Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in suspending his presidential campaign as his family members long desired, nevertheless displeased those sharing his last name by endorsing Donald Trump in the process. “It is worse than disappointment,” Max Kennedy wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “We are in mourning.”
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” a statement joined by five other Kennedy siblings read. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Several of the Kennedy siblings, including former congressman Joseph and current journalist Douglas, did not attach their names to the statement.
“Personally,” reacted younger sister Kerry, “I completely disavow and separate and disassociate myself from my brother, Bobby Kennedy, and his flagrant and inexplicable effort to desecrate and trample and set fire to daddy’s memory.”
Our memories of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. remain uncorrupted by facts. Like his brother John and so many others cut down in the prime of life, he appears to us as less a person than projection. In the case of Democrats, including many of his children, this amounts to a depiction of him as a loyal servant of the party. Falling for this seduction makes for an imaginary Bobby Kennedy, who always and everywhere acts to please the present. Reality, so often the imagination’s bête noire, objects.
Both Robert Kennedys, in fact, not only opposed Democrats in the White House when their disgust with party overwhelmed their loyalty to it but also voted Republican. Here the factual past overrules a present in search of not truth but affirmation. Who, really, “tramples” the memory of Robert F. Kennedy Sr.?
Robert Kennedy Sr. hosted Joseph McCarthy as a speaker while in law school. Is there a greater bogeyman in Democratic Party lore? The Wisconsin Republican, financially supported by family patriarch Joseph Kennedy, hired Bobby to serve as an assistant counsel for him during the height of so-called McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy dated Bobby’s sisters Patricia and Eunice. He became the godfather for Bobby’s firstborn, Kathleen. He broke ribs in one of the family’s touch football games.
Democrats hate Joseph McCarthy in the same way that they love the Kennedys, i.e., their passion so overpowers that it creates a fictional character where a man once stood. A few Democrats loved Joe McCarthy. Many of them shared the last name Kennedy.
“Politically,” McCarthy biographer Thomas Reeves wrote, “Bobby could easily have qualified as a McCarthyite. The University of Virginia still possesses a paper he wrote while at law school attacking Roosevelt’s ‘sellout’ at Yalta. Kennedy also had a strong personal fondness for McCarthy that would be exhibited for many years.”
According to Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s The Kennedys, at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, when the momentum for the second slot on the ticket shifted from his brother John to Senator Estes Kefauver, “Bobby went from delegation to delegation, begging them with tears in his eyes to hold fast.” His brother’s defeat engendered bitterness. Nominee Adlai Stevenson’s lethargic campaigning style, like his passive punt on allowing the convention to choose his running mate, disgusted Bobby. Instead of holding his nose and casting a ballot for the Democrat who passed over his brother, he voted for Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that fall.
Going against sitting presidents within their own party seems as much a Kennedy tradition as supporting them. In 1940, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the uncle whom RFK Jr. never met, served as a delegate for James Farley in his quixotic challenge of President Franklin Roosevelt at the Democratic National Convention. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. announced his candidacy against a sitting Democrat president in Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Younger brother Ted followed in Robert’s footsteps by primarying President Jimmy Carter in 1980. In three concrete instances, RFK Jr.’s uncles—the same uncles shared by all of his siblings criticizing him for betraying their family—actively opposed Democrats seeking reelection to the presidency.
When Ted Kennedy faced off with another well-connected Democrat, Eddie McCormack, the nephew of House Speaker John McCormack, in that 1962 Democratic Party primary for U.S. Senate, Bobby Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general, used the power of the state to dig for dirt on his brother’s opponent. “With Robert Kennedy’s approval,” Ralph Martin writes in Seeds of Destruction, “Justice Department records were searched for anything detrimental about McCormack, and there was a similar search in the Pentagon files for anything useful in McCormack’s record.” Here, again, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. went after a fellow Democrat—and not just any fellow Democrat but a close relative of the Speaker of the House.
From all this context, then, it seems clear that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not gone rogue. For his family, as its critics sometimes observed, there have always been three parties: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Kennedys. RFK Jr., then, has rebelled merely against the Kennedy mythology—he is acting very predictably within a long Kennedy tradition. And his stated reasons for publicly endorsing a Republican for president in 2024 seem more noble than his father’s petty reasons for privately voting for a Republican for president in 1956.
“In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantle it,” he explained in endorsing Trump. “Lacking confidence that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against President Trump and myself.” He noted that Democrats, not the Republicans upon whose candidate he probably acted as a siphon of votes, dragged him into court to challenge the validity of signatures on petitions in “state after state.” Beyond these personal affronts, he notes that on freedom of speech, war, the Constitution, and other important issues, his party no longer represents him.
From Honey Fitz to Joseph P. Kennedy to, especially, his father Bobby Kennedy—a more vindictive man than his brothers, who feuded with such fellow Democrats as Roy Cohn, Gore Vidal, and Lyndon Johnson—RFK Jr. has done what Kennedys always do when facing hostility from their own party: fight back. Faced with his rebellion, partisans have responded as they always do. They hype old, odd, and occasionally discredited stories—RFK Jr. sawed off a whale’s head, RFK Jr. ate a dog (that was a lamb), RFK Jr. placed a dead bear in Central Park as a joke—even as they otherwise suppress substantive current discussions (the former candidate points to how ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN have afforded him just two live interviews during his 16-month campaign).
“Kennedy votes Republican” strikes many as a man-bites-dog story. It should not.
Photo by Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images