No one seems to be bothered more by Robert F. Kennedy’s voice than Robert F. Kennedy.
Though the Democratic presidential challenger has explained many times the reason behind his warbling timbre, Piers Morgan brought it up at the top of his RFK interview on Wednesday’s edition of “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” which is broadcast on Talk TV in the UK and Fox Nation in the United States.
“Let me ask you, because viewers were asking me last time – what’s up with his voice?” Morgan asked. “They didn’t know, they didn’t know you, they hadn’t heard you speak before. Talk about that. What is the issue with your voice?”
Unbothered by the question – which he gets a lot – Kennedy launched into the story:
“I had a very very strong voice until I was 42 years old,” RFK began. “In 1996 I had an injury that caused a neurological disorder called spasmodic dysphonia. And it make my voice like this – I cannot listen to my voice. When I go home I will not listen to this program,” he said, making Morgan chuckle.
“I can’t do it,” he continued. “And I feel sorry for the people in your audience who have to listen to me. But this is the best I’ve got right now.”
But Kennedy added that it’s been improving – and that there’s hope that it could keep getting stronger.
“You know, went over with my wife, (the actress) Cheryl Hines, to do surgery in Kyoto, Japan, eight months ago and it made my voice a lot more reliable. And I’m doing a bunch of alternative therapies that I think are making it a lot stronger. So we’ll see what happens.”
Morgan noted that RFK uses his voice a lot, especially now that he’s on the 2024 campaign trail: “Does it worry you that it may just pack up?”
“No, because my voice actually doesn’t get weaker when I use it, it gets stronger,” Kennedy said. “Because it’s not a tissue injury. My vocal chords are very very strong. It’s just that the neurological signals that are being sent are telling them to tighten up all the time, and it makes my voice gravelly but – I can talk 20 hours a day and my voice won’t wear out. So I’m not worried about that. But I don’t like the way it sounds, and I apologize to everybody.”
Watch (and listen to) the entire exchange in the video above.
