Book Review: The Real RFK, Jr.

Cutting through Media Distortions and Caricature

A new biography by Dick Russell, The Real RFK, Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023), begins, “It would be difficult for you to have lived in America and not have a negative picture of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” This statement is undoubtedly true.

Although Kennedy was at one time the country’s leading champion of the environment, “this has been obfuscated,” continues Russell, “in recent years by the mass media’s labeling of him as an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘peddler of misinformation.’”  

Indeed, when I told my eldest son that l was going to work in support of Kennedy’s campaign for president, he responded, “Oh, the anti-vaxxer, that should be fun.”  But the work Kennedy  has done on this issue cannot be fairly characterized as “anti-vax,” but rather, it has been about vaccine safety and specifically about removing certain toxins such as mercury and aluminum from vaccines. A quote by Kennedy from the book really puts a finer point on this distinction,“I’ve spent thirty-seven years trying to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish. I’ve spent thirty-seven years trying to get pesticides out of food. Nobody calls me anti-food. I spent thirty years trying to improve fuel efficiency and get carbon fuel out of automobiles. Nobody calls me anti-energy.”

To try to educate both of my sons about Kennedy, I recently played the audio version of The Real RFK Jr. while we traveled by car to a family wedding. My sons were captivated by the story of Kennedy’s life and impressed by the many feats he has accomplished over a lifetime. This was not a story they had ever even caught a glimmer of before.

I am old enough to remember Kennedy’s great environmental work, described in the book, and, in particular, his successful work in saving the Hudson River Valley from near-environmental collapse. Indeed, I was going to law school at Columbia University in New York City, just a few short blocks from the Hudson, at the time Kennedy was doing this work.  It seemed that the sky was the limit for Kennedy’s professional and political career and that he might indeed follow in his uncle’s footsteps to the White House.  

I also was writing guest columns for Huffington Post at the same time Kennedy was doing so on a regular basis. Kennedy was also getting published in major outlets, such as Rolling Stone and The New York Times. However, something happened. After 2011, Kennedy was never published again in such publications. As I learned from Russell, he had become persona non grata and written off as a conspiracy nut.

Russell’s biography is an antidote to the mainstream media’s quite unfair caricature of  Kennedy. To this extent, the book makes for fascinating and critical reading.  However, with each turn of the page, I could not help but feel infuriated at how unfair the public characterization of Kennedy has been. For here is a man who has lived many lives; who has helped raise seven children; experienced many triumphs, particularly in the legal realm; suffered many tragedies; and who has nonetheless continued to survive and persevere. To see such a man reduced to a cartoon portrait is quite simply heartbreaking.

Of course, any biography of Kennedy must start with his upbringing in the most legendary political family of the United States. Kennedy is old enough to have known his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and to have visited him in the Oval Office, where he once brought his uncle the gift of a live salamander. I recently listened to an interview in which Kennedy described his uncle’s frequent trips to his family’s home for the weekend, from where he would conduct the business of the nation.  

Russell relates how Kennedy was taken out of school with his siblings to be told that his uncle had been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. If this were not traumatic enough, he was taken out of school several years later to be told that his own father had been shot during a presidential campaign event.  Russell describes the sad story of how, later, the young Kennedy realized his father was dead when he overheard people around him say that his father’s campaign offices should be shut down. At the time of his assassination, RFK Jr.’s father, who had just won the California Democratic Primary, seemed destined for the White House just as JFK. But this, sadly, would never be.

Russell reports how these traumas would, not surprisingly, haunt Kennedy for the rest of his life, and would lead him down a dark path of drug and alcohol addiction.  But Kennedy was able to overcome this addiction through the help of his faith. He is a devout Roman Catholic, who has had a life-long devotion to the saints, especially St. Francis. Also, his love of animals and nature helped in his recovery. He has been a falconer since a young age when his father gave him a raptor as a gift, while he was recovering from an injury. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has also been important for him. As Russell records in detail, Kennedy is quite forthcoming about his battles against addiction and is not afraid to say that he continues to attend daily AA meetings.

Such struggles, as depicted in the new biography, have only made Kennedy more empathetic to the struggles that all of us have to face. Russell explains that Kennedy realized that the only way to deal with such struggles is to live intentionally every day and to focus on doing the right thing, even in regard to the smallest of decisions. Many of  Kennedy’s reflections are recorded in the biography, including:

I started breaking my day down into about forty different little choices and each one took on a spiritual dimension. Simple things:  do I get up in the morning when my alarm goes off or do I sleep through or stay in bed with indolent thoughts? Do I hang up the towels, brush my teeth, make my bed as soon as I get up? Do I put water in the ice tray before I put it back in the freezer? When I go into the closet and put on a pair of pants and some of those wire hangers fall on the floor, do I shut the door like I used to and think I’m too busy to pick them up or that’s somebody else’s job?  Do I put the shopping cart back where they’re supposed to go?

Meanwhile, Kennedy has been able to focus with laser vision on the big picture as well throughout his life. 

The Real RFK Jr. explains that Kennedy was greatly influenced as a child by the book, Silent Spring, written by legendary environmentalist and author, Rachel Carson. Carson and her book were  attacked by corporate interests, which tried to suppress her revelations about the dangers of DDT and its impact on our food and environment. Russell relates how Kennedy had the pleasure of meeting Carson when she was a guest at the White House during his uncle’s term in office. Kennedy would go on to become a legendary environmentalist himself.

As discussed above, The Real RFK Jr. establishes the key role Kennedy played as a lawyer with the non-profit organization, Riverkeeper, in helping to save the Hudson River and its watershed. This was very personal for Kennedy.  As Russell tells the story, Kennedy had gone boating with his father as a youngster, witnessing, even back then, the degradation of the Hudson from waste and sewage, which were being directly dumped into the river. After receiving a masters in law (LLM) from PACE University Law School, Kennedy founded the PACE Environmental Law Center, which continues to this day to do important environmental-protection work.

Kennedy would then help found the Waterkeepers Alliance – the largest clean water advocacy group in the world. As The Real RFK Jr. notes, in total, Kennedy has helped to win or successfully settle 500 environmental lawsuits throughout his career.

Kennedy also served as a lead attorney in landmark and successful cases against E.I. Dupont, to challenge its degradation of the environment in West Virginia, and against Monsanto, in response to the damage being done by its Roundup weed killer. And Kennedy also successfully worked to kill fracking in the State of New York.

As someone who has participated in legal cases against major corporations for alleged human rights abuses—cases which literally brought me to the brink of despair at times—I was greatly impressed when I read of Kennedy’s feats in  environmental litigation.  Only someone with an iron will and an iron gut could participate in such litigation and go on to win time and again.

The book reveals a number of surprises. For example, I was surprised to learn that Kennedy spent thirty days in a maximum prison for his act of civil disobedience in attempting to end the U.S. Navy’s use of  the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for target practice. This protest proved successful, with the Navy ultimately agreeing to end the bombing of the island.  

Again, to learn of such a rich life and career made me realize just how unjust the media has been in attempting to reduce RFK Jr. to an alleged “anti-vaxxer.”

The book does not shy away from Kennedy’s vaccine safety work – work which Kennedy reluctantly took on only after scores of parents came to him with similar stories of children suffering what seemed to be almost immediate cognitive decline after receiving a series of vaccines.  

Whatever one may think about the merits of the vaccine issue, I certainly came away with a new-found respect for him as a human being and an advocate for children.  Kennedy came to this work honestly and has done what he believes in to try to help children, all the while knowing that he would suffer a loss of reputation and status by doing so. To me, this is the definition of morality and heroism.

The Real RFK JR. is a must-read for people wanting to take the measure of a man now making a run for the presidency—as his father and uncle before him.