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RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets. [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Joe Hagan']
Date: 2024-07-02 10:00:00+00:00
Editor’s note: This story contains an image of an animal carcass that some readers may find disturbing.
Twenty years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an HBO documentary about the dangers of a nuclear plant on the Hudson River. Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister Rory Kennedy, pits the crusading Kennedys, pictured flying in a helicopter over the nuclear facility, against Entergy, the power company. The film argued that the surrounding environment would be made uninhabitable if the plant came under terrorist attack.
This was necessarily a high-stakes confrontation. In anticipation, Rory warned her production team they had a potential liability: Her brother, though a prominent and successful environmental lawyer known for suing polluters, could be fast and loose with the facts. “He can say some crazy shit,” she told them, according to a person involved in the film. Kennedy’s interviews had to be thoroughly fact-checked “even though he might come across as an expert,” she said. “That’s who he is.”
Sure enough, the film had already been edited when producers discovered that Kennedy’s interviews were littered with inflated and inaccurate claims, rendering portions of the film unusable. “It was like, Holy shit,” says another source familiar with events. “We have to get the audio and cut certain things out. We can’t really say this. You can be sued!”
The experience of having to tear the film apart and reedit it was deeply frustrating for Rory, especially because HBO had wanted more Bobby, not less. When her brother gave a speech at the film’s premiere, wowed audience members asked Rory why she hadn’t included some of his more dramatic points in her film. She couldn’t tell them it was because they were untrue.
Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories, the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality—the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the “savior complex” (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.” A few months ago I began talking to Kennedy family members and close friends, some on the record, others on background, to get insights into the man they know well, and to ask some pointed questions: Rather than merely rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s already fatally faltering campaign, shouldn’t you be telling voters what you know about your brother and cousin, whose candidacy threatens to swing the presidential election to Donald Trump and upend American history forever? With the future of the country riding on the narrowest of polling margins, shouldn’t you be describing in fine detail the acute dangers of the person you know so well—before your own family’s tragedy becomes the nation’s?
A FAMILY AFFAIR Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Michael Kennedy, and Joseph Kennedy II attend Jeff Ruhe and Courtney Kennedy’s wedding in 1980. Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images.
To describe the family as reluctant is an understatement. Behind the scenes, his siblings, especially brothers Max, Chris, and Joseph II, are furious over his candidacy. Sisters Kerry and Rory are heartbroken. But the desire to preserve their relationship with their brother combined with the long-standing Kennedy “blood oath” to protect the family reputation (as someone close to the family described their loyalty) has prevented them from pulling back the curtain on the RFK Jr. they know, instead choosing to focus on “policy” differences.
The Kennedy campaign did not respond to detailed questions from Vanity Fair.
After initially denouncing his candidacy last summer, most of the 105 Kennedy relatives —including Bobby’s eight siblings, the largest branch of the family—had hoped his campaign would collapse under the weight of his many bizarre claims and alliances with anti-vax cranks and Trumpworld figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Instead the family has played defense, going public only when Kennedy’s statements went so far out of bounds they had no choice, like when he suggested COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people; or his claim that anti-vaxxers suffered worse oppression than Anne Frank (a statement sister Kerry called “sickening and destructive”); or when he claimed there was a mysterious alternative shooter in the death of his father in 1968 (going so far as to interview Sirhan B. Sirhan in prison and proclaim him innocent); or that the CIA was possibly involved in the assassination—claims that caused deep pain for his siblings.
Their private efforts to get Bobby to drop out—or at least wait until 2028 to run—have also come to naught. “I’ve spoken to Bobby about this race, about what’s at stake, about the importance of supporting Joe Biden, of the impact of the Trump presidency on our country and on the world,” Kerry Kennedy, who leads the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and is disciplined in how she speaks of her brother, tells me, “and I was clearly unpersuasive.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/robert-kennedy-jr-shocking-history
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