Every once in a while, a story appears that is so riveting that you can’t put it down. Such a story is Clare Malone’s analysis of what makes Bobby Kennedy Jr. tick. It appears in The New Yorker, where Malone is a staff writer. Malone has interviewed him and numerous people who knew him at different points in his life. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is charismatic and charming but deeply troubled.
He is a man of many addictions. He was addicted to drugs for many years; she says he first tried heroin when he was 15, and he was deeply into drugs when he was a student at Harvard.
He is addicted to sex. Women flocked to him, and he bedded them as often as he could. He married three times, and she writes that he was a serial philanderer. He left his first wife for his second wife, who was six months pregnant when they married. He left her for his third wife and sued for custody of their children. The second wife committed suicide.
He is addicted, as she shows, to attention. A lawyer, he became involved in environmental activism, where he carved out a new identity and achieved great success litigating against major corporations. Then he became engaged in anti-vaccine activism, after a mother from Minnesota convinced him in 2003 that her son’s autism was caused by vaccines he received when he was only four months old.
Kennedy, she shows, was always susceptible to conspiracy theories. He believes the CIA was involved in the murders of his uncle and father. He easily saw a conspiracy to hide the evidence behind vaccines and autism. He became a leading opponent of vaccines.
Malone tells the story of Kennedy and the body of a black bear cub, which he found on the road in the Adirondacks in 2014. He put the dead animal in the trunk of his car and staged a photo of himself with his hand in the mouth of the dead animal.
That year, Kennedy and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he became active with an anti-vaccine group called World Mercury Project, founded by a vaccine skeptic, Eric Gladen. The group was later named Children’s Health Defense.
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.”
Following a measles outbreak in 2019, his older brother and sister wrote an article denouncing Robert’s anti-vaccine advocacy. He was undeterred. Children’s Health Defense was one of the nation’s leading purveyors of vaccine skepticism.
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.)
After Kennedy decided to run for president as a spoiler, Kennedy’s former colleagues in the environmental movement were appalled. They were afraid that he would help Trump win, the candidate whose record on the environment was a disaster. He had turned from anti-corporate to anti-government.
After the assassination attempt on Trump, Kennedy praised Trump for his courage. Trump called Kennedy and let him know that there would be a place for him in the next Trump administration. Kennedy appeared at the Republican National Convention.
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.”
Kennedy’s press secretary told Malone that Trump wanted Kennedy to drop out of the race because he was hurting Trump more than Biden. Kennedy was tempted by the role as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The article is engrossing. At the end, I felt that Kennedy was a man of intellect and passion who squandered his talents. Too much money, too much privilege, too much tragedy, too consumed by his addictions. And now, championing a cause that may lead to the deaths of countless children.
Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post’s great humorist, wrote about the bear cub incident from the perspective of Kennedy’s brain worm:
Hello again. I had been hoping to continue my peaceful existence, far from the news cycle. But I have heard my name invoked and I simply must set the record straight. I would not rest well knowing that people thought I was implicated in the episode that recently came to light involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s disposal of a dead bear cub. That was all my host. I, the brain worm that died inside his skull in 2010, had no part in it.
“Isn’t picking up a dead bear cub and bringing it along in your car, ‘Weekend at Bearnie’s’-style, for an afternoon of outdoor activity and dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, then ditching it in Central Park along with a bicycle in an attempt to implicate cyclists in its demise the kind of suggestion that a brain worm would make?” First of all, rude. Second of all, no. What self-respecting parasite would say, “Yes, let us spend more time with meat that has been improperly handled? I want maximum competition for my spot within my host’s brain!” There is no logic in it.
Worse yet, there is an image circulating of my erstwhile host posing with the dead bear cub that he drove around for that memorable afternoon in 2014; he suggests that perhaps taking this photo was when he picked up his brain worm. This is slander, and my legal team will be in contact with his. I died in 2010 and was not involved in the bear incident.
Candidly, no part of the story makes any sense to me. I have watched the video in which my former host attempts to explain the situation to Roseanne Barr, whose presence is, improbably, the most normal part of the video. My host’s explanation, as far as I can understand it, is that he was on his way to do falconry (no, this is still not the strangest part of the story! If I lose you now you are lost forever), saw an unknown driver hit a bear and then he put the dead cub in his van because he was going to eat the meat.
I had thought that we parted on bad terms and he would not want a repeat brain-worm visitor, but the decision to eat roadkill bear meat, especially roadkill bear meat that had sat in his car all day while he did falconry, leads me to wonder if perhaps he missed me, or if I had left an emptiness in him that he wished to fill with another guest. But I can only speculate.
He had such a good day of falconry that he forgot all about the bear carcass in his van. (I am just a simple brain worm. Is this a normal sentence that human beings say all the time?) And then he had to go to dinner at a famous steakhouse and then realized he had to go to the airport and couldn’t just leave the bear carcass in his car at the airport. The part about not leaving a bear carcass in your car at an airport makes sense to me, once you have reached the point where you have a bear carcass in your car. It is that first part, though, that continues to baffle me.
And then his friends, who had been drinking (when you are a human being and your drunk friends all say, “This sounds like a good idea!” is this how you know that you have hold of a good idea?) signed off on his plan for disposing of the bear, which was as follows: There had been a lot of bike accidents, and he had an old bike in his car that someone had asked him to get rid of (okay!), so why not drive the bear to Central Park and stage the bike to make it appear that the bear had perished in one such accident? Just as a treat for the people who would find the bear. (Is this what you would consider a treat? I don’t know! I am just a brain worm, asking questions. I do not have a brain, except a little bit of it which I enjoyed consuming very much.)
Anyway, I had no part in any of this. And for the record, the talks about taking a Cabinet position in a second Trump administration weren’t my idea, either.
Diane Ravitch's blog 