RFK Jr
Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s presidential uncle was born the same year as my father. RFK Jr was born a few days before me.
I vaguely remember watching a Kennedy-Nixon debate with my parents, who were not political but did like JFK.
My clearest memories of any few days before I was ten years old was the Friday through Monday in November 1963 from the announcement over the loudspeaker in Mrs. Viola Brown’s fifth-grade classroom of the president’s assassination to watching on television the lighting of the eternal flame at his grave in Arlington National Cemetery.
I was, of course, disappointed not have Saturday morning cartoons because of the nonstop television coverage. But I was in front of the screen when, on live TV, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald point blank. Tom Pettit’s cool, calm and collected reporting for NBC News became indelible even in my nine-year-old mind. I called out to my parents who were in the kitchen: “Oswald’s been shot!”
The year I was fourteen, Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for re-election, Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy Senior was assassinated, and I argued with my father about the righteous cause of the rioters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
When I was fifteen, during at the time I participated in a track meet in Virginia, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were the first men on the moon — fulfilling President Kennedy’s challenge to the Congress and to the nation “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”
On the way home from that track meet there were news reports of Senator Edward Kennedy’s involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at the Chappaquiddick Bridge.
In 1980, I was happy to have an opportunity to vote, in the Pennsylvania presidential primary, for a Kennedy — as Senator Ted Kennedy was challenging the renomination of President Carter. I came to rue this enthusiasm. With the passage of years, I came to have ever increased respect and admiration for Jimmy Carter, both for his presidency and what he accomplished and sought to accomplish afterward.
I rued this enthusiasm also because, among other things, I eventually realized that I should not have taken at face value Senator Ted Kennedy’s virulent opposition to Robert Bork, President Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court. The movie Oppenheimer paid a tribute to the young Senator John Kennedy for his Senate committee vote against unfairness perpetrated against the movie’s title character — the same, in regard to Bork anyway, would not apply to his youngest brother.
By upbringing, education, and inclination, I suppose I have always cast a hopeful look for yet another Kennedy who might emerge on a white charger from Camelot, or at least Massachusetts, onto the national scene.
There was Robert Kennedy’s eldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy II who served in Congress as a Representative for more than ten years until the mid-1990s. Then in this century, Joseph P. Kennedy II’s son Joseph P. Kennedy III served several congressional terms until he resigned to challenge, unsuccessfully, Ed Markey for the Democratic nomination as Senator from Massachusetts.
Which brings me back to Robert Kennedy’s second son, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the 70-year-old environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine advocate currently running in an attention-getting campaign as an independent candidate for President.
It brings me no joy to disparage a Kennedy running for office.
If you are content with generalities, RFK Junior may be your man. I’ve listened to him in an extended interview with the journalist Bari Weiss. Once I got used to his raspy voice, he seemed persuasive — when not pressed on details or implications.
If you are for “more choices, more life,” solving the immigration crisis, demilitarization, protecting the environment, ending chronic disease, childcare subsidies, 3% home mortgages, less plastics, regenerative farming, “restoring our rights,” and favoring, “people over corporations,” well, I’m pretty much with you. You and I might well think RFK Jr is the candidate we’ve been hoping for.
If you visit his campaign website, you can read his proposals. Some are breathtaking in their ambition and scope (dismantling much of our military or redirecting much of our foreign policy, for examples) and all are anodyne in expression.
But if, as Emerson said, “institutions are the lengthened shadow of one man,” I would recommend a visit to the website of the Children's Health Defense (not to be confused with Children’s Defense Fund), an organization begun by Kennedy in 2007 — and thus more indicative of what Kennedy not only has stood for but has acted upon.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is a source for diametrically opposed views to what the Center for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health are recommending or promulgating. Sometimes, I find CHD’s counter views worth considering. But often they are expressed in a confusing welter of rabbit holes. Maybe what you will find in anyone of the rabbit holes is worth the effort. Maybe not. I eventually find the excursions into the holes exhausting. Maybe that is the point. But there is a bottom line:
CHD is anti-vaccination.
I accept as valid the appraisal of epidemiologists Vinay Prasad and Alyson Haslam (not writing for CHD) that the COVID-19 vaccine “has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed.” I also accept as valid their criticism that the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies contained missed opportunities and errors that ran counter evidence-based medicine and revealed “limitations in the judgment of public policy makers.”
Like imposing a second dose of the vaccine on healthy young men for whom, it was recognized at the time, the risk of developing myocarditis from the second dose was greater than the risk posed by the virus itself. Like recommending the masking of very young children. Like keeping schools closed. Like discounting or even refusal to acknowledge the immunity developed in persons who contracted the disease.
But these responsible criticisms are not the same as suggesting, as Kennedy has done, that the COVID-19 virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black People” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Other notions RFK Jr has floated: Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer, chemicals in water supply cause gender dysphoria, certain antidepressants lead to school shootings, vaccines cause autism, and the CIA killed his father and uncle. To the extent our fellow citizens share these views, RFK Jr is, in effect, their spokesman — and a debate is necessary. Sadly, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump is up to the task.
For entertainment value alone, I would actually tune in to see Kennedy on a debate stage with Trump. I believe RFK Jr can out-bluster even the Donald — maybe because he actually believes what he says. With Biden, it would be nolo contendere.
But, before the nominating conventions anyway, there will be no “presidential” debate which includes Robert Kennedy — and probably not one after the conventions either. It doesn’t matter whether Kennedy “qualifies” for a debate or not. Neither the Biden nor Trump campaign will consent to sharing a platform with the charismatic Kennedy.
To his credit, Kennedy has, it is generally acknowledged, secured a place on the November ballot in seven states — Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Oklahoma, and Texas. His campaign is claiming to have enough petition signatures for nine more — New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York.
The remaining toughest ballot-access nut to crack is in Pennsylvania where Kennedy has until the first of August to offer 5,000 properly presented signatures — which will doubtless be thoroughly vetted by both the Republican and Democratic parties. If he gets on the ballot here, it is a safe bet he will have had the means to get on the ballot in all the states and territories. If so, his candidacy will have to be taken seriously— whether as contender or spoiler. (Isn’t the contest “spoiled” already?)
One last thing:
Since George Washington, there has been only one President who, in his lifetime leading up the Presidency, had never taken an oath — whether in federal, state, local government, or in the military — to “support and defend the Constitution” and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
That sole exception is, of course, Donald Trump.
It should be self-evident that assuming a role in government that requires that kind of solemn oath should be a de facto if not de jure rite of passage on any person’s journey to the Presidency.
It takes a tremendous amount of cheek, to put it charitably, for anyone to think they are good enough to be President without having served first in a lower office sworn to uphold the Constitution. That cheek is a trait both Trump and RFK Jr share.
Sources:
Alex Roarty, NOTUS, “RFK Jr’s Campaign Isn’t So Sure About RFK Jr’s Policy Ideas,” May 2, 2024
Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as an RFK Jr Voter,” July 5, 2023.
Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic, “The Most Shocking Aspect of RFK Jr’s Anti-Semitism,” July 16, 2023.
Vinay Prasad and Alyson Haslam, Monash Bioethics Review, “COVID-19 Vaccines: History of the Pandemic’s Great Scientific Success and Flawed Policy Implementation,” January 24, 2024.