Two views of cabinet secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Then & Now.
My first view was written nearly 30 years ago.
And my current view, I wrote last week.
RFK Jr. neither strode nor swaggered (he didn’t seek to come across quite so cocksure back then) as he entered a convention hall in Salt Lake City to give a speech. His gait was more of an amble, an athletic saunter that managed to claim both the stage and our attention in a more casual way. His garb was populist: chinos and a denim shirt with its cuffs rolled up to the elbows.
A cadre of outdoor writers and sporting goods purveyors awaiting his talk at the 1998 Outdoor Retailer show in Utah took a cue from that low-key entrance and his lack of fanfare. They harvested impressions of him in sidelong glances, tried not to stare. Still, the air had grown electric due to star power invoked by his famed surname, and more so by that highly familiar appearance.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s physical resemblance to his dad, RFK—US attorney general at the dawn of the Civil Rights era and a tragically ill-fated presidential candidate—has always seemed a snug fit. His son bore that same thick shock of hair of a sunburnt brown, pale blue eyes, beaklike nose, toothy grin. Once I got closer, I could even see a similar network of ravines worked into the skin around his eyes and the tanned planes of his face.
From an aesthetic distance, RFK Jr. seemed to broadcast vitality. Up close, I saw traces of wan, overdrawn energy and emotional fatigue. Still he was unmistakably a scion of American political royalty, a reminder of the way a Camelot saga had been enacted on our national stage some three decades before.
A tall, slim brunette with a regal presence stood at RFK Jr.’s side in that cavernous hall—his wife Mary. Gazing at them together, it was easy to recall that a youthful and beautiful couple also bearing the name Kennedy, John and Jacqueline, had once held legendary court at the White House.
Staff from the masthead of Sports Afield magazine mounted the dais to announce themselves and introduce their sponsored speaker. At this point, the casual air evaporated. They verbally—and almost physically—purred against RFK Jr., as though seeking to rub some of his aura onto themselves and put a glossy sheen on their periodical.
Once he took the mic himself, RFK Jr. thoroughly obliged them by claiming he’d read their monthly “all the time” in his youth. Then he warmed to his theme: wilderness as a precious creche of the American spirit. Only preservation of healthy ecosystems, he said, could permit them to serve as touchstones for our nation’s genuine ideals, and help them to endure in any recognizable form.
“The American national consciousness did not begin when John Smith landed at Virginia, or the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock,” RFK Jr. intoned. “It was born when John Winthrop, who acted as the Moses of the Puritan emigration here, gave a speech on the deck of the ship Arbella, as he first looked upon the green landscapes of New England.”
Energized now, RFK Jr. waved both his arms while orating, and sought to paint the scene on the flagship of the modest Puritan fleet, afloat off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. For that moment, the sterile white walls of the convention hall faded away, and we could see that blue, heaving sea, fecund with marine life, that sprawling shoreline blanketed in virgin forest, and the upturned faces of the pioneering voyagers too, rapt with new hope.
“Winthrop told them this land is not being given to us so we can increase our corporeal opportunities,” RFK Jr. said. “It’s being given so we can establish our city on a hill, a lamp to all other nations on earth, about what people can accomplish if they can only maintain their vision about being on a spiritual mission.”
RFK Jr’s oration was intriguing in more ways than one. His enthusiasms and his essential meanings came through, yet his sentences grew steadily more convoluted and ungrammatical. The more grand a statement he pursued, the more garbled its syntax became. Still, he spoke with nary a glance at notes, and his eye contact with this audience remained unwavering.
I discovered that this high, reedy voice, garlanded with the broad, soft, stretchy vowels of a Boston accent, appealed to buried thirsts that I didn’t know I still had. Those tones reminded me of JFK’s inaugural speech of 1960 (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”). Even more, they echoed the voice of his famous father, a voice forever stilled at 12:15 AM on the morning of June 5, 1968, on blood-smeared floors in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in LA.
That tragic night came right after RFK’s triumph in the California primary, when he seemed assured of a chance to snatch up the torch of leadership dropped from the hand of his assassinated brother, JFK. Then his charmed moment in time was occluded by repeated twitches of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan’s finger, curled around the trigger of a cheap revolver. Whereupon the nascent hopes and dreams of an entire generation of Americans seemed to go into total eclipse.
Until I heard a simulacrum of that voice, somehow alive once more, I couldn’t grasp how avidly I’d missed it. Perhaps back in the 60’s I’d entered a state of political shock, sunk into a disenchantment that wasn’t exactly despair, but a form of striving to soldier on in a state of highly diminished hope.
Yet somehow, deep within had endured a lust to hear someone, anyone in politics, convey a vision that I could truly believe in and proceed to bet my life on.
I turned my head to gaze at other faces in that Salt Palace Convention Center audience, and I realized I wasn’t the only one feeling clobbered by this kind of insight. Mentally, I drifted back into memories of an era when those damages to our collective spirit had been inflicted.
I’d been just a skinny lad in elementary school, strolling indoors after a brief recess spent on the basketball court, when I learned to my horror that JFK, President John F. Kennedy, had just been slain, on a clear autumn day in 1963. I was a teenager in 1968, when Martin Luther King also got cut down by an assassin’s bullet. And then, just two months later, RFK, Bobby Kennedy—who’d done more than any other national figure to express our heartfelt grief and quell our incendiary rage after King’s death—was also snatched away from us.
An old question that I could never answer popped once again into my head as I sat in the hall. Why hadn’t a hundred or more American cities erupted again in riots upon RFK’s death, just as they’d exploded after King was assassinated? Why hadn’t our nation blown up again, after this latest insult to its soul?
Perhaps we were all just too demoralized and stunned. Or maybe we saw that giving sway to violence after the death of another peacemaker would have repudiated all that MLK and RFK sought to stand for. In any case, the lack of a radical response then proved lucky for our nation. We sat upon a racial and generational powder keg, primed to detonate with unquenchable fury. Just as the killing of Archduke Ferdinand (by one more politically addled loner), heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had ignited the first World War, the slaying of RFK might easily have sparked a much broader conflict—even if it kept confined within our shores.
After RFK got filched out of our national life, a fleeting chance for unity that he fought to provide was also lost, and our overall path grew splintered. Many fled into an alternate reality of drug-addled indulgence, for which that era is notorious. Few displayed enough grit to keep trying to rescue and nurture the period’s foremost ideals. For me, activist Tom Hayden, who became a California state senator, well-represented that all-too-scarce breed.
In his speech at the Salt Palace, RFK Jr. did not directly invoke the light of his illustrious forebears. But anecdotes that studded his talk did provoke reflections on who they had been and what we’d lost.
“When I was a little boy, I’d go down to the Justice Department a couple times a week to visit my father and have lunch with him. And on the roof of the old Post Office building at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue, there was a nesting pair of Eastern Anatum Peregrine falcons, some of the most spectacular birds we had in this country. They could dive on prey at speeds of 200 mph, and I would watch them fly down and pluck pigeons out of the air just some 40 feet above people on the sidewalk. Seeing that was even more thrilling that visiting my uncle at the White House.”
The crowd’s laughter abruptly faded when he added, “But my children can never see that sight, because that species of bird went extinct in 1963.”
Now we were closing in on the heart of his theme. The deaths he wished to forestall, to battle against, were those about to occur on a large scale in the present and future, affecting everyone’s family.
He said that communities striving to care for nearby ecological areas existed in strong contrast to, “A Conquistador’s view, where you don’t put down roots, you just go in, pull out the wealth and keep moving. That view gained precedence in this country after the 1849 Gold Rush. But the primary view of America up until that time was that this land was a gift from God, and so something we all had a duty to steward.
“And that struggle between views is the basis for every struggle in American history, from Billy the Kid to the Civil War.
“Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. We ought to measure it on the basis of continuing long-term jobs and the dignity those job holders can keep over the course of generations.
“On the other hand, the extractive industries and their indentured servants on Capitol Hill urge us to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation. To convert our natural resources into cash as quickly as possible. Take a few years of pollution-based prosperity to enjoy the illusion of a robust economy. But our children will have to pay for that brief flash of prosperity in the form of a denuded landscape, the huge clean-up costs they won’t be able to afford.”
At this point, the oratorical stab of RFK Jr.’s finger and the flash of his eyes made him appear to be someone you might want to draft as a leader for this struggle. And whether he did it consciously or not, he teased the crowd about assuming such a role.
“My father truly believed in the American character,” he said. “And he taught us kids that it was formed by exposure to wilderness. That’s a theme that has echoed throughout our history. Our greatest political leaders and all the great campaigns… In the 19th Century, the guy who had the most contact with wilderness, the log cabin guys, the rail-splitters, these were the people who won elections, because Americans saw that these were the ones truly in touch with American values.”
That notion was actually the first part of a syllogism formed by his talk. The second part came with his story of the way his father Bobby had inculcated these values in his own kids by camping with them in the woods, and engineering long rafting trips on all the major rivers of the West. And then the conclusion arrived after RFK Jr. spoke of his current work as prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeepers—a New York grassroots group that he said forced more than 150 polluters to put a billion dollars into rescue and rehabilitation of that once-thriving stream.
“The Hudson was dead for long stretches in 1966. Today it’s the richest water body in the North Atlantic, producing more biomass per gallon, more pounds of fish per acre. Just one water body in the entire North Atlantic has strong spawning stocks of all its historic species, and that’s the Hudson.
“I fight for that river because I believe my life and my children’s life and my community’s life will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad, striped bass and sturgeon, and anglers can be out on the water casting nets from tiny boats as they have for generations”
Now it had come high time to close the loop and deliver his point, and that was to challenge his audience to play a stronger part in the struggle he’d just defined.
In roundtables at this Outdoor Retailer conference, the mavens of this industry had already congratulated themselves on the burgeoning power of their joint ($5 billion, by one estimate) business. But they’d devoted their most intense discussions to ways to reject a proposed excise tax on all their products. This was aimed at funding parks and preserves, just as an older tax on fishing tackle and firearms had already built the US wildlife refuge system.
RFK Jr. frankly told them they were missing their moment, and not truly stepping up to the plate. The outdoor industry was long overdue in sponsoring a PAC (political action committee) that would actively lobby for more wilderness, healthy ecosystems, and more resource protection.
“You’re making a huge mistake if you fail to start a PAC like that. You need someone good up there telling your story on Capitol Hill. I know enough politicians to say that stuff works. You might have a powerful voice, but if you don’t use it, it’s your loss.”
A voice came from the audience. “Why don’t you lead it? We need someone on point, like you.”
RFK Jr. quickly demurred. “There’s plenty of good people out there, who are paid to do such things. A commitment to find and hire them has to come from you guys.”
But an expectation aroused by his lineage would not be denied. In mere seconds, the question popped up once more. “This guy right here wants to suggest that you run for office.”
RFK Jr. hesitated for a moment, looking pained. “I love what I’m doing now,” he finally said. “I can’t say I’d never run for office. But I’d rule it out if I could continue what I’m doing and stay effective. I’d run if it was the only way I could be of benefit.”
Present there as a journalist, I couldn’t let myself get caught up in this moment. I need to admit I felt the tidal tug of it, though. A part of me wanted to see this heir of a famed American political family rise up to seize a role that history had seemingly designed for him. And a cynical part of me also didn’t buy RFK Jr.’s ostensible refusal; I thought I could still detect in him a strong yen for some sort of elevated office.
It was like we were being treated to a new version of a hoary scene out of Shakespeare, when Julius Caesar refuses a proffered crown. “’Twas one of these coronets, and as I told you he put it by once. But for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it.”
I imagined I’d score another chance to pursue the question. As a reporter, I’d been told by an event organizer that I’d get a chance for a one-on-one with RFK Jr. after his speech. However, the person who’d promised to arrange that for me now was nowhere in sight, the hall had begun to empty out, and his wife looked eager to depart. And RFK Jr. did, too.
The only sure bet for scoring a word with him was buying one of his books on his Hudson River work, then standing in a long line for him to sign it. Which I did, turning my question over in my mind, seeking to hone and compress it, while I closed in on a folding table where he sat.
Now I could see lines of fatigue had been etched deeper in his face. So many attendees, nearly half the crowd, had approached him, eager for a word, a touch, an autograph. I was reminded that, whatever else charisma might be, it’s also one helluva lot of work.
Then I reached his side.
“So, a few other members of your family have spoken of a mission, a tradition of public service,” I said. “As though that eternal flame at Arlington might also be a torch, a light that must be picked up, made stronger, carried into new places. Do you feel that obligation?”
RFK Jr.’s shoulders seemed to sag. Not because he was startled by the question, but, I think, because he was so thoroughly unsurprised. It was the kind of query that had likely ambushed him throughout life.
Then he straightened up and spoke rapidly. “I’m doing what I do because I love the outdoors. I don’t need to make a ton of money, so I can perform this type of service. I don’t do it as a sacrifice, and I don’t do it to be part of a legacy. It’s just because I like it.”
“So, for you, the mission is personal.”
“Yes!”
He scrawled quickly on his book’s flyleaf, handed it to me with a tight, cheerless smile, and turned to the next person in line.
POSTLUDE & CONCLUSION
The famed Camelot era of JFK’s presidency always had a dark underbelly. Of course, so did Britain’s myth of Camelot and our modern musical based upon it. JFK’s infirmities, indulgences and infidelities only seeped into public awareness after his president tenure had drawn to a close.
The glorious sheen of any halcyon period frequently depends on a reluctance to probe its shadows.
I confess I’ve been complicit. For example, in the prose piece above, I described RFK Jr’s garbled syntax early. But then, I presented his quotes as logical, lucid sentences—at times, quite distant from the way he’d actually spoken. I did so for a pair of reasons. One, I wanted my readers to understand what he was saying, so I distilled his chaotic verbiage down to its essence. Two, space is severely limited for any publishable story; directly quoting all the fluff, chaff and flubs in his speech would’ve eaten up a bunch of room for only miniscule gain.
Unless, perhaps, that had managed to reveal the turbulence of this man’s thought. In retrospect, it might’ve been a valuable service and better than what I did do: portray RFK Jr. as a star legal beagle and environmental warrior, a role he clearly loved sketching for that crowd. Did I do so out of misplaced loyalty to his legendary dad? Or—more dangerously—because I felt impressed by the momentum of RFK Jr.’s dawning celebrity, and so fell into a trap of helping him to further it?
In any case, here we jolly well are, 27 years on, as RFK Jr. savors deploying his newfound power as DJT’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s leapt onto the rumbling juggernaut of an administration seemingly hell-bent on crushing every shred of life out of science, truth, benevolence, mercy, justice, public service, national solvency, and even our astonishingly frail system of democracy. Not to mention, the environmental health of our home planet. That same natural realm, btw, that RFK Jr. had claimed to adore…
It’s no secret that DJT’s own rise was facilitated by his penchant for gaudy celebrity, amply boosted by a star turn on “The Apprentice,” and fueled by his noxious menu of con-man wiles ever since. Now, with his blobby bulk plopped back into the Oval Office, the orange ogre has made devout loyalty to both his person and his wacko schemes a litmus test for holding a federal post of any significant clout. Doing so is no minor feat, since DJT can shift directions—and misdirections—faster than a weathervane snatched up by a waterspout. One must keep one’s own brain on a swivel to have any hope of keeping track. Consistency and honor, morality and honesty, become sheer impediments, deadweights that must be shed, simply to keep up.
I’m a fan of a joke/meme that goes: “The only person Trump ever hired who was fully qualified for the job was Stormy Daniels.”
All RFK Jr. had to do to meet DJT’s odd staffing requirements was to own great hair, a telegenic presence, a feisty demeanor, a good measure of pre-existing celebrity and, most importantly, display the ability to jettison every prior conviction in service of overweening ambition—wedding DJT’s with his own.
To illustrate: RFK Jr. had launched his campaign for the presidency on the Libertarian ticket in April of 2024; when that bid faltered, he courted the Harris campaign for a cabinet post; when she rebuffed him, he promptly began to court the Trump campaign. In prior moments, he’d derided DJT as, “a discredit to democracy”, “a terrible human being,” and a probable “sociopath,” swearing that nothing would ever induce him to sign onto a Trump ticket.
However, as soon as RFK Jr. found out he could score a cabinet post in return for endorsing DJT, he went in like Flynn.
It’s been a long and winding road for RFK Jr., from being a youthful heroin addict and reputed pusher to being now able to decimate the entire US Department of Health and Human Services at whim. Enroute, there have been undeniably praiseworthy successes, especially in cases of environmental law (no matter how much he alienated his partners), along with stints of weird conspiracy mongering as well as other jaw-dropping lapses.
Mary Richardson Kennedy, the dark beauty I saw him with at Salt Lake, divorced him after discovering proof of RFK Jr.’s serial promiscuity, soon lost custody of their children to him in a court case, then committed suicide by hanging two years later. Perhaps she found partnership with a narcissistic celebrity was a bed of roses that also displayed no lack of thorns.
Some 12 million or so Americans about to lose Medicaid and the untold number who will also suffer from botched vaccine policies are likely to make a similar finding in our days just ahead. But they needn’t worry; AI-hallucinated studies sent out from RFK Jr.’s department will doubtlessly assure them that all manner of thing shall go quite well indeed. To quote Marx (the other one): “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”
The USA’s thrall to celebrity culture and ardent consumerism, as well as other trivial pursuits, is rushing headlong into its harvest phase. A triumph of style over substance and rhetoric over reality is almost complete. In response to our twin dire and looming threats of global ecological implosion coupled with a rampant and rabid bloom of authoritarian governance, a great mass of the world’s public appears to have decided that it’s not enough to grasp at straws—we must also grasp at straw men.