Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, author, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccine activist, and serving since February 2025 as the 26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. A member of the Kennedy family, he is a son of senator and former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a nephew of 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 (NRDC). In 1986, he became an adjunct professor of environmental law at Pace University School of Law. In 1987, Kennedy founded Pace's Environmental Litigation Clinic. In 1999, He founded the nonprofit environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance. He first ran as a Democrat and later started an independent campaign in the 2024 United States presidential election, before withdrawing from the race and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Since 2005, Kennedy has promoted vaccine misinformation and public-health conspiracy theories, including 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 (1997), Crimes Against Nature (2004), The Real Anthony Fauci (2021), and A Letter to Liberals (2022).
Kennedy 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 a Boston suburb. 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. 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 his uncle, President 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 his experimentation with heroin and cocaine, often with his brother David, earning a reputation that has been described as a "pied piper" and "drug dealer".
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.
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 (NRDC) 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.
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.
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.
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 (2000), 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.
Beginning in 1991, Kennedy represented environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers in a series of lawsuits against New York City and upstate watershed polluters. Kennedy authored a series of articles and reports alleging that New York State was abdicating its responsibility to protect the water repository and supply. In 1996, he helped orchestrate the $1.2 billion New York City Watershed Agreement, which New York magazine recognized in its cover story, "The Kennedy Who Matters". This agreement, which Kennedy negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development.
In 2000, Kennedy and the environmental lawyer Kevin Madonna founded the environmental law firm Kennedy & Madonna, LLP, to represent private plaintiffs against polluters. The firm litigates environmental contamination cases on behalf of individuals, non-profit organizations, school districts, public water suppliers, Indian tribes, municipalities and states. In 2001, Kennedy & Madonna organized a team of prestigious plaintiff law firms to challenge pollution from industrial pork and poultry production. In 2004, the firm was part of a legal team that secured a $70 million settlement for property owners in Pensacola, Florida whose properties were contaminated by chemicals from an adjacent Superfund site.
Kennedy & Madonna was profiled in the 2010 HBO documentary Mann v. Ford, which chronicles four years of litigation by the firm on behalf of the Ramapough Mountain Indians against the Ford Motor Company for dumping toxic waste on tribal lands in northern New Jersey. In addition to a monetary settlement for the tribe, the lawsuit contributed to the community's land being relisted on the federal Superfund list, the first time that a delisted site was relisted.
In 2007, Kennedy was one of three finalists nominated by Public Justice as "Trial Lawyer of the Year" for his role in the $396 million jury verdict against DuPont for contamination from its Spelter, West Virginia, zinc plant. In 2017, the firm was part of the trial team that secured a $670 million settlement on behalf of over 3,000 residents from Ohio and West Virginia whose drinking water was contaminated by the toxic chemical perfluorooctanoic acid, which DuPont released into the environment in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
In 2016, Kennedy became counsel to the Morgan & Morgan law firm. The partnership arose from the two firms' successful collaboration on the case against SoCalGas Company following the Aliso Canyon gas leak in California. In 2017, Kennedy and his partners sued Monsanto in federal court in San Francisco, on behalf of plaintiffs seeking to recover damages for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases that, the plaintiffs allege, were a result of exposure to Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup. Kennedy and his team also filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto for failing to warn consumers about the dangers allegedly posed by exposure to Roundup.
In September 2018, Kennedy and his partners filed a class-action lawsuit against Columbia Gas of Massachusetts alleging negligence following gas explosions in three towns north of Boston. Of Columbia Gas, Kennedy said "as they build new miles of pipe, the same company is ignoring its existing infrastructure, which we now know is eroding and is dilapidated".
In 2005, Kennedy clashed with national environmental groups over his opposition to the Cape Wind Project, a proposed offshore wind farm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (in Nantucket Sound). Taking the side of Cape Cod's commercial fishing industry, Kennedy argued that the project was a costly boondoggle. This position angered some environmentalists, and Kennedy was criticized by commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and John Stossel, the latter of whom called him a hypocrite. In The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy wrote, "Vermont wants to take its nuclear plant off line and replace it with clean, green power from Hydro-Québec—power available to Massachusetts utilities—at a cost of six cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). Cape Wind electricity, by a conservative estimate and based on figures they filed with the state, comes in at 25 cents per kwh."
In 1999, Kennedy, Chris Bartle and John Hoving created a bottled water company, Keeper Springs, which donated all of its profits to Waterkeeper Alliance.
Kennedy was a venture partner and senior advisor at VantagePoint Capital Partners, one of the world's largest cleantech venture capital firms. Among other activities, VantagePoint was the original and largest pre-IPO institutional investor in Tesla, Inc. VantagePoint also backed BrightSource Energy and Solazyme, amongst others. Kennedy is a board member and counselor to several of Vantage Point's portfolio companies in the water and energy space, including Ostara, a Vancouver-based company that markets the technology to remove phosphorus and other excessive nutrients from wastewater, transforming otherwise pollution directly into high-grade fertilizer. He is also a senior advisor to Starwood Energy Group and has played a key role in a number of the firm's investments.
He is on the board of Vionx, a Massachusetts-based utility-scale vanadium flow battery systems manufacturer. On October 5, 2017, Vionx, National Grid and the U.S. Department of Energy completed the installation of advanced flow batteries at Holy Name High School in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. The collaboration also includes Siemens and the United Technologies Research Center and constitutes one of the largest energy storage facilities in Massachusetts.
Kennedy helped found and served on the board of the New York League of Conservation Voters.
Kennedy is a partner in ColorZen, which offers a turnkey-cotton-fiber pre-treatment solution that reduces water usage and toxic discharges in the cotton-dyeing process.
Kennedy was a co-owner and director of the smart-grid company Utility Integration Solutions (UISol), which was acquired by Alstom. He is presently a co-owner and director of GridBright, the market-leading grid management specialist.
In October 2011, Kennedy co-founded EcoWatch, an environmental news site. He resigned from its board of directors in January 2018.
In his first case as an environmental attorney, Kennedy represented the NAACP in a lawsuit against a proposal to build a garbage transfer station in a minority neighborhood in Ossining, New York. In 1987, he successfully sued Westchester County to reopen the Croton Point Park, which was primarily used by poor and minority communities from the Bronx. He then forced the reopening of the Pelham Bay Park, which New York City had closed to the public and converted to a police firing range.
Starting in 1985, Kennedy helped develop the international program for environmental, energy, and human rights of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), traveling to Canada and Latin America to assist indigenous tribes in protecting their homelands and opposing large-scale energy and extractive projects in remote wilderness areas.
In 1990, Kennedy assisted indigenous Pehuenches in Chile in a partially successful campaign to stop the construction of a series of dams on Chile's iconic Biobío River. That campaign derailed all but one of the proposed dams. Beginning in 1992, he assisted the Cree Indians of northern Quebec in their campaign against Hydro-Québec to halt construction of some 600 proposed dams on eleven rivers in James Bay.
In 1993, Kennedy and NRDC, working with the indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival, clashed with other American environmental groups in a dispute about the rights of Indians to govern their own lands in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Kennedy represented the CONFENIAE, a confederation of Indian peoples, in negotiation with the American oil company Conoco to limit oil development in Ecuadorian Amazon and, at the same time, obtain benefits from resource extraction for Amazonian tribes. Kennedy was a vocal critic of Texaco for its previous record for polluting the Ecuadoran Amazon.
From 1993 to 1999, Kennedy worked with five Vancouver Island Indian tribes in their campaign to end industrial logging by MacMillan Bloedel in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. In 1996, he met with Cuban president Fidel Castro to persuade him to halt his plans to construct a nuclear power plant at Juraguá. During the meeting, Castro reminisced about Kennedy's father and uncle, speculating that U.S. relations with Cuba would have been far better had President Kennedy not been assassinated.
Between 1996 and 2000, Kennedy and the NRDC helped Mexican commercial fishermen halt Mitsubishi's proposal to build a salt facility in the Laguna San Ignacio, an area in Baja where gray whales breed and nurse their calves. Kennedy wrote in opposition to the project, and took the campaign to Japan, meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. In 2000, he assisted local environmental activists to stop Chaffin Light, a real estate developer, and U.S. engineering giant Bechtel from building a large hotel and resort development that, Kennedy argued, threatened coral reefs and public beaches used by local Bahamians, at Clifton Bay, New Providence Island.
Kennedy was one of the early editors of Indian Country Today, North America's largest Native American newspaper. He helped lead the opposition to the damming of the Futaleufú River in the Southern Zone of Chile. In 2016, due to the pressure precipitated by the Futaleufú Riverkeepers campaign against the dams, the Spanish power company Endesa, which owned the right to dam the river, reversed its decision and relinquished all claims to the Futaleufú.
Kennedy has been a critic of environmental damage by the U.S. military.
In a 2001 article, Kennedy described how he sued the U.S. Navy on behalf of fishermen and residents of Vieques, an island of Puerto Rico, to stop weapons testing, bombing, and other military exercises. Kennedy argued that the activities were unnecessary, and that the Navy had illegally destroyed several endangered species, polluted the island's waters, harmed the residents' health, and damaged its economy. He was arrested for trespassing at Camp Garcia Vieques, the U.S. Navy training facility, where he and others were protesting the use of a section of the island for training. Kennedy served 30 days in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico.
The trespassing incident forced the suspension of live-fire exercises for almost three hours. The lawsuits and protests by Kennedy, and hundreds of Puerto Ricans who were also imprisoned, eventually forced the termination of naval bombing in Vieques by the Bush administration.
In a 2003 article for the Chicago Tribune, Kennedy called the U.S. federal government "America's biggest polluter" and the U.S. Department of Defense the worst offender. Citing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he wrote, "unexploded ordnance waste can be found on 16,000 military ranges ... and more than half may contain biological or chemical weapons."
Kennedy considered running for political office in 2000 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a U.S. senator from New York, did not seek reelection to the seat formerly held by Kennedy's father.
In 2005, Kennedy considered running for New York attorney general in the 2006 election, which would have put him up against his then-brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo, but he ultimately chose not to, despite being considered the front-runner.
On December 2, 2008, Kennedy said he did not want New York Governor David Paterson to nominate him to the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Hillary Clinton, Obama's nominee for Secretary of State. Some outlets indicated that Kennedy was a possible candidate for the position. He said that Senate service would leave him too little time with his family.
As a "well-respected climate lawyer" in the 2000s, Kennedy was "often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations", including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. He was considered as a potential chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.
According to Politico, the Obama transition team decided not to nominate Kennedy due to his past heroin conviction and opposition from Senate Republicans. Then United States Chamber of Commerce lobbyist William Kovacs said that Kennedy's nomination "would speak volumes as to where Obama is going with his appointments ... A Kennedy appointment is as liberal as you can possibly get ... There is no one [candidate] based firmer in extremes." Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma also criticized the proposal, saying Kennedy was too radical and would further a left-wing agenda if appointed.
In a speech in New Hampshire on March 3, 2023, Kennedy said he was considering a run for president in 2024: "I am thinking about it. I've passed the biggest hurdle, which is that my wife has greenlighted it."
Kennedy filed his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on April 5, 2023. He formally declared his candidacy at a campaign launch event at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on April 19. On October 9, he became an independent candidate in the election. He is the fifth member of his family to seek the presidency.
Listing many false conspiracy theories that Kennedy used during campaign appearances, PolitiFact named his presidential campaign its 2023 "lie of the year".
In May 2024, Kennedy was considered for the Libertarian Party's nomination for president, but lost to Chase Oliver. In Colorado, the state Libertarian Party selected Kennedy, but Oliver appeared on the ballot as the Libertarian nominee.
Kennedy's campaign was noted for receiving significant support from Republican donors and Trump allies who believed he would serve as a "spoiler", taking the votes of those who would have otherwise voted for the Democratic nominee. In August 2023, it was revealed that Timothy Mellon, who gave $15 million to Donald Trump's super PAC MAGA Inc., also donated $5 million to Kennedy's super PAC, making him Kennedy's largest single donor. Mellon donated another $5 million to Kennedy's super PAC in April and another $50 million to MAGA Inc. in May. In July 2024, Forbes reported that Mellon had donated $25 million to Kennedy and Kennedy-affiliated groups.
In August, facing declining poll numbers, limited campaign funds, and increasing challenges to ballot access, the Kennedy campaign began appealing to the Harris and Trump campaigns, seeking a cabinet post in exchange for an endorsement. Harris reportedly rebuffed Kennedy, but Trump said he "probably would [consider the offer], if something like that would happen". On August 22, the Kennedy campaign filed to be removed from the Arizona ballot amid reports he would drop out to endorse Trump.
On August 23, Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump, saying he intended to maintain ballot placement in certain non-swing states. This was a reversal for Kennedy, who had previously said he would "under no circumstances" join Trump on a presidential ticket, that his and Trump's positions "could not be further apart", and that Trump was a "terrible human being", a "discredit to democracy", and "probably a sociopath". In his speech endorsing Trump, Kennedy described speaking with Trump and his advisers and said he discovered that he and Trump were "aligned on many key issues".
Days before the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump said that Kennedy would have "a big role in health care". According to The Washington Post, Kennedy's position was not originally meant to be one requiring Senate confirmation. On November 14, after winning the election, Trump announced his intention to nominate Kennedy for secretary of health and human services (HHS).
In December 2024, more than 75 Nobel Laureates urged the U.S. Senate to oppose Kennedy's nomination, saying he would "put the public's health in jeopardy".
During the week of December 16, 2024, Kennedy began meeting with senators in advance of his confirmation hearings.
As of January 9, 2025, over 17,000 doctors who are members of Committee to Protect Health Care, had signed an open letter urging the Senate to oppose Kennedy's nomination, arguing that Kennedy had spent decades undermining public confidence in vaccines and spreading false claims and conspiracy theories, that he was a danger to national healthcare, and that he was unqualified to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, said putting Kennedy in charge of a health agency would be like "putting a flat earther in charge of NASA". As of January 24, 2025, more than 80 organizations had voiced opposition to Kennedy's nomination.
In January 2025, the Senate Committee on Finance and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) held hearings on Kennedy's nomination. Senator Bernie Sanders, the committee's ranking member, was critical of Kennedy during the hearing.
Kennedy disclosed to an HHS ethics official his arrangement with a law firm specializing in pharmaceutical drug injury cases, Wisner Baum, whereby Kennedy earns 10% of fees awarded in contingency cases that he refers to the firm. If confirmed as HHS director, Kennedy would retain the arrangement only in cases that do not directly affect the federal government. He listed his income from Wisner Baum for this arrangement as $856,559. Before assuming the position of director of HHS, he will have from the law firm the complete and final payments for concluded cases against the U.S. government. He added that will assign his son his interests in litigation against the maker of Gardasil, a vaccine given to prevent cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).
On February 4, 2025, the Senate Committee on Finance voted 14–13 to forward Kennedy's nomination to a full Senate vote. The deciding vote was from Bill Cassidy, who was originally hesitant, but said he had received "serious commitments" from the Trump administration and "honest counsel" from Vice President JD Vance in exchange for his support of Kennedy's nomination. According to the Senate HELP Committee site, Cassidy said that he was a doctor who had practiced for 30 years before becoming a politician. He told the committee that he had a patient with acute hepatitis B who needed a liver transplant and had to be transported by Medi-vac. He called the transplant "an invasive, quarter-of-a-million-dollar surgery—in 2000—that, even if successful, would leave this young woman with a lifetime of $50,000 per year medical bills", adding, "As I saw her take off, I was so depressed. A $50 of vaccine could have prevented this all".
Of the two committees that Kennedy spoke before, only the Senate Finance was to vote on his nomination.
On February 13, 2025, the Senate confirmed Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services by a vote of 52 to 48, with former Senate Republican Conference leader Mitch McConnell the sole Republican to vote against him. A polio survivor, McConnell was critical of efforts to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. He said, "anyone seeking the Senate's consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts".
On February 13, 2025, Kennedy was sworn in as the 26th secretary of health and human services in the Oval Office by Justice Neil Gorsuch. He is the first independent or third-party presidential candidate to become a cabinet member after running for president.
Minutes later, Trump signed Executive Order 14211, which ordered the creation of a "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) Commission to be chaired by Kennedy. Its objectives include investigating the incidence and causes of chronic childhood diseases and "assess[ing] the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs".
The next morning, agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were informed that approximately 5,200 newly hired federal health workers were to be fired that day.
On February 20, 2025, during an unusually severe influenza season, HHS instructed the CDC to suspend its ad campaign promoting flu vaccination. The advertising, in part a response to declining flu vaccination rates, promoted the message that vaccination would result in much milder symptoms and lower chances of becoming severely ill for those with the flu.
Kennedy's tenure began during a measles outbreak in the southwestern U.S., including the first measles death in a decade. The Texas Department of State Health Services reported 146 cases, 20 hospitalizations, and one death in late February. In his first public comments, on February 26, Kennedy said there had been two deaths and that "there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. So it's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year." Such outbreaks of the disease had been declared domestically eliminated. He also falsely claimed that the people hospitalized were done so "mainly for quarantine", a claim healthcare professionals refuted. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wrote: "Nothing about kids dying from measles is normal. Anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. and the Republicans who enable them are responsible for every single one of these deaths."
Days later, Kennedy called the outbreak a "top priority" for the department. His messaging regarding the outbreak cited fringe theories blaming poor diet and health. He promoted cod liver oil, steroid inhalation, an antibiotic, vitamin A, and other questionable treatments that he called "almost miraculous". While recommending vaccination against measles, he also overstated the vaccine's possible harms and suggested that acquiring immunity from catching the disease would be better. The CDC says that the MMR vaccine is "much safer than getting measles, mumps, or rubella". The antibiotic is not effective against a viral disease such as measles. Vitamin A is part of measles treatment primarily in areas where children may be deficient in the vitamin.
On February 28, HHS top spokesperson Thomas Corry abruptly resigned, two weeks after being sworn in as the assistant secretary of public affairs. He reportedly clashed with Kennedy over his management of the department during the measles outbreak.
On March 2, Kennedy was criticized for writing an op-ed for Fox News that called vaccines a "personal choice" and recommended vitamins and good nutrition to combat measles. But he also wrote in the piece: "Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons."
After Kennedy took to the media to falsely claim that vitamin A is both a prophylactic and treatment for measles, doctors in Texas began to see children infected with measles also having symptoms of vitamin A toxicity.
On March 28, Kennedy told Peter Marks, the head of FDA's vaccine program, that he should resign or be fired. Marks wrote a resignation letter that lamented Kennedy's attempts to erode trust in vaccines: "It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies." Days earlier, the CDC head of communications said after his own resignation, "Kennedy and his team are working to bend science to fit their own narratives, rather than allowing facts to guide policy."
Kennedy is a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm has said that Kennedy's "anti-vaccine disinformation" is effective "because it's portrayed to the public with graphs and figures and what appears to be scientific data. He has perfected the art of illusion of fact." Osterholm added:
Kennedy has said that he is not against vaccines but wants them to be more thoroughly tested and investigated. In Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak (2015), he writes that he does not see himself as anti-vaccine: "People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible." But in July 2023, Kennedy said, "There's no vaccine that is safe and effective."
In January 2024, Kennedy published a podcast about Lyme disease in which he said it is "highly likely to have been a military weapon" developed at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Multiple experts and authoritative sources have debunked the charge and called it "absurd".
From 2015 to 2023, Kennedy chaired the Children's Health Defense, formerly known as the World Mercury Project, an anti-vaccine advocacy group he joined in 2015. In its early years, the group focused on mercury in industry and medicine, especially the ethylmercury used in thimerosal in vaccines.
The group alleges that exposure to certain chemicals and radiation has caused a wide range of conditions in many American children, including autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), food allergies, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. Children's Health Defense has blamed and campaigned against vaccines, fluoridation of drinking water, paracetamol (acetaminophen), aluminum, and wireless communication, among other things. The group has been identified as one of two major buyers of anti-vaccine Facebook advertising in late 2018 and early 2019. Members of his family have criticized Kennedy and his organization, saying he spreads "dangerous misinformation" and that his work has "heartbreaking" consequences.
Kennedy and Children's Health Defense have falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. Kennedy focused on the subset of vaccines that contained thimerosal, a mercury-based anti-microbial that has been falsely claimed to cause autism. Thimerosal has never been used in MMR, chickenpox, pneumococcal conjugate, or inactivated polio vaccines. In 2001, thimerosal was removed from all other childhood (under 6 years old) vaccines except for a few versions of flu and hepatitis vaccines. No childhood vaccine now contains more than traces (1 microgram or less) of thimerosal, except for flu, which is also available without thimerosal in the U.S. For those 6 years and older, including pregnant women, all vaccines are now available in versions with only trace amounts of thimerosal.
In April 2015, Kennedy participated in a Speakers' Forum to promote the film Trace Amounts, which promotes the discredited claim of a link between autism and mercury in vaccinations. At a screening, he called the increased cases of autism (which he calls an "autism epidemic") a "holocaust".
In 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate said that Kennedy uses his status as an environmental activist to bolster the anti-vaccination movement, regularly appearing in online conversations with the discredited British former doctor Andrew Wakefield, the anti-vaccination activist Del Bigtree, and the conspiracy theorist Rashid Buttar. Kennedy is listed as executive producer of Vaxxed II: The People's Truth, the 2019 sequel to Wakefield's and Bigtree's anti-vaccination propaganda film Vaxxed.
In February 2021, Kennedy's Instagram account was deleted "for repeatedly sharing debunked claims" about COVID-19 vaccines. In March 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Kennedy as one of 12 people responsible for up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.
Kennedy has said that governments and the media are conspiring to deny that vaccines cause autism.
In June 2005, Kennedy wrote an article, "Deadly Immunity", that appeared in both Rolling Stone and Salon.com and alleged a government conspiracy to conceal a connection between thimerosal and childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. The article contained factual errors, leading Salon to issue five corrections. Joan Walsh, Salon.com's editor-in-chief at the time and the sole Salon editor of the piece, said she had mistakenly relied on Rolling Stone's fact-checking, a process she later learned was "less than arduous". As soon as the piece was up, she said, "We were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data ... It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired."
In 2011, Salon.com retracted the article in its entirety. It said the retraction was motivated by accumulating evidence of alleged errors and scientific fraud underlying the vaccine-autism claim. A corrected version of the original article was published on Rolling Stone's website. Kennedy said on The Joe Rogan Experience—and was paraphrased in The New York Times as saying—that "Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry." Walsh responded: "That's just another lie. We caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences."
In May 2013, Kennedy delivered the keynote address at the anti-vaccination AutismOne / Generation Rescue conference.
In 2014, Kennedy's book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury – a Known Neurotoxin – from Vaccines, was published. While methylmercury is a potent neurotoxin, thimerosal is not. According to the CDC, there is "no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines". The book's preface is by Mark Hyman, a proponent of the alternative medical treatment called functional medicine. Kennedy has published many articles on the inclusion of thimerosal in vaccines.
On January 10, 2017, incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that Kennedy and President-elect Donald Trump met to discuss a position in the Trump administration. Kennedy said afterward that he had accepted an offer from Trump to chair the Vaccine Safety Task Force, but a spokeswoman for Trump's transition said that no final decision had been made. In an August 2017 interview with STAT News reporter Helen Branswell, Kennedy said that he had been meeting with federal public health regulators at the White House's request to discuss defects in vaccine safety science.
On February 15, 2017, Kennedy and the actor Robert De Niro gave a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in which they said the press was working for the vaccination industry and did not allow debates on vaccination science. They offered a $100,000 reward to any journalist or citizen who could point to a study showing that it is safe to inject mercury into babies and pregnant women at levels currently contained in flu vaccines. Craig Foster, a psychology professor who studies pseudoscience, deemed the challenge "not science", calling it a "carefully constructed 'contest' that allows its creators to generate the misleading outcome they presumably want to see". Foster added, "Proving that something is safe is importantly different than proving that something is harmful."
On June 4, 2019, during a visit to Samoa, coinciding with its 57th annual independence celebration, Kennedy appeared in an Instagram photo with Australian-Samoan anti-vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein. Kennedy's charity and Winterstein have both perpetuated the allegation that the MMR vaccine played a role in the 2018 deaths of two Samoan infants, despite the subsequent revelation that the infants had mistakenly received a muscle relaxant along with the vaccine. Kennedy has drawn criticism for fueling vaccine hesitancy amid a social climate, that gave rise to the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak, which killed over 70 people, and the 2019 Tonga measles outbreak.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy promoted multiple conspiracy theories related to COVID, including false claims that Anthony Fauci and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were trying to profit off a vaccine, and suggesting that Bill Gates would cut off access to money of people who do not get vaccinated, allowing them to starve. In August 2020, Kennedy appeared in an hour-long interview with Alec Baldwin on Instagram and touted a number of incorrect and misleading claims about vaccines and public health measures related to the pandemic. Public health officials and scientists criticized Baldwin for letting Kennedy's claims go unchallenged.
In May 2021, Kennedy petitioned the FDA to rescind authorization for all current and future COVID vaccines. The vaccines had saved about 140,000 lives in the United States. John Moore, a professor of immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, called Kennedy's request "an appalling error of judgment".
Kennedy has promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, falsely suggesting that it contributed to the death of Hank Aaron and others. In February 2021, his Instagram account was blocked for "repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines". The Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Kennedy as one of the main propagators of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and 5G phone technology. His conspiracy theory activities considerably increased his social media impact. Between the spring and fall of 2020, his Instagram account grew from 121,000 followers to 454,000.
Kennedy has expressed skepticism about the COVID-19 pandemic, contending that it served to benefit billionaires. According to Kennedy, the pandemic resulted in a "$4.4 trillion shift in wealth from the American middle class to this new oligarchy that we created—500 new billionaires with the lockdowns, and the billionaires that we already had increased their wealth by 30%".
In November 2021, Kennedy's book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health was published. In it, Kennedy alleges that Fauci sabotaged treatments for AIDS, violated federal laws, and conspired with Bill Gates and social media companies such as Facebook to suppress information about COVID-19 cures, to leave vaccines as the only option to fight the pandemic. In the book, Kennedy calls Fauci a "powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020's historic coup d'état against Western democracy". He claims without proof that Fauci and Gates had schemed to prolong the pandemic and exaggerate its effects, promoting expensive vaccinations for the benefit of "a powerful vaccine cartel".
The book repeats several discredited myths about the COVID-19 pandemic, notably about the effectiveness of ivermectin. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that in the book "polemics alternate with chapters that pedantically seek to substantiate Kennedy's accusations with numerous quotations and studies". Kennedy also released a video depicting Fauci with a Hitler mustache. In response to the book, Fauci called Kennedy "a very disturbed individual" and has publicly said that, having met with Kennedy to discuss vaccines early during his tenure in the Trump administration, he "[doesn't] know what's going on in [Kennedy's] head, but it's not good".
Kennedy wrote the foreword to Plague of Corruption, a 2020 book by the former research scientist and the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits.
In August 2020, Kennedy appeared as a speaker at a partially violent demonstration in Berlin where populist groups called for an end to restrictions caused by COVID-19. His YouTube account was removed in late September 2021 for breaking the company's new policies on vaccine misinformation.
In January 2022, during a speech at an anti-vaccination rally on the National Mall in Washington D.C., Kennedy said: "Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide." The Auschwitz Memorial responded on Twitter: "Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany—including children like Anne Frank—in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay." Kennedy's wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, also condemned his comments, tweeting that the reference to Frank was "reprehensible and insensitive". Two days later, Kennedy apologized for his comment. In June 2023, Instagram reinstated his account.
In July 2023, at a private dinner, Kennedy was recorded saying, "There is an argument that [COVID-19] is ethnically targeted", adding, "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are the most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese ... we don't know whether it's deliberately targeted or not." The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League immediately condemned his remarks, with the latter saying that Kennedy's statement "feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories".
Kennedy responded that he "never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews" and that he does not "believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered". He explained his remarks by citing a 2021 study that he said showed that "COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races" due to racial differences in the effectiveness of COVID-19's furin cleave docking site, thus serving "as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons".
Experts roundly criticized these further claims, pointing out that the study said nothing about Chinese people or bioweapons and that Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews contract COVID-19 at rates similar to other ethnic groups and nationalities. The virologist Angela Rasmussen said, "Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism."
Kennedy targets Black Americans with anti-vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories, linking vaccination with instances of medical racism such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Echoing others in the anti-vaccination movement, Children's Health Defense claimed that the U.S. government seeks to harm ethnic minorities by prioritizing them for COVID-19 vaccines. In March 2021, Children's Health Defense released an anti-vaccine propaganda video, "Medical Racism: The New Apartheid", that promotes COVID-19 conspiracy theories and claims that COVID-19 vaccination efforts are medical experiments on Black people. Kennedy appears in the video, inviting viewers to disregard information dispensed by health authorities and doctors. Brandi Collin-Dexter, a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said, "the notorious figures and false narratives in the documentary were recognizable" and "the film's incompatible narratives sought to take advantage of the pain felt by Black communities." At the urging of disinformation experts, the film was removed from Facebook, but Kennedy was permitted to keep his account.
In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy writes that he takes "no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS", but spent over 100 pages quoting HIV denialists such as Peter Duesberg who question the isolation of HIV and the etiology of AIDS. Kennedy refers to the "orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS" and the "theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS", and repeats the false HIV/AIDS denialist claim that no one has isolated the HIV virion and "No one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs." He also repeats the false claim that the early AIDS drug AZT is "absolutely fatal" due to its "horrendous toxicity".
Molecular biologist Dan Wilson noted that Kennedy falsely claims that Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, was a "convert" to Duesberg's fringe hypothesis. Wilson concludes that Kennedy is a "full blown" HIV/AIDS denialist. Epidemiologist Tara C. Smith suggests that Kennedy's book "even flirts with outright germ theory denial", quoting from a portion in which Kennedy contrasts the germ theory of disease with terrain theory and another in which he writes that Louis Pasteur "is said to have recanted" germ theory on his deathbed in favor of Antoine Béchamp's terrain theory, an unproven claim that circulates among germ theory denialists.
Several members of Kennedy's close family have distanced themselves from his anti-vaccination activities and conspiracy theories on public health, and condemned his comments equating public health measures with Nazi war crimes. On May 8, 2019, his niece Maeve Kennedy McKean and elder siblings Kathleen and Joseph wrote an open letter saying that while Kennedy has championed many admirable causes, he "has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines". They also cited the roles played by President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy in (respectively) signing and reauthorizing the Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962.
On December 30, 2020, another niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a physician, wrote a similar open letter, saying that her uncle published misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines' side effects. John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline Kennedy said her family was generally united in supporting public health infrastructure, citing the work of Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She added, "I think Bobby Kennedy [Jr.]'s views on vaccines are dangerous, but I don't think that most Americans share them, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens."
On January 28, 2025, Caroline Kennedy publicly denounced Kennedy in a letter she sent U.S. senators and in a video of her reading the letter, calling him a "predator" and a "hypocrite" who was unqualified to be the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. She accused him of animal cruelty and "encouraging" other family members, such as his brother David Kennedy, into substance abuse that led to addiction, illness, and death. Caroline Kennedy's cousin Stephen Smith Jr. said, "I completely support my cousin Caroline's view that RFK Jr. is unqualified in terms of experience and character for the role of Secty of HHS."
Kennedy's political rhetoric often uses conspiracy theories.
Kennedy has argued that poor communities shoulder a disproportionate burden of environmental pollution. Speaking at the 2016 South by Southwest environment conference, he said, "Polluters always choose the soft target of poverty", noting that Chicago's South Side has the highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in the U.S., and added that 80% of "uncontrolled toxic waste dumps" are in black neighborhoods, with the largest site in Emelle, Alabama, which is 90% black.
Kennedy has said that "systematic" erosion of the middle class is taking place, remarking in a 2023 interview with UnHerd that American politicians have "been systematically hollowing out the American middle class and printing money to make billionaires richer". He said that the financial industry and the military–industrial complex are funded at the expense of the American middle class; that the U.S. government is dominated by corporate power; the Environmental Protection Agency is run by the "oil industry, the coal industry, and the pesticide industry"; and that the Food and Drug Administration is dominated by "Big Pharma". Kennedy sees a "vibrant middle class" as the economy's backbone and has said that the economy has deteriorated because the middle class has become poorer.
In an interview with Andrew Serwer, Kennedy said that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. had become too great and that "the very wealthy people should pay more taxes and corporations". He also expressed support for Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax plan, which would impose an annual tax of 2% on every dollar of a household's net worth over $50 million and 6% on every dollar of net worth over $1 billion.
Kennedy is critical of the United States' alliances with dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. He criticized the Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni civil war, calling it a "genocide against the Iranian-backed Houthi tribe". Kennedy is a supporter of Israel. In December 2023, he had a heated exchange with Breaking Points host Krystal Ball, in what Rabbi Shmuley Boteach called "the single greatest defense of Israel on videos since the start of the" Gaza war. In a March 2025 HHS news release, he referred to student protests against Israel's actions in Gaza as "anti-semitism" and the product of "woke cancel culture".
An opponent of the military industry and foreign interventions, Kennedy was critical of the Iraq War as well as American support for Ukraine against Russia's invasion of the country. He condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but called the Russo-Ukrainian War "a U.S. war against Russia" and said the war's goal was to "sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons". He called for a peace agreement in Ukraine based on the Minsk Accords; in his view, the Donbas region should remain in Ukraine but also be given territorial autonomy and placed under the jurisdiction of United Nations peacekeeping forces, while Aegis missile systems should be removed from Eastern Europe.
Kennedy said Ukraine should be forbidden from joining NATO, and announced that as president he would consider admitting Russia to NATO and deescalating tensions with China. He said the 2014 Ukrainian revolution was an attempted coup sponsored by the U.S. against the Ukrainian government, and that the Ukrainian government committed atrocities against the Russian population in Donbas, wrongly claiming that all casualties of the Donbas War between 2014 and 2022 (about 14,000) were Russians. He said that Russians living there "were being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government".
Kennedy denounced the operations of former CIA director Allen Dulles, condemning U.S.-backed coups and interventions such as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état as "bloodthirsty", and blamed U.S. interventions in countries such as Syria and Iran for the rise of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and creating anti-American sentiment in the region. Kennedy said the CIA has no accountability and declared his intention to restructure the agency.
Kennedy's disapproval of U.S. intervention in foreign governments was expressed in a 1974 Atlantic Monthly article titled "Poor Chile", discussing the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. He also wrote editorials against the execution of Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. In 1975, he published an article in The Wall Street Journal criticizing assassination as a foreign policy tool. In 2005, he wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times decrying President Bush's use of torture as anti-American. His uncle Senator Ted Kennedy entered the article into the Congressional Record.
In an article titled "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria" published in Politico in February 2016, Kennedy referred to the "bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists 'hate us for our freedoms.' For the most part they don't; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders." Kennedy blames the Syrian war on a pipeline dispute. He cites apparent WikiLeaks disclosures alleging that the CIA led military and intelligence planners to foment a Sunni uprising against Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, following his rejection of a proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline through Syria in 2009, well before the Arab Spring.
In a June 2023 interview, Kennedy said that in broad terms, he believes that U.S. foreign relations should involve significantly reducing the military presence in other nations. He specifically said the country must "start unraveling the Empire" by closing U.S. bases in different locations worldwide.
Kennedy believes that the administration of President Joe Biden, in large part, caused the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia due to reckless and militant action; he has specifically cited the issue of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. At the same time, he has clarified that he refuses to connect this criticism with anything considered support of the government of Russia under Putin, particularly given Kennedy's ethical opposition to the regime's beliefs and politics. He has called Putin a "monster", a "thug", and a "gangster". He also criticized the Trump and Biden administrations' "provocative policies" in regard to U.S. relations with China, saying that "China does not want a hot war" and calling for a reduction in tensions.
In 2023, Kennedy said he was "arguably the leading environmentalist in the country". He promotes populist and anti-establishment environmental policies, claiming that "Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys' club in Davos" have hijacked the climate crisis. In a 2015 interview, Kennedy said of politicians skeptical of global warming that he "wished there were a law you could punish them under". He has said that environmentalists' priority should be to tackle the "carbon industry". He has called the current society and economy unsustainable and largely based on a "longtime deadly addiction to coal and oil" and contended that the economic system rewards pollution. In 2020, Kennedy said: "Right now, we have a market that is governed by rules that were written by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most war-mongering fields from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome and patriotic fields from heaven."
Kennedy has advocated for a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but has opposed hydropower from dams. He has argued that switching to solar and wind energy reduces costs and greenhouse gases while improving air and water quality, citizens' health, and the number and quality of jobs. Kennedy's fight to stop Appalachian mountaintop removal mining was the subject of the film The Last Mountain.
In one of his first environmental cases, Kennedy sued Mobil Oil for polluting the Hudson. He had been an early supporter of natural gas as a viable bridge fuel to renewables and a cleaner alternative to coal, but said he turned against this controversial extraction method after investigating its cost to public health, climate, and road infrastructure. As a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's fracking commission, Kennedy helped engineer a 2013 ban on fracking in New York State.
In 2013, Kennedy assisted the Chipewyan First Nation and the Beaver Lake Cree in fighting to protect their land from tar sands production. In February 2013, while protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline Kennedy, along with his son, Conor, was arrested for blocking a thoroughfare in front of the White House during a protest.
In 2015, Kennedy mounted a national effort against the construction of liquefied natural gas facilities.
In August 2016, Kennedy and Waterkeepers participated in protests to block the extension of the Dakota Access pipeline across the Sioux Indian Standing Rock Reservation's water supply.
Kennedy has maintained that the oil industry remains competitive against renewables and electric cars only due to massive direct and indirect subsidies and political interventions on behalf of the oil industry. In a June 2017 interview on EnviroNews, he said of the oil industry, "That's what their strategy is: build as many miles of pipeline as possible. And what the industry is trying to do is to increase that level of infrastructure investment so our country won't be able to walk away from it".
Kennedy stated his support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal resolution, saying in a 2020 interview, "I think the Green New Deal and all that stuff is important. We ought to be pursuing it. My approach is more market-based than kind of top-down dictates. You know, I believe that we should use market mechanisms like carbon taxes and the elimination of subsidies."
Kennedy has spoken against geoengineering, saying that geoengineering solutions are an attempt by big business to profit from climate change.
Kennedy has expressed support for regenerative farming, and in May 2023, he voiced support for agrarian movements, saying, "If we want to have democracy, we need a broad ownership of our land by a wide variety of yeoman farmers, each with a stake in our system." In 1995, Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta declared Kennedy persona non grata in the province due to his activism against Alberta's large-scale hog production facilities. In 2002, Smithfield Foods sued Kennedy in Poland under a Polish law that makes criticizing a corporation illegal after he denounced the company in a debate with Smithfield's Polish director before the Polish parliament.
Kennedy has opposed conventional nuclear power, arguing that it is unsafe and not economically competitive. In June 1981, he spoke at an anti-nuclear rally at the Hollywood Bowl with the musicians Stephen Stills, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne. He believes nuclear energy is a profit-making venture promoted by corporate lobbyists rather than environmental activists, and has claimed insurance companies are unwilling to insure nuclear plants, saying in a 2023 interview, "It's not hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts who are saying it's dangerous; it's guys on Wall Street with suits and ties."
Throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, Kennedy was critical of Bush's environmental and energy policies, saying Bush was defunding and corrupting federal science projects. Kennedy was also critical of Bush's 2003 hydrogen car initiative, arguing that, because of plans to extract the hydrogen from fossil fuels, it was a gift to the fossil fuel industry disguised as a green automobile. In 2003, Kennedy wrote an article in Rolling Stone about Bush's environmental record, which he expanded into a New York Times bestselling book. His opposition to the Bush administration's environmental policies earned him recognition as one of Rolling Stone's "100 Agents of Change" on April 2, 2009.
During an October 2012 interview with Politico, Kennedy called on environmentalists to direct their dissatisfaction toward Congress rather than President Barack Obama, reasoning that Obama "didn't deliver" due to having a partisan Congress "like we haven't seen before in American history". He said politicians who do not act on climate change policy serve special interests and sell out public trust. He said Charles and David Koch—the owners of Koch Industries, Inc., the nation's largest privately owned oil company—subverted democracy and made "themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us".
Kennedy has spoken of the Koch brothers as leading "the apocalyptical forces of Ignorance and Greed". During the 2014 People's Climate March, he said: "The Koch brothers have all the money. They're putting $300 million this year into their efforts to stop the climate bill. And the only thing we have in our power is people power, and that's why we need to put this demonstration on the street."
In a 2020 interview on Yahoo Finance's "Influencers with Andy Serwer", Kennedy called President Trump's environmental policies a "cataclysm" and said Trump is "simply the radical step of a process that's been happening in our country and in the Republican Party from the past—really, since 1980—which is a growing hostility towards the environment, a growing orientation to representing the concentrated corporate power and power, particularly of the oil industry and the chemical industry and some of the other large polluting industries."
Kennedy has said he intends to create "wellness farms" to rehabilitate illegal drug users, to be paid for from the revenue from taxing the sale of legalized cannabis. The farms' inmates would grow organic food, without access to computer technology. He has suggested that the farms might be used to treat people on psychiatric medications: "I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities." Kennedy has said the farms would be compulsory only for illegal drug users.
Kennedy has been critical of the integrity of the voting process. In June 2006, he published an article in Rolling Stone purporting to show that GOP operatives stole the 2004 presidential election for President George W. Bush. Most Democrats and Republicans regarded it as a conspiracy theory. The journalist Farhad Manjoo countered Kennedy's conclusions, writing: "If you do read Kennedy's article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data."
Kennedy has written about the ease of election hacking and the dangers of voter purges and voter-identification laws. He wrote the introduction and a chapter in Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, a 2012 book on election hacking by the investigative journalist Greg Palast.
Kennedy worked on his uncle Sargent Shriver's 1976 presidential campaign in Massachusetts, and later was on the national staff and a state coordinator for his uncle Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign.
Kennedy endorsed and campaigned for Vice President Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign and openly opposed Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign.
In the 2004 presidential election, Kennedy endorsed John Kerry, noting his strong environmental record. After Kerry lost the election to George W. Bush, Kennedy wrote an article for Rolling Stone falsely claiming that the results were fraudulent and that the election was stolen from Kerry, basing his argument on discrepancies between exit polling and reported results in swing states such as Ohio, as well as voter disenfranchisement.
In late 2007, Kennedy and his sisters Kerry and Kathleen endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries. After the Democratic Convention, Kennedy campaigned for Obama across the country. After the election, the Obama administration was reportedly considering Kennedy for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, but felt his controversial statements and arrest for heroin possession in the 1980s made him unlikely to win Senate confirmation.
In 2016, Kennedy called supporters of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump "belligerent idiots" and suggested that some were "outright Nazis". He has also characterized Trump as a "bully" and a "threat to democracy", comparing him to Adolf Hitler and George Wallace.
In 2024, Kennedy endorsed Trump for president at a Trump campaign rally in Arizona.
Kennedy was a founding board member of the Food Allergy Initiative. His son has anaphylactic peanut allergies. Kennedy wrote the foreword to The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, in which he and the authors falsely link increasing food allergies in children to certain vaccines that were approved beginning in 1989.
In 2003, Kennedy published an article in The Atlantic Monthly about the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, in which he insists that his cousin Michael Skakel's indictment "was triggered by an inflamed media, and that an innocent man is now in prison". Kennedy argues that evidence suggests that Kenneth Littleton, the Skakel family's live-in tutor, killed Moxley, and calls investigative journalist Dominick Dunne the "driving force" behind Skakel's prosecution. In 2016, Kennedy released the book Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit. In 2017, the rights to the book were optioned by FX Productions to develop a multi-part television series.
In 2018, Skakel's conviction was vacated, and in 2020, prosecutors decided not to seek a new trial.
On the evening of January 11, 2013, Charlie Rose interviewed Kennedy and his sister Rory at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas as a part of then Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings's hand-chosen committee's year-long program of celebrating John F. Kennedy's life and presidency. Of JFK's assassination, RFK Jr. said his father was "fairly convinced" Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone and believed the Warren Commission report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship". RFK Jr. said, "The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman." He endorsed the 2013 edition of JFK and the Unspeakable, saying it had moved him to visit Dealey Plaza for the first time.
In November 2023, RFK Jr. launched a petition on his presidential campaign website for the Biden administration to release the estimated remaining 1% of documents related to the case. He said that finally releasing full and unredacted documents could help restore trust in the government.
In an interview on Lex Fridman's podcast, Kennedy said that the evidence that the CIA was involved in the assassination was "beyond any reasonable doubt".
Kennedy does not believe that Sirhan Sirhan fired the shot that killed his father, Robert F. Kennedy. Based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, especially Paul Schrade, who was standing next to Kennedy and was shot himself, as well as the autopsy, he believes there was a second gunman. In December 2017, he visited Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego to meet Sirhan. After meeting Sirhan, he gave his support for a reinvestigation of the assassination.
In a June 2023 podcast interview with Jordan Peterson, Kennedy posited that several issues in children, including gender dysphoria, might be linked to atrazine contamination in the water supply. He cited a 2010 study by Hayes that claims that acute atrazine exposure causes chemical castration and feminization in frogs, leading some to become hermaphrodites. Kennedy suggested that there was other evidence indicating potential effects on humans. YouTube removed the interview under its vaccine misinformation policy, a decision Peterson and Kennedy criticized as censorship. Various publications denounced the theory, such as Philadelphia Gay News, The Independent, and Vice.
After media criticism, a spokesperson for Kennedy's 2024 presidential campaign told CNN that he was being mischaracterized and that he was not claiming that endocrine disruptors were the sole cause of gender dysphoria, but rather proposing further research. Andrea Gore, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Texas at Austin, said, "I don't think people should be making statements about the relationship between environmental chemicals and changes in sexuality when there's zero evidence."
In August 2024, after he endorsed Trump for president and started to work with Trump's campaign, Kennedy posted, "We are going to stop this crime" of chemtrails. Belief in chemtrails involves a conspiracy theory that airplane water vapor trails (contrails) are purposely dumped chemicals designed to harm the population.
Kennedy says that he drinks only raw milk and believes that it has health benefits. In October 2024, he accused the FDA of "aggressive suppression'' of raw milk.
Raw milk has not been pasteurized to kill harmful pathogens. Experts and the FDA say raw milk is not more nutritious than pasteurized milk and consuming raw milk has disease risks. Raw milk consumption has caused many U.S. disease outbreaks. The U.S. prohibits interstate commerce in raw milk and 20 states prohibit its sale.
Kennedy is a licensed master falconer and has trained hawks since he was 11. He breeds hawks and falcons and is also licensed as a raptor propagator and a wildlife rehabilitator. He holds permits for Federal Game Keeper, Bird Bander, and Scientific Collector. He was president of the New York State Falconry Association from 1988 to 1991. In 1987, while on Governor Mario Cuomo's New York State Falconry Advising Committee, Kennedy authored New York State's examination to qualify apprentice falconers. Later that year, he wrote the New York State Apprentice Falconer's Manual, which was published by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and remains in use.
Kennedy is also a whitewater kayaker. His father introduced him and his siblings to whitewater kayaking during trips down the Green and Yampa Rivers in Utah and Colorado, the Columbia River, the Middle Fork Salmon in Idaho, and the Upper Hudson Gorge. Between 1976 and 1981, Kennedy was a partner and guide at a whitewater company, Utopian, based in West Forks, Maine. He organized and led several "first-descent" whitewater expeditions to Latin America, including three hitherto unexplored rivers: the Apurimac, Peru, in 1975; the Atrato, Colombia, in 1979; and the Caroni, Venezuela, in 1982. In 1993, he made an early descent of the Great Whale River in northern Quebec, Canada.
In 2015, Kennedy took two of his sons to the Yukon to visit Mount Kennedy and run the Alsek River, a whitewater river fed by the Alsek Glacier. Mount Kennedy was Canada's highest unclimbed peak when the Canadian government named it for John F. Kennedy in 1964. In 1965, Kennedy's father became the first person to climb Mount Kennedy.
On April 3, 1982, Kennedy married Emily Ruth Black, whom he met at the University of Virginia School of Law. Kennedy and Black separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994.
On April 15, 1994, Kennedy married architect and designer Mary Kathleen Richardson, a close friend of his sister Kerry, aboard a research vessel on the Hudson River. Kennedy has six children, two with Black and four with Richardson.
During his marriage to Richardson, Kennedy was known among his friends for sending explicit nude photos of women that they presumed he had taken, according to Vanity Fair. He reportedly engaged in multiple affairs during the marriage. His friends later called him a "lifelong philanderer". On May 12, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson. On May 16, 2012, Richardson was found dead in a building on the grounds of her home in Bedford, New York. The Westchester County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide due to asphyxiation from hanging.
Before her death, Richardson had discovered Kennedy's personal journal from 2001, in which he recorded sexual encounters with 37 different women. According to Kennedy, Richardson passed the journal along "to her sisters with instructions that, if anything happened to her, [it should be] published in the press". During their divorce, Richardson began exhibiting signs of drug and alcohol abuse and psychiatric distress.
After her death, Kennedy won a court case against Richardson's siblings to have her buried alongside fellow Kennedy family members in St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville, Massachusetts, instead of closer to her siblings in New York. Shortly after her burial, Kennedy had her body disinterred and moved to an unmarked grave in an empty area of the cemetery, to allow for more space for future burials closer to the Kennedy family plots. Kennedy's niece Saoirse Kennedy Hill was buried next to Richardson after her death from a drug overdose at age 22.
In 2012, Kennedy began dating the actress Cheryl Hines. They married on August 2, 2014, at the Kennedy Compound. The couple were introduced by Larry David, Hines's co-star on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Kennedy and Hines reside in Los Angeles and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
In September 2024, Olivia Nuzzi, a reporter for New York magazine who had been covering his presidential campaign, told her editors that she had been in a relationship with Kennedy, which she described as personal but not physical.
During Kennedy's college years, he started having heart problems, which he has said were caused by caffeine, stress, and sleep deprivation.
In his 40s, Kennedy developed adductor spasmodic dysphonia, an organic voice disorder that causes his voice to quaver and makes speech difficult. It is a form of involuntary movement affecting the larynx, related to dystonia. Kennedy said he traveled to Kyoto, Japan, for a procedure where a titanium bridge was inserted between his vocal cords to try to relieve the disorder.
Kennedy began experiencing severe short- and long-term memory loss and mental fog in 2010. In a 2012 divorce court deposition, he attributed neurological issues to "a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died", in addition to mercury poisoning from eating large quantities of tuna. The Washington Post reported that Kennedy's campaign "has not released his medical records that could verify his account, and Kennedy has previously spread health misinformation, including about mercury in vaccines".
Kennedy is a Roman Catholic. In 2005, journalist Michael Paulson called him "a deeply devout Catholic who attends daily Mass". Kennedy considers Francis of Assisi his patron saint and a role model. In a 2005 interview with The Boston Globe, he said he was deeply inspired by Francis's devotion to social justice, helping the poor, animal welfare, and environmentalism; Francis is a patron saint of ecology.
In 2004, Kennedy published a biography, Saint Francis of Assisi: A Life of Joy. He said Catholicism was a vehicle of his environmentalism, adding, "environmental work is spiritual work". Despite identifying as pro-life, Kennedy also identifies with liberal Catholicism. He criticized the church's argument that John Kerry should have been denied communion because of his support for abortion rights.
In a 2018 interview with Vatican News, Kennedy expressed his admiration for Pope John XXIII, who is best known for his modernization of the church in the 1960s. Kennedy said, "the Church should be an instrument of justice and kindness around the world."
In July 2024, Vanity Fair reported that in the late 1990s, when he was in his 40s, Kennedy engaged in sexual misconduct with Eliza Cooney, a 23-year-old part-time babysitter for his children. Cooney alleges that Kennedy groped her and touched her inappropriately on multiple occasions and asked her to rub lotion on his back when the two were alone in a bedroom.
Kennedy called this Vanity Fair piece a "lot of garbage". When asked specifically about Cooney's allegation, he responded, "I am not a church boy. I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world." When pressed further, he said he had no comment.
After the Vanity Fair piece was published, Cooney said that Kennedy texted her: "I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so." Cooney said, "I don't know if it's an apology if you say 'I don't remember' ... In the context of all his public appearances, it seemed a little bit—it didn't match. It was like a throwaway."
In July 2024, an image of Kennedy holding a charred animal carcass captured in 2010 surfaced in a Vanity Fair story, which alleged that the carcass belonged to a dog and that Kennedy ate it. Kennedy denied that he ate dog meat, and said the animal carcass in the picture was a goat. According to Snopes, the carcass in the photo is lamb. Kennedy had eaten dog, horse, and guinea pig meat before 2001, however.
In August 2024, Kennedy released a video on Twitter, acknowledging that in October 2014 he placed a dead six-month-old bear in Central Park after initially planning to skin it for meat. Kennedy claimed that the bear had been hit by a car in front of him and that he ultimately abandoned the carcass for fear that it would spoil before he could preserve it, deliberately positioning the body to give the impression that it had been struck by a cyclist in Central Park. He released the video in advance of a story in The New Yorker that detailed the incident. At the time of the incident, the spectacle of a dead bear in a New York City park made the local news. A resulting necropsy by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation found that the death was caused by "blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision".
In a 2012 Town & Country magazine profile of Kennedy's daughter Kathleen ("Kick"), she recounted a story about how her father—who, she said, liked to study animal skulls and skeletons—used a chainsaw to sever the head of a dead beached whale in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, then strapped the whale's head to the top of their minivan with bungee cords for the five-hour drive home, saying, "every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car" and they "had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us". In September 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement announced that it was investigating the incident.
Kennedy has written books on subjects such as the environment, vaccinations, biography, and American heroes. Two of his books, The Real Anthony Fauci and Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak are New York Times Bestsellers.