He is the notorious philanderer who was 14 when his father was assassinated. Now, the former heroin addict and anti-vaxer is running for president. David Charter meets the independent candidate dividing America and his own family - and rattling Donald Trump.
The first thing you notice about Robert Francis Kennedy Jr is just how Kennedy he is. He has that unmistakable matinee idol look, those gleaming teeth and striking baby blue eyes, with a dimpled chin thrown in for good measure. Yet he rarely flashes the famous half-sneer, all-charm Kennedy smile.
The nephew of President John F Kennedy and the third of 11 children of Bobby Kennedy, the US senator gunned down aged 42 while running for the White House in 1968, RFK Jr somehow survived the family curse that took so many in their prime, including his 28-year-old brother David from a drug overdose. But all those tragedies and conspiracies, not to mention his own obsessive personality and darkly paranoid view of the condition of America today, seem to weigh heavily on him.
All of this — a fatalistic sense of destiny, his conviction that corporations have poisoned democracy and that institutions set up to protect Americans actually oppressed and, occasionally, killed them — lie behind his decision, like several Kennedys before him but at the much greater age of 70, to run for president of the United States.
The second thing you notice at once is his voice. We meet in the basement of the Royal Oak Music Theater, a vaudeville venue dating back to 1928 in a comfortable northern suburb of Detroit, after Kennedy has just appeared at a fundraising evening of stand-up comedians and addressed the crowd in his distinctive rasp, like a strangled man struggling to convey some important final words.
Every sentence sounds like a strain, although his fluency seems to improve as he goes on. He is not, however, suffering from a debilitating physical condition, but from a rare neurological disorder called spasmodic dysphonia. It came on in his early forties and causes involuntary spasms of the vocal muscles, resulting in his gravelly delivery.
Having heard him last year when he announced his break from the Democratic Party and launched his independent bid for the White House, I think he sounds worse now. Is this perhaps due to the stress of the campaign and fundraising circuit as he crisscrosses the country?
Kennedy blames too much coffee.
“When I drink caffeine, you know… Because it’s neurological. It’s not in my throat; it’s in my brain. Caffeine excites my brain, which makes my vocal cords tighten up,” he says, matter-of-factly.
The condition clearly does not prevent him being a loquacious orator and his problem is actually saying too much, occasionally resulting in a scrabble to rein in some incautious comments.
“My voice is getting better and better,” he says. “Everybody says it. Two years ago, I could not even run this campaign. But I had this surgery in Japan and I’m also doing these therapies.”
Still, he cannot bear to listen to himself, even as he seems to captivate his supporters. “You know, I hate the way it sounds. I feel sorry for people that have to listen to me.”
Much of his family feel the same way.
At a campaign event in Philadelphia last month, President Biden appeared with a dozen Kennedys who backed him and the Democratic Party so closely identified with their famous name, including six of RFK Jr’s eight surviving siblings. “Nearly every single grandchild of [family patriarch] Joe and Rose Kennedy supports Joe Biden,” Kerry Kennedy, RFK’s seventh child, said when introducing Biden. “That’s right: the Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president.”
RFK Jr’s closest relatives are on record distancing themselves from his vaccine scepticism (he said last year, “There is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective”), his conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon, and his criticism of US support for the “unnecessary war” in Ukraine. Most of them also disagree with his backing for the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who confessed to murdering their father, because of “his record of rehabilitation” in prison.
Kennedy has parlayed his relatives’ opposition into a parable for the way that polarised Americans should try to live together. He told the audience at his Detroit fundraiser that he had a lot in common with the comedians who performed because “they all come from families that wish they had a different job”, adding that, back in the Sixties, “My father wanted us to show our mettle by taking positions in debate, and to debate with passion and not hate each other because we disagreed, and I love my family… I feel that they love me and I wish the same thing could happen for all of our country, where we could disagree with each other without hating each other.”
There are a few Kennedys in his camp — his ex-CIA daughter-in-law Amaryllis Hope Fox, married to his son Robert F Kennedy III (also known as Bobby), is helping to manage the campaign, while a cousin, Anthony Shriver (the fifth child of JFK’s sister Eunice), came to his campaign launch, with three of his five children. It’s a big family.
Happy 96th to the World’s most amazing Gramma!! 🎂 pic.twitter.com/6tqe1WT7Hb
— Joe Kennedy III (@joekennedy) April 11, 2024
RFK Jr was photographed early in April amid a huge Kennedy gathering to celebrate his mother Ethel’s 96th birthday, where some of the conversations were rather awkward. But not with the matriarch herself, he says. “She’s very supportive of me. Cheryl [his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines] and I had a long conversation with her about running, I don’t know, six months ago? She was very happy and very supportive.”
The repaired relationship with his mother is deeply important to Bobby, whose teenage years were notoriously difficult as Ethel, widowed at 40 while pregnant with her 11th child, struggled to cope with her huge brood despite all the hired help. RFK Jr was 14 when he was woken at 6am at his Washington DC prep school and hastily flown to Los Angeles in time to spend some final moments at his brain-dead father’s bedside before the machines were switched off.
“My father’s head was bandaged and his eyes were black,” he wrote in The Riverkeepers, the co-authored biography that charts his rise as one of the country’s most prominent environmental lawyers, battling corporate and government polluters to clean up the Hudson River in New York. “His face was bruised, especially around his eyes. My mother was beside him, holding his hand, where she stayed all night. Each of us spent time with him that night, holding his hand, praying, saying goodbye, listening to the pumps that kept him breathing.”
Ethel placed Bobby under the paternal care of Lem Billings, the closeted gay best friend of JFK who transferred his Kennedy fixation to his new charge. Billings treated Bobby as the standard bearer of the new Kennedy generation and the natural heir to the Oval Office, where as a seven-year-old he was photographed in 1961 proudly presenting his uncle with a large glass jar containing a spotted salamander he caught in the grounds of Hickory Hill, the northern Virginia mansion that Robert Sr bought from JFK to house his growing family. It was the first of a series of exotic pets, including a red-tailed hawk given to him by his father, which led to a serious lifelong interest in falconry. Naturally, because of his last name he was able to have the bird with him at boarding school against all the usual rules banning animals, although staff did draw the line at his lion cub after it started to grow too big.
This special status only stoked Bobby’s increasingly wild lifestyle and he was expelled from two schools for rebellious antics involving drugs. Of course, that did not stop him following the Kennedy footsteps to Harvard, although he was ordered to remove the rattlesnake he brought with him. Asked by a classmate whether he really thought he could become president, Bobby reportedly replied, “I feel that is my destiny.”
Kennedy’s independent campaign may seem a long shot, not least because he lacks the organisational heft of a major political party and is having to work hard to meet the criteria to qualify for each state’s ballot paper (at the time of writing, he has enough signatures in ten of them, although many deadlines are still a way off, in July or August).
But there is undeniably a big gap in the market. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans are unhappy at choosing between two old retreads, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78 in June). Both have recorded the lowest approval ratings of the postwar presidents. Even at this early stage RFK Jr is polling at an average of around 10 per cent, with Trump and Biden in a virtual tie on around 40 per cent each, according to the political news website realclearpolitics.com.
There are already signs of open panic in both the Democratic and Republican camps at the prospect of RFK Jr taking votes to tilt the election against them. Some polls show Kennedy’s presence pushing Biden ahead; others give Trump a boost. Some of his support seems to come from those who would otherwise simply not bother to vote.
“Both sides are trying to frighten their voters, saying that I’m helping the other guy,” Kennedy says, acknowledging that his supporters will be bombarded with messaging not to “waste their vote” as polling day approaches. Trump has posted on his Truth Social platform that RFK Jr is “the most radical left candidate in the race”, that he is a “wasted protest vote” and “a Democrat ‘plant’… who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get re-elected”, while four of Bobby’s siblings called him “dangerous to our country” because he “might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment”.
Kennedy says Democrat fears he will damage Biden’s chances are misplaced, because there is no way the president can win re-election. “There are members of my family who believe that I might pull votes from President Biden and get President Trump elected, and they think that would be a dangerous outcome.
“I don’t think that that’s true. I mean, our polling shows that I poll much more from President Trump… 57 per cent of my voters, if I withdrew, would vote for Trump.”
Kennedy’s comedy fundraiser seemed to underline his appeal to a Trump-esque crowd. Many of the jokes had a decidedly anti-woke flavour, especially from top-of-the-bill Rob Schneider: “We have a Supreme Court justice [Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson] and they asked her what your definition of a woman is. She’s like, I’m not falling for that trick question… Hey, everybody knows what a woman is: a woman is someone who gets mad at you for something you did three years ago.” Schneider, a California friend of Kennedy’s, similarly left the Democratic Party and is a fellow vaccine sceptic. (“They call us anti-vaxers… I think it’s such an unfair term. If you question the safety of airplanes like the new Boeing 737 MAX that doesn’t make you anti-planer.”)
I point out to Kennedy that a CNN poll in March put Biden and Trump level in Pennsylvania (46 per cent each), but gave the crucial swing state to Trump (40 to 38 per cent) when he (16 per cent) was added to the mix.
“There may be some state polls that indicate that but, you know, we have the most extensive polling of anybody in the country,” Kennedy says. “Our polling shows that with me in or out, Biden cannot beat Trump, and that I can beat Trump. If Biden withdraws, I will beat Trump. And if Trump withdraws, I will beat Biden… If I leave the race, Trump wins two extra states, Maine and Virginia.” Kennedy quickly adds that he is not planning to quit but to go all the way. “I’m running to win.”
The idea that he could ever run for president appeared tragically overblown to successive biographers because of the young RFK’s twin addictions: drugs and sex. David Horowitz, a writer who followed Bobby when he worked for his uncle Ted Kennedy during the 1980 Democratic primaries, has said, “Bobby had a girl in every place. There were women there like moths to the flame… By the end of the day, the rest of us were exhausted and Bobby was ill, had the flu or something, but there was a girl waiting for him… It was just insanity, compulsive, nutty with him.”
Jerry Oppenheimer, the author of 2015′s Robert F Kennedy Jr and the Dark Side of the Dream, wrote that Bobby became “a monument to scandal, controversy and excess, a life that paralleled the decline in the power, prestige and politics of America’s royal family”. Kennedy has tried to make light of his unavoidable backstory, telling one audience, “I told my wife the other day, ‘I got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I could be king of the world.’ "
He went from Harvard via an unsuccessful short interlude at the London School of Economics to law school at the University of Virginia, where he met his first wife, Emily Black, a fellow student, scoring a plum job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan that he blew when he overdosed on heroin on a plane in 1983. A court ordered rehab and 1,500 hours of community service, which turned out to be a life-defining move. Bobby, 30, volunteered with an environmental organisation, the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, later known as Riverkeeper, where he used his legal skills to win a series of pollution cases that saw him named a “hero of the planet” by Time magazine. He became president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of more than 500 bodies in 50 countries founded in 1999.
Bobby cleaned himself up too. He told Oprah Winfrey in a 2007 interview, “I’ve been sober for 23 years, and I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve never had a single urge [for drugs] since. Once I completed a 12-step programme, the obsession I lived with for 14 years just lifted. I’d describe it as miraculous.”
He had an even longer battle against his sexual appetites. His first marriage to Black, with whom he had two children, ended in a quickie divorce filed in the Dominican Republic in 1994 when his girlfriend and soon to be second wife, Mary Richardson, a designer who had worked for Andy Warhol, was six months pregnant. That marriage ended 16 years and four children later. It was scarred by his philandering and her depression, with the New York Post revealing that Kennedy’s diary from 2001 catalogued liaisons with 37 women that year alone. “I’m like Adam and live in Eden, and I can have everything but the fruit,” he wrote in the diary on November 5, 2001. “But the fruit is all I want.” The diary was found by Richardson, who went on to take her own life in 2012, two years after the divorce.
The biggest test for wife number three Cheryl, who was introduced to Kennedy by fellow Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David — they married in 2014 — appears to have been his obsession with vaccines. In early 2022 Kennedy referenced Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp, while speaking at an anti-vaccine rally. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said. There was an immediate outcry, including from Cheryl, who tweeted that his reference to Frank was “reprehensible and insensitive”. She added: “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.” Kennedy tweeted an apology, adding: “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control.”
Kennedy has long been mired in the world of conspiracy, blaming the CIA for the murder of his uncle JFK and believing there was a second gunman involved in his father’s death. His own fear of assassination, backed by threats including one from a man who says he will kill him on the June 6 anniversary of his father’s death, has led him to request Secret Service protection five times, so far without success, obliging his campaign to pay a huge security bill. In Detroit there are security guards posted all over the theatre including three outside the room where we meet.
Kennedy became drawn into the febrile world of vaccine scepticism after a woman turned up at his house in 2005 with a huge pile of documents setting out her theory — widely debunked — about a link between inoculations and her son’s autism. Kennedy was hooked, eventually founding Children’s Health Defense in 2018, a charity “to end the childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable and establish safeguards so this never happens again”. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was named by the British group the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the 12 main spreaders of vaccine disinformation, and banned by Instagram in 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”.
Kennedy’s agenda for the White House includes using American influence to “overhaul” the United Nations, “including the World Health Organisation”. He thinks the WHO has “a legitimate… traditional function, which is to operate health clinics in countries that were under-served, to help with some issues like sanitation, agricultural innovation, health clinics… But the repurposing of WHO to be a vehicle for testing pharmaceutical drugs on poor Africans and poor Asians and for promoting certain kinds of vaccines… The larger function that WHO has now taken on, which is global pandemic management, I think is a catastrophe.”
His appeal to disaffected Americans goes beyond his own vaccine fixation, telling his supporters that only he will address truly existential issues at stake in November, such as “the chronic disease epidemic”, the US$34 trillion ($57 trillion) national debt and “winding down the war machine which is destroying this country”.
His distrust of institutions extends to Nato, which he blames for provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which he says “has to be rethought for many, many reasons”. Technology, he argues, “has made the current version of Nato nonsensical. Russian and Chinese hypersonic missiles mean that it would be impossible for us to get a million soldiers across the Atlantic… Those technological realities are going to force us to reassess our military strategies, including the principle strategies behind Nato… We need to make sure that the function of Nato is not to keep the world at war. We want peace.”
His idealistic pledges to tackle America’s polarisation and convene talks with Russia and China to agree world peace have struck a chord at a time when conflict appears to be erupting all over. “Both political parties want to use fear to get us to do something that nobody really wants to do, to choose the lesser of two evils,” Kennedy said in Detroit, referring to the choice between Biden and Trump.
It is a sentiment I have heard repeated by his supporters and it finds a wider echo among many millions of Americans. “Do any of you want more of the same?” Kennedy asked his audience. “No!” they roared back. “Let’s figure out a way,” Kennedy concluded. “Let’s focus on being Americans again, rather than Republicans and Democrats.”
Written by: David Charter
© The Times of London