It seems like an aeon ago now but last August, when Robert F Kennedy jnr endorsed Donald Trump for president, his sister Kerry released a short statement that was wreathed in heartbreak: “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Another interpretation is that the Kennedy saga has become so embedded in the American subconscious that it can never end, it just morphs into something else. On Thursday afternoon, Kennedy jnr stood in the Oval Office at the lectern bearing the seal of office of the president of the United States. For all Americans, particularly those with vivid memories of the 1,000-day Kennedy presidency, the image will stand as a poignant symbol of an undeniable crossing point in American political life.
For Democrats, Kennedy jnr’s swearing in as secretary of health in the radically disruptive Trump Republican presidency is a bitter moment. For Republicans, the historic appointment is further evidence of Trump’s ability to outsmart and strip away the tired orthodoxy.
To his strange coalition of tech billionaires and fight-club enthusiasts, Trump has now added a blue-blood, blue-eyed Kennedy.
The nomination, which narrowly passed the Senate vote, means that at 70, Kennedy jnr becomes the highest office holder in his family since his father, Bobby Kennedy, was attorney general; since his uncle, John F Kennedy, was president. On a purely surface level, with Kennedy jnr’s wife, actor Cheryl Hines, and his adult children in the room, it was impossible, of course, not to travel on the memory carousel to when the Oval Office was teeming with Kennedys.
Kennedy jnr is a canny communicator and within seconds of his address, he had turned the Oval Office sepia by recalling a day in 1962 when he met JFK in that very room. He would have been eight years old. They apparently had a conversation about the environment.
“He was involved deeply as we all know in restoring physical fitness in this country. He challenged, at one point in his administration, Americans to do a 50-mile walk, which I ultimately did,” Kennedy jnr told the gathering.
“But I remember the day my father completed his walk. We were staying up at Camp David and my father came in after 18 hours walking on the C&O towpath with his feet bleeding and blisters on them,” he continued. Kennedy jnr recalled the note his father wrote Al Lowenstein, the New York congressman who was shot and killed in 1980 (“assassinated” was the term Kennedy jnr used) after he had urged Kennedy to run against Lyndon Johnson. “At the time people thought it was a fool’s errand. My father wrote him a note: ‘If a single man lands himself firmly on his own ideal and there abide, all the wide world will come round to him.’”
It was all there – the resurrection of the fabled brothers, the allusion to assassination and the deft linking of himself with the revered family tradition his siblings and many relatives believe he has betrayed.
Trump stood with his grimace of indulgence – the president has limited patience for the speeches of others, but this was a moment. Trump, after all, was as smote with the Kennedy mythos as all Americans of his generation. Now, he has one on his team: a Kennedy confirmed.
What Kennedy jnr will do with the American health system is a matter of starkly differing opinion and perspective. Condemned by many as a frightening vaccine sceptic in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Kennedy jnr, since closing in on the health role Trump promised him, vowed again in the Oval Office that the public will feel differently, “when people actually hear what I think about vaccines which is common sense: that vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent”.
“People are reacting because they hear things that are not true. They hear characterisations of things that are said that are actually not true. When they hear what I actually have to say about vaccines, everybody supports it,” he said.
Kennedy jnr maintains he has a clear vision for Americans: to get them back on that towpath, walking and exercising and eating healthy food. The system is broken and corrupted by a ruinous food system and big pharma profiteering.
“President [Donald] Trump has promised to restore the American dream in this country. A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person only has one. Sixty per cent of our population only has one dream – to get better. We can’t be a strong nation if we have a weak citizenry. Seventy seven per cent of our children cannot qualify for military service,” he said.
Many medical experts have professed terror at what Kennedy jnr might do as secretary of health. Here’s paediatrician Dr Paul Offit, who serves on the vaccine advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration department, in a New York Times opinion piece last year:
“He could remove some or all vaccines from the federal programme created to prevent frivolous civil litigation. Doing so could return us to the days when baseless lawsuits drove many pharmaceutical companies out of the vaccine-making business altogether. Given the lack of appropriate guardrails that would normally prevent an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist from heading the country’s most important public health agency, it’s a dangerous time to be a child in the United States.”
Against that, Roger Marshall, a medical doctor and a Republican junior senator from Kansas, forecast Kennedy jnr as “just the disrupter our health system needs” in an opinion piece in The Hill this week.
“He will turn NIH, CDC, Medicare and Medicaid away from their disease-treatment mindset and toward prevention. This is not complicated. It’s common sense,” Marshall said.
Kennedy jnr’s life-story is, in the family tradition, filled with lurching turns and episodes of extraordinary self-destruction. He shares with Trump all the privileges of having been born into enormous wealth and opportunity while fostering private grievances and slights as he travelled through.
It was something his cousin, JFK’s daughter Caroline – another family member to whom the Oval Office was a childhood playroom – referenced in the January letter she sent to senators arguing against his nomination, and which she later read aloud.
“I watched his younger brothers and cousins follow him down the path of drug addiction. His basement, his garage, his dorm room were always the centre of the action where drugs were available and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence,” she said.
The words, coming from a rigorously private Kennedy member, would have caused a storm of controversy in ordinary times. But these are no ordinary times, and they were lost in the vortex of the opening weeks of the Trump presidency.
So, the age of Make America Healthy Again is here. During his crusade as an independent presidential candidate last summer, Kennedy jnr eclipsed both Trump and Joe Biden in favourability ratings. Polls showed he appealed most to Americans aged under 40.
He ran, to most observers, a chaotic if trippily entertaining campaign which ended in August. But nothing – not his revelation, in May, that doctors had found a parasitic worm in his brain, or a series of bizarre stories involving animals, or his stunt of debating himself during the night of the infamous Trump/Biden presidential debate in Atlanta, stopped him from this unlikely rise to one of the more powerful offices in US politics.
In November, Trump promised to allow Kennedy jnr to “go wild on health” if elected. Now, here they were in the hallowed room. Turning to the past again, Kennedy jnr noted that his uncle Jack had established USAid in 1961, “for humanitarian purposes to put our country on the side of the poor”.
Then the line that will surely wound many Democrats the most: “It has been captured by the military industrial complex. It has become a sinister propagator of totalitarianism and war across the globe. And very few people understand just how sinister this agency truly is.”
Turning to address Trump directly, Bobby’s kid told the 47th president, “we need a revolutionary figure, and you are that figure”.
And you could tell Kennedy jnr was comfortable to find himself back in the Oval Office: that he felt the day was a homecoming, that all of this was meant to be.
“Success is not about chance,” is one of the many aphorisms attributed to his grandfather, old Joe Kennedy, who wanted all of it for his boys, “but about choices”.
