6 1GT Thursday October 15 2020 | the times

times

Above left: Max

Kennedy Jr at an event

in 2018. Above right:

Donald Trump and

Jared Kushner. Below:

Kushner and his wife,

Ivanka Trump

that something called the strategic

national stockpile wasn’t strategic,

national or very much of a stockpile.

On April 2 a nation turned its

frightened eyes to the Coronavirus

Task Force Briefing where the

vice-president, Mike Pence, described

this new volunteer force that Kushner

had assembled as “a working group...

that literally has identified millions of

medical supplies around the nation

and around the world”.

Kushner apparently did nothing to

dispel the idea that a crack squad of

supply chain specialists were now at

work. The president wanted “to make

sure we’re finding all the best thinkers

in the country”, he said. They were

going to move fast, “break barriers”

and “think outside the box”.

As Kennedy tells it, it was a farce.

The team was given a day to get to the

Washington DC HQ of the Federal

Emergency Management Agency

(Fema). In a windowless

conference room in the

basement, Kennedy says,

they were given a pep talk by

a representative from Fema

and a representative from

the military. They talked

about “the stuff”, Kennedy

says. “They said, ‘There is

stuff all around the world,

there is stuff in the US and

we need to get it to hospitals

as fast as possible.’ ”

Then the top brass filed

out of the room. “The

only people left were

the volunteers,” Kennedy

says. “We thought we would

be auxiliary support for an

existing procurement team

that just needed to be

expanded as quickly

as possible. Instead, we were the team.”

The richest country in the world was

leaning on a group of “about ten

20-year-old volunteers, just with

private laptops, no industry

relationships, no experience”.

They began by thinking of friends or

colleagues who knew people in China,

finding the addresses of factories and

making contact using their personal

Gmail accounts. “Because we had

never done this before there were

all these really basic questions about

how a federal procurement operation

should work,” he says. “We would call

factories and say, ‘We think the federal

government can send you a cheque

in 60 days,’ and they would say, ‘There

is someone with a briefcase of cash

and they are offering to pay me

right now.’ We would run around

the Fema building looking for

someone who could tell us what

payment terms the federal

government was allowed to

offer... No one ever told us.”

Kennedy would eventually

send an anonymous

whistleblower’s complaint

to Congress. He says the

directors of Totally Under

Control reached him through

a mutual acquaintance and

persuaded him to go public.

They tried for other task force

members too, but all

had been made to sign

non-disclosure agreements,

and having seen what

happened to other public

officials who spoke out,

“They are scared,” Suzanne

Hillinger, one of the film’s

three directors, tells me. In

Max’s case, perhaps, it might have

helped that he was a Kennedy.

I speak to the three directors —

Hillinger, Ophelia Harutyunyan and

Gibney — on a Zoom call. Gibney

thinks that the volunteer force fiasco

exemplifies the White House response

to the pandemic. Trump portrays large

parts of the federal bureaucracy as the

“deep state”, a reservoir of resistance

to his policies. During the pandemic it

came to include scientists at public

health agencies. There was also the

conviction “that began with Reagan,

that government is not the solution

— it’s the problem”, he says.

In their film Kennedy recalls

that “the whole philosophy of the

task force was that... the private

market could quickly settle this issue.

It was only once they had tried and

failed that they started to blame

other people.”

Trump began saying that the states

were responsible for the shortfall.

Kennedy says he heard higher-ups

on the task force “talking about the

president, saying, ‘Love him or hate

him, he’s a marketing genius. He came

up with the strategy to blame the

states because the federal government

isn’t able to do this effectively.’ ”

Kushner, whom no one describes as

a marketing genius, then went before

the microphones to declare, “The

notion of the federal stockpile is that

it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s

not supposed to be states’ stockpiles

that they then use.”

The statement was baffling. What

was America but a union of states?

Who was he talking about when he

said “our”, reporters asked.

State governors found themselves

bidding against each other for medical

supplies. It was like being on eBay,

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor,

complained. “And then Fema gets

How a Gen Z

Kennedy

joined Jared

Kushner’s

Covid team

The US president’s ‘task force’ was a

group of 20-year-old volunteers with

no experience, a new documentary

asserts — and it was a Kennedy who

blew the whistle. Will Pavia reports

F

resh out of Harvard,

Max Kennedy Jr knocked

around at consulting

and finance companies.

He was prepping for law

school when coronavirus

halted all civilised life in

the United States, down

to its lowest and murkiest depths.

Even the law school admissions

exam was cancelled.

Then he got a call from an old boss.

“He’d heard that Jared Kushner’s task

force needed volunteers who had

general skills and were willing to work

seven days a week for no money,”

Kennedy says in Totally Under Control,

a new documentary chronicling how

America handled the pandemic. It is

co-directed by Alex Gibney, who was

nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,

the story of one of the worst corporate

scandals in US history.

Kennedy, 26, has reddish rumpled

hair, a square jaw and an expression

of such earnestness that I started to

wonder if he was a member of the

Kennedy political dynasty, a relative

of the politician Joe Kennedy III, who

appears in a scene interrogating a

Trump official in Congress. The film’s

directors don’t tell you, but it turns

out that they are cousins and

grandchildren of Bobby Kennedy.

Max balked at the thought of

working for Kushner, Donald Trump’s

aide and son-in-law, but it was an

emergency. “I felt like the country and

the world were under attack,” he says,

and one can almost hear his great-

uncle Jack telling Americans to ask

what they can do for their country.

By late March the coronavirus was

rampant, hospitals were running out

of supplies and it was becoming clear