The signs were open and public for the past 40 years that this was a man who had no business in public life.
Rebecca Traister, in a lengthy New York magazine profile, points fingers at who gave us Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.” Traister reports the dots, but is (not for the first time) somewhat hesitant about connecting them explicitly, especially in the front end of the piece:
After a brief stint as an assistant district attorney in New York, Kennedy joined Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He founded Pace Law School’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and the Waterkeeper Alliance. . . . Kennedy’s trajectory juddered in the early aughts when parents who believed their children’s autism diagnoses might have been tied to vaccines approached him and persuaded him of their view. Kennedy became one of the loudest voices blaring false links between vaccination and autism. In 2005, Salon, in partnership with Rolling Stone, published a long reported story by Kennedy that pointed toward the mercury compound thimerosal, used as a preservative in vaccines, as the autism culprit. The story included significant errors, and in 2011 Salon removed it from the site.
Who hired him as an assistant district attorney? Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Democrat and Kennedy family loyalist who was U.S. Attorney for the SDNY under John F. Kennedy. What do the NRDC, Salon, and Rolling Stone have in common? They’re all left-wing outlets or organizations. Who promoted and benefited from Kennedy’s vaccine theories? The trial bar:
His vaccine beliefs hooked him up with a broader world of conspiracy theorizing. In 2006, Kennedy wrote a lengthy story, again for Rolling Stone, claiming the Republican Party had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” stealing the election in Ohio via Diebold voting machines — a specious claim that was seductive to Democrats who simply could not believe George W. Bush had won his reelection bid against John Kerry. Kennedy’s doubts in electoral results have persisted, and he recently equivocated to the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer about the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t know. I think that Biden won.”
That’s not the “broader world of conspiracy theorizing,” it’s the left wing of the Democratic Party. As I have noted previously, the 2004 stolen-election theory was taken seriously at the highest levels of the party:
As Democratic Party chairman, [Terry McAuliffe] ordered a thoroughly bogus forensic “investigation” into crackpot theories that voting machines had stolen the 2004 election for Bush in Ohio. . . . Thirty-one Democrats voted, with no justifiable basis, against certifying Bush’s 2004 election, in which he won a national popular majority and carried Ohio by 118,000 votes. They included James Clyburn, now the House majority whip; Maxine Waters, now chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee; Bennie Thompson, now chairman of both the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack; Raúl Grijalva, now the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee; Eddie Bernice Johnson, now the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee; Ed Markey, now a senator; John Conyers, who served as chairman of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees; and John Lewis, who today is the namesake of the Democrats’ current election bill. Democrats who ducked that vote include House majority leader Steny Hoyer, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Senators Ben Cardin and Bob Menendez, and current House Intelligence Committee chairman and lead 2019 impeachment manager Adam Schiff.
Of course, it is awkward for Traister to be quite that explicit about where the rot is, and she deserves credit for naming some of the culprits who are quite close to home:
He has been friendly with many in the media, including Salon founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann Wenner. Kennedy’s campaign manager is Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio congressman. . . . Kennedy is trafficking in lines that have tremendous appeal to many on the left dismayed by the Biden presidency, so much so that some have been open about a willingness to ignore what they regard as the crazy. Talbot, author of two books on the previous generation of Kennedys and my former boss when I was a writer at Salon, endorsed Kennedy via Facebook in a series of posts. . . . The assumption that Kennedy would enter politics has been long-standing; this magazine put him on its cover in 1995, labeling him “a New York political player with a future.” He recalled he had considered running in 2000 for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s vacated New York Senate seat, the one Clinton wound up winning. “Because I was having family problems, I decided not to,” he said. Then when Clinton was tapped to head the State Department in 2008, Governor David Paterson “called me and offered me her Senate seat,” he said.
I was a young person in journalism in New York at the turn of the millennium when a lot of people I worked for and with were Kennedy’s dining companions, buddies, and neighbors. Peter Kaplan (another of my former bosses), then editor of the New York Observer, had been his roommate at Harvard and was one of his best friends. Kennedy and his cousin John Jr. — who ran the magazine George — were big handsome puppies who frolicked among a generation of political junkies who had grown up worshipping their dads and then wound up at the same schools, jobs, and parties as the sons. I saw this at Talk and the Observer and Salon; it was true at The New Yorker and the New York Times and The New Republic and The Atlantic and the places that published Kennedy from the 1970s on, providing him the mainstream credentials he cited when I asked him about his preparation for the presidency.
The clubbiness of liberal and progressive journalism, the gauzy gloss it drapes over young and ambitious Democrats, and the particular culture of Democratic family dynasties (among whom the Kennedys sit at the top of the pyramid) are all at fault for elevating and glamorizing such an irresponsible figure, when the signs were open and public for the past 40 years that this was a man who had no business in public life.