Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, author, conspiracy theorist, and anti-vaccine activist serving as the 26th United States secretary of health and human services since 2025. A member of the prominent Kennedy family, he is a son of Senator and U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and a nephew of U.S. president John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy began his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. In the mid-1980s, he joined two nonprofits focused on environmental protection: Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1986, he became an adjunct professor of environmental law at Pace University School of Law, and in 1987 he founded Pace's Environmental Litigation Clinic. In 1999, Kennedy founded the nonprofit environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance. He first ran as a member of the Democratic Party and later started an independent campaign in the 2024 presidential election, before withdrawing from the race and endorsing the Republican Party's nominee, Donald Trump.
Since 2005, Kennedy has promoted vaccine misinformation and public-health conspiracy theories, including the chemtrail conspiracy theory, HIV/AIDS denialism, and the scientifically disproved claim of a causal link between vaccines and autism. He has drawn criticism for fueling vaccine hesitancy amid a social climate that gave rise to the deadly measles outbreaks in Samoa and Tonga.
Kennedy is the founder and former chairman of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group and proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. He has written books including The Riverkeepers, Crimes Against Nature, The Real Anthony Fauci, and A Letter to Liberals.
Early life and education
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was born at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1954. He is the third of eleven children of senator and U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. He is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy.Kennedy was raised at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and at Hickory Hill, the family estate in McLean, Virginia. In June 1972, Kennedy graduated from the Palfrey Street School, a day school in Watertown, Massachusetts. While attending Palfrey, he lived with a surrogate family at a farmhouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kennedy continued his education at Harvard University, graduating in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in American history and literature. With his former roommate Peter W. Kaplan, he did thesis research in Alabama. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1982 and a Master of Laws from Pace University in 1987.
He was nine years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and 14 when his father was assassinated while running for president in 1968. Kennedy learned of his father's shooting while at Georgetown Preparatory School. A few hours later, he flew to Los Angeles on Vice President Hubert Humphrey's plane, along with his older siblings, Kathleen and Joseph. He was with his father when he died. Kennedy was a pallbearer at his father's funeral, where he spoke and read excerpts from his father's speeches at the mass commemorating his death at Arlington National Cemetery.
After his father's death, Kennedy struggled with drug abuse, which led to his arrest in Barnstable, Massachusetts, for cannabis possession at age 16, and his expulsion from two boarding schools: Millbrook and Pomfret. During this time, some in the Kennedy family regarded him as the "ringleader" of a pack of spoiled, rich kids who called themselves the "Hyannis Port Terrors", engaging in vandalism, theft, and drug use. His first cousin Caroline Kennedy later blamed Kennedy for leading other members of their family "down the path of drug addiction", calling him a "predator". At Harvard, Kennedy continued to use heroin and cocaine, often with his brother David, earning a reputation that has been described as a "pied piper" and "drug dealer".
In 1972, Kennedy and Roger Ailes made a film about wildlife and conservation in Kenya. Kennedy's book on Frank Minis Johnson, a federal judge who led racial desegregation in Alabama, was published in 1978.
Legal career
Manhattan DA's office
In 1982, Kennedy was sworn in as an assistant district attorney for Manhattan. After failing the New York bar exam, he resigned in July 1983.Conviction for heroin possession
On September 16, 1983, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession in Rapid City, South Dakota. In February 1984, he pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of possession of heroin, and was sentenced to two years of probation and community service. After his arrest, he entered a drug treatment center. To satisfy conditions of his probation, Kennedy worked as a volunteer for the Natural Resources Defense Council and was required to attend regular drug rehabilitation sessions. Kennedy asserted that this ended his 14 years of heroin use, which he said had begun when he was 15. His probation ended a year early.Riverkeeper
In 1984, Kennedy began volunteering at the Hudson River Fisherman's Association, renamed Riverkeeper in 1986 after a patrol boat it had built with settlement money from legal victories preceding Kennedy's arrival. After he was admitted to the New York bar in 1985, Riverkeeper hired him as senior attorney. Kennedy litigated and supervised environmental enforcement lawsuits on the east coast estuaries on behalf of Hudson Riverkeeper and the Long Island Soundkeeper, where he was also a board member. Long Island Soundkeeper sued several municipalities and cities along the Connecticut and New York coastlines. On the Hudson, Kennedy sued municipalities and industries, including General Electric, to stop discharging pollution and clean up legacy contamination. His work at Riverkeeper set long-term environmental legal standards.In 1995, Kennedy advocated for repeal of legislation that he considered unfriendly to the environment. In 1997, he worked with John Cronin to write The Riverkeepers, a history of the early Riverkeepers and a primer for the Waterkeeper movement.
In 2000, a majority of Riverkeeper's board sided with Kennedy when he insisted on rehiring William Wegner, a wildlife lecturer and falcon trainer whom the organization's founder and president, Robert H. Boyle, had fired six months earlier after learning that Wegner had been convicted in 1995 for tax fraud, perjury, and conspiracy to violate wildlife protection laws. Wegner had recruited and led a team of at least 10 who smuggled cockatoo eggs, including species considered endangered by Australia, from Australia to the U.S. over a period of eight years. He served 3.5 years of a five-year sentence and was hired by Kennedy a few months after his release. After the board's decision, Boyle, eight of the 22 members of the board, and Riverkeeper's treasurer resigned, saying it was not right for an environmental organization to hire someone convicted of environmental crimes and that it would hurt the organization's fundraising.
While working with Riverkeeper, Kennedy spearheaded a 34-year battle to close the Indian Point nuclear-power plant. Kennedy was featured in a 2004 documentary about the plant, Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister, the documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy. In 2017, Kennedy argued that the electricity Indian Point provided could be fully replaced by renewable energy. In 2022, after the plant's closure, carbon emissions from electricity generation in New York state increased by 37%, compared to 2019, before the start of the closure.
Kennedy resigned from Riverkeeper in 2017.
Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic
In 1987, Kennedy founded the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law, where for three decades he was the clinic's supervising attorney and co-director and Clinical Professor of Law. Kennedy obtained a special order from the New York State Court of Appeals that permitted his 10 clinic students to practice law and try cases against Hudson River polluters in state and federal court, under the supervision of Kennedy and his co-director, Professor Karl Coplan. The clinic's full-time clients are Riverkeeper and Long Island Soundkeeper.The clinic has sued governments and companies for polluting Long Island Sound and the Hudson River and its tributaries. It argued cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline and won hundreds of settlements for the Hudson Riverkeeper. Kennedy and his students also sued dozens of municipal wastewater treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act. In 2010, a Pace lawsuit forced ExxonMobil to clean up tens of millions of gallons of oil from legacy refinery spills in Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.
On April 11, 2001, Men's Journal gave Kennedy its "Heroes" Award for creating the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic. Kennedy and the clinic received other awards for successful legal work cleaning up the environment. The Pace Clinic became a model for similar environmental law clinics throughout the country.
Waterkeeper Alliance
In June 1999, as Riverkeeper's success on the Hudson began inspiring the creation of Waterkeepers across North America, Kennedy and a few dozen Riverkeepers gathered in Southampton, Long Island, to found the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is now the umbrella group for the 344 licensed Waterkeeper programs in 44 countries. As president, Kennedy oversaw its legal, membership, policy and fundraising programs. The Alliance is dedicated to promoting "swimmable, fishable, drinkable waterways, worldwide".Under Kennedy's leadership, Waterkeeper launched its "Clean Coal is a Deadly Lie" campaign in 2001, bringing dozens of lawsuits targeting mining practices, including mountaintop removal and slurry pond construction, as well as coal-burning utilities' mercury emissions and coal ash piles. Kennedy's Waterkeeper alliance has also been fighting coal export, including from terminals in the Pacific Northwest.
Waterkeeper waged a legal and public relations battle against pollution from factory farms. In the 1990s, Kennedy rallied opposition to factory farms among small independent farmers, convened a series of "National Summits" on factory meat products, and conducted press conference whistle-stop tours across North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and in Washington, D.C. Beginning in 2000, Kennedy sued factory farms in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Iowa. In a 2003 article, he argued factory farms produce lower-quality, less healthy food, and harm independent family farmers by poisoning their air and water, reducing their property values, and using extensive state and federal subsidies to impose unfair competition against them.
Kennedy and his environmental work have been the focus of several films, including The Waterkeepers, directed by Les Guthman. In 2008, he appeared in the IMAX documentary film Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, riding the Grand Canyon in a wooden dory with his daughter Kick and anthropologist Wade Davis.
Kennedy resigned the Waterkeeper Alliance presidency in November 2020.