Joe Kennedy III calls Washington Post column invoking RFK 'grotesque'

Rep. Joe Kennedy III says that a Washington Post columnist’s recent attempt to use his grandfather as a cudgel against the current Democratic Party was “grotesque.”

In his own op-ed Wednesday evening, the Massachusetts congressman responded to conservative columnist and radio host Hugh Hewitt’s opinion piece Saturday in the Post headlined “The party of Robert F. Kennedy is gone.”

Hewitt pointed to the former attorney general and New York senator’s famously moving speech in 1968, in which the then-presidential candidate announced the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to a largely African-American crowd in Indianapolis and called for “love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”

Kennedy himself was assassinated two months after the speech.

In his article, Hewitt suggested that, in the wake of the recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, today’s Democratic Party sought to “score points,” rather than urge peace and healing.

Read more: https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2019/08/15/joe-kennedy-hugh-hewitt-rfk-column