Bobby Kennedy Jr., We Know Ye Too Well

Was there a mix-up in the hospital or did the Kennedy gene skip Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? In his presidential run on a platform attacking vaccines and fluoride, RFK Jr. might as well have been named Jones for all he invoked his family’s storied service. Instead, he ran a Quixotic campaign as a Democrat and then as an independent and, when it failed, threw his jacked (maybe steroid-enhanced?) weight behind Donald Trump. For that, the president-elect nominated the quack without a medical degree to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with a consolation prize of a $3 trillion budget to “go wild” with. 

My fellow Americans, take two aspirin and call your dentist in the morning—and your kid’s pediatrician. Kennedy’s coming for your fluoride, your Wi-Fi, your “Thank You, Dr. Fauci” lawn sign, and your mumps, rubella, polio, and other vaccines. He’ll be in your grocery store, refrigerator/, medicine cabinet, milk carton (he prefers his raw), hospital room, Social Security, and Medicare. He wants to remove neurotoxins from your water and DTaP shots from your back-to-school to-do list. 

Scary as he is, the 70-year-old has competition for the most frightening cabinet pick. At this point, Marco Rubio for Secretary of State feels like George C. Marshall and even South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who killed her puppy and swayed on stage to show tunes and hymns for 40 minutes to make Trump’s dementia look normal, seems in the realm of acceptably horrible for Homeland Security. But the rest is like C-SPAN on acid: Tulsi Gabbard, who cozies with murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al Hassad, for Director of National Intelligence; For Defense, Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hesgeth (Steve Doocy from the main show wasn’t free?), with no experience running an organization, who’s admitted to paying money to a woman who accused him of sexual misconduct and wants to fire the chair of the Joint Chiefs to show how completely over diversity he is. Whether the now ubiquitous photos of his Jerusalem Cross chest tattoos and crusader slogans on his bicep mean he’s a white nationalist or just really into ink is almost irrelevant. I don’t want to have to think about the Da Vinci code symbology of a cabinet officer’s tats. It was once mildly shocking when reports out of Bohenian Grove had Secretary of State George Shultz sporting a tiger tattoo in honor of Princeton, his alma mater.

But we’ve found a bottom beneath which the sniveling Senate won’t sink. After a week of shame, former Representative Matt Gaetz, a rich party boy who’s been accused under oath of having sex with a 17-year-old (there’s witness testimony) and paying for his escapades with his stepson’s Venmo account, will not be Attorney General, itching to dig up something to indict Trump’s enemies for. Coming to a school near you, the Vaccine Police. Kennedy will also have a big role in migrant detentions, making Cheryl Hines’s husband (Hines is Kennedy’s third) Stephen Miller’s handmaid. 

Kennedy is no more a doctor than Trump is a statesman, or Hegseth has medals to display when he shows up at the Pentagon if he ever does. The enormity of Trump’s bad nominees protects Kennedy from the thorough strip-mining he deserves. Like Trump, he believes COVID was engineered in a lab (possibly true) to sicken most people and spare others, particularly in Kennedy’s tinfoil hat world, such as the Han Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Like Trump, he has cures.

His favorite is Ivermectin, one dangerous remedy away from drinking bleach and generally used to kill parasites. You don’t have to love Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex to prefer a COVID-19 shot to horse medicine. This is the Kennedy who will run the gems of American science, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the heart of the American safety net, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He may take his crusade against chemicals in what we eat to the Food and Drug Administration, which he will also be running, but he doesn’t know the first thing about getting additives out of our Cocoa Puffs. Republican Senator Charles Grassley, who runs a 750-acre corn and soybean farm in Iowa with his son, said he wants to have a go at the lightly informed nominee before any hearings. “I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture, and I’m willing to do that,” Grassley said.

Kennedy didn’t have to end up like this. Instead of campaigning as a chemtrails independent, he could have cleaned up his act and campaigned as a Kennedy Democrat, invoking memories of his Uncle Jack—the Back Bay politico with war wounds, a toothy smile, thick hair, Irish wit, and an elegant wife pregnant with John Jr. He had the Catholics at hello. The usually apolitical nuns at my parish church in Pennsylvania hung his stock photo in a cheap frame in the vestibule, decorated with a vase of flowers recycled from Sunday mass. He was sworn in as president in 1961 and killed in 1963. 

That was good enough for RFK Jr.’s father, Senator Robert Kennedy, the next brother in line to run for president in 1968, whose arc from Joe McCarthy hanger-on to Aeschylus-quoting champion of peace and the poor is one of the more remarkable arcs in American life, unlike his son’s that went from Harvard drug dealer to wanna be quack. After his second brother was assassinated after winning the California primary, being a Kennedy was good enough for Teddy, who tested the country’s enduring affection for the family with Chappaquiddick, where a female aide he was driving home from a party drowned when his car went off a Martha’s Vineyard bridge. The family name helped him recover, and the youngest brother ran for president in 1980 against Jimmy Carter, a Sunday school teacher and submarine officer, who won. But unlike RFK Jr., Teddy gave an electrifying speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden, invoking his brothers and ending with the promise that “the Dream will never die,” not the vow that Trump will return. Teddy returned to Washington, his libertine debauchery giving way to a happy second marriage in 1991. He created his own myth as the third longest-serving member in history.

RFK’s race didn’t end with a bang of a speech but a whimper and the grim duty of speaking to small crowds in church basements and tapping a wealthy Google divorcée to be his running mate to keep the thing afloat. His dismal failure was Trump’s opportunity to recruit a Kennedy Democrat into the MAGA cult with the mandate to “go wild.” 

Lightly and often mistakenly informed with a weakness for conspiracy theories, Trump lit up at the baseless idea that Big Pharma’s vaccines might be causing autism. Without the wish to do no harm, Trump and his accomplice risk setting back the stunning progress in eradicating the worst childhood diseases. For those born between 1994 and 2023, inexpensive vaccines prevented hundreds of millions of illnesses, tens of millions of hospitalizations, and more than one million deaths, according to the HHS’s Center for Disease Control. To RFK, these numbers are propaganda from the Medical Industrial Complex that made him a greater victim of oppression for his views than Anne Frank. (Yes, he said that and apologized.) 

The 70-year-old who traded Hyannisport for Hollywood is having none of it. He’ll do his investigations, come up with his own numbers, and put HHS’s imprimatur on it. Finally, his view is no longer that of a skeptic but of a person in authority. He can then use his office to try to withhold money from schools that persist in mandating immunizations before enrollment. He’ll do this fully aware that so far this year, because of anti-vax efforts, not scarcity, cases of whooping cough and measles have risen dramatically. 

In his generation of Kennedys, RFK Jr. isn’t the only tragic figure but the only one who thought he deserved to be president. Some ran for and won office, serving honorably like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Joseph Kennedy II, but none had the nerve to launch a campaign for president, complete with a Super Bowl ad putting their face on an old Jack Kennedy ad from 1960. But RFK Jr. will do anything for attention and sees his dark history as an opportunity, joking that if all the skeletons in his closet voted for him, he’d win in a landslide. A heroin addict as a teenager, he kicked the habit just before his 30th birthday. He had a bad first marriage and moved on to a second and a brutal divorce. His wife hung herself from the rafters of their barn. There were other drugs, including a suspected addiction to testosterone (his ripped septuagenarian abs don’t come from touch football) and ones to control a condition that makes it impossible for him to clear his throat. Addiction is no sin, but it does not give him the authority to teach the country how to overcome its addictions. There’s no Hubris Anonymous to overcome his vision of himself. 

But look what it got him: a high government position. Until his campaign, the family stayed quiet through all of Bobby’s escapades. They suffered through his visit to Sirhan Sirhan in prison, after which he proclaimed him innocent of the 1968 murder of his father. He suspects the CIA. He craves attention and will lie to get it, as he did by exaggerating his accomplishments cleaning up the Hudson River so that his sister Rory, making a documentary for HBO, had to leave so many lies and exaggerations on the cutting room floor, there was a huge hole where a credible brother’s testimony should have been. They tried to send a message by publicly appearing at the White House to show solidarity with Joe Biden. But as his rhetoric worsened, they (including Caroline Kennedy) raised their voices, warning that he wasn’t fit to be president while professing their love for him. 

The behavior that repelled RFK’s own family is catnip for Trump, who welcomed his support and promised him a job, not necessarily in that order. Now, the president could meet the moment, taking back his plea for Kennedy to “go wild” and instead ask what he could do for his country. He won’t. Trump has long been driven to stick it to The Man. He’s so damaged that he can’t see that at age 78, and in the White House, he is The Man.

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