RFK Jr. is no chip off the old block

Lyndon B. Johnson, who became U.S. president on Nov. 22, 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, never had a good relationship with JFK’s younger brother attorney general Robert (Bobby) F. Kennedy. To ease the transition after JFK’s death, however, Johnson kept RFK in his cabinet. Bobby resigned as attorney general a few months before the 1964 elections so he could run for a senate seat in New York, which he won.

Johnson’s bitterness about RFK never vanished and he never understood Bobby’s popularity.

“I thought I was dealing with a child,” Johnson said in an interview in 1969, more than a year after he opted not to run for a second term as president and RFK was assassinated on June 5, 1968. “I never did understand how the press built him into the great figure that he was.”

Johnson had a point. As a lawyer, Kennedy had worked with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and shared his paranoid fear of communists. This fear was a key factor in his questionable decision to allow J. Edgar Hoover, the ruthless director of the FBI, to put wiretaps on civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s home and hotel rooms. Though Kennedy publicly supported King, he wrongly believed that King’s close association with lawyer Stanley Levison, a former member of the Communist Party USA, was dangerous. (RFK also knew that Hoover had evidence of JFK’s marital indiscretions.)

By the time he decided to run for president in 1968, he had rehabilitated his reputation. Kennedy became the liberal champion of African-Americans, impoverished farmworkers, and Indigenous leaders in South Dakota. He had also decided that American involvement in the Vietnam War was a mistake. His tragic death cemented his legacy as a defender of the underdog.

Kennedy and his wife Ethel had 11 children; their third child and second son was Robert, Jr., the current secretary of health and human services in U.S. President Donald Trump’s cabinet. RFK Jr. was 14 when his father was murdered and his life took a downward spiral after that. He became involved with drugs including heroin, which in criminal court proceedings in South Dakota in 1984 he admitted to using for 15 years.

In 1985, he became a lawyer in New York and transformed himself into an outspoken environmentalist. He took on many difficult cases that pitted him against large corporations. In this and other notable legal work, he was following in his father’s footsteps and the progressive politics espoused by many other members of his illustrious family — including his uncle, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy.

Then, in about 2005, RFK Jr. embraced conspiracy theories and emerged as a leading anti-vaccination proponent — despite his repeated claims to the contrary. Since then, in countless online and printed articles and in speeches, he has twisted and distorted scientific facts beyond all recognition to support his nutty view that vaccines cause autism. In a 2005 article, he argued that U.S. public health officials “knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children.”

Emboldened, Kennedy founded the alternative medical organization the Children’s Health Defense in 2007 and served as its chairman until April 2023 when he announced he was running for president. During the COVID pandemic, Facebook was forced to cancel his Instagram account for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines. According to a March 2021 report by the U.K./U.S. non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch, Kennedy was one of 12 anti-vaxxers “responsible for almost two-thirds of anti‑vaccine content circulating on social media platforms.”

You would think that all of this would have nullified any chance of him ever becoming the U.S. secretary of health and human services. But, of course, in Trumpland up is down and down is up. Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign in late August 2024 and immediately endorsed Trump. It was an action denounced by his siblings and family as “a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold most dear.”

In late January 2025, Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings were confrontational and controversial. When pressed, he insisted he was not a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaccine “and that he merely supports more stringent studies and safety tests for injections.” When asked why he claimed on a 2023 podcast that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” he said his words were taken out of context. A few weeks later, inexplicably, Republican senators, except Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, confirmed Kennedy’s appointment.

A few weeks ago, Kennedy announced that his department was cancelling 22 medical studies worth US$500 million to develop treatments for cancer and cystic fibrosis and vaccines for COVID and the flu using mRNA technology that saved the lives of millions of people during the pandemic, but which Kennedy opposes.

Among medical experts, the reaction to this decision was harsh. “I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases and pandemic preparations.

No doubt, junior’s father would have concurred with that statement.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His next book, The Dollar A Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War, will be published in October.