Vaccine sceptic, conspiracist: it’s Robert F Kennedy Jr
The US president once called RFK Jr the ‘dumbest’ member of the Kennedy clan. Then he chose him to lead America’s health agenda.
Before he won the presidential election last year Donald Trump said he had a clear message for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the man he had chosen to make America healthy again: “Go wild on health.”
This week Trump and his health secretary gave an indication of just how wild they intend to be.
Five months after Kennedy said that he and his team would know by this month “what has caused the autism epidemic”, the two men held an event at the White House where the president said that pregnant women should not take paracetamol.
Medical experts have said there is no link between use of the pain medication and autism in children, and the UK health secretary, Wes Streeting, said people should not pay attention to what Trump says about medicines.
Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Chief Medical Officer issued a statement “rejecting claims regarding the use of paracetamol in pregnancy, and the subsequent risk of development of ADHD or autism in children”.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine sceptic, said there would be more study into whether the vaccines cause autism, while Trump warned against giving babies too many vaccines at once, a statement that is likely to reheat old – and debunked – theories about childhood vaccines causing autism.
For the scion of America’s most famous political dynasty, Monday’s event was a demonstration of how Trump, who once called him the “dumbest” member of the Kennedy clan, now sees him as a useful standard bearer for the Maha offshoot of the Maga project.
The nephew of President John F Kennedy and son of Bobby Kennedy once dreamt of becoming a Democratic president himself.
But now, after a life of tragedy, scandal, addiction and family feuding, he may have been lifted to his political high-water mark by a Republican president set on shaking up the American scientific and medical establishment.
Kennedy, 71, has no medical or public health qualifications but carries a famous name and shares with his president a taste for bold, incendiary statements that make experts tear their hair out.
The third of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, he was 14 when his father, known as RFK, was fatally shot while campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 1968. He has promoted the conspiracy theory that the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle JFK in 1963.
As a teenager RFK Jr was expelled from two schools over drug incidents but still succeeded in going to Harvard. While there he told a contemporary he believed the White House was his destiny.
His career as a lawyer received a setback in 1983 when he overdosed on heroin on a plane. While doing court-ordered community service at an environmental project he was inspired to dedicate himself to fighting water pollution and he spent many years as a high-profile campaigner.
He has long been a vaccine sceptic and has spread health-related conspiracies about wi-fi causing “leaky brain” and chemicals in water turning children transgender.
“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” he said in an interview with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist.
He wants to remove fluoride, which protects against tooth decay, from American drinking water supplies and has said fluoride is “associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease”.
He was banned from Instagram during the Covid-19 pandemic for sharing unfounded claims about the virus.
He apologised in 2022 after suggesting at an anti-vaccine rally that it was worse for people living under Covid restrictions than it was for Anne Frank.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said.
He also suggested that Covid was being used to target some ethnic groups and spare others. “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” he said. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
His campaign for president peaked when he reached 15 per cent in the polls but he attracted unhelpful headlines, including an allegation from a former family babysitter that he groped her in the late 1990s. In a text that Eliza Cooney shared with the media, he said to her: “I have no memory of this incident but I apologise sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.”
One bizarre story concerned him finding the carcass of a bear that had been hit by a car and deciding to dump it in Central Park in New York. He also spoke of an incident in 2010 when he experienced severe memory loss that a doctor ascribed to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it”.
Some family members were against his independent presidential run and then became even more dismayed when he abandoned the campaign and backed Trump. Several of them accused him of “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story”.
But it wasn’t the end of the story. Trump, apparently thrilled to have a Kennedy come to him and bend the knee, nominated him to be his secretary for health and human services. Kennedy’s cousin Caroline Kennedy, an ambassador and daughter of John F Kennedy, wrote a letter branding him a “predator” who preyed on the “desperation of parents and sick children” and said he was unqualified for the role and had “misrepresented, lied and cheated his way through life”.
This month he clashed with senators at a hearing and afterwards his nephew – the former congressman Joe Kennedy III – said his uncle was “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” who had chosen to “dismiss science”.
One of RFK Jr’s siblings, Kerry Kennedy, called on him to resign, while Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, referred to him in terms the present president might recognise: “RFK LOSER”.
As a young man, according to one writer, Kennedy was a “compulsive” philanderer and he has joked: “I got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I could be king of the world.”
Infidelities contributed to the end of his first two marriages. His second wife, Mary Richardson, with whom he had four children, found a diary documenting dozens of his casual liaisons. After struggling with depression and alcoholism, she killed herself in 2012, after they had separated.
His third wife is Cheryl Hines, 59, the Curb Your Enthusiasm actor who was also once known for embracing liberal causes. Speaking to Trump supporters on election day he called Hines “the most supportive person in the room”.
A few weeks earlier it had been reported that Olivia Nuzzi, 31, the Washington correspondent of New York magazine, had been “sexting” with Kennedy. She admitted that some of their communications had “turned personal” and later parted company with the magazine.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month Hines and Kennedy declined to comment on the allegations. At the time they were reported, a spokesperson for him said he had met Nuzzi “once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece”.
Hines told the Journal: “I don’t think there’s any point to going through every rumour and headline to try to defend or explain it.”
Asked if her new memoir would give readers a positive picture of her marriage, she said: “One would deduce that we love each other and are still married and whatever we’ve been through is behind us.”
The couple were introduced at a charity ski event by Larry David, whose on-screen wife Hines played. They were no longer with their partners when they started dating in 2011 (Hines was previously married to Paul Young, the founder of the management firm Principato-Young). Kennedy and Hines married in 2014 and now live in a $4.4 million townhouse in Georgetown, the Washington neighbourhood where JFK and his wife, Jackie, lived before entering the White House.
Hines said that she understands some friends find it stressful to be around her because of their opposition to her husband’s views but is struck by the intense hostility some show. “Some people … can’t even talk about it. It’s really rather strange, actually.”
She condemned his Anne Frank comment on Twitter in 2022 but is supportive of Maha. “I feel like everything they’re doing is to be more mindful of what is going into all of it, into food, into drinks, and educating people. So there’s nothing that I can think of that I would have been against.”
The reporter noted that among the paintings on the wall of their house was a portrait of Hines that she doesn’t like. When Kennedy is away she takes it down. But when he returned most recently he put it back up, higher on the wall. She says she will take it down again, which is a two-person job.
RFK Jr is, even by the standards of his fellow cabinet members, a genuine eccentric. Before this week’s White House event, his most high-profile appearance as health secretary was when he and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, challenged Americans to join them in a 100 press-up, 50 pull-up challenge in under 10 minutes.
Kennedy is in impressive physical shape and completed the challenge, although fitness experts questioned the form of both men’s exercises. Some of his press-ups appeared to involve little more than a dip of the head. More strikingly, he completed the whole stunt in jeans, which is apparently his standard gym attire.
Some years ago I interviewed Kennedy. One notices immediately that he has the clear eyes of his father and a touch of the Kennedy drawl, although a voice disorder means that he has a vocal tremor.
He can be an intense interviewee but offered lighter moments, telling the story of taking a salamander with him when visiting his uncle in the Oval Office. The creature was dead on arrival and the president “was poking it with a pen for a lot of the meeting, saying, ‘I don’t think it looks well.’ I was saying, ‘He’s just sleeping’.”
He also recalled how he and his siblings had to give talks at Sunday dinners as part of their parents’ attempts to make them aware that “we are part of a battle larger than ourselves”. These days he might do well to ensure that battle doesn’t get larger than the present president.
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