RFK Jr., page 2
Despite his lofty goals, Bobby Sr. was no doctrinaire liberal. He began his career going after Communists in the United States when he worked for family friend Senator Joseph McCarthy, promoted hard-line positions against Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis, even as his greatest legacy was the promotion of equality for Black Americans. “I never vote for the party19,” he once said. “I always vote for the man.” As a result, he included many trusted Republicans among his advisers, including John Doar, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations, and former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who had started off as a Republican when he worked in the Kennedy administration but later became a Democrat.
Years later, in 2007, Kennedy would give a similar answer to a reporter who asked if he would consider following in his father’s footsteps. “I wouldn’t be a reliably liberal senator20,” he said. “My father was never a liberal. He was a devout Catholic with an open mind.”
In an interview with Fox News executive and family friend Roger Ailes in 1995, Kennedy refused to commit to a timeline to go into politics or even identify himself as either Republican or Democrat. “I live my life one day at a time21,” he said. “I love what I’m doing and keep doing that until the signs are right. I wouldn’t characterize myself with either of those labels. I believe in free market economics where we liberate people.”
In fact, his diary entries show how he gradually became disillusioned with the Democratic demigods and civil rights heroes that he and his family had once embraced. Nearly a quarter century before running for political office, he became deeply critical of everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Jesse Jackson and even his former brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo, a former governor of New York.
In 2021, Kennedy launched his biggest attack against Democrats and the Joe Biden administration, targeting Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. He accused him of “the catastrophic mismanagement” of the HIV epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic in his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. While it was derided by most critics and experts, the book touched a chord with many Americans who weren’t entirely convinced that the social distancing and masking protocols mandated by Fauci and his cronies would do anything to keep them healthy. The Real Anthony Fauci argued that Fauci had pushed COVID-19 vaccines that had not been properly tested and compared the strict vaccine mandates in the United States to living under the rule of the Nazi Party in Germany. The book also blamed billionaire Bill Gates for the “forced” vaccinations of millions of African children. The Real Anthony Fauci went on to sell more than 1.1 million copies. More than anything, it jump-started his run for the presidency.
Fauci replied to the charges against him in the book by dismissing Kennedy completely and contrasting him to his martyred and heroic father. “I don’t think he is inherently malicious22,” he said about Kennedy following the book’s publication. “I just think he’s a very disturbed individual. . . . And it’s a shame because he comes from such an extraordinarily distinguished family, many members of whom I know personally, and I was very close to Senator Ted Kennedy, who was such an extraordinary person and a real warrior for public health. And to have RFK Jr. just spouting things that make absolutely no sense.”
In that same year, Kennedy wrote a letter to President Biden noting that the latter had promised to give Americans a COVID vaccine program that was “rooted in honesty, transparency23 and rigorous science”—principles that Biden had abandoned in the first few months of his presidency. “The sad reality is vaccines cause injuries and death,” he wrote.
Kennedy’s obsession with vaccines began gradually in 2003 when a woman showed up at his summer home in Hyannis Port with a Bankers Box of studies on mercury and vaccines. Sarah Bridges told Kennedy that her son had experienced brain damage after being vaccinated. Although Kennedy at first claimed that he needed convincing, in 2015 he had joined the World Mercury Project, a nonprofit that eventually became Children’s Health Defense, a controversial anti-vaccine advocacy group that with Kennedy’s help had launched dozens of lawsuits across the country challenging pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines, raking in millions of dollars in damages and making Kennedy a millionaire several times over. “It took me a long time24,” he told the broadcaster Megyn Kelly following Trump’s victory in 2024.
Still, during his Senate hearings he hesitated when asked whether he would vaccinate his children today with the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine, eventually saying that he probably would. “I am not going to just tell people everything is safe and effective if I know there are issues,” he said, promising to work with Vermont’s independent senator, Bernie Sanders, to make sure that the United States pays similar prices for drugs as do other countries, which often pay lower prices because their single-payer health care systems negotiate the deals.
It may have been a rare form of compromise on his part. Among the traits he inherited from his father are a reputation for hardheaded stubbornness and determination as well as a willingness to challenge accepted wisdom. He has repeatedly questioned the assassination of his father, suggesting that his assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, couldn’t have fired the bullet that ultimately killed him. His diaries show that throughout his career as an environmental lawyer, he has been known for his obdurate views, often ignoring scientific evidence that could disprove them. His diary entries relate combative meetings with members of Riverkeeper, the environmental nonprofit he joined in the mid-1980s as part of his required community service following a drug bust and conviction.
He has also inherited the Kennedy family’s sense of entitlement. One source recalled a meeting in his Manhattan office over lunch. Kennedy had sat and eaten his lunch and then left all the wrappers from his burger and fries on a conference table. “He had wrappers all over25 his side of the table and he just left them there, and then he just walked out,” said the source. “I cleaned up after him. Everything else about Bobby is consistent with that.”
In his diary, Kennedy related the story of his mother, whom he referred to by her initials, ESK—Ethel Skakel Kennedy—who had been caught for speeding by a trooper26 near the family home in Maryland. She had told the trooper to send the bill “to the New York office.” When the confused trooper had asked what that was, she had simply said, “That’s where they pay all the bills.” And then she had left.
Despite his feeling of entitlement, Kennedy has a deep love for his country and a keen sense of patriotism that was forged largely while he was a college student in Alabama. Many of his diary entries are more aligned with the ideas of Bible Belt Republicans than with the progressive principles embraced by most of his family. He spent more than a year in Montgomery and Hayneville, Alabama, to work on his senior thesis for Harvard University beginning in 1975 and returned to help organize his uncle Teddy’s presidential campaign five years later. “I felt close to these people27 because of their sentimentality, their strong bond with the land, the attachment to . . . values and love of country and pride in our traditions—patriotism and humility and love of God,” he wrote on July 25, 2001. Everyone drove American cars, he continued. “No BMWs like in Cambridge.” Instead, people were “rooted in the conviction that this country was great and were suspicious of Europeans.”
For Kennedy, who was suspended from just about every boarding school he attended after his father’s death, the teacher he credits with having the most influence on his life was no liberal. His biology teacher Skip Lazell was a right-wing scientist who was an expert on amphibians, a supporter of the Vietnam War, and a member of the John Birch Society, a secretive group that believed the fluoridation of drinking water was a Communist plot. Kennedy has long argued that fluoride is responsible for a host of health problems, including neurodevelopmental disorders, thyroid disease, and cancer.
With these kinds of sentiments, it may not have been a huge leap for Kennedy to embrace the Trump credo to “Make America Great Again” when he saw an opportunity to profit from Trump’s campaign, ending his own attempt at the presidency in exchange for wielding his authority over the country’s health ministry. “For 20 years, I’ve gotten up28 every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country,” he said on February 13, 2025, when he was sworn in as secretary of health and human services.
Kennedy may have prayed for divine inspiration, but he also dug deep into his soul—a process that began in earnest when he found himself in prison for a daring act of disobedience on the island of Vieques in 2001. Alone in his cell in Puerto Rico, the forty-seven-year-old began a process of intense soul-searching. In his prison diary—musings scrawled on a collection of yellow legal pads—he questioned his legacy and the nature of heroism and justice, invoking everyone from his father to the Buddha and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “The true disciples are often found29 on the front lines fighting for justice,” he wrote on July 8, days after he was sentenced.
Four days later, on July 12, he questioned what it really meant to be a hero, citing his uncle Jack’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Profiles in Courage: “I’ve been thinking about heroics lately30, how the subject has fascinated us,” he wrote. “Profiles in Courage and my father surrounding himself with war and sports heroes. How our spiritual longing is really a search for heroes. . . . My father found it in the endurance and perseverance of the poor in Appalachia and the ghetto who faced and overcame challenges that he knew he would never know. He urged us to be heroes and put us constantly in strenuous situations to nurture those qualities.”
His constant questioning about his responsibility in the world was something that was well known to his closest friends. “There’s a deeper aspect to him31 than people give him credit for,” said a friend, who was close to him for nearly twenty years. “I believe that he believes he’s doing right for the world.”
In his quest to radically reform the US health care system, Kennedy is clearly taking inspiration from his father, so much so that he has started dressing like the former senator and presidential candidate, donning trim suits and skinny retro ties. “When people look at his position32, the subtlety they are missing is that he is now a member of the president’s cabinet,” said the former close friend. “In his deep consciousness, this is more important for him. Bobby reveres the presidency. He has had a lifelong passion to collect items that are signed by all the presidents, and he believes that one of the highest callings he can have is national service. It’s his family-driven mission.”33
Like Fauci, critics who have denounced Kennedy have done so largely by comparing him to his crusading uncles and father—the failed heir who could never live up to their heroic legacy. But like most heroes, the Kennedys were no saints. They were entitled and wealthy, with a family who could buy their way into Ivy League universities, pull strings with the military, and even buy their books in bulk to ensure that they made it onto the bestseller lists. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy may have been a big proponent of health care, but he left a young woman to drown at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Jack and Bobby Sr. escalated the United States’ involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, presided over the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which ultimately led to the missile crisis that took the country and the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration. They wiretapped civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s phone and hotel rooms, eager to prove that he was a Communist and hoping to discredit him by exposing his various romantic trysts. Jack, Bobby Sr., and Ted took their inspiration from their father and engaged in their own marital infidelities.
In their explosive statement on their brother, Kennedy’s siblings noted that “Bobby might share the same name as our father34, but he does not share the same vision, values or judgment.” Or maybe he shares all of them. And perhaps that’s what’s really making his family and his other critics so apoplectic. For in many ways, Kennedy may be exactly like his father. “Other people’s opinions of me35 are not my business,” he told a reporter in the days before his Senate hearings. “I know what I have to do.”
Chapter 1
Prison Diary
In his prison mug shot, Robert Kennedy Jr. wore an easy smile. The square jaw and the rugged good looks that mark him as a scion of America’s most storied family were on display in the black-and-white photo that federal prison administrators affixed to a name tag that also included information about his height (six feet, one inch), his weight (180 pounds), and the colors of his eyes (blue) and hair (brown). But there was something beyond the Kennedy mystique in that very comfortable smile, the way he fixed the camera with a steady gaze. Was it pride? A sense of accomplishment? No doubt it was both—the very things that had eluded him for most of his very privileged life, the things that his family’s wealth and connections couldn’t buy. Now, in the summer of 2001, the forty-seven-year-old former heroin addict who had carved out a career as an environmental crusader was about to spend a month in federal prison at Puerto Rico’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Guaynabo, on the outskirts of San Juan. He was political prisoner 21553-069. And he couldn’t have been happier.
“I was exultant,” he wrote on July 6, 2001, in his diary, after US District Court Judge Hector Manuel Laffitte sentenced him to thirty days in prison on trespassing charges and ordered federal marshals to take him into custody. Not only was he thrilled about doing time for a cause he believed in, but the sentence would be completed by early August, allowing him to enjoy the last month of summer with his family at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.
Judge Laffitte had been harsh with some of the other Vieques protestors who had been sentenced before him, and Kennedy had feared the worst during his court appearance in San Juan. A day before the sentencing, he had participated in a betting pool with the other protestors convicted of trespassing on Vieques. They had all met for dinner, and Kennedy bet five dollars that he would get at least thirty days from Laffitte, who was known for being tough. He feared that he would be singled out for harsher punishment because of his last name. Whatever happened, he was prepared to take a stand. On the morning of July 5, he had told his lawyers that he didn’t want them to challenge the evidence “particularly vigorously,” which the other protestors had been doing. Following the meeting with his legal team, he seemed largely unperturbed. He wrote in his diary that he had gone for a swim in the ocean with a fellow protestor.
The next day, he boarded a bus with the other convicted trespassers, clutching a sheet of paper with the scribbled notes of the comments he wanted to make in court in a hearing that would last some seven hours. “I was dead sure that when he entered the courtroom, we were going to do 40—maybe 45—maybe even 60 days,” he wrote in his diary on July 6, 2001, referring to Judge Laffitte. “But there were to be several before us.” When it finally came to Kennedy and his coconspirator Dennis Rivera, the powerful Puerto Rico–born president of New York’s Service Employees Union Local 1199, who was among the leaders of the protestors, “all he [Laffitte] said was 30 days.”
Puerto Rican state senator Norma Burgos, whose hearing came right before theirs, received a sixty-day sentence after an outburst in which she began to criticize the proceedings and told Judge Laffitte that he should have put the navy on trial instead of the protestors. Burgos, who was a member of the pro-state party in Puerto Rico, had originally been sentenced to forty days in prison. “You’re being defiant1,” Judge Laffitte said. “It does not behoove you to defy the court.” He added twenty days to her sentence, which she later successfully appealed.
As he was driven off to prison with the other protestors, Kennedy was pleased with himself. During his first few days in the lockup, his wife, Mary, who was days away from delivering their fourth child, had managed to get through to him on the phone. She told him that she had received many calls from friends expressing their outrage at his sentence. Everyone except Kennedy’s own family condemned his treatment, she said. “Well, it’s Bobby’s own choice to be there,” his younger sister Kerry had told Mary following news of his sentence.
Mary told her husband that his mother, Ethel Kennedy, was “very proud of me”—likely for the first time in his life. His mother was planning to visit him at Guaynabo, Mary said. So was Hillary Clinton, who was six months into her first term as the junior senator from New York. His uncle Ted Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, was also planning a visit, as was Mark Green, New York City’s public advocate and a fellow environmentalist who was running in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.
And there were other things to look forward to. Days later, on July 12, Kennedy noted on the yellow legal pad that now served as his makeshift prison diary, “My life is so fast paced. I really needed a break and this place is perfect.”
He spent most days alone in his cell, working on an article about his part in the protest on Vieques, an island nature preserve off the coast of Puerto Rico that had been used as a weapons training ground for the US Navy since 1941, when it had taken over 26,000 acres of the island’s eastern and western shores, forcing local residents to move to the center of the territory. For years, the bombing had been playing havoc with the island’s biodiversity, and Kennedy, along with Rivera, Burgos, the Hollywood actor Edward James Olmos, and others, including the civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, had been part of the protests, which had taken place at the end of April and beginning of May. Sharpton, who had previously been arrested for civil disobedience, was originally sentenced to ninety days. His attorney, Johnnie Cochran, who had successfully defended the football star O. J. Simpson in his murder trial six years earlier, appealed the sentence. He was unsuccessful, although Sharpton was allowed to serve most of his prison time at a facility in Brooklyn.
