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What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want? [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Clare Malone']
Date: 2024-08-12
In December of 2021, the pollster Jeremy Zogby began designing a national survey to capture the radical changes that he believed were under way in American life nearly two years into the pandemic. Zogby, who is an avid reader of the psychologist Carl Jung, was especially curious about the kinds of people that Americans considered “heroic,” and he came up with a list of archetypes. There was the spiritual leader, the Pope; the female entrepreneur, Oprah; the rogue pundit, Tucker Carlson; and the philanthropist-scientist, Bill Gates. Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as the presumptive Presidential nominees of the major parties, were also included. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nephew of John F. Kennedy and a prominent opponent of vaccine mandates, struck Zogby as the quintessential COVID protester. When the results of the poll came back, Zogby was shocked to find that Kennedy topped the list. “What it told me was that the name still meant something in the political landscape,” he said.
Zogby flew out to California, where Kennedy lives with his third wife, the actor Cheryl Hines. At the time, leaders in the anti-vaccine movement were encouraging Kennedy, who has long expressed the widely refuted belief that vaccinating children can cause autism, to consider a Presidential bid. Kennedy was skeptical. “I thought about it a little, but I just didn’t want to run if I couldn’t win,” he said. “I knew that Cheryl would never go for it.”
Kennedy was introduced to Hines by Larry David, her co-star on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” (David had met Kennedy through his work in the environmental movement.) In 2022, after Kennedy compared America’s COVID-vaccine protocols to the fascism of the Third Reich—“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did”—he suggested to Hines that they publicly separate in order to save her reputation in Hollywood. But Zogby’s polls showed that, “despite all the bad publicity,” Kennedy said, “I still had a lot of popular strength.” That summer, Facebook and Instagram shut down the accounts of his anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, for spreading misinformation. Instagram had suspended his personal account a year earlier. Kennedy told me, “I started thinking, Well, the one place that they couldn’t censor me was if I was running for President.”
In April, 2023, Kennedy announced that he would be running for the Democratic nomination. It was a month before a campaign manager came on, the former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich. Kennedy’s campaign coördinator in New Hampshire, meanwhile, was Rhonda Rohrabacher, the wife of the former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was once warned by the F.B.I. that the Russian government was trying to recruit him as an intelligence asset. That October, after it became clear that Kennedy wouldn’t be competitive in the Democratic primary, he declared his intention to run as an independent. “The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil it for Trump,” Kennedy said. “The truth is—they’re both right. My intention is to spoil it for both of them.”
Kennedy’s views are heterodox. He inveighs against the American “war machine,” opposing military aid to Ukraine, but supports Israel’s war in Gaza. He is pro-choice and also wants to “seal” the southern border. On the campaign trail, he has embraced his status as an oddball and an outsider. In May, the Times reported that Kennedy had once testified, in a divorce deposition, that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain; in response, he posted on X, “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” When the Department of Homeland Security denied his requests for a Secret Service detail—typically, such protection is provided only to “major” candidates—the campaign made T-shirts featuring an image of Kennedy, in an airport, wearing a full suit but no shoes or socks, with the words “NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO SECRET SERVICE.” (In July, after Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania, Biden instructed the Secret Service to assign a team to Kennedy.)
Nationally, Kennedy’s polling numbers are hovering around five per cent of the vote, and he has shown particular strength among young and Latino voters. In the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin, all of which Biden narrowly won in 2020, Kennedy’s presence carries the distinct possibility of swinging the race. “He can have an impact in any of these states, because you’re looking at ten thousand to twenty thousand votes,” Spencer Kimball, the director of Emerson College Polling, told me. Kennedy’s approval ratings tend to be higher among Republicans, but Timothy Mellon, a billionaire who backs Trump, has given twenty-five million dollars to a Kennedy-affiliated super PAC—a suggestion that, in some circles at least, the Kennedy campaign has been seen as a potential spoiler for Democrats.
“Before you go into the quiet room, would you like a bucket of the loudest food on the planet?” Cartoon by Asher Perlman Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Kennedy’s family members have been nearly unanimous in opposing his campaign. Last fall, four of his siblings released a statement calling his run “perilous for our country.” In private, some have bristled at what they see as a flagrant misuse of the family’s legacy. A Super Bowl spot from Kennedy’s super PAC borrowed the ditty of his uncle’s famous 1960 television ad—“a man who’s old enough to know and young enough to do.” (Kennedy later issued an apology: “I’m so sorry if the Super Bowl advertisement caused anyone in my family pain.”) At a campaign event in Detroit this spring, the walls of the venue’s lobby displayed various illustrations of Kennedy, including one of him as a knight pulling a sword from a stone labelled “Camelot.” A family member who has urged Kennedy to drop out of the race told me, “He’s very much running on perpetuating an unfinished Presidential campaign from 1968.”
In May, I flew to Atlanta to speak with Kennedy, and we met in his suite at the St. Regis. Kennedy has the septuagenarian face that his father and his uncle never got to age into, which lends him the unsettling effect of a black-and-white photo come to life. His startlingly blue eyes contrast sharply with a shock of white hair, which he stopped dyeing a decade ago. On the trail, he favors skinny ties, often with critters on them—flamingos, bees—and gray suits, a sartorial nod to the nineteen-sixties, when his family set the standard for preppy American glamour. He has suffered from spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological vocal-cord condition, for more than two decades, and it gives his voice a distinctive, halting rasp that he himself has said is difficult to listen to; in 2022, he travelled to Japan to have a titanium bridge inserted in his throat, a relatively niche treatment intended to mitigate vocal strain.
In Atlanta, I asked Kennedy how his family’s legacy had influenced his own political aspirations. “It was realistic to think of myself in the Senate,” he said. He added that his uncle Edward Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts for forty-seven years, “had enormous fun in that job.” But, when it came to the Presidency, “I think I was always conscious that it was kind of a dangerous thing to make that my ambition,” he said. “I always had at least a part of me that recognized the implausibility of ever achieving that.”
As we spoke, Kennedy occasionally grabbed at a fruit platter that sat on the table between us, munching first on some blueberries before going back for a slice of watermelon. Running for President, he said, presented “the danger of hubris and arrogance.”
Two weeks earlier, I had driven to a public library in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, to meet with Charles Eisenstein, who has called himself Kennedy’s “campaign philosopher.” A graduate of Yale, he spent his twenties in Taiwan, working as a translator and becoming immersed in Buddhism and Taoism. “I just completely left the system,” he said. At forty, Eisenstein published “The Ascent of Humanity,” which he told me was “partly a critique of technology and civilization itself.” “I study the transition in the defining myths of our civilization,” he said. “The deep stories that we’re not even really aware of, that answer questions like ‘What is the human being? Why are we here? How does change happen in the world?’ ”
Eisenstein, who wore a flannel shirt and a thin necklace, is fifty-six and gaunt, with flecks of white in his hair and a wide, toothy grin. In 2021, as he became increasingly critical of COVID safety measures, he wrote a Substack post called “Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed,” in which he compared unvaccinated people to historical scapegoats, including Jews in Europe. “That really got me cancelled,” Eisenstein told me. “The terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have been adopted by governments and corporations to quash dissent. That’s one of the things that drew me to Bobby Kennedy.”
In early 2023, Eisenstein struck up a conversation with Kennedy at a fund-raising event for Children’s Health Defense. (A subscriber of Eisenstein’s Substack had won a raffle to attend and asked him to come along.) Kennedy, who was a month or so from officially launching his bid, invited Eisenstein to share some of his ideas with the campaign’s inner circle, many of whom had similarly gained notoriety for expressing anti-establishment views. Del Bigtree, his communications director, is the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine advocacy group; at a rally in Texas in 2019, he wore a yellow Star of David, apparently as a symbol of the persecution of people who refuse to vaccinate their children. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who had joined the campaign in an unofficial capacity, is married to Kennedy’s oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy III. Her memoir, from 2019, about working as an undercover officer for the C.I.A.—which included details of a meeting with “a feared and battle-hardened jihadi”—was met with skepticism by members of the intelligence community. “You don’t go wandering around Karachi on your own,” William Murray, a former C.I.A. operations official, told one interviewer. “You’ll wind up in some warlord’s harem, or you’ll wind up dead.”
Shortly after Kennedy announced his decision to run as an independent, Kucinich quit and was replaced by Fox Kennedy. Without the backing of a major party, the campaign had to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures to secure ballot access across the country. Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire ex-wife of Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, was chosen as Kennedy’s running mate in part because she could help finance the effort.
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[1] Url:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/robert-f-kennedy-jr-profile-presidential-campaign
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