When Jesse Ventura and Bobby Kennedy Jr. First Met

The independent-minded leaders are set to reconnect today in Tucson, Arizona

By Dick Russell, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

[On Monday, February 5, in Tucson, Arizona, the former independent Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura will introduce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a private reception and then a public event at the Fox Theater. What follows is the story of their first meeting.]

In the final months of 2004, I took a break from writing and traveled to the East Cape of Mexico’s Baja California, where my family had built a home above the Sea of Cortez. That’s where I was when Bobby’s assistant emailed to say that he would be flying to my proximity with his family over Thanksgiving, and would I like to go fishing with them? 

It would become a fishing expedition of a very different sort, but that wasn’t how it started out. I arose before dawn to make the hour-and-a-half drive and meet Bobby, his wife Mary, and their three boys at the marina in Cabo San Lucas. 

It turned out to be a windy day with a rough sea, and our fishing was sandwiched in between the kids getting sick one by one. We returned to the dock around 11 AM. I’d mentioned to Bobby that I was staying a few miles down the road from where Jesse Ventura had recently purchased a second home. He was the famous wrestler who’d shocked the nation in 1998 by defeating the Democratic and Republican candidates to be elected governor of Minnesota. He’d served a successful four-year term and decided not to seek another. 

In Baja, we’d run into each other one afternoon on the beach and ended up working together on his memoir. I knew that Ventura had great admiration for the Kennedy family. He and Bobby had never met, but I also knew that both men liked to go diving. So I suggested: what about tomorrow, Sunday? Bobby looked at me for a long moment before responding: “Let’s do the two o’clock dive.”

I bypassed my family’s place and went straight to the Venturas’. Yes, the governor would definitely be up for this. The next morning, he showed up at 11 AM in his Hummer. As always, he waxed loquacious on the drive. After deciding not to run again, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard had hired him as a political science professor for a year. A guy who’d never gone beyond high school! 

We arrived at the house in Cabo where Bobby had invited us for lunch. When he came out to greet us, Ventura looked at him and grinned. “Yeah, I can sure see the resemblance,” he said, adding that he’d grown up in the Sixties with Bobby’s father and uncle as important figures in his life.

Early discussion focused around his wrestling career and Navy SEAL days. The governor made sure to note that JFK had started the SEALS. Bobby interjected that it was actually his father who’d pushed for that, because he was fascinated with “those kind of covert action things.” Bobby chuckled through much of lunch at the colorful banter from the governor, who didn’t eat much because he was too busy talking. 

Time to head for the dive shop downtown. As we pulled into a parking lot, Bobby asked Jesse what his numbers were like as governor of Minnesota. “My numbers? Oh… they try to pretend it didn’t happen, that those four years were just a bad dream.” Bobby cracked up laughing. It felt like the governor had just won his heart. “But I was as high as 73 [percent approval] and as low as 45.” Was that when he was leaving office? “Yeah,” Ventura said. Bobby noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger, as California’s governor, went as low as 30. “Yeah,” Jesse said, “and that’s when he decided to become a Democrat” in order to get reelected.

En route to picking up the diving gear, Ventura raised the fact that they’d both visited Fidel Castro in Cuba. “We met for an hour,” he added. Bobby responded that they’d met for four-and-a-half hours but it didn’t start until one o’clock in the morning. “My meeting was at noon,” the governor replied. In retrospect, there may have been something of a how-much-time-did-you-get-with-Fidel competition.

Inside the dive shop, the owner wanted to see Ventura’s certification. He brought out his Navy SEAL Underwater Demolition card. “I guess that will do,” the proprietor said. At Pelican Rock I snorkeled with the kids, observing a large number of beautiful fish, while Ventura in a wet-suit and Bobby wearing a bathing suit and T-shirt dove deep with their tanks for about forty-five minutes. We swam above them for a while, as though watching them on TV way down below, before losing them entirely.

When Jesse surfaced, struggling up the ladder beneath the 80-pound tank, he expressed that he’d forgotten how physically tough this was, but was excited at having seen a moray eel. When Bobby returned, he said, “That was kind of existential,” going right to an abyss and watching the sand pour over a waterfall.

Walking back to the car, ten-year-old Conor asked what the governor had taught at Harvard. “Third-party politics,” Ventura replied. “Something your Dad doesn’t know anything about!” Bobby cracked up laughing again. As we returned to the house, he posed a number of personal questions – where did Jesse live in Minnesota, did he fish on the lake, what was his wife like? He seemed genuinely curious about his new companion. In return, I noticed that Jesse called him “Bob,” as if “Bobby” was a little too familiar.

Bobby wanted to know all about Ventura’s meeting with Castro. The governor began by saying how Fidel had a handshake unlike anyone he’d ever met, imitating how the Cuban premier thrust his hand forward. Bobby was impressed that Ventura had gone to Cuba while he was governor, since technically an American ban on traveling there still existed. Well, he’d privately considered being the first governor to defect, Ventura said, or at least implying that to Fidel.

Then he recounted a story of Castro’s security guards taking him out “on the town” for his last night in Cuba. They’d asked Ventura, did he want to “lose” the two CIA guys who were tailing him? Upon his return to the US, he wasn’t surprised when the CIA debriefed him – “That’s their job” – asking about Castro’s health and more. At the end of the debrief, Ventura told them: “If you ever put a tail on me again without telling me about it, I’ll put those guys in the river.” He was clearly a man after Bobby’s heart, who laughed uproariously again.

Bobby asked seven-year-old Finn if he remembered seeing Predator, Jesse being the guy with the Gatling gun. This led to the subject of Schwarzenegger, the other star of the movie. When they were on the Predator set together right before Schwarzenegger went to Hyannis Port for his wedding to Maria Shriver, Ventura noted it was he who coached Arnold on how to say “I do.”

We moved to the subject of politics, sitting around a coffee table over some cheese-and-crackers. Ventura spoke of how violently upset he became at the state of affairs when he went back to the US from Mexico. Bobby agreed. They talked about terrorism, again finding common ground that you had to take on fanatics selectively. One trouble with the Iraq War, Bobby added, was its being “a police action” that was only leading to the likely creation of more terrorists. 

Jesse described himself as a fiscal conservative who is liberal on social issues. The same was true of Bobby. It was fascinating to see how in sync the two men seemed on so many issues. Then Jesse looked across the table at Bobby. 

“Do you want to run the country?” he asked, almost matter-of-factly.

Bobby, clearly somewhat flustered, stood up. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I want to run the country.” He added that the Green Party had asked him to be its candidate in 2008.

“Oh, don’t do what Nader did!” Ventura exclaimed, referring to Ralph Nader’s third-party run against Bush and Gore in 2000. “You should quit the Democratic Party and run with me as an independent!”

“I can’t do that,” Bobby stammered. ‘I’m a Democrat.”

“Well, that’s been done; your uncle was a great Democrat and so was your father. But the two-party system is finished! We need something new!”

At this moment, late in November 2006, the field for the presidential election two years hence seemed wide-open. Barack Obama wouldn’t announce his then-unlikely presidential bid until the new year.

Ventura went on to say that he’d won the governorship after spending only $300,000! “I’m the most powerful man in America!” Jesse announced. “You know why? Because I’m the only one who can unite both parties against me!”

As we were hot into this, Finn bounded down some stairs and began doing head-stands behind us, suddenly bashing his foot into the ping pong table and raising a big welt. It was going to need some ice.

Jesse looked over at me and said, “Guess we’d better go.” But the governor gave it one more try. He walked over to Bobby in full wrestler persona, urging him to go independent.

“I am independent,” Bobby insisted. “You should become a Democrat!”

“I’d lose all my credibility!” Ventura shouted back.

“We’ll keep talking about it,” Bobby said.

Then he gave the governor a big hug, a gesture I’d never seen him do before. Walking back toward the car, Jesse asked Bobby one more time to consider his offer, telling him that the wrestling mogul Vince McMahon was prepared through his connections to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. 

Bobby said nothing. He wanted to look inside Ventura’s gas-guzzling Hummer. “You should get one of these,” the governor said.

“I can’t do that! I’m an environmentalist!” Bobby exclaimed, but laughed again.

Then Ventura issued this prediction: “We’ve had nothing but Bushes and Clintons since 1980, if you count when papa Bush was vice president, and that’s more like a monarchy. Now in 2008, we’re gonna have Hillary and Jeb!”

“Oh, that’s a discouraging thought,” Bobby concurred.

Ventura started the engine. Bobby stood in the driveway and saluted, a huge grin on his face. As we began to drive away, he came running down to say he’d lead us out in his car because he had to get something from the store.

Turning onto the main highway, Jesse rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat, he turned to me. “What do you think, Dick? Should we leak it?” He paused before inventing the headline: “Jesse Ventura and Robert Kennedy Jr., meeting in Mexico to talk about the fate of the country.”

“I don’t think it’s quite time to do that yet,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He wondered if Bobby played golf. I said he was more into sports like skiing and whitewater rafting, apparently ruling out a future private conference on the links.

There is a short coda to this story. As I completed working the following year with Governor Ventura on a memoir that he chose to title Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!, he decided he’d like to have a fictional epilogue. He runs for president as an independent – and ends up getting shot! I mused about this for a while. Then I wrote the epilogue in the form of a series of newspaper headlines with accompanying short paragraphs. Ventura enters the race and selects Bobby as his running mate. Nobody gives them a chance. But as the year goes by, they start to rise in the polls. The independent Ventura-Kennedy ticket wins by a narrow margin. Then Jesse is seriously wounded by a gunman outside the White House … hovering between life and death as the book comes to a close.

When the book came out early in 2008, Bobby’s assistant told me that his office phone had been ringing off the hook. A lot of people somehow didn’t realize that the ending was purely fictional. They were asking, is it true? Is Bobby going to run with Governor Ventura?

I next spoke to Bobby in the spring. Did he get the Ventura book I sent him? I asked. “Oh yeah. I got a lot of reactions to that.” He paused before adding: “It was pretty funny.” He didn’t seem to mind, and asked how the book was doing. When he heard it had hit the Times Best-Seller List at number 21, he was glad to hear it. I asked what he thought was going to happen, was Hillary going to pull out? “I hope so,” he said at the time.

She did, Obama won the election, and the rest is history.

Dick Russell is the author of The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior, a biography published in 2023.