It all looked so promising in April 2023, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his “history-making” run for president as a proud Democrat, actually, hang on, make that vehemently anti-Democrat independent, and some strong early polling and fundraising, plus that video he posted of himself doing bare-chested push-ups in a parking lot, suggested a serious-ish candidacy but for the fact that it all threw a harsher light on his problematic backstory—the childhood traumas of his father’s and uncle’s assassinations, the expulsion from two boarding schools, the drug dealing, the years of heroin use, the years as an environmental lawyer (an interlude that now seems as out of character on his C.V. as it does in this sentence), the suicide of his second wife (whose coffin he later had secretly exhumed and removed from the Kennedy family plot), the subsequent discovery of a coded sex diary (“10” = intercourse) reflecting his self-described “lust demons,” his perverse belief that Sirhan B. Sirhan did not assassinate his father and should be paroled, the trained pet ravens—and in hindsight all that, combined with Kennedy’s surfeit of confidence and diminishing command of facts, might have foretold at least some of what was to come: the conspiracies detected everywhere, the hostility to science, his declaration that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” his comparison (in Berlin!) of lockdown to Nazi Germany, his implication that Anne Frank had it relatively easy because, unlike Americans forced to get vaccines, she could always hide in the attic (“reprehensible and insensitive,” said his wife, Cheryl Hines), the notion that the coronavirus was “ethnically targeted” and bypassed Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, the revelations about brain worms, the resurfaced photo ops with (a) a dead bear cub he transported to Central Park and left under a bicycle, and (b) a barbecued dog (or goat, as he insisted), the revisited whale decapitation and subsequent strapping of its head to the roof of the family car (no photo—yet), the sexual-assault accusation by a babysitter during that earlier marriage and his decades-later texted apology, the V.P. running-mate shortlist that included N.F.L. quarterback/fellow conspiracy buff Aaron Rodgers before the eventual selection of deep-pocketed Nicole Shanahan, who had bankrolled an unsettling Super Bowl ad that grafted Kennedy’s name onto a 1960 commercial for his uncle John F. Kennedy, the fact that more Russell Brands (one) than Kennedys endorsed him and that he in turn has now endorsed and will join the hypothetical transition team of a man he’s called a “terrible human being,” the “worst president ever,” and “probably a sociopath,” and finally, the tanking polls, evaporating fundraising, and “suspended” campaign (really a suspension of the suspension of disbelief that was his campaign), with everything leading, inevitably, to Ben Affleck, lately keeping company with Kennedy’s daughter Kick.
George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. He is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War
