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.
By his own account, Kennedy, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of possessing heroin, had become addicted to the drug in his teens, as he struggled to cope with the assassination of his father. Two days after the airplane episode, he checked himself into a New Jersey drug treatment center. He says he has been sober ever since.
Now Kennedy is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, a nomination he landed after a renegade presidential campaign in which he cast his life as a redemption story. He told a conservative Christian radio host this year that as an addicted and troubled young man he had undergone a “spiritual awakening” and “knew he had to change at a deep, fundamental way.”
Yet Kennedy’s early fight for sobriety was far from the end of his battles with demons and self-destructive impulses. An examination of his life, gleaned through interviews with more than a dozen people, court filings and his own statements, reveals his distinct pattern of cycling through extremes — including his early drug addiction, compulsive sexual behavior and deep dives into conspiracy theories — all while under the microscope of fame.
At midlife, Kennedy won public acclaim as a crusading environmental lawyer who sued corporate polluters, cleaned up rivers and lobbied to protect New York’s drinking water. But he was also a serial philanderer who kept a journal chronicling his encounters and assigned numerical scores to women, even as he berated himself for his inability to control his actions.
His infidelities contributed to the breakup of his second marriage, according to interviews with people who knew the couple. A former nanny who worked for his family during this time also has accused Kennedy of making sexual overtures toward her and touching her without consent.
As an anti-vaccine advocate, Kennedy has plunged into dark and conspiratorial views of government, the press, scientific institutions and especially the drug industry. He has promoted wild and debunked theories, suggesting AIDS could be caused by “poppers,” an inhaled drug popularized by gay men in the 1970s, rather than HIV. He backed a documentary asserting that the 2020 pandemic was a “plandemic” — an event orchestrated by the government as part of an effort to undermine American liberties.
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.