He had written more than 20 books, drew healthy audiences speaking across America and attracted coverage from the country’s top newspapers and magazines. Still, by the height of the pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he felt muzzled.
Facebook and Instagram had banned posts by Children’s Health Defense, the Kennedy-founded organization that questions the value of vaccines. The social media sites noted that Kennedy’s group trafficked in medical misinformation, and a science research team labeled him a “superspreader” of bogus claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
But as 2024 loomed, the scion of America’s most famous Democratic family saw a way back into the public eye.
“I started thinking, ‘Well, the one place that they couldn’t censor me was if I was running for president,’ ” Kennedy told the New Yorker. As he prepared to announce his candidacy in 2023, he proclaimed, “The censors are permitting me to talk to Americans again!”
Indeed, a 16-month run for the White House and subsequent two months as a supporter of Republican nominee Donald Trump succeeded in keeping RFK Jr. close to the center of the public’s consciousness. It’s a prominent perch he’s likely to maintain if he succeeds in being confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Loyola Marymount University political scientist Michael A. Genovese said Trump’s designation of Kennedy for the Cabinet post demonstrates “the power of mutual opportunism.”
“RFK revives his failing career. Trump is linked to the glamour of the Kennedy name,” said Genovese, ticking off factors that may have informed Trump’s decision. “RFK gains some measure of respectability. Trump puts Kennedy in a Cabinet position he cares little about. RFK finds a way to stay in the glow of the spotlight. Trump gets an anti-science colleague to complement Trump’s anti-science sentiments.”
Kennedy’s halting ramble from Democratic Party fringe player to fervent MAGA ally did not shock anyone who has watched him closely in recent years. They recall how Kennedy visited Trump Tower shortly before Inauguration Day in 2017 and proclaimed that Trump would make him chair of a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity. The Trump administration position never materialized.
Campaigning for the White House this year, Kennedy criticized both major parties, though he saved his most spirited beat-downs for the Democrats. Part of the reason surely was that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris had spurned his overtures. It eventually became clear that Trump — as he had so many times before — was more than willing to strike a strategic alliance with a former adversary.
Kennedy, 70, came with a checkered personal history. Controversial — even bizarre — revelations dotted his presidential run. But several Trump appointees came with unsettling personal histories.
Kennedy, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has persevered over the course of a life frequently turned upside down by tragedy. He was 14 when his father and namesake was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Not long after, he became addicted to heroin, a habit he did not kick until he was 29. Despite that, he graduated from Harvard and the University of Virginia law school.
His two strongest calling cards as a candidate appeared to be his family name and his career as an attorney who fought to clean up the environment. But both became overshadowed by his later preoccupations.
Kennedy spread the myths — refuted by science — that vaccines commonly injure children and cause autism. He outraged many in 2022 by comparing vaccine mandates to the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany.
When he announced last fall that he would continue his presidential run as an independent rather than as a Democrat, many in his family did not hesitate to heap on their disdain.
“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” three of the candidate’s sisters and one brother said in a joint statement. “We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”
This spring, nearly 50 of his former colleagues and leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund pilloried Kennedy.
“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,” the environmental leaders wrote in a broadside published in several newspapers.
Not unlike the man who would later offer him a Cabinet position, the candidate seemed impervious to criticism, positioning himself as someone who was delivering inconvenient truths to an unyielding establishment.
The candidate liked to quote his famous relatives, suggesting he was living by his father’s words: “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”
Not long after the NRDC disowned him, Kennedy suffered another embarrassment. The New York Times reported on a 2012 deposition in which he described his concerns that he might have a brain tumor. A doctor, Kennedy said, had told him that his abnormal brain scans were likely “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
The revelation made him the butt of a slew of jokes on late-night TV, just as he was trying to assure voters of the seriousness of his candidacy.
Kennedy also took incoming fire from the right. “Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!!” Trump posted in April on his Truth Social platform. “It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot.”
Kennedy accused Trump of “a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims.”
Into the summer, Kennedy continued to insist that the American people would eventually turn to him and away from the major party candidates. But while he wanted to talk about the evil of corporate and government elites, his past kept resurfacing in the media.
In July, Vanity Fair reported that a woman accused Kennedy of groping her decades earlier when she was the 23-year-old nanny of his children. Kennedy was married at the time.
After the story broke, the candidate texted an apology to the woman, while contending that he remembered nothing of the episode.
Not long after that, a video surfaced that raised questions about Kennedy’s long-term commitment to the race. In the recording, posted by his son on social media, the candidate is speaking by phone with Trump, who hints that he wants Kennedy to jump to his side.
“I would love you to do something,” Trump said, without offering further context. “And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.” Kennedy’s response: “Yeah.”
Yet in public Kennedy insisted he offered a third way, unattached to the two major parties.
Then in August came a series of events that set the stage for Kennedy’s later emergence as a Cabinet pick. He weathered yet more embarrassing revelations, but also threw his backing behind Trump.
‘I like him a lot, I respect him a lot.’
— Donald Trump, on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in August interview
A story in the New Yorker recounted an odd prank that Kennedy had pulled several years prior.
After finding a dead bear cub on a mountain roadside, according to his account, he loaded the carcass into his car and drove into New York City. Kennedy then deposited the body in Central Park, alongside a bicycle. The New Yorker reported: “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.”
Most of the attention from the story surrounded the dead bear, but it also revealed text messages in which Kennedy called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.” But Kennedy judged that President Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.”
Despite Kennedy’s assurances he was running to win, his campaign manager hinted in the profile that he might be willing to take a lesser role. She called the possibility of Kennedy as Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services “incredibly interesting.”
Kennedy had reached out to Harris, too, CNN reported, expressing interest in a role in her administration. He was rebuffed.
“No one has any intention of negotiating with a MAGA-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Matt Corridoni told the cable network on Aug. 14.
It became apparent change was afoot six days later when Trump began to publicly flatter Kennedy, while the Democratic National Convention was in full swing and buoyed by Harris’ energetic candidacy.
“I like him a lot, I respect him a lot,” Trump told CNN. At a campaign event in Arizona, Trump called Kennedy “very smart.”
On Aug. 23, the day after the Democratic convention ended, the Kennedy heir endorsed the Republican, saying that, together, they were going to “Make America Healthy Again.” Trump’s handlers later rhapsodized at how a MAGA crowd in Glendale, Ariz., greeted Kennedy “like a rock star.”
The campaign knew it had a problem with some young female voters, particularly because Trump’s Supreme Court picks had eliminated federal protection of abortion access by overturning of Roe vs. Wade. But some of those same women were won over by Kennedy’s calls for improving healthcare and removing food additives that could harm children, said a senior campaign official who declined to be named. “A lot of that group of young moms loved what Bobby was saying,” said the advisor. “He moved that group for us.”
It’s impossible to know how many voters were moved by such feelings. Or how many were turned off by the continuing drumbeat of Kennedy oddities.
Just three days after Trump and Kennedy took the stage together for the first time, Kennedy faced another embarrassing headline. An old magazine article surfaced in which one of Kennedy’s daughters remembered her father’s strange encounter with a dead whale on Cape Cod.
Town & Country magazine reported that, many years earlier, Kennedy “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.”
Again, late-night comics had fodder for Kennedy jokes. But, again, Kennedy weathered the storm and went on to campaign vigorously for his new ally.
Kennedy’s path to confirmation is uncertain. Although the incoming GOP majority in the Senate should clear the way, even some Republicans have said the former Democrat will have to answer questions about his vaccine stances and his desire to change how processed foods are made.
Kennedy proclaimed on X his readiness “to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”
Though well short of the spot in the Oval Office once held by his uncle and coveted by his father, the Cabinet post would put Kennedy the closest he has ever been to the heart of a federal government that he previously pilloried only from the outside.