Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Based on Wikipedia: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Kennedy Who Chose a Different Path

In the summer of 1968, a fourteen-year-old boy flew across the country on the Vice President's plane to watch his father die. Robert Francis Kennedy Junior had been at Georgetown Preparatory School when word came that his father—Senator Robert Kennedy, then running for president—had been shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. By the time the boy arrived, there was nothing to do but say goodbye.

Five years earlier, when he was just nine, his uncle President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

What happens to a child who loses two of the most powerful men in America before he turns fifteen? In Robert Kennedy Junior's case, it began a lifelong journey that would transform him from an heir to political royalty into one of the most controversial figures in American public health—a man who started as an environmental crusader and ended up leading the charge against vaccines.

Born Into American Royalty

The Kennedys are as close to a royal family as America has ever produced. Robert Francis Kennedy Junior was born on January 17, 1954, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. He was the third of eleven children born to Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. His uncle occupied the White House. His father served as Attorney General of the United States.

He grew up splitting time between two legendary estates: the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia. These weren't just homes—they were command centers for a family that saw itself as destined to shape America.

But destiny had other plans. After his father's assassination, the teenage Kennedy spiraled. He was arrested for cannabis possession at sixteen. He was expelled from two boarding schools—first Millbrook, then Pomfret. Family members whispered that he had become the "ringleader" of a pack of privileged troublemakers who called themselves the "Hyannis Port Terrors."

The group engaged in vandalism, theft, and drug use. His cousin Caroline Kennedy would later call him a "predator" who led other family members "down the path of drug addiction."

At Harvard, things got worse. Kennedy used heroin and cocaine, often with his brother David. He earned a reputation as what some described as a "pied piper" of drugs. Yet somehow, he graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in American history and literature.

The Long Road to Recovery

Kennedy went to law school at the University of Virginia, earning his Juris Doctor in 1982. He was sworn in as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan—a prestigious position for any young lawyer, let alone one carrying the Kennedy name.

Then he failed the New York bar exam. He resigned in July 1983.

Two months later, on September 16, 1983, he was arrested in Rapid City, South Dakota, for heroin possession. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge and was sentenced to two years of probation and community service.

This was rock bottom. Kennedy entered a drug treatment center. The terms of his probation required him to volunteer for the Natural Resources Defense Council and attend regular rehabilitation sessions. Kennedy later said this marked the end of fourteen years of heroin addiction—an addiction he claimed had begun when he was just fifteen years old.

His probation ended a year early for good behavior. And something unexpected happened during those required volunteer hours: Kennedy discovered his calling.

The Environmental Warrior Emerges

In 1984, Kennedy began volunteering with the Hudson River Fisherman's Association, a scrappy nonprofit fighting to clean up one of America's most polluted waterways. The Hudson River, which flows past Manhattan and through the heart of New York State, had become a dumping ground for industrial waste. General Electric alone had discharged massive quantities of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls—known as PCBs—into its waters.

The organization renamed itself Riverkeeper in 1986, after a patrol boat it had purchased with settlement money from legal victories. Kennedy, newly admitted to the New York bar after finally passing the exam in 1985, was hired as senior attorney.

What followed was two decades of aggressive environmental litigation that would establish Kennedy as one of America's most effective environmental lawyers.

He sued municipalities for dumping sewage. He sued General Electric to clean up its PCB contamination. He litigated cases up and down the east coast estuaries. His work set long-term legal standards for environmental protection that are still cited today.

In 1987, Kennedy founded the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law. He obtained a special order allowing his law students to actually practice law and try cases in court—an unusual arrangement that turned classroom learning into real-world action. The clinic sued polluters on behalf of Riverkeeper, winning hundreds of settlements.

One of its most significant victories came in 2010, when a Pace lawsuit forced ExxonMobil to clean up tens of millions of gallons of oil from legacy refinery spills in Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.

Taking on Factory Farms and Nuclear Power

Kennedy's environmental work expanded beyond water pollution. He became one of the most vocal opponents of factory farming—the industrial-scale animal agriculture that produces most of America's meat.

In a 2003 article, Kennedy laid out his case: factory farms produce lower-quality, less healthy food. They poison the air and water of neighboring communities. They use government subsidies to undercut independent family farmers who can't compete with their scale. He organized farmers across the Midwest, convened national summits, and filed lawsuits in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Iowa.

He also waged a thirty-four-year campaign to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant, located just thirty-five miles north of New York City. Kennedy argued that the aging facility posed unacceptable safety risks to the millions of people living in the metropolitan area. His sister Rory, a documentary filmmaker, made a film about the issue in 2004 called "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable."

In 2021, Indian Point finally closed. But the aftermath complicated Kennedy's legacy on the issue: carbon emissions from electricity generation in New York State increased by thirty-seven percent compared to 2019, as gas-fired power plants ramped up to replace the nuclear facility's output. Kennedy had argued in 2017 that renewable energy could fully replace Indian Point. That prediction proved optimistic.

The Watershed Agreement

Perhaps Kennedy's most enduring environmental achievement came from a fight over drinking water.

New York City's water supply comes from a vast network of reservoirs and watersheds stretching far upstate. In the 1990s, Kennedy represented environmentalists and city residents in a series of lawsuits arguing that New York State wasn't adequately protecting these water sources from pollution.

In 1996, he helped negotiate the New York City Watershed Agreement—a $1.2 billion deal that created a framework for protecting the city's drinking water while allowing economic development upstate. The agreement was hailed as an international model for what's called "stakeholder consensus negotiations"—getting all the parties who care about an issue to sit down and hammer out a solution together.

New York magazine ran a cover story calling Kennedy "The Kennedy Who Matters."

Building a Global Movement

In June 1999, Kennedy helped found the Waterkeeper Alliance, expanding the Riverkeeper model that had worked so well on the Hudson. The idea was simple: put a dedicated advocate—a "waterkeeper"—on every threatened waterway in the world.

Starting with a few dozen members gathered in Southampton, Long Island, the alliance grew into an international organization with 344 licensed Waterkeeper programs across 44 countries. Kennedy served as president, overseeing legal, membership, policy, and fundraising operations.

The alliance launched campaigns against coal mining, including the controversial practice of mountaintop removal, where entire peaks are blasted away to access coal seams. It targeted mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants. It fought coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest.

Kennedy was featured in several documentaries about his environmental work, including "The Waterkeepers" in 2000 and "Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk" in 2008, where he rode the Grand Canyon in a wooden dory with his daughter and the anthropologist Wade Davis.

Private Practice and Big Verdicts

In 2000, Kennedy and fellow environmental lawyer Kevin Madonna founded a private law firm, Kennedy and Madonna, to represent plaintiffs against polluters. The firm took on some of the largest corporate defendants in America.

In 2004, they helped secure a $70 million settlement for property owners in Pensacola, Florida, whose homes had been contaminated by chemicals from an adjacent Superfund site.

In 2007, Kennedy was nominated as a finalist for "Trial Lawyer of the Year" for his role in winning a $396 million jury verdict against DuPont. The case involved contamination from DuPont's zinc plant in Spelter, West Virginia.

The firm was featured in the 2010 HBO documentary "Mann v. Ford," which chronicled their four-year legal battle on behalf of the Ramapough Mountain Indians against Ford Motor Company. Ford had dumped toxic waste on tribal lands in northern New Jersey for years. The lawsuit not only won monetary compensation for the tribe but contributed to the contaminated land being relisted as a federal Superfund site—the first time a delisted site had ever been relisted.

In 2017, Kennedy's team secured an even larger victory: a $670 million settlement for over 3,000 residents of Ohio and West Virginia whose drinking water had been contaminated by perfluorooctanoic acid, a toxic chemical DuPont released into the environment near Parkersburg, West Virginia. Perfluorooctanoic acid, often abbreviated as PFOA, is part of a class of chemicals known as "forever chemicals" because they don't break down in the environment.

The Pivot to Vaccines

Around 2005, something changed.

Kennedy began promoting what he called concerns about vaccine safety. He claimed there was a link between vaccines and autism—a claim that has been thoroughly investigated and definitively disproven by scientific research. He promoted the idea that a preservative called thimerosal, which contains mercury and was used in some vaccines, caused neurological damage in children.

The scientific consensus is clear: vaccines do not cause autism, and thimerosal at the levels used in vaccines is safe. Dozens of studies involving millions of children have found no connection. The original 1998 study that sparked vaccine-autism fears was retracted, and its author lost his medical license for ethical violations.

But Kennedy persisted. He founded an organization called Children's Health Defense, which critics describe as an anti-vaccine advocacy group. He wrote books questioning vaccine safety and the motives of public health officials.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy promoted skepticism about COVID vaccines and criticized pandemic health measures. His book "The Real Anthony Fauci" attacked the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, accusing him of corruption and malfeasance.

Public health officials and scientists say Kennedy's activism has contributed to vaccine hesitancy—the reluctance of some parents to vaccinate their children. They point to deadly measles outbreaks in places like Samoa and Tonga, where misinformation spread partly through anti-vaccine networks helped drive down vaccination rates before outbreaks killed dozens of children.

Kennedy has also promoted other conspiracy theories that scientists reject, including the chemtrail conspiracy theory—the false belief that aircraft condensation trails contain harmful chemicals deliberately sprayed on populations—and claims questioning whether Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes AIDS.

The Presidential Run

In 2024, Kennedy ran for president. He started as a Democrat, challenging President Joe Biden in the primary. When that path seemed blocked, he launched an independent campaign.

Then came another pivot. In August 2024, Kennedy withdrew from the race and endorsed the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. It was a remarkable turn for a member of a family synonymous with the Democratic Party—a family that had produced two Democratic presidents and multiple Democratic senators.

After Trump won the election, he nominated Kennedy to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the cabinet position that oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and dozens of other agencies central to American public health.

Kennedy was confirmed in 2025, becoming the twenty-sixth person to hold the position.

A Controversy About a Bird

One episode from Kennedy's environmental career deserves mention because it illuminates something about his character—his willingness to buck conventional wisdom and stand by people others have abandoned.

In 2000, Kennedy insisted on rehiring a man named William Wegner to work at Riverkeeper. Wegner was a wildlife lecturer and falcon trainer whom the organization's founder had fired after learning of his criminal history. Wegner had been convicted in 1995 for tax fraud, perjury, and conspiracy to violate wildlife protection laws. He had led a team that smuggled endangered cockatoo eggs from Australia to the United States over eight years. He served three and a half years in federal prison.

Kennedy hired Wegner just months after his release. When the Riverkeeper board voted, a majority sided with Kennedy. The founder and eight board members resigned in protest, arguing that an environmental organization had no business employing someone convicted of environmental crimes.

Kennedy saw something worth salvaging in a man who had served his time.

Another Controversy About Wind

In 2005, Kennedy took a position that surprised and angered many of his environmentalist allies. He came out against the Cape Wind Project, a proposed offshore wind farm in Cape Cod's Nantucket Sound.

Kennedy sided with the commercial fishing industry, calling the project a costly boondoggle. Critics noted that the wind farm would have been visible from the Kennedy family's Hyannis Port compound. They accused him of prioritizing his family's ocean views over clean energy.

The episode illustrated a tension that runs through Kennedy's career: his willingness to take positions that put him at odds with his natural allies when he believes he's right.

The Man and His Contradictions

How do you make sense of Robert F. Kennedy Junior?

Here is a man who overcame fourteen years of heroin addiction to become one of America's most effective environmental lawyers. He won verdicts and settlements totaling over a billion dollars against some of the world's largest corporations. He built an international movement to protect waterways. He negotiated agreements that still protect the drinking water of millions of New Yorkers.

And here is a man who promotes theories about vaccines that the scientific community has thoroughly rejected—theories that public health officials say contribute to disease outbreaks that kill children.

Here is a Kennedy who started as a Democrat, ran as an independent, and ended up in a Republican administration.

Here is an environmental champion who opposed a major wind energy project.

Here is an anti-establishment crusader who now leads one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government.

Kennedy's supporters see a fearless truth-teller who challenges powerful interests whether they're polluting corporations or the medical establishment. His critics see a conspiracy theorist whose attacks on public health institutions cost lives.

What's certain is that the boy who watched his father die in Los Angeles in 1968, who spiraled into addiction and nearly threw everything away, has become one of the most consequential and divisive figures in American public life. The Kennedy name opened doors for him. But the path he walked through them has been entirely his own.