full of marijuana and offering some, Kennedy left the room and returned about five minutes later.
As Andersen explained, Kennedy “put out a line of coke and we tried it with his little—he hands us a little piece of, you know, one-inch straw that he’d gotten from… the freshman eating place next to his dorm.”
After trying it and buying some, Andersen returned to the dorm. Once he was back in his room, the future Spy magazine co-founder got a phone call from Kennedy.
“The phone in my dorm room rang and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s Bobby,’” Andersen said, portraying Kennedy as angry.
“He said, ‘You took my straw, man!’” Andersen recalled.
“I said, ‘What?’”
“He said, ‘You took the straw!’”
“And apparently I had pocketed—not wanting to steal Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s special cocaine straw—but it turned out it was his special cocaine straw, because he believed, as he explained to me, it had crystals growing in it,” Andersen said.
“Meaning somehow the repeated use of mucus and cocaine buildup made it something that it was very precious to him,” he continued. “And therefore, now he’s the head of the health system of the United States.“
When he returned the straw, Andersen said, Kennedy took it and then “virtually slammed the door” in his face.
Cocaine and an apparently special straw weren’t the only things Andersen left Kennedy’s room with the first time.
While looking at Kennedy’s address book, Andersen saw numbers for several contacts, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pope Paul the Sixth, whose papacy lasted from 1963 until 1978.
“We wrote all these numbers down” just before Kennedy returned, Andersen said.
The straw incident was the end of two’s cocaine relationship, Andersen said. But he would see Kennedy around and would hear stories about his shenanigans.
“He was a reckless, entitled guy,” Andersen said. “And one of my friends tells me this story of driving with Bobby—Bobby driving, because he had a car, none of the rest of us did—driving through this tunnel… in Harvard Square at night, turning the lights of the car off.”
“There are many stories like that of him just behaving recklessly and heedlessly because, well, he was young,” Andersen said, “and when you’re young, you don’t think you can die.”
The Daily Beast reached out to both Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the White House for comment.
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