page_title: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
section_title: Political endorsements
hierarchical_section_title: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. / Personal views / Political endorsements
caption_attribution_description: English: Nick and Helen Forster present Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. with the E-Chievement Award during an eTown taping at the Democratic National Convention.
context_page_description: Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American environmental lawyer and activist, author, and anti-vaccinationist. Kennedy is a son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy. He is the president of the board of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999.
  From 1986 until 2017, Kennedy was a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental organization. From 1984 until 2017, he was a board member and chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper. For over thirty years, Kennedy has been an adjunct professor of Environmental law at Pace University School of Law. Until August 2017, he also held the post as supervising attorney and co-director of Pace Law School's Environmental Litigation Clinic, which he founded in 1987. He is currently professor emeritus at Pace.
  Kennedy co-hosts Ring of Fire, a nationally syndicated American radio program, and has written or edited ten books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
  He is a prominent anti-vaccine activist and believes in pseudoscientific speculation of a link between vaccines and autism. Kennedy has denied such characterization.
context_section_description: Kennedy was on the National Staff and a State Coordinator for Edward M. Kennedy for President from 1979 to 1980. Prior to that he had been on Senator Kennedy's 1970 and 1976 Massachusetts Senatorial Campaigns. He was a co-founder and a former board member of the New York League of Conservation Voters.
  Kennedy endorsed and campaigned extensively for Vice President Al Gore during his 2000 presidential campaign, and openly opposed his friend Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign, predicting that it could sink the Gore campaign and put George W. Bush into the White House. In the 2004 presidential election, Kennedy endorsed John Kerry, noting his strong environmental record.
  In late 2007, Kennedy and his sisters Kerry and Kathleen announced that they would be endorsing Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries. After the Democratic Convention, Kennedy campaigned for Obama across the country. After the election, he was named as a front-runner for Obama's EPA administrator.
  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. Farhad Manjoo countered Kennedy's conclusions, but there were other people who argued otherwise.
  Kennedy has written frequent warnings about the ease of election hacking and the dangers of voter purges and voter ID laws. He wrote the introduction and a chapter in Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, a 2012 book on election hacking by investigative journalist Greg Palast.
caption: Kennedy at a taping of ETown during the 2008 Democratic National Convention
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