RFK and the dead bear, part 2
Kennedy attended Harvard with his younger brother David, who was also drawn to the drug scene. But while Kennedy was able to turn his senior thesis—on the Alabama judge and champion of civil rights Frank M. Johnson—into a book, David struggled. “He was always coming around—‘Anybody got anything? I need some,’ ” the Harvard friend said of David. “He seemed really lost, and that was really sad.” Another person who knew Kennedy at Harvard recalled seeing Ethel walking with Kennedy and David down a street in Cambridge, screaming at them at the top of her lungs. (David would die of a drug overdose, in a Palm Beach hotel room, at the age of twenty-eight.)
After graduating from Harvard, Kennedy attended the University of Virginia law school, where he met his first wife, Emily Black, an Indiana native and the daughter of a widowed schoolteacher. He took a leave of absence to work on Edward Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential campaign and, according to the longtime friend, spent much of it on the campaign trail in Alabama, high on speedballs. He also allowed Horowitz to tag along. In Jerry Oppenheimer’s book “RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream,” from 2015, Horowitz said he was shocked by Kennedy’s reckless behavior, particularly when it came to women. According to Horowitz, Kennedy had a fling in every city they visited during a three-day swing of Alabama. “It was just insanity, compulsive, nutty with him,” Horowitz said.
A number of people who are close to Kennedy described him to me as a lifelong philanderer. “He has a very addictive nature, whatever it is—whether it’s drugs, whether it’s sex, whether it’s attention,” the longtime Kennedy friend said. Recently, Vanity Fair reported that Kennedy had groped a babysitter who’d cared for his kids; according to the Washington Post, after the article appeared, Kennedy sent the woman an apologetic text. Kennedy has developed campaign talking points about his former drug use—he had “a big empty hole inside” that needed filling—and speaks of making, and sometimes breaking, contracts with himself. He told me that his will power is “iron” in all parts of his life outside of his drug use.
In September, 1983, Kennedy was on a flight to South Dakota, where he planned to get treatment for drug addiction, when he overdosed on heroin in the airplane’s bathroom. He and Black had married and moved to New York the year before. Kennedy had been named an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney, a job he’d held for a year, despite failing the bar twice. (He passed on the third try.) Billings, who’d died two years earlier, had left Kennedy his Upper East Side apartment. Kennedy would regularly ride the subway uptown to purchase drugs in Harlem. After the plane landed, in Rapid City, Kennedy, who was twenty-nine, was arrested on the tarmac, an event that made national news.
Kennedy spent five months in a New Jersey rehab facility. He’d pleaded guilty to possession charges and was sentenced to two years probation and fifteen hundred hours of community service. To fulfill the requirements, he began volunteering with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental legal-advocacy group. “I decided now to explore job opportunities in areas that felt truer to my earlier aspirations,” Kennedy wrote in his book “The Riverkeepers,” from 1997, co-authored with the environmentalist John Cronin. John Adams, the N.R.D.C.’s founding director, helped Kennedy stabilize his life. For a time, Kennedy would visit Adams and his wife every day at their home.
In 1984, Adams helped Kennedy get work as a pro-bono lawyer for the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, which had been founded, in 1966, by Robert Boyle, a former marine and a Sports Illustrated writer. A year earlier, the group had launched Riverkeeper, a patrol boat that monitored and reported polluters on the Hudson River. “It was an English concept,” Boyle’s son Alex told me. (Robert Boyle died in 2017.) “A lord who owned a manor, to protect from trespassers and poachers, would have a gamekeeper. They would have a riverkeeper.” Riverkeeper collected a portion of the fines that were levied against the polluters they caught. Kennedy and Black moved, with their two children, into a large home not far from the Hudson River, in New York’s Westchester County.
One of Kennedy’s first projects was helping to bring charges against polluters of Quassaick Creek, a tributary in the lower Hudson River Valley. Kennedy and Cronin swam the creek’s contaminated ponds and streams to gather samples, and they sneaked onto factory rooftops to record evidence of illegal dumping. They eventually identified sixteen polluters, all of whom settled without going to trial, bringing in two hundred thousand dollars in revenue for Riverkeeper. Alex Boyle, who was then a college student, worked with Kennedy on the project. “He realized that this was his ticket back to legitimacy,” Boyle said. “He wanted to muscle in and claim the credit.”
But Boyle’s father saw Kennedy as an asset, particularly for fund-raising. Kennedy used his cachet and his genuine fascination with nature—he kept a pet crow at his desk in the Riverkeeper office—to draw celebrities to the organization’s galas. Lorraine Bracco, Uma Thurman, Glenn Close, and Alec Baldwin became supporters. Liz Barratt-Brown, who worked closely with Kennedy at the N.R.D.C., told me, “He had some sense of who he was and where he was and the world around him and how he could use his name and, really, his ego to do good.”
In 1987, Kennedy began to help run an environmental-law clinic at Pace University and worked with Barratt-Brown at the N.R.D.C. on an international program that advocated for environmental rights. He also began a lucrative speaking career, eventually earning as much as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at overseas engagements. Kennedy seemed to enjoy the attention. The Times book review of “Riverkeepers” noted that it was “tedious to read a list of Kennedy’s Op-Ed pieces, to be given accounts of calls from CBS and NBC and front-page articles in The New York Times. No doubt gaining press coverage is an important tactic, but it is treated almost as an achievement in itself.”
At Riverkeeper, Kennedy’s relationship with Robert Boyle became increasingly tense. “In the beginning, Kennedy was all right,” Boyle later told New York magazine. “But then he started throwing his weight around.” In 2000, Boyle became apoplectic when he discovered that Kennedy had hired a staff scientist who’d been arrested for running a rare-bird-smuggling ring. Boyle demanded that Kennedy fire him. Instead, Kennedy won the support of the board; the man remained on staff. Boyle resigned. “He just became very hostile,” Kennedy told the Washington Post this year. “Bob Boyle was always a curmudgeon, and that was part of his charm. And he became increasingly charming with age.” Boyle was furious to be leaving the organization that he had founded. “He was pissed, livid, very much betrayed,” Alex Boyle said.
Kennedy, who left Riverkeeper in 2017, has continued to have a major impact on the environmental movement, helping to bring successful lawsuits against DuPont and Monsanto. In April, a number of his former colleagues at the N.R.D.C., including Adams and Barratt-Brown, signed an open letter calling on him to drop out of the Presidential race: “In nothing more than a vanity candidacy, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the role of election spoiler to the benefit of Donald Trump—the single worst environmental president our country has ever had.” Barratt-Brown emphasized the deep sense of personal betrayal that the letter’s signatories felt. “That’s his environmental family,” she said. (Kennedy is the godfather to one of Barratt-Brown’s children.) She added that Kennedy’s candidacy has weighed heavily on Adams, who is eighty-eight. “I think he feels the strain of having to speak out that way against somebody he was such a mentor to,” Barratt-Brown said.
In January, 2017, two months before his departure from Riverkeeper, Kennedy had visited Trump, then the President-elect, at Trump Tower. In the building’s lobby, Kennedy told reporters that Trump had asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety. The Trump campaign denied that such an offer was made. I asked Kennedy if Trump’s 2016 victory had changed the way he thought about his own political future; Trump, like Kennedy, had skeletons in his closet. “I think that it enlarged the notions of what’s possible,” he said.
Mary Richardson had been a Kennedy family friend since she was a teen-ager. She and one of Kennedy’s sisters, Kerry, were roommates at the Putney School, in Vermont, in the seventies, and again at Brown. For a time, Richardson, who had long dark hair and thick eyebrows, lived in SoHo, where she was friends with Andy Warhol. But her attachment to the Kennedys was paramount. The longtime Kennedy friend recalled a car ride with Kerry and Mary when they were in college. “I said, ‘O.K., Mary, what’s your life? Cut to the future,’ ” the friend said. “And there was a long pause. And she said, ‘Well, you know, if I could just have a room in Kerry’s house, that would be so great.’ And this is somebody who is so intelligent and beautiful.”
In 1993, Richardson and Robert Kennedy, Jr., reconnected at an art gallery, in New York. She had studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and was working at Parish-Hadley, a design firm whose two founders had decorated the Kennedy White House. The pair began an affair that quickly became serious. Richardson, who was thirty-four, got pregnant. Kennedy secured a divorce from Black, in the Dominican Republic, and three weeks later he married Richardson on a boat in the Hudson River. Their first child, Conor, was born three months after the wedding.
Richardson moved into Kennedy’s Westchester home, where the couple threw dinner parties for a rotating roster of celebrities and city friends. Kennedy was serially unfaithful and often indiscreet. A close friend of the couple’s described him hitting on her: “It was disgusting. It was anyone and everyone.” Years later, she told Richardson to check her husband’s phone. “She was genuinely stunned to find out the stuff that he was texting and sexting with women that were friends of hers,” the friend said. Kennedy denied the affairs. “He said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re a downer, you’re just negative’—it was always Mary’s fault.”
Richardson saw Kennedy’s infidelity as an aspect of his addictions. One of her confidantes told me, “We would walk the beach, and she would have rosary beads, and she would talk to me about how he was sick and he was a sex addict, and if he would just go back into recovery their marriage could be saved.” Another person with knowledge of their relationship said that Kennedy, whose speaking career had taken off, travelled frequently for work. “He also gaslighted her about her own psychiatric health,” this person said. “He told her more than once that she was crazy, that she was paranoid, that all the things she feared about what he was doing when he was out and about were fantasies.” In 2007, Kennedy called the police on two separate occasions, saying that he was afraid that Richardson would hurt herself. He later claimed that she had physically abused him.
At some point, Richardson became aware of a diary, from 2001, in which Kennedy had logged his sexual conquests. The New York Post later obtained and reviewed the contents of the diary, reporting that it included dozens of women, with numbers next to their names to indicate sexual acts; ten meant intercourse. According to the Post, Kennedy seemed to have recorded the encounters as a way of policing himself. In one entry, he recalls being propositioned to have sex with two women: “It was tempting but I prayed and God gave me the strength to say no.” In another, he reminded himself to “avoid the company of women. You have not the strength to resist their charms.” He admonished himself to “be humble like a monk. Keep your hands to yourself. Avert your eyes.”
In the spring of 2001, Kennedy was arrested in Puerto Rico while participating in a protest against U.S. military exercises on the island, which he said at the time were making local populations sick. He was convicted, along with several others, including Al Sharpton, for trespassing, and served thirty days in jail. Richardson gave birth to their fourth child while he was incarcerated, but Kennedy seemed perfectly content behind bars. “I have to say it. There’s no women. I’m happy!” he wrote in the diary. “It’s not misogyny. It’s the opposite! I love them too much.” He called his “lust demons” his “greatest defect” and wrote that, after his father died, “every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie—to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”
Kennedy told me that part of his addiction recovery was a commitment to a more personally vigilant existence. “I just said, ‘I’m going to act as if there’s a God out there watching me all the time and I have to behave myself, even when I don’t have an audience.’ ”
In May, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce. Three days later, Richardson was arrested for driving under the influence. “This gets to the core of Mary—she couldn’t not be Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy,” the longtime Kennedy friend said. “It just gave her a sense of being that she didn’t have otherwise.” Those who knew the couple said that Richardson repeatedly begged Kennedy to take her back, even after he began dating Hines. People magazine later reported that, while the couple was separated, Kennedy called child-protective services on Richardson. “I know Bobby was concerned about the kids,” his friend Peter Michaelis, a TV producer, told the magazine. Richardson’s contact with the children was limited to supervised visits. Peter Kaplan, Kennedy’s Harvard roommate, who died in 2013, was troubled by Kennedy’s treatment of Richardson. According to one former friend, “He thought Bobby was cruel to her during that divorce.”
By Mother’s Day of 2012, the kids were living with Kennedy, who was pursuing full custody. Three days later, Richardson was found dead in the garage of the Westchester house; she had hanged herself. Almost immediately, Kennedy went into damage control. The day after Richardson’s death, he and his sister Kerry gave an interview to the Times in which they detailed Richardson’s struggles with depression and sobriety. “A lot of times, I don’t know how she made it through the day,” Kennedy said. In his eulogy at a memorial service, in Bedford, New York, that was not attended by Richardson’s family, Kennedy said, “I know I did everything I could for her. And she knew that.”
A month later, Newsweek published a story based largely on Kennedy’s divorce affidavit, which said that Richardson had been given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Appended to the piece was an editor’s note with a statement from Richardson’s family: “The affidavit, which Mary repudiated at the time, is full of vindictive lies. This latest piling on is proof perfect of the unbelievable emotional and psychological abuse that Mary endured during the last years of her life, and now in death. The false claim that Mary suffered from BPD is also an insult to those who do struggle with this serious mental illness.”
The Richardsons had sued to have Mary buried in Westchester, but Kennedy won the right to bury her in the Kennedy family plot on Cape Cod. At the burial, Conor, a skinny seventeen-year-old with mussed hair, bent over his mother’s coffin, looking eerily similar to Kennedy at his father’s funeral forty-four years earlier. A month later, Kennedy had Richardson’s body exhumed and moved to a separate part of the cemetery, because, he said, it offered more space. Afterward, many of Kennedy’s friends began to distance themselves. Tim Hagan, a retired Democratic Party official, who has been close to the family for decades, told me, “I think it was a real unravelling in many ways.”
In August, 2003, Sarah Bridges, a Minnesota mother, wrote a harrowing account in the Washington Post Magazine about the struggles of her second child, who, at four months, had spiked a fever after a vaccination and experienced a grand-mal seizure. Bridges’s son was later diagnosed with autism, and he has continued to experience seizures and other serious problems. “I was getting my Ph.D. in neuropsychology, a total science mom, all my kids were vaccinated,” Bridges told me. “I came to this as a total skeptic, but what happened to my son made it very stark.”
Bridges was researching the potential causes of her son’s condition when a college friend, the wife of Kennedy’s brother Max, mentioned that her brother-in-law was interested in looking at the deleterious effects of mercury. In public talks, Kennedy often spoke about the dangers of mercury contamination in fish, which is a by-product of coal plants. (Kennedy has said that he likely got mercury poisoning from eating too many tuna-fish sandwiches.) Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, had been used for decades in vaccines, though, in the early two-thousands, it was largely phased out. Kennedy’s sister-in-law told Bridges where she could find the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Bridges, armed with a Bankers Box full of studies, showed up unannounced.
“I think I got about three sentences in and he said ‘I’m not interested,’ ” Bridges recalled. She started telling Kennedy about the studies. “And he said, ‘I need to go sailing,’ and he literally walked away.” Kennedy was gone for hours. When he returned, Bridges was still there, and he promised to look at the studies. “I think mainly to get rid of me,” Bridges said. The next day, when she went back to Hyannis Port, “he said, ‘I’m going to make some phone calls. There’s something going on here.’ ”
Like Bridges, Kennedy had experienced a feeling of helplessness when it came to the health of his children. Conor had serious food allergies; anaphylaxis had sent him to the emergency room twenty-nine times before age three. Another son, Finn, also developed severe allergies. In 1998, Kennedy helped found the Food Allergy Initiative, and he and Richardson often attended the annual Food Allergy Ball, in Manhattan. In recent years, he has suggested that such allergies could be caused by vaccines. (Conor, who is now thirty, formerly dated Taylor Swift and, in 2022, briefly volunteered with Ukraine’s International Legion.)
In 2005, Kennedy approached his friend Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, with an idea for a story about what he said were links between vaccines and autism. Kennedy was well liked at the magazine; two years earlier, he had written an article on the environmental movement. “He’s an incredibly charismatic presence,” Will Dana, the former managing editor of the magazine, said. “One time, he gave this speech in the Rolling Stone conference room about environmentalism, and I swear to God he practically had everyone in tears.” Still, Dana went on, he could display a certain sense of entitlement. “He came in one day carrying a bucket with a little injured baby bird,” Dana said. “So then we have our meeting, and we do our thing, and suddenly he’s, like, ‘I gotta go. Um, can you get one of your interns to take the bird to the vet?’ ” (When asked to comment, Kennedy said, “This is a lie.”)
Kennedy’s previous work for the magazine was sometimes problematic. “He would turn in these manuscripts, and it’s barely exaggerating to say, like, eighty to ninety per cent of the facts would be incorrect, even the simple ones,” Dana said. “It’s because he’s not a journalist. He’s a lawyer. He’s more about making arguments than about trying to communicate the truth.” The former friend remembered attending a dinner party with Kennedy and finding his case against vaccines persuasive and nimble, even though the former friend knew that the facts were wrong. “People think he’s an idiot—he’s not an idiot,” the person said. But the vaccine story for Rolling Stone was riddled with errors. Eric Bates, an editor at the magazine, tried to slow-roll the piece, but Wenner pushed it through. (Wenner said that, if he had known that the piece was “flawed that deeply,” he wouldn’t have published it.)
The article, titled “Deadly Immunity”—which stated that “the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real”—required a number of major corrections. Kennedy falsely reported the amount of ethylmercury that infants receive in their vaccinations and misrepresented the transcript of a meeting of doctors in order to support his thesis that they were conspiring with the pharmaceutical industry to push unsafe vaccines. The magazine staff agonized over the fallout, but Kennedy seemed unfazed. “Bobby never had a moment of doubt,” a former staffer told me. “He was already convinced in the overarching argument, so the loss of any one piece or all of the pieces of data didn’t put a dent in that.”
Kennedy told me that, in the aftermath, he stepped away from the vaccine issue. “I did the Rolling Stone article, and I felt like I’d done my part,” he said. “Things kind of calmed down.” A year later, he published a piece for the magazine suggesting that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election. In Kennedy’s telling, he was dragged back into the vaccine debate in 2011, when Salon—which had co-published “Deadly Immunity”—retracted and removed the story from its Web site. “By then, I was watching the science on this issue, on neurological harms from certain vaccines,” Kennedy told me.
In 2014, he published “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” an expansion on his refuted claims in Rolling Stone that vaccines contain dangerous amounts of ethylmercury. He told the Washington Post that friends and colleagues had urged him not to pursue the project. But, when we spoke in Atlanta, he seemed to suggest that his honor had been besmirched, forcing him to respond. “At that point,” he said, “it was like a declaration of war from pharma.”
One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”
That year, Kennedy moved with Hines to Los Angeles, where he soon became acquainted with Eric Gladen, a vaccine skeptic who, in 2007, founded a group called World Mercury Project. According to an Associated Press investigation, the group—which was later renamed Children’s Health Defense—reported $13,114 in revenue on its 2014 tax filings. But, in 2015, after Kennedy joined the group’s board, revenue shot up to $467,443. At an event in Sacramento to promote a film by Gladen, “Trace Amounts,” Kennedy told a crowd that, when children receive vaccines, “that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
In May, 2019, as a measles outbreak rippled across the country, Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph, his older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Townsend’s daughter Maeve published an op-ed in Politico about Kennedy’s anti-vaccination efforts. “He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines,” they wrote. That summer, Kennedy and the actress Jessica Biel spearheaded a high-profile campaign against mandatory vaccination in California schools. By the end of the year, the journal Vaccine found that, during a two-month period, two groups accounted for more than half of the ads spreading misinformation on Facebook about vaccines. One was Children’s Health Defense, which, in 2021, paid Kennedy an annual salary of five hundred thousand dollars.
With the arrival of COVID, Kennedy’s reach exploded. He churned out books: “The Real Anthony Fauci,” “Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak,” and “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid.” In the summer of 2021, as COVID vaccines were rolling out, Children’s Health Defense promoted its film “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” which was seemingly aimed at Black Americans. During the early weeks of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, the New York Post published a video in which Kennedy said that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Researchers in China, Russia, and the U.S., he went on, are developing “ethnic bioweapons” to “target people by race.” (Kennedy said that his remarks were taken out of context.)
Kennedy has long been drawn to questionable science. But some of his former close friends have grown alarmed at the changes they’ve seen in him more recently. Last summer, Kennedy posted a video of himself shirtless, doing pushups, a sunburn blooming across his well-defined back and torso. The implication was that his then rivals, Trump, at seventy-seven, and Biden, at eighty, were comparatively old and enfeebled. On a podcast last year, Kennedy said that he was taking testosterone-replacement therapy under the guidance of a doctor. One of the side effects of that treatment is increased muscle mass. But the longtime friend told me, “It’s almost like he’s been body-snatched. I look at pictures of him, and he’s unrecognizable. His sense of humor is all but gone. There’s this anger.”
The tragedy of Kennedy, the former friend said, is that there is a lot of good in him. Kennedy is said to have a natural affinity with children, taking them fishing or falconing, enthusiastically explaining nature and animals. “That guy was kind of magical,” the former friend said. “And that guy appears to be gone.” The longtime Kennedy friend said that he has tried talking to Kennedy about the environmental havoc that, he believes, Trump will unleash. In response, he said, Kennedy just “goes on a rant about the D.N.C.” Nearly everyone who knows him is perplexed by his belief that he can win the Presidency. “Sure, he was anti-corporate when we worked together,” Barratt-Brown said. “But he is now anti-government in such a dark way.”
In early May, the Kennedy campaign invited the media to a press conference with the candidate in Brooklyn, though what unfolded was more of a state-of-the-race briefing from the campaign’s perspective. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the campaign manager, led a slide-show presentation, striding across a stage in black riding boots and a blazer with leather-panelled sleeves. “The D.N.C. has been demanding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., drop out of this race in the name of saving democracy,” she said. But really, Fox Kennedy continued, it was Biden who was playing the spoiler. “He cannot win in either scenario, and by being in the race he prevents the only person who can beat Donald Trump from doing so in November. How do you like them apples?”
Kennedy sat on a stool at the side of the stage, sipping from a venti Starbucks. Electoral maps appeared on the screen, one showing how Kennedy would beat Biden in a two-way race, another how he would beat Trump. Neither image included the fact that, for now, Kennedy hasn’t formally qualified to be on the ballot in most states. At the end of the event, as Kennedy was hustled into a black Mercedes, a reporter shouted a question: Had Trump’s team been in touch about debates this summer? “Oh, I’m available for debates,” Kennedy replied. “Anytime, anywhere.”
A month later, in a debate with Trump at CNN’s studios, in Atlanta, Biden’s responses were so incoherent and awkward that, afterward, Democrats joined Republicans in calling for him to step aside. Kennedy, who wasn’t invited to participate, held what his campaign called “the real debate,” a video stream of him, alone on a stage, answering the same questions that Biden and Trump were asked. Fox Kennedy recently told me that the campaign wasn’t surprised by Biden’s poor performance. When Kennedy had first approached her, in the fall of 2022, about the possibility of his running for President, she recalled, “even then, he said, ‘I think Biden has Parkinson’s.’ ”
On July 13th, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt. That night, Kennedy appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said that the “courage” Trump had shown during the shooting was “inspirational.” “All of us are complicit in some ways in what happened tonight,” he added. “How do we change the tone of the political dialogue in this country and start to forgive each other, to reconcile, to love each other again, and to see each other, and to be able to have differences with each other without wanting to murder each other?”
Soon after, Trump and Kennedy spoke on the phone. In a video of the call, which Kennedy’s oldest son, Robert Kennedy III, posted online, Trump can be heard discussing his own vaccine skepticism—“And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically,” Trump says—before seeming to offer Kennedy the possibility of a spot in his Administration: “I would love you to do stuff, and I think it would be so good for you, and so big for you, and we’re going to win. We’re going to win.” Kennedy replies, “Yeah.”
The following week, Kennedy was at the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, where a Trump victory was treated as a near-inevitability. In a recent text exchange, Kennedy told one person that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.” But, Kennedy went on, Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.” At the Convention, Fox Kennedy said, Trump alluded to the possibility of Kennedy ending his run. “They said, ‘You know, we know that you take more from us than you take from Biden,’ ” she recalled. Trump and his team, she went on, had asked Kennedy, “ ‘Is there something that you would want to do?’ ” Kennedy is not opposed to serving in a Trump Administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Fox Kennedy said, “is an incredibly interesting one.”
That Sunday, Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the campaign, and he endorsed his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, for President. Early polling suggests that Harris is gaining ground with certain traditionally Democratic voters who were disillusioned with Biden. Kennedy’s numbers are slipping. If the youth vote goes to Harris, Kimball, the pollster, said, “that’s going to hurt him.” (Fox Kennedy told me that Kennedy would also be open to offers from a Harris Administration.)
For now, Fox Kennedy said, the campaign is not focussing on specific states but, rather, on constituencies, mainly Democrats in reliably Republican states and Republicans in reliably Democratic states. One way in which she sees Kennedy becoming President is in a contingent election, a scenario in which no one candidate receives enough Electoral College votes to win outright, and the House of Representatives picks the President. (It was also a plot device on the HBO comedy series “Veep.”) Fox Kennedy told me, “We’ve always said, as soon as people realize Bobby can win, he will win.”
In Atlanta, I asked Kennedy how the deaths of his loved ones had affected his political identity. He told me that, after his brother David died, he turned to his mother for solace. “I said to her, ‘Does the hole that they leave in you when they die, does it ever get any smaller?’ ” Kennedy recalled. “And she said, ‘It never gets any smaller, but our job is to grow ourselves bigger around the hole.’ ” He added, “In doing that, we make ourselves larger, and the hole becomes proportionately smaller.”
Published in the print edition of the August 12, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Inheritor.”
And to make it even weirder in the photo Bobby’s fly is undone.