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.”
At the age of 69, having sometime flirted with but always retreated from the public eye — too volatile, troubled and unstable for it — he has been running for president, first in the Democratic primaries, and now as an independent candidate and possible spoiler.
For much of his family — his many brothers and sisters, cousins, and nephews and nieces, all in their way engaged with the Kennedy franchise — RFK Jr’s late-stage career is an appalling development. Indeed, for almost everyone in the Democratic party, for whom the name Kennedy is still a high point of liberalism, it is another one of those political turns in the time of Trump that nobody can quite explain.
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
Running as a neo-nut puts him in danger of losing his Kennedy cred, something that has long had an unquestioned value, particularly in the new Hollywood neighbourhood where he lives. The problematic life he has tried to keep from public view — that has, he long seemed to appreciate, disqualified him from public life — is now out in the open. And, of course, this is all difficult to understand because he has no real path to office. On the other hand, this is the last moment, practically speaking, when he might be able to be a Kennedy in any public sense — running is his inheritance, use it or lose it. Also, having decamped to Hollywood, with a celebrity wife, he really might not have that much else to do. Plus, as one of 11 siblings, sharing in the fortune created by a grandfather with nine children, he doesn’t really have that much money — he needs an angle. And then — and this he shares with many more traditional politicians — there is the belief that this actually might be his time, however much that might seem to be a delusion to the otherwise rational world.
An independent candidacy for president is an especially messianic pursuit. Your goal is entirely out of reach. But you do it for the higher, or at least more cantankerous, purpose of being a symbol or messenger — and in the modern media world, that’s a living.
In this, Kennedy is in an oddly ideal position, even a poetic one, to represent the view — a more and more dominant view — that America is broken, that it has been cast out of liberal paradise, that the arc of its history, once so promising, has been thwarted by dark forces. A damaged Kennedy may be a particularly apt symbol of damaged modernity.
He looks the part, a heroin chicness added to the traditional Kennedy preppiness, and, even with his strangled voice, talks the part, an off-the-cuff literateness and eloquence. At least half of everything he says, with great didactic authority, is made up of facts and data whirled through a blender into some strange gobbledygook, but that seems only to vividly illustrate the idea that logic, meaning and linear reality have been lost. By rejecting reality, he is trying to reclaim it — sort of. So much about the Kennedys and indeed the wrong turn of America seems to go back to the Sixties: Kennedy, fittingly, represents that quintessential Sixties view that insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane world.
Indeed, Kennedy — and he is hardly alone — updates this view. It used to be that the obviously nutso and clearly disturbed remained outside of the clear tracks of ambition and career attainments. But that has been another big change in the Trump era: the functionally insane have discovered that they have particular gifts.
Kennedy might, according to recent polls, take as much as 14 per cent
In this presidential race, Kennedy is reinventing himself. The wounded person, having seen too much, having experienced such despair, previously rejecting his family’s public vocation to fight privately with his own demons, is now a ubiquitous social media presence doing public battle with America’s demons. He may never be president, nor ever again be able to represent the nobility of the Kennedy franchise (and, really, what has that got any of his siblings or cousins), but he can be a niche superstar. It’s difficult to monetise a mainstream voice, but an outré one has lots of possibilities.
The first months of his quixotic campaign worried the Democrats; here was the Kennedy name with its ghost magic. His early numbers against Joe Biden in national polls seemed potentially ominous — a serious protest vote. If he extended that into a third party run, it could, it seemed, cost Biden a crucial few per cent. But now that has shifted to a worry too in the Trump camp. The effort among Republicans to take Trumpism from Trump with more disciplined and judicious behaviour has all but failed. But here now was Kennedy, talking to Republicans as well as Democrats, a vehicle for saying the unsayable, if for no other reason that just having the boldness to say it, calling out a damaged nation and offering to represent the damaged people in it, and like Trump himself, with high personal branding. Kennedy might, according to recent polls, take as much as 14 per cent, quite a high point in third-party polling — unclear who that would hurt more, Biden or Trump.
The two main political parties both seem unable to speak the language of psychic upheaval, this rebellion against political logic itself, that a new electorate, a minority but a potent one, seems to crave. Trump himself has represented a new sort of third party — still confusing to the party he has all but replaced. Kennedy, likewise, even as a walking-talking crazy — because he is a walking-talking crazy — might turn out too to be a reasonable contender in the new political marketplace.
