Robert F Kennedy Jr speaks in a croaking, rasping, painful-sounding voice. As a younger man, he did not have this timbre. There’s a vague explanation that its cause is a virus he might have contracted. Or, more likely, it is a crack-pipe voice, the larynx and throat seared over a long addiction he admits to, a descent that took him quite as far down to the bottom as you can go.
After the suicide of his second wife, raising six children, various of them social media demi-monde famous, and stepping away from a career as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy now lives in Los Angeles, where he is married to the actress Cheryl Hines. Once a stalwart Left-winger, in recent years Kennedy has become a vax naysayer, a conspiracist, a gun control sceptic, a purveyor of a broad range of dubious and unfounded science and health views and nostrums, a supporter of enhanced voting restrictions and an advocate of ending aid to Ukraine. He is a favourite of both Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. “He’s crazy,” Carlson told me not long ago. “But that’s what I like about him.”
