In the early 1980s, Robert Kennedy Jr. told a story to journalists about being ambushed in a bow-and-arrow attack by Indigenous people during a 1974 whitewater rafting trip in Peru.

Kennedys account of the incident, which is detailed in the 1984 book The Kennedys: An American Drama , describes how one of his friends was nearly hit in the leg with an arrow, which penetrated a canteen nearby. Kennedy said he and his cousin, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, retaliated by picking up a stick of dynamite they found, lighting it and throwing it at their attackers:

Bobby rummaged for the bow and arrows he had earlier obtained in a trade. He hadnt brought them. Chris found a stick of dynamite and held it up. Lawford was standing there holding it, telling me to hurry, Bobby recalled later. We could hear the Indians coming at us through the bush. We put a blasting cap and a fuse on the dynamite. As the Indian whod shot at us stepped out on the bank of the river, I lit the dynamite. Lawford held it until the fuse had almost burned down, then threw it. It landed in the water right next to the Indian. Then it exploded, sending water thirty feet in the air. He and all the rest of them took off.

Its a wild story from Kennedy, who is currently running for president as an independent and it also appears to be wildly exaggerated or entirely made up.

Lawford, who died in 2018, offered a brief and far less dramatic account of this incident in his 2005 memoir , Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption. He made no mention of a near-miss arrow strike or dynamite.

He wrote only: We floated by Indian villages, once having to avoid the arrows being shot in our direction by a drunken tribe on the shore.

A longtime Kennedy friend who was also on the rafting trip, Blake Fleetwood, said as soon as the 1984 book came out that the incident never happened.

Fleetwood said yesterday that the river was calm, and that the Indian attack never occurred, according to a 1984 Washington Post article about the Kennedy book. In the same article, Fleetwood said a number of Kennedys other claims in the book were distorted or just fantasy.

Kennedys campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether he stands by his detailed account of the bow-and-arrow ambush. A request for comment from Fleetwood was not immediately returned.