Cub Your Enthusiasm: In RFK Jr.’s bear story, a plot worthy of Larry David — or Samson
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with a bike and a baby black bear. Photo-illustration by Canva/Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar August 5, 2024
Proverbs 17:12 says, “Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.”
It takes a once-in-a-generation political talent — say, third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to say “Why not both?”
Kennedy has previously made headlines for having a parasitic brainworm, appearing to eat a dog (he said it was a goat but elsewhere admitted to dining on man’s best friend), and having most members of his family call him a threat to the United States. But as you may have heard, either from Kennedy’s confession or The New Yorker profile that prompted it, he also dumped the corpse of a baby bear in Central Park back in 2014. Call it a reverse Teddy Roosevelt.
In a presidential race that has so far featured the wanton murder of a puppy, you may be asking yourself, just how bad is this for Kennedy? Well, to get biblical — and a bit Larry Davidian — it may not exactly spell his death in politics.
To hear Kennedy tell the story — to Mama Barr Roseanne of all people — this is all just a prank gone wrong born out of a singular instance of inconvenience.
Kennedy says he was driving to Goshen to do some falconry — as one does — when a woman in front of him hit and killed the baby black bear. Kennedy pulled over, picked up the bear and popped it in his van with the intent of skinning the animal and refrigerating its meat. (“You can do that in New York City, you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear,” he said.)
But his plans changed. He couldn’t go straight back home to Westchester because he had dinner at Peter Luger’s, and by the time that was over he had to go to the airport and obviously didn’t want to leave a decaying carcass in his car “because that would have been bad.” Kennedy’s next move, he admits, betrays “a little bit of the redneck in me.” (Kennedy, as Clare Malone’s New Yorker article notes, spent much of his childhood in McClean, Virginia, albeit in a mansion where he cared for an impressive menagerie of animals; hilariously, he wanted to be a veterinarian.)
At the time, Kennedy explained, bike lanes had just been put in for the city, and there were a lot of accidents making the news. Kennedy happened to have an old bike someone asked him to get rid of in his trunk (as one does). He left it and the bear in the park — they were discovered in a bush, not a bike lane — to make it look like a bike rider had hit the bear. Kennedy’s friends, who had been drinking, thought it would be funny. Take that, New York cyclists.
The casual way Kennedy tells this story, with a tray of ribs before him, expecting his audience to relate to this superlatively strange, carrion-centric action, recalls a moment from the Book of Judges where Samson, entertaining his wedding guests, poses the following riddle: “Out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet.”
This, of course, is a reference to the one time Samson killed a young lion and found bees and honey inside its dead body. A charming anecdote, whether for entertaining guests at one’s nuptials, heads of state or comedians cancelled for racist social media posts!
But beyond the biblical, there is something about Kennedy’s delivery, which makes this bonkers scenario seem somewhat plausible, and even maybe the best and only option available to him, that recalls a connection closer to home.
As reported in The New Yorker and elsewhere, Kennedy met his wife, Cheryl Hines, through her Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Larry David and had recently married her at the time of the bear incident. In his video confession, Kennedy explains his terrified reaction when his hijinks made the news, describing scenes of police tape, helicopters over the crime scene and talk of having the bike fingerprinted up in Albany.
Cue the theme and the “directed by Robert B. Weide.”
While Larry David, who does not endorse his old friend RFK Jr., probably isn’t the sort to handle roadkill or take up falconry, the confluence of events that led to a young bear in Central Park feels decidedly Curbian. It has all the hallmarks of a classic episode: inconvenient scheduling, lucking into having a pivotal prop from a B-plot on hand (someone else’s bike), commentary on city planning, a demented act of disrespect that seemed like a good idea at the time and — we can imagine — Hines being baffled by the conduct of her spouse. It’s not quite on the level of David stealing shoes from a Holocaust museum because it’s raining outside and he disposed of his old kicks after he stepped in dog poop, but it’s not too far a cry either.
Even the decade-in-the-making revelation that a high-profile guy was behind this bizarre behavior feels nearly inseparable from David’s misadventures, not least because of the crazy coincidence that one of the initial articles about the bear was written by Kennedy’s cousin and JFK’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, who said she had no idea RFK Jr. was responsible.
But then, the real David would almost certainly never do such a thing. He is no Kennedy just as he is no hirsute Samson. At best David might be like the prophet Elisha, who, after children mocked his bald head, seemed to conjure two she-bears to tear them apart.
Elisha and his bears have long been a source of Talmudic debate. It is only right to expect RFK and his bear will generate a similar level of discussion — at least until the next animal-themed exposé.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Kennedy left the bear carcass and bicycle in a bike lane. They were discovered beneath a bush.
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