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.
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.
Kennedy ultimately appointed Nick Brana, a former national-political-outreach coördinator for Bernie Sanders and the founder of the progressive group the People’s Party, to run his ballot-access operation. Two years earlier, Brana had allegedly tried to force himself onto a female colleague, an accusation that was corroborated by a woman who had walked in on the scene. (Brana has said that the allegation is “false and politically motivated.”) The campaign and its super PAC have spent millions of dollars working with firms associated with a ballot-access consultant named Trent Pool. In May, Pool was arrested in New York for choking and punching a woman. (A lawyer for Pool called it “a completely unjustified prosecution.”) So far, Kennedy has got his name on the ballot in about a dozen states.
The campaign has also been beset by disagreements on policy and messaging. Eisenstein nearly quit because of Kennedy’s support for Israel. “He invited me to his house, and we had a pretty long conversation,” Eisenstein said. “But I wouldn’t say it’s resolved. It’s still a point of contention.” In 2023, at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told reporters that he was in favor of federal legislation banning abortion after the first three months of pregnancy, a statement that the campaign quickly walked back. In 2024, he told the podcaster Sage Steele that he didn’t believe in any government interference in a woman’s choice. In response, Angela Stanton King, Kennedy’s adviser on Black-voter engagement and a former Trump supporter, resigned from the campaign. Even his running mate appeared confused. “My understanding is that he absolutely believes in limits on abortion, and we’ve talked about this,” Shanahan had told Steele in an episode released a week earlier. In a statement on X, Kennedy said that he supported “the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point.” Kennedy told me that his views had been influenced by his wife and her older sister: “They were all on the phone with me, hot as hornets, and said, ‘It’s always got to be the woman’s right to choose.’ ”
On the campaign trail, Kennedy tells crowds that he wants to redefine which issues should actually matter to them. Abortion, guns, border security, and transgender rights, he says, are distractions that career politicians use to divide voters. He calls chronic disease an “existential” threat facing the U.S. “The cost of diabetes now in this country is higher than the defense budget,” Kennedy told the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro. In an interview with the podcaster Todd Ault, he said, “Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on S.S.R.I.s. Why? Doctors didn’t just start prescribing these for no reason. We have damaged this entire generation. We have poisoned them.”
Notably, there isn’t much talk of vaccines at Kennedy’s campaign events. “I think what Kennedy learned along the way is that it’s not in his interest to go after Tony Fauci and to say, ‘Lock him up,’ ” Zogby, who has conducted polling for the campaign, told me. Kennedy now typically deploys euphemisms such as “medical freedom” and “informed consent” when referring to the issue.
The candidate has sought to widen his appeal in other ways, too. Recently, his campaign released a slick thirty-minute video with a voice-over by Woody Harrelson. In the opening, Kennedy reads a selection of headlines and excerpts from articles criticizing him. “He is a walking, talking conspiracy theory,” Kennedy intones, quoting the Times. “He is a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.” Then he says matter-of-factly, “I wouldn’t vote for that guy, either.” A title card flashes onscreen: “Who is Bobby Kennedy? What if he’s not crazy?”
Kennedy was born in 1954, to Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel; he was the third of their eleven children. At the time, his father was a Democratic attorney on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was then chaired by Joseph McCarthy. Kennedy spent most of his childhood at Hickory Hill, an estate in McLean, Virginia, that had once served as General George McClellan’s headquarters for the Union Army. The home became something of a second White House during the Kennedy Administration. Young women from the Justice Department would babysit. The adults worked and mingled; the children would swim and play touch football.
Les Guthman, whose father was R.F.K.’s press secretary, recalled visiting on the weekends. “I remember meeting Bobby, I think when he was about nine years old,” Guthman said. “And he had dozens of animals.” Kennedy wanted to be a veterinarian, and the house and grounds were filled with creatures—horses, ducks, dogs, a seal, a giant leopard tortoise. Ethel, whose father had made a fortune selling chemical coke for blast furnaces, was herself an animal-lover; in 1963, she directed Kennedy and his older brother, Joseph, to steal a neighbor’s horses because she felt they were being mistreated. “I think my mom liked that chaos, and she endorsed risktaking,” Kennedy told the journalist David Samuels last year. He and his siblings were always outside, getting into some kind of trouble. “There were a lot of emergency-room visits,” he said.
R.F.K. nurtured his son’s love of nature, too, outfitting the house with a walk-in terrarium for his son’s collection of lizards. When Kennedy was eleven, he injured his foot jumping off a roof. During his recovery, his father bought him a red-tailed hawk, igniting a lifelong passion for falconry. Kennedy has said that, as a child, he had difficulty concentrating in school. “I broke thermometers and rolled balls of mercury down my desk,” he wrote in his 2018 book, “American Values.” “I doodled hawks and iguanas and daydreamed about Hungarian homing pigeons.” He seemed to thrive on the reactions that his unusual hobbies elicited. One of Kennedy’s cousins told me, “He wanted to have something that makes you go, ‘Oh, wow! ’ ”
On June 5, 1968, Kennedy’s father won the Democratic Presidential primary in California. He had just delivered his victory speech, in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, when he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan. In an iconic photograph from that night, Ethel can be seen crouching over her husband, clasping his hands. Kennedy’s younger brother David, who was then thirteen, had travelled with his parents and stayed up late in the hotel room to watch his father’s speech; he saw the assassination unfold on live TV. Because of the chaos, it was several hours before anyone thought to check on him. He was discovered, with the television still on, unable to speak.
Kennedy and his older siblings flew to California to say goodbye to their father, who was in the hospital on life support. Kennedy, fourteen years old, with a thick mop of hair, served as a pallbearer at the burial, in Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, at their home in Virginia, he went into his father’s study, which still smelled of his cologne, and looked at the pictures on the wall: Uncle Joe, a fighter pilot shot down in the Second World War; Aunt Kick, killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-eight; Uncle Jack, assassinated five years earlier. “I remember sitting there thinking they all looked so young, and they were all dead,” Kennedy told an interviewer in 1993. “And I lay there and wept for probably an hour or more.”
Kennedy has said that he subscribes to the theory that Sirhan, who opposed R.F.K.’s support of Israel, was not the only participant in the assassination. In 2018, when Kennedy’s older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, told the Washington Post that she thought the investigation should be reopened, she said, “Bobby makes a compelling case.” R.F.K., for instance, suffered a fatal wound behind his ear, but Sirhan, who was convicted of the killing, was standing in front of him. (Investigators have said that R.F.K. turned away from the shooter.) Kennedy has gone further, arguing that his father was assassinated by a supposed C.I.A. asset named Thane Eugene Cesar, who had recently been hired as a security guard at the hotel; the C.I.A. refutes this. When Sirhan was recommended for parole, in 2021, Ethel and most of her children opposed his release, but Kennedy and his younger brother Douglas, a Fox News reporter, advocated for it. (Ultimately, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, reversed a parole board’s decision to release Sirhan.)
Kennedy also believes that J.F.K.’s death was part of a C.I.A. conspiracy. In “American Values,” he recounts his father’s early fears that members of the agency, angered by efforts to curtail their sprawling powers, had been involved in J.F.K.’s assassination. “My dad immediately suspected that the CIA had killed Uncle Jack,” Kennedy writes. “He called a yet-unidentified CIA official and asked point-blank, ‘Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?’ ”
Such suspicions are a theme of Kennedy’s thinking. In 2016, he published a book about the conviction of his cousin Michael Skakel, in 2002, for the 1975 murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, in Greenwich, Connecticut. The case against Skakel was built on circumstantial evidence and fuelled by media speculation. In 2018, his conviction was vacated on the ground that his defense had been inadequate. But Kennedy’s version of events was widely seen as outlandish. His book raised the possibility that the crime had been committed by two young men of color from New York City—“unusually big, muscular, and tall”—who were friends with a classmate of Skakel’s and who, the classmate claimed, had been in Greenwich that night. The Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice released a statement calling the book “inflammatory,” noting it provided “no valid or new information.”
A year after his father’s death, Kennedy dropped acid in Hyannis Port. He was having a good trip until he went into a diner, looked up, and noticed a picture on the wall of his father, his uncle, and Jesus Christ, their hands folded in prayer. The sight sent Kennedy into a tailspin. Walking home in the Cape Cod morning air, he ran into a group of boys and told them that he was feeling down. They offered him a bump of meth to improve his mood. For the next fourteen years, Kennedy has said, his life was a merry-go-round of chasing a high and coming down into a deep despair.
Ethel, at forty, had become a single mother of eleven children—Kennedy’s youngest sibling, Rory, was born six months after R.F.K.’s funeral. Ethel delegated the care of Kennedy to Lem Billings, a close family friend who had been J.F.K.’s roommate at Choate. “I had a very troubled relationship with my mom, but I had people in my life from whom I experienced unconditional love,” Kennedy told me. “One of them was a woman who was a housekeeper, a nanny at my home, a Costa Rican woman named Ena Bernard. I felt profound love from her. And I felt that from Lem.”
When Kennedy arrived at Harvard, in 1972, he was a celebrity—cool, pleasant, and handsome, with high cheekbones and long, wavy hair. In his room at Winthrop House, he had a water bed; when he moved off campus, he kept a pet owl. He rowed crew and developed close relationships with faculty members, including Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and Marty Peretz, the former publisher of The New Republic, who was then a lecturer at Harvard. Kennedy was “a smart boy and a bad influence,” Peretz wrote in his memoir. Peter Kaplan, who would later edit the New York Observer, was among Kennedy’s closest friends. Their sophomore-year roommate Locke Bowman said, “It was just a constant stream of women and friends.”
Many people around Kennedy seemed to think that he was destined for the White House, a notion that he did little to dispel. His cousin and Harvard classmate Stephen Smith, whose father helped manage R.F.K.’s Presidential campaign, told me, “He always wanted to be President.”
It was the early seventies, and drugs—pot, cocaine, barbiturates—were ubiquitous. Kennedy has said that he first tried heroin at the age of fifteen. After Kennedy’s brother Joseph flipped his car on Nantucket, paralyzing one of his passengers, a friend at Harvard recalled watching Kennedy tie off and shoot up in his dorm room. “Our family, at least the generation that preceded me, went through difficulties, but they had what Bob Coles called the ability to transfigure their suffering,” Smith told me. “J.F.K. became a more deep and interesting person because of his war experience, and Robert F. Kennedy became a deeper and more compassionate person because of the loss of his brother. Bobby seems to have had a maladaptive approach to that experience.” Drugs could be a part of that, Smith said, but there was also something more: “The way I think Bobby compensated for his lack of a close relationship with his parents was to surround himself with the comfort of acolytes.”
Billings, who was then in his fifties and working as an advertising executive in New York, was a frequent presence at Harvard. He and Kennedy did drugs together, even as Billings encouraged the notion that Kennedy was the heir apparent to the family’s political dynasty. “He was more of a comrade-follower who adored Bobby,” a family member said. Bowman, Kennedy’s college roommate, found Kennedy’s relationship with Billings “weird.” A longtime Kennedy friend told me that he had always found Billings “creepy” and thought that Billings was in love with Kennedy.
In the book “The Kennedys: An American Drama,” which the journalist David Horowitz co-authored with Peter Collier, an ex-girlfriend of one of Kennedy’s cousins described a typical scene at Billings’s apartment, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: “There was always the period of sitting around making small talk. It was really a period of waiting for somebody to decide when and how we were going to score. Then there would be the fighting over who got to do it first. Bloody needles. Doors slamming. Lem in his bathrobe and shorts yelling, ‘Bobby, get in here quick,’ and then going in to get his shot. The women were supposed to sit there waiting for the drug leftovers. It was always a macho scene, a shoot-out: which of them could do the most drugs, which of them could do the most women.”
Kennedy attended Harvard with his younger brother David, who was also drawn to the drug scene. But while Kennedy was able to turn his senior thesis—on the Alabama judge and champion of civil rights Frank M. Johnson—into a book, David struggled. “He was always coming around—‘Anybody got anything? I need some,’ ” the Harvard friend said of David. “He seemed really lost, and that was really sad.” Another person who knew Kennedy at Harvard recalled seeing Ethel walking with Kennedy and David down a street in Cambridge, screaming at them at the top of her lungs. (David would die of a drug overdose, in a Palm Beach hotel room, at the age of twenty-eight.)
After graduating from Harvard, Kennedy attended the University of Virginia law school, where he met his first wife, Emily Black, an Indiana native and the daughter of a widowed schoolteacher. He took a leave of absence to work on Edward Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential campaign and, according to the longtime friend, spent much of it on the campaign trail in Alabama, high on speedballs. He also allowed Horowitz to tag along. In Jerry Oppenheimer’s book “RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream,” from 2015, Horowitz said he was shocked by Kennedy’s reckless behavior, particularly when it came to women. According to Horowitz, Kennedy had a fling in every city they visited during a three-day swing of Alabama. “It was just insanity, compulsive, nutty with him,” Horowitz said.
A number of people who are close to Kennedy described him to me as a lifelong philanderer. “He has a very addictive nature, whatever it is—whether it’s drugs, whether it’s sex, whether it’s attention,” the longtime Kennedy friend said. Recently, Vanity Fair reported that Kennedy had groped a babysitter who’d cared for his kids; according to the Washington Post, after the article appeared, Kennedy sent the woman an apologetic text. Kennedy has developed campaign talking points about his former drug use—he had “a big empty hole inside” that needed filling—and speaks of making, and sometimes breaking, contracts with himself. He told me that his will power is “iron” in all parts of his life outside of his drug use.
In September, 1983, Kennedy was on a flight to South Dakota, where he planned to get treatment for drug addiction, when he overdosed on heroin in the airplane’s bathroom. He and Black had married and moved to New York the year before. Kennedy had been named an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney, a job he’d held for a year, despite failing the bar twice. (He passed on the third try.) Billings, who’d died two years earlier, had left Kennedy his Upper East Side apartment. Kennedy would regularly ride the subway uptown to purchase drugs in Harlem. After the plane landed, in Rapid City, Kennedy, who was twenty-nine, was arrested on the tarmac, an event that made national news.
Kennedy spent five months in a New Jersey rehab facility. He’d pleaded guilty to possession charges and was sentenced to two years probation and fifteen hundred hours of community service. To fulfill the requirements, he began volunteering with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental legal-advocacy group. “I decided now to explore job opportunities in areas that felt truer to my earlier aspirations,” Kennedy wrote in his book “The Riverkeepers,” from 1997, co-authored with the environmentalist John Cronin. John Adams, the N.R.D.C.’s founding director, helped Kennedy stabilize his life. For a time, Kennedy would visit Adams and his wife every day at their home.
In 1984, Adams helped Kennedy get work as a pro-bono lawyer for the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, which had been founded, in 1966, by Robert Boyle, a former marine and a Sports Illustrated writer. A year earlier, the group had launched Riverkeeper, a patrol boat that monitored and reported polluters on the Hudson River. “It was an English concept,” Boyle’s son Alex told me. (Robert Boyle died in 2017.) “A lord who owned a manor, to protect from trespassers and poachers, would have a gamekeeper. They would have a riverkeeper.” Riverkeeper collected a portion of the fines that were levied against the polluters they caught. Kennedy and Black moved, with their two children, into a large home not far from the Hudson River, in New York’s Westchester County.
One of Kennedy’s first projects was helping to bring charges against polluters of Quassaick Creek, a tributary in the lower Hudson River Valley. Kennedy and Cronin swam the creek’s contaminated ponds and streams to gather samples, and they sneaked onto factory rooftops to record evidence of illegal dumping. They eventually identified sixteen polluters, all of whom settled without going to trial, bringing in two hundred thousand dollars in revenue for Riverkeeper. Alex Boyle, who was then a college student, worked with Kennedy on the project. “He realized that this was his ticket back to legitimacy,” Boyle said. “He wanted to muscle in and claim the credit.”
But Boyle’s father saw Kennedy as an asset, particularly for fund-raising. Kennedy used his cachet and his genuine fascination with nature—he kept a pet crow at his desk in the Riverkeeper office—to draw celebrities to the organization’s galas. Lorraine Bracco, Uma Thurman, Glenn Close, and Alec Baldwin became supporters. Liz Barratt-Brown, who worked closely with Kennedy at the N.R.D.C., told me, “He had some sense of who he was and where he was and the world around him and how he could use his name and, really, his ego to do good.”
In 1987, Kennedy began to help run an environmental-law clinic at Pace University and worked with Barratt-Brown at the N.R.D.C. on an international program that advocated for environmental rights. He also began a lucrative speaking career, eventually earning as much as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at overseas engagements. Kennedy seemed to enjoy the attention. The Times book review of “Riverkeepers” noted that it was “tedious to read a list of Kennedy’s Op-Ed pieces, to be given accounts of calls from CBS and NBC and front-page articles in The New York Times. No doubt gaining press coverage is an important tactic, but it is treated almost as an achievement in itself.”
At Riverkeeper, Kennedy’s relationship with Robert Boyle became increasingly tense. “In the beginning, Kennedy was all right,” Boyle later told New York magazine. “But then he started throwing his weight around.” In 2000, Boyle became apoplectic when he discovered that Kennedy had hired a staff scientist who’d been arrested for running a rare-bird-smuggling ring. Boyle demanded that Kennedy fire him. Instead, Kennedy won the support of the board; the man remained on staff. Boyle resigned. “He just became very hostile,” Kennedy told the Washington Post this year. “Bob Boyle was always a curmudgeon, and that was part of his charm. And he became increasingly charming with age.” Boyle was furious to be leaving the organization that he had founded. “He was pissed, livid, very much betrayed,” Alex Boyle said.
Kennedy, who left Riverkeeper in 2017, has continued to have a major impact on the environmental movement, helping to bring successful lawsuits against DuPont and Monsanto. In April, a number of his former colleagues at the N.R.D.C., including Adams and Barratt-Brown, signed an open letter calling on him to drop out of the Presidential race: “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.” Barratt-Brown emphasized the deep sense of personal betrayal that the letter’s signatories felt. “That’s his environmental family,” she said. (Kennedy is the godfather to one of Barratt-Brown’s children.) She added that Kennedy’s candidacy has weighed heavily on Adams, who is eighty-eight. “I think he feels the strain of having to speak out that way against somebody he was such a mentor to,” Barratt-Brown said.
In January, 2017, two months before his departure from Riverkeeper, Kennedy had visited Trump, then the President-elect, at Trump Tower. In the building’s lobby, Kennedy told reporters that Trump had asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety. The Trump campaign denied that such an offer was made. I asked Kennedy if Trump’s 2016 victory had changed the way he thought about his own political future; Trump, like Kennedy, had skeletons in his closet. “I think that it enlarged the notions of what’s possible,” he said.
Mary Richardson had been a Kennedy family friend since she was a teen-ager. She and one of Kennedy’s sisters, Kerry, were roommates at the Putney School, in Vermont, in the seventies, and again at Brown. For a time, Richardson, who had long dark hair and thick eyebrows, lived in SoHo, where she was friends with Andy Warhol. But her attachment to the Kennedys was paramount. The longtime Kennedy friend recalled a car ride with Kerry and Mary when they were in college. “I said, ‘O.K., Mary, what’s your life? Cut to the future,’ ” the friend said. “And there was a long pause. And she said, ‘Well, you know, if I could just have a room in Kerry’s house, that would be so great.’ And this is somebody who is so intelligent and beautiful.”
In 1993, Richardson and Robert Kennedy, Jr., reconnected at an art gallery, in New York. She had studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and was working at Parish-Hadley, a design firm whose two founders had decorated the Kennedy White House. The pair began an affair that quickly became serious. Richardson, who was thirty-four, got pregnant. Kennedy secured a divorce from Black, in the Dominican Republic, and three weeks later he married Richardson on a boat in the Hudson River. Their first child, Conor, was born three months after the wedding.
Richardson moved into Kennedy’s Westchester home, where the couple threw dinner parties for a rotating roster of celebrities and city friends. Kennedy was serially unfaithful and often indiscreet. A close friend of the couple’s described him hitting on her: “It was disgusting. It was anyone and everyone.” Years later, she told Richardson to check her husband’s phone. “She was genuinely stunned to find out the stuff that he was texting and sexting with women that were friends of hers,” the friend said. Kennedy denied the affairs. “He said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re a downer, you’re just negative’—it was always Mary’s fault.”
Richardson saw Kennedy’s infidelity as an aspect of his addictions. One of her confidantes told me, “We would walk the beach, and she would have rosary beads, and she would talk to me about how he was sick and he was a sex addict, and if he would just go back into recovery their marriage could be saved.” Another person with knowledge of their relationship said that Kennedy, whose speaking career had taken off, travelled frequently for work. “He also gaslighted her about her own psychiatric health,” this person said. “He told her more than once that she was crazy, that she was paranoid, that all the things she feared about what he was doing when he was out and about were fantasies.” In 2007, Kennedy called the police on two separate occasions, saying that he was afraid that Richardson would hurt herself. He later claimed that she had physically abused him.
At some point, Richardson became aware of a diary, from 2001, in which Kennedy had logged his sexual conquests. The New York Post later obtained and reviewed the contents of the diary, reporting that it included dozens of women, with numbers next to their names to indicate sexual acts; ten meant intercourse. According to the Post, Kennedy seemed to have recorded the encounters as a way of policing himself. In one entry, he recalls being propositioned to have sex with two women: “It was tempting but I prayed and God gave me the strength to say no.” In another, he reminded himself to “avoid the company of women. You have not the strength to resist their charms.” He admonished himself to “be humble like a monk. Keep your hands to yourself. Avert your eyes.”
In the spring of 2001, Kennedy was arrested in Puerto Rico while participating in a protest against U.S. military exercises on the island, which he said at the time were making local populations sick. He was convicted, along with several others, including Al Sharpton, for trespassing, and served thirty days in jail. Richardson gave birth to their fourth child while he was incarcerated, but Kennedy seemed perfectly content behind bars. “I have to say it. There’s no women. I’m happy!” he wrote in the diary. “It’s not misogyny. It’s the opposite! I love them too much.” He called his “lust demons” his “greatest defect” and wrote that, after his father died, “every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie—to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”
Kennedy told me that part of his addiction recovery was a commitment to a more personally vigilant existence. “I just said, ‘I’m going to act as if there’s a God out there watching me all the time and I have to behave myself, even when I don’t have an audience.’ ”
In May, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce. Three days later, Richardson was arrested for driving under the influence. “This gets to the core of Mary—she couldn’t not be Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy,” the longtime Kennedy friend said. “It just gave her a sense of being that she didn’t have otherwise.” Those who knew the couple said that Richardson repeatedly begged Kennedy to take her back, even after he began dating Hines. People magazine later reported that, while the couple was separated, Kennedy called child-protective services on Richardson. “I know Bobby was concerned about the kids,” his friend Peter Michaelis, a TV producer, told the magazine. Richardson’s contact with the children was limited to supervised visits. Peter Kaplan, Kennedy’s Harvard roommate, who died in 2013, was troubled by Kennedy’s treatment of Richardson. According to one former friend, “He thought Bobby was cruel to her during that divorce.”
By Mother’s Day of 2012, the kids were living with Kennedy, who was pursuing full custody. Three days later, Richardson was found dead in the garage of the Westchester house; she had hanged herself. Almost immediately, Kennedy went into damage control. The day after Richardson’s death, he and his sister Kerry gave an interview to the Times in which they detailed Richardson’s struggles with depression and sobriety. “A lot of times, I don’t know how she made it through the day,” Kennedy said. In his eulogy at a memorial service, in Bedford, New York, that was not attended by Richardson’s family, Kennedy said, “I know I did everything I could for her. And she knew that.”
A month later, Newsweek published a story based largely on Kennedy’s divorce affidavit, which said that Richardson had been given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Appended to the piece was an editor’s note with a statement from Richardson’s family: “The affidavit, which Mary repudiated at the time, is full of vindictive lies. This latest piling on is proof perfect of the unbelievable emotional and psychological abuse that Mary endured during the last years of her life, and now in death. The false claim that Mary suffered from BPD is also an insult to those who do struggle with this serious mental illness.”
The Richardsons had sued to have Mary buried in Westchester, but Kennedy won the right to bury her in the Kennedy family plot on Cape Cod. At the burial, Conor, a skinny seventeen-year-old with mussed hair, bent over his mother’s coffin, looking eerily similar to Kennedy at his father’s funeral forty-four years earlier. A month later, Kennedy had Richardson’s body exhumed and moved to a separate part of the cemetery, because, he said, it offered more space. Afterward, many of Kennedy’s friends began to distance themselves. Tim Hagan, a retired Democratic Party official, who has been close to the family for decades, told me, “I think it was a real unravelling in many ways.”
In August, 2003, Sarah Bridges, a Minnesota mother, wrote a harrowing account in the Washington Post Magazine about the struggles of her second child, who, at four months, had spiked a fever after a vaccination and experienced a grand-mal seizure. Bridges’s son was later diagnosed with autism, and he has continued to experience seizures and other serious problems. “I was getting my Ph.D. in neuropsychology, a total science mom, all my kids were vaccinated,” Bridges told me. “I came to this as a total skeptic, but what happened to my son made it very stark.”
Bridges was researching the potential causes of her son’s condition when a college friend, the wife of Kennedy’s brother Max, mentioned that her brother-in-law was interested in looking at the deleterious effects of mercury. In public talks, Kennedy often spoke about the dangers of mercury contamination in fish, which is a by-product of coal plants. (Kennedy has said that he likely got mercury poisoning from eating too many tuna-fish sandwiches.) Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, had been used for decades in vaccines, though, in the early two-thousands, it was largely phased out. Kennedy’s sister-in-law told Bridges where she could find the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Bridges, armed with a Bankers Box full of studies, showed up unannounced.
“I think I got about three sentences in and he said ‘I’m not interested,’ ” Bridges recalled. She started telling Kennedy about the studies. “And he said, ‘I need to go sailing,’ and he literally walked away.” Kennedy was gone for hours. When he returned, Bridges was still there, and he promised to look at the studies. “I think mainly to get rid of me,” Bridges said. The next day, when she went back to Hyannis Port, “he said, ‘I’m going to make some phone calls. There’s something going on here.’ ”
Like Bridges, Kennedy had experienced a feeling of helplessness when it came to the health of his children. Conor had serious food allergies; anaphylaxis had sent him to the emergency room twenty-nine times before age three. Another son, Finn, also developed severe allergies. In 1998, Kennedy helped found the Food Allergy Initiative, and he and Richardson often attended the annual Food Allergy Ball, in Manhattan. In recent years, he has suggested that such allergies could be caused by vaccines. (Conor, who is now thirty, formerly dated Taylor Swift and, in 2022, briefly volunteered with Ukraine’s International Legion.)
In 2005, Kennedy approached his friend Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, with an idea for a story about what he said were links between vaccines and autism. Kennedy was well liked at the magazine; two years earlier, he had written an article on the environmental movement. “He’s an incredibly charismatic presence,” Will Dana, the former managing editor of the magazine, said. “One time, he gave this speech in the Rolling Stone conference room about environmentalism, and I swear to God he practically had everyone in tears.” Still, Dana went on, he could display a certain sense of entitlement. “He came in one day carrying a bucket with a little injured baby bird,” Dana said. “So then we have our meeting, and we do our thing, and suddenly he’s, like, ‘I gotta go. Um, can you get one of your interns to take the bird to the vet?’ ” (When asked to comment, Kennedy said, “This is a lie.”)
Kennedy’s previous work for the magazine was sometimes problematic. “He would turn in these manuscripts, and it’s barely exaggerating to say, like, eighty to ninety per cent of the facts would be incorrect, even the simple ones,” Dana said. “It’s because he’s not a journalist. He’s a lawyer. He’s more about making arguments than about trying to communicate the truth.” The former friend remembered attending a dinner party with Kennedy and finding his case against vaccines persuasive and nimble, even though the former friend knew that the facts were wrong. “People think he’s an idiot—he’s not an idiot,” the person said. But the vaccine story for Rolling Stone was riddled with errors. Eric Bates, an editor at the magazine, tried to slow-roll the piece, but Wenner pushed it through. (Wenner said that, if he had known that the piece was “flawed that deeply,” he wouldn’t have published it.)
The article, titled “Deadly Immunity”—which stated that “the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real”—required a number of major corrections. Kennedy falsely reported the amount of ethylmercury that infants receive in their vaccinations and misrepresented the transcript of a meeting of doctors in order to support his thesis that they were conspiring with the pharmaceutical industry to push unsafe vaccines. The magazine staff agonized over the fallout, but Kennedy seemed unfazed. “Bobby never had a moment of doubt,” a former staffer told me. “He was already convinced in the overarching argument, so the loss of any one piece or all of the pieces of data didn’t put a dent in that.”
Kennedy told me that, in the aftermath, he stepped away from the vaccine issue. “I did the Rolling Stone article, and I felt like I’d done my part,” he said. “Things kind of calmed down.” A year later, he published a piece for the magazine suggesting that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election. In Kennedy’s telling, he was dragged back into the vaccine debate in 2011, when Salon—which had co-published “Deadly Immunity”—retracted and removed the story from its Web site. “By then, I was watching the science on this issue, on neurological harms from certain vaccines,” Kennedy told me.
In 2014, he published “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” an expansion on his refuted claims in Rolling Stone that vaccines contain dangerous amounts of ethylmercury. He told the Washington Post that friends and colleagues had urged him not to pursue the project. But, when we spoke in Atlanta, he seemed to suggest that his honor had been besmirched, forcing him to respond. “At that point,” he said, “it was like a declaration of war from pharma.”
One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. 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. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”
That year, Kennedy moved with Hines to Los Angeles, where he soon became acquainted with Eric Gladen, a vaccine skeptic who, in 2007, founded a group called World Mercury Project. According to an Associated Press investigation, the group—which was later renamed Children’s Health Defense—reported $13,114 in revenue on its 2014 tax filings. But, in 2015, after Kennedy joined the group’s board, revenue shot up to $467,443. At an event in Sacramento to promote a film by Gladen, “Trace Amounts,” Kennedy told a crowd that, when children receive vaccines, “that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
In May, 2019, as a measles outbreak rippled across the country, Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph, his older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Townsend’s daughter Maeve published an op-ed in Politico about Kennedy’s anti-vaccination efforts. “He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines,” they wrote. That summer, Kennedy and the actress Jessica Biel spearheaded a high-profile campaign against mandatory vaccination in California schools. By the end of the year, the journal Vaccine found that, during a two-month period, two groups accounted for more than half of the ads spreading misinformation on Facebook about vaccines. One was Children’s Health Defense, which, in 2021, paid Kennedy an annual salary of five hundred thousand dollars.
With the arrival of COVID, Kennedy’s reach exploded. He churned out books: “The Real Anthony Fauci,” “Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak,” and “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid.” In the summer of 2021, as COVID vaccines were rolling out, Children’s Health Defense promoted its film “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” which was seemingly aimed at Black Americans. During the early weeks of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, the New York Post published a video in which Kennedy said that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Researchers in China, Russia, and the U.S., he went on, are developing “ethnic bioweapons” to “target people by race.” (Kennedy said that his remarks were taken out of context.)
Kennedy has long been drawn to questionable science. But some of his former close friends have grown alarmed at the changes they’ve seen in him more recently. Last summer, Kennedy posted a video of himself shirtless, doing pushups, a sunburn blooming across his well-defined back and torso. The implication was that his then rivals, Trump, at seventy-seven, and Biden, at eighty, were comparatively old and enfeebled. On a podcast last year, Kennedy said that he was taking testosterone-replacement therapy under the guidance of a doctor. One of the side effects of that treatment is increased muscle mass. But the longtime friend told me, “It’s almost like he’s been body-snatched. I look at pictures of him, and he’s unrecognizable. His sense of humor is all but gone. There’s this anger.”
The tragedy of Kennedy, the former friend said, is that there is a lot of good in him. Kennedy is said to have a natural affinity with children, taking them fishing or falconing, enthusiastically explaining nature and animals. “That guy was kind of magical,” the former friend said. “And that guy appears to be gone.” The longtime Kennedy friend said that he has tried talking to Kennedy about the environmental havoc that, he believes, Trump will unleash. In response, he said, Kennedy just “goes on a rant about the D.N.C.” Nearly everyone who knows him is perplexed by his belief that he can win the Presidency. “Sure, he was anti-corporate when we worked together,” Barratt-Brown said. “But he is now anti-government in such a dark way.”
In early May, the Kennedy campaign invited the media to a press conference with the candidate in Brooklyn, though what unfolded was more of a state-of-the-race briefing from the campaign’s perspective. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the campaign manager, led a slide-show presentation, striding across a stage in black riding boots and a blazer with leather-panelled sleeves. “The D.N.C. has been demanding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., drop out of this race in the name of saving democracy,” she said. But really, Fox Kennedy continued, it was Biden who was playing the spoiler. “He cannot win in either scenario, and by being in the race he prevents the only person who can beat Donald Trump from doing so in November. How do you like them apples?”
Kennedy sat on a stool at the side of the stage, sipping from a venti Starbucks. Electoral maps appeared on the screen, one showing how Kennedy would beat Biden in a two-way race, another how he would beat Trump. Neither image included the fact that, for now, Kennedy hasn’t formally qualified to be on the ballot in most states. At the end of the event, as Kennedy was hustled into a black Mercedes, a reporter shouted a question: Had Trump’s team been in touch about debates this summer? “Oh, I’m available for debates,” Kennedy replied. “Anytime, anywhere.”
A month later, in a debate with Trump at CNN’s studios, in Atlanta, Biden’s responses were so incoherent and awkward that, afterward, Democrats joined Republicans in calling for him to step aside. Kennedy, who wasn’t invited to participate, held what his campaign called “the real debate,” a video stream of him, alone on a stage, answering the same questions that Biden and Trump were asked. Fox Kennedy recently told me that the campaign wasn’t surprised by Biden’s poor performance. When Kennedy had first approached her, in the fall of 2022, about the possibility of his running for President, she recalled, “even then, he said, ‘I think Biden has Parkinson’s.’ ”
On July 13th, at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt. That night, Kennedy appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said that the “courage” Trump had shown during the shooting was “inspirational.” “All of us are complicit in some ways in what happened tonight,” he added. “How do we change the tone of the political dialogue in this country and start to forgive each other, to reconcile, to love each other again, and to see each other, and to be able to have differences with each other without wanting to murder each other?”
Soon after, Trump and Kennedy spoke on the phone. In a video of the call, which Kennedy’s oldest son, Robert Kennedy III, posted online, Trump can be heard discussing his own vaccine skepticism—“And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically,” Trump says—before seeming to offer Kennedy the possibility of a spot in his Administration: “I would love you to do stuff, and I think it would be so good for you, and so big for you, and we’re going to win. We’re going to win.” Kennedy replies, “Yeah.”
The following week, Kennedy was at the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, where a Trump victory was treated as a near-inevitability. In a recent text exchange, Kennedy told one person that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.” But, Kennedy went on, Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.” At the Convention, Fox Kennedy said, Trump alluded to the possibility of Kennedy ending his run. “They said, ‘You know, we know that you take more from us than you take from Biden,’ ” she recalled. Trump and his team, she went on, had asked Kennedy, “ ‘Is there something that you would want to do?’ ” Kennedy is not opposed to serving in a Trump Administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Fox Kennedy said, “is an incredibly interesting one.”
That Sunday, Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the campaign, and he endorsed his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, for President. Early polling suggests that Harris is gaining ground with certain traditionally Democratic voters who were disillusioned with Biden. Kennedy’s numbers are slipping. If the youth vote goes to Harris, Kimball, the pollster, said, “that’s going to hurt him.” (Fox Kennedy told me that Kennedy would also be open to offers from a Harris Administration.)
For now, Fox Kennedy said, the campaign is not focussing on specific states but, rather, on constituencies, mainly Democrats in reliably Republican states and Republicans in reliably Democratic states. One way in which she sees Kennedy becoming President is in a contingent election, a scenario in which no one candidate receives enough Electoral College votes to win outright, and the House of Representatives picks the President. (It was also a plot device on the HBO comedy series “Veep.”) Fox Kennedy told me, “We’ve always said, as soon as people realize Bobby can win, he will win.”
In Atlanta, I asked Kennedy how the deaths of his loved ones had affected his political identity. He told me that, after his brother David died, he turned to his mother for solace. “I said to her, ‘Does the hole that they leave in you when they die, does it ever get any smaller?’ ” Kennedy recalled. “And she said, ‘It never gets any smaller, but our job is to grow ourselves bigger around the hole.’ ” He added, “In doing that, we make ourselves larger, and the hole becomes proportionately smaller.” ♦
