Scorching new biography of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exposes the man behind the caricature

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• Title: RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise
• Author: Isabel Vincent
• Genre: Non-Fiction
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Pages: 304

For four glittery days beginning June 2, the Harvard Class of 1976 will gather for its 50th reunion. Like the West Point Class of 1915 – which eventually boasted 59 generals including Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and was known as “the class the stars fell upon” – the celebrating Harvard alumni include several high-profile examples of great achievement.

There’s John G. Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States. There’s Jill Abramson, the first woman to be executive editor of The New York Times. There’s Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist extraordinaire. There’s Alan Garber, now the president of Harvard itself.

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And there’s one more luminary in this remarkable group – although this classmate is likely to be shunned if he turns up for the commemoration in Cambridge, Mass.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Members of this remarkable class remember their compatriots vividly: Roberts for his classroom brilliance, Abramson for her incisive commentary, Ma for his string-instrument virtuosity, Garber for graduating in three years rather than four.

And Kennedy for using and selling drugs.

Young Kennedy’s drug use is just one of the disturbing features of a life that Toronto-born writer Isabel Vincent examines in this biography, a book that leaves no blemish unsighted (or uncited). It is a searing look at someone who may be the most controversial member of Donald Trump’s thoroughly controversial circle. His vaccine skepticism has led him to be viewed skeptically by the medical community that is supposed to be his constituency, but instead has emerged as his most vocal cadre of critics.

In fairness – and Vincent stretches mightily to be fair – Kennedy is a complex character, in a way far more interesting than his caricature.

It is not her first time delving into this subject. As a reporter, she mounted a fierce examination of the suicide of Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson, who was found hanging from a rafter in an outbuilding of her family home.

By plying through his diaries and conduction voluminous interviews, she comes to see the contradictions in Kennedy.

“There were days when I admired his very intense soul-starving, the breadth of his knowledge of religion and philosophy, and his respect for the dead,” writes Vincent, a flick to the deaths by assassination of his uncle, president John F. Kennedy (1963), and his father, senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968). “There were other days when I felt he was just making excuses for his bad behavior and projecting a fiction of Kennedy family happiness.”

Indeed, Kennedy experienced little if any family happiness himself, and not solely owing to his vaccine stance.

It is also because of his 2024 primary challenge to a sitting Democratic president (Joe Biden, endorsed by many Kennedy family members); the Independent candidacy he undertook after abandoning the party that for two-thirds of a century has all but beatified the Kennedys; and, finally, his consorting with the ne plus ultra opponent of Kennedy liberalism, Trump himself.

There was also his effort in 2021 to win the release of Sirhan Sirhan, in prison for murdering Kennedy’s father. That gambit only added to his isolation from family.

Vincent walks us briskly through all of that – plus the bizarre episodes involving other members of the animal kingdom such as the worm apparently lodged in Kennedy’s brain and the dead bear (a roadkill victim) he drove around in his van before depositing it in New York’s Central Park.

She also points out how the original RFK’s third child – just 11 when his father was gunned down in a hotel kitchen – is a faithful heir to at least some Kennedy-family traditions: extreme behaviour (he was kicked out of several prestigious prep schools and was a prodigious consumer of heroin), sexual adventurism, humiliation of a wife (in his case two) and, of course, getting away with most of it, because there was always someone around to mop up the damage and try to cover up the incident.

It was all par for the course for a young man (and then an older man, now 72) related to power and surrounded by celebrity: a president; three family members in the Senate; four, including a brother, in the House of Representatives (there’s some overlap here); a sister who was a creditable lieutenant-governor of Maryland; and another sister who was the daughter-in-law to the governor of New York (and later the ex-wife of another New York governor).

When he was a well-known and relatively respected champion of the country’s rivers, Al Gore wrote an introduction to his environmental-rights book. His third wife is Cheryl Hines, of Curb Your Enthusiasm. (She, too, has been humiliated by his unusual and now public internet dalliance with a magazine reporter.)

Vincent’s book is enhanced immeasurably by her exclusive possession of Mr. Kennedy’s diaries, in which he writes: “The thing that scares me most in life is that I might squander the great life I’ve been given – the extraordinary access to any CEO or head of state on Earth, the enormous reserve of public good toward my father’s children, the powerful political power and the wealth, etc.”

He adds: “Will I use these things to the maximum effect possible to improve people’s lives and bring benefits to others?”

In a verdict extending 244 pages (followed by 30 pages of footnotes in small type), Vincent answers the question: No.