Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has reached a pinnacle of power after a life of fame and addictions and a career intertwined with conspiracy theories.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.In September 1983, Robert F. Kennedy Jr fell ill on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota. The pilot radioed ahead for medics. By dint of his famous name, Kennedy, then 29 and fresh out of law school, was taken to a VIP room at the airport, where investigators found heroin in his luggage.
Kennedy declined a request for an interview. Friends and close associates say his choices are best understood as a quest to live up to the legacy of his father and namesake, Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney-general, senator and liberal icon who was assassinated while running for president in 1968.
Close friends and supporters see him as a revolutionary, speaking truth to power. They also say he should not be defined by addiction, but by recovery: they note he is disciplined and focused. He has thrown himself into exercise and adheres to a strict diet known as intermittent fasting. More than 40 years after the flight to South Dakota, he still attends daily 12-step meetings, he says.
Kennedy cycled through two more high schools before graduating, and despite his troubles, was able to follow in his father’s footsteps to Harvard.Credit:He continued to battle a growing drug addiction — a problem that plagued other family members, including a younger brother, David, who died in 1984 after ingesting cocaine and other drugs, and his cousin Patrick, who served in Congress and is today an advocate for people with mental illness and drug addiction.
At his office at Pace University, where he got his master’s and ran the environmental litigation clinic, the wall was covered with photos of him posing with celebrities. He would eventually marry one – actress Cheryl Hines, his third wife. As part of his 12-step recovery programs, Kennedy kept a journal. In it, he chronicled sexual encounters with more than three dozen women in a one-year period in around 2001, assigning them rankings, 1 to 10, that corresponded with different sexual acts,t reported. The journal reportedly includes entries suggesting his behaviour filled him with self-loathing.
Once he dived in, there was no stopping him. Using “my name and my family’s relationships”, he said in a speech at Hillsdale College, he secured meetings with Dr Anthony Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease specialist, and Dr Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.
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