The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (TV Series)

Denzel Washington/Joe Kennedy III/Carmen Lagala (2018)

Joe Kennedy III: Self

Quotes 

• Self - Host : Thanks for being here

  Joe Kennedy III : Thanks for having me

  Joe Kennedy III : How we doing?

  Self - Host : How are we doing? "That's the question: "How are we doing?"

  Joe Kennedy III : It ain't great

  Self - Host : No, it's not but every day in every way there's a new way to be shocked

  Joe Kennedy III : [Referring to President Trump]  Yeah, it's a hard bar to meet but he finds a way to meet it

  Self - Host : Yes, they just bury the bar now so they can clear it. So ok before we get into anything else I wanted to talk to you about your grandfather Bobby Kennedy for a moment because last month was the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination which I remember as a child, one of my earliest memories was the slow train with your grandfather's casket on it. I guess the question is we all Americans feel like we have some sort of ownership and relationship to your family. We all have our own stories about your grandfather but what stories do you all tell in your family? What are the things that you choose to remember? The stories you like to tell?

  Joe Kennedy III : So, I think there are stories you know and a lot of Americans know the role he played and his brothers and sisters played in our history: the Cuban Missile Crisis, standing in the school house door, the civil rights battles, and obviously his campaign for Presidency. And the turmoil we saw in 1968 and that's important to me and my family. There's the other side that doesn't get told. He was a dad, and he was a brother

  Self - Host : Father of eleven

  Joe Kennedy III : Yeah, which is a lot turns out. So it's those that I draw the most on, it's the stories of them as a huge group going white water rafting down the Colorado River for big portions without a raft only an air mattress, which changes the definition of white water rafting. It's the photos and stories they have of sailing and spending time with each other in the summers. It's playing football, it's those pieces that families have that I think gets lost in this. We're a public family, yes but my favorite day of the year is Thanksgiving because we have most of our family around a table and you've got to be first in line for the turkey because if you're not...

  Self - Host : Oh, I know I'm one of eleven myself. I understand you reach for somebody else's skin on their plate you pull back a bloody stump

  Joe Kennedy III : It's like a competitive sport

  Self - Host : Does the family still get together to play football and everything?

  Joe Kennedy III : Yeah

  Self - Host : Really?

  Joe Kennedy III : It's the younger generation that ends up playing football but it's fun

  Self - Host : [while looking down at his card]  so, in your State Of The Union response you said "The State of The Union is hopeful, resilient, and enduring, how do you feel seven months later? Because I'll agree with you that we're enduring "something"

  Joe Kennedy III : You know the ending of Animal House where Kevin Bacon's character is saying "All is well"?

  Self - Host : That's not the part that sticks out to me the most but yeah go ahead

  Joe Kennedy III : So, I feel somewhat like that but look the bottom line on it is I have an equal amount of faith in our country, it's this Administration that's letting people down and their letting people down every day and I see that. I feel that because I spoke about it couple months ago but at the same time you see individual Americans doing amazing things every single day. This past week there was this story of a young man that walked eleven miles every day to work and on his first day you know what his boss and his coworkers did? They gave him a car. There was a story of a teacher that got on an airplane, talked about how they didn't have enough school supplies and the passenger behind her overheard the story and slipped her a hundred dollar bill. Somebody else gave her some money and she walked off the plane with five hundred dollars for school supplies for her students. People choose to do these incredibly gracious things for strangers every single day and so I'm at a job where you can see and hear those stories and talk to those folks. I have an awful lot of faith for the American public: my faith in this administration this past week didn't quite hit that same level of confidence

  Self - Host : Well, I agree with you. I have faith in the American people too. The majority of them did not vote for this "cat" and I believe the majority of the American people are good people but I believe they're being led to a "bad place" but being told it's a "good place". Their being put in a position of "moral hazard", to have to call something that is a "sin of virtue", and what is Congress doing? You're in there, obviously you're a Democrat, you guys are not the majority, and how do you think Congress is dropping the ball in checking the abuses of the Trump administration?

  Joe Kennedy III : How much time you got?

  Self - Host : [Jokingly]  one minute

  Joe Kennedy III : So, the Republican majority is doing nothing. We had a vote literally today to try to restore funding for election security for our midterm elections and it got pulled out by the Republican majority

  Self - Host : Why? What was the rationale?

  Joe Kennedy III : I have no idea

  Self - Host : Your great uncle, our President said "Those who make peaceful resolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable". What is the "peaceful revolution" that is most possible for us?

  Joe Kennedy III : Look, it's getting back to those stories I told a second ago and it's the stories you see if you're out and around this country every single day. It's the six hundred thousand people that showed up in Austin Texas on the anniversary of a women's march and all those folks that are going to help get my buddy Beto O'Rourke elected to the Senate and beat Ted Cruz