Who is Robert F Kennedy Jr and why is he running for president in 2024?

There are a number of near-inevitabilities in US politics. As sure as a change in the seasons, every decade or so the national mood will flutter from liberalism to conservatism or back again, and from quiet, steady hand to charismatic, galvanising force. Election cycles will start earlier and earlier and be more and more expensive. Promises will be made on gun control, then quietly un-promised again.

But one thing is more predictable than all else: like clockwork, every few years, a member of the Kennedy dynasty will make their presence felt on the national stage. The first did so in 1884, 35 years after the family’s arrival from Ireland. The latest, Robert F Kennedy Jr, did so when he filed paperwork confirming his intention to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, and then when he announced his bid to run as an independent in October.

Kennedy, 69, is the son and namesake of Robert F Kennedy, who was fatally shot while running for president in 1968, five years after his brother, President John F Kennedy, was also assassinated. A former top environmental lawyer, he has become better known in recent years for his virulent anti-vaccine activism and tendency to embrace conspiracy theories – positions that have caused other members of the family, and even his wife, to publicly admonish him.

For the past month, Kennedy has had a tweet pinned to his Twitter profile. “Help me decide whether to run for President,” it reads, with a link to his website. “If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilise enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race.”

If he runs, he says: “My top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.”

It says something about the health of US politics that the headline “Kennedy to challenge Biden for White House” could feasibly have been written in just about any election year since the late 1970s. As it is, Robert F Kennedy Jr is a relative novice in a family that had at least one member serving in federal elective office from 1947 to 2011. (Even today, the US ambassadors to Austria and Australia, as well as the US special envoy to Northern Ireland, are Kennedys.)

He is the third of 11 children born to RFK and Ethel Kennedy, and grew up between McLean in Virginia and Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the Kennedy family’s traditional home state. He was nine years old when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his father suffered the same fate. At the latter’s funeral he served as the youngest pallbearer and spoke, earning national attention while still at school. He went on to study at Harvard and the London School of Economics.

As is typical of anybody in his family, it’s been a colourful adult life since then. Aged 29, he was serving as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan when he was arrested and pleaded guilty to possessing heroin. “Pretty soon after my dad died, I started taking drugs,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2007.

“I was part of a generational revolution that looked at drugs almost as a political statement – a rebellion against the preceding generation, which had opposed the civil rights movement and promoted Vietnam. At the time, I don’t think any of us were aware of how damaging drugs could be.”

Kennedy has been sober, as well as a devout Catholic, ever since. After a year’s probation and community service, he began specialising in environmental law, building a reputation as a powerful voice fighting mass polluters and promoting greater understanding of climate change. He certainly knows nature: a licensed master falconer, he has trained hawks since he was a child and still breeds them. He has also led several “first descent” whitewater kayaking expeditions around the world and written numerous books about the environment.

A father of six, he has been married three times, first to Emily Black before their divorce in 1994, then to the interior designer Mary Kathleen Richardson (they were married on a research boat on the Hudson River) until their divorce in 2012. Two years later, Mary died by suicide in New York – one of dozens of tragedies filed under what Ted Kennedy once referred to as “some awful curse” hanging over the family.

In another twist, Kennedy is now married to the Hollywood actress and director Cheryl Hines, after being introduced by Hines’s Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Larry David. They live between Los Angeles and Cape Cod but, as Kennedy’s activism and political interest has piqued, he spends more and more time addressing crowds in Washington DC.

The question of whether he’ll enter politics has been asked for decades, as if it is somehow a rejection of birthright to not run for some kind of office as a Kennedy. In the 2000s, after writing the book Crimes Against Nature: How George W Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Highjacking Our Democracy, many assumed he would become the next member of his family to aim for the White House. Indeed, he was viewed by some as one of the more politically gifted Kennedys in his generation. As a friend of Hillary Clinton and many of the Democratic firmament at the time, however, he decided against it. A 2008 diagnosis with spasmodic dysphonia, which causes his voice to be thin and quivering, may have also played a part.

Channelling his obsessive energy and fierce intellect into conspiracy theories has been a later addition to his CV. Ironically, the assassinations of his uncle and father sowed the seed for the modern thirst for conspiracy theories in America and in recent years Kennedy has said that Sirhan Sirhan, who has been in prison for more than 50 years for killing his father, is not guilty and should be freed. In 2017, he met Sirhan at a prison in California, speaking for three hours while Hines waited in the car.

His anti-vaccine stance has grown since the late 1990s, when he began falsely linking an increase in food allergies in children to vaccines. Later, he drew a line between autism and vaccines in a notorious (and later withdrawn) 2005 magazine article.

“I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was sceptical,” he once said. His “research” has been roundly rebuked by the American scientific community.

As with linking 5G mobile phone masts to mass government control, the Covid vaccination programme was always likely to become grist to his mill. Kennedy was a vocal critic and, in a recently published book, he claimed that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Dr Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser during the pandemic, conspired to profit from the vaccines. Dr Fauci, he said, was orchestrating “fascism”.

“The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates,” he told the crowd at a rally last year. “It will make you a slave.” In 2021, he was barred from Instagram for promoting misinformation.

At one point Kennedy suggested Holocaust victim Anne Frank was better off than Americans whose jobs require them to be vaccinated. It was that particular comment that caused Hines to publicly condemn his views. “My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” she tweeted. “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.” Kennedy later apologised.

The Kennedy siblings have been equally dismissive, breaking an unwritten family rule to close ranks and deal with issues behind closed doors by making sure the American public understands “Bobby Jnr” is very much the black sheep. After all, if a political figure with the surname Kennedy says anything in the US, it is given an immediate level of credence. Five of his eight surviving brothers and sisters – two of his brothers have died – publically distanced themselves from him during the pandemic.

“He was an extraordinary older brother,” Kerry Kennedy, his younger sister, told the New York Times last year. “He’s brilliant, he’s well read, he cares deeply, he is extremely charismatic. He has a childlike buoyancy and lightness to him. He’s a beautiful person in a million different ways [...] And then he has this.”

In profiles over the years, the common observation is that whatever he puts his mind to, Kennedy has an unimpeachable self-confidence. The kind, perhaps, that can only come with growing up in a family like his. “Sometimes you want to shake him and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Bobby, pay attention to something else,’” Mike Papantonio, a lawyer and talk show host said. “But at the end of the day he’s committed to it. The jaws are locked.”

Kennedy has always been expected to run for president one day. Many thought the moment had passed. Now, a few months before his 70th birthday, he is going for it. “I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is, my wife has greenlighted it,” he told a crowd last month.

Bereft of clear successors, nobody is expecting Biden to have much trouble securing the Democratic nomination, despite the fact that, if re-elected, he would be 86 years old when his second term ended. With the pressure off, and with Republicans hand-wringing over whether Donald Trump is worth the risk again, it’s been suggested Biden won’t officially declare his candidacy until the summer.

Until then, the black sheep of the Kennedy dynasty can try and gather some support. He might want to start with his own family.

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