With his just-declared bid for the US presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sees himself at the forefront of “a new revolution to resurrect American democracy” — but the anti-vaccination crusader will likely have his work cut out for him in convincing Democrats and even members of his own family to vote for him in 2024.
“Most of the Kennedys are disgusted with his attitude,” said Kennedy family biographer Laurence Leamer, referring to Robert’s recent anti-vaccination activism. “They still care about him, but he’s an embarrassment.”
Robert, 69, filed paperwork to run for president with the Federal Election Commission last week.
He plans to formally announce his bid to take on President Biden in a Democratic primary at a hotel in Boston on April 19, according to his Team Kennedy campaign. (Biden told the “Today” show Monday that “I plan on running” in 2024.)
The environmental lawyer and author has earned the disapproval of many of his Kennedy relatives for his controversial views on vaccines and his attacks on former White House medical chief Anthony Fauci, as well as his embrace of his father’s convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.
Robert has said Sirhan did not actually participate in the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968.
Robert’s uncle President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
“After more than 50 years in prison, the state’s own psychiatrists and the parole board deem that Sirhan poses no threat to society,” Robert wrote in a 2021 opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, urging California Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant Sirhan, 79, parole. “During a three-hour meeting with him in 2018, I was impressed with the genuineness of Sirhan’s remorse for his role in my father’s shooting, even though he has always claimed to have no memory of those moments. Sirhan wept, clenched my hands and asked for forgiveness from me, from my siblings and from my mother for his part in the tragedy.”
Leamer told The Post Thursday that the rapprochement with Sirhan particularly grated on his relatives, including six of his siblings and his 94-year-old mother, Ethel Kennedy, who said in 2021 that she does not want the convicted killer released from prison.
“I have done quite a bit of work on the [Robert Kennedy] assassination, and that he should support Sirhan Sirhan is even worse than his anti-vax stuff for his family,” said Leamer, author of several books including “The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963.”
In a 2019 opinion column for Politico, Robert’s siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Joseph P. Kennedy II, along with his niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, denounced his crusade against vaccinations.
Robert, the bestselling author of “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” is the chair and chief legal counsel of the Georgia-based Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that campaigns against vaccines for children.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Joe and Kathleen’s brother and Maeve’s uncle — is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases,” they wrote. “He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.”
Even actress Cheryl Hines, Robert’s third wife, has distanced herself from his vaccine extremism after he invoked Nazi Germany in a speech against vaccines at the Lincoln Memorial last year.
In it, he implied that those who oppose vaccines are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, the German teen who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at Auschwitz.
“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in DC was reprehensible and insensitive,” Hines 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.” Robert later apologized for the reference.
However, Hines does apparently support his presidential run.
“I’m thinking about it, and I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it,” Robert said during a speech in New Hampshire last month, when he first spoke of running for the top office.
Kennedy has also been enmeshed in other scandals that are likely to resurface during his presidential run.
In 2013, The Post revealed that he kept a “sex diary” in which he chronicled his affairs with numerous women while married to second wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, who committed suicide in 2012.
But with Robert’s presidential bid and anti-vaccination advocacy, Leamer said that “he’s found a new life for himself” — even if it’s separate from his famously liberal family.
“American Resurrection,” Robert’s Substack website, is devoted to advancing “my lifelong battle against the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has subverted America’s once exemplary democracy,” he writes.
His sister Kathleen served as the lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003.
His brother Joseph was a congressman from Massachusetts from 1987 to 1999. And more recently, his brother Chris Kennedy was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Illinois in 2018.
Cousin Caroline Kennedy is currently the US ambassador to Australia.
Robert’s nephew Joe Kennedy III, a former Massachusetts congressman, lost a Democratic Senate primary in 2020.
“Do the Democrats really want Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this race?” said Leamer. “The whole thing is just troubling for Democrats.”
