RFK JR.

An influential iconoclast labors in his famous forebears’ shadow.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s capacity for “overcoming great adversity” lends him an air of heroism, contends Vincent, a New York Post reporter. But this biography frequently casts the Health and Human Services secretary in a rather different light. Her account is partially based on Kennedy’s diaries, which his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died by suicide in 2012, had “seized” during marital troubles. Along with ruminations on his father’s assassination and the pressures of being a Kennedy, the diaries record his extramarital trysts. The book’s main theme is “Kennedy privilege and entitlement.” We read of a young Kennedy taking his pet lion (a gift from a TV personality) to boarding school; reportedly introducing his brother, David, to heroin; and selling cocaine to a fellow Harvard student—says the journalist Kurt Andersen, who was the student in question. As a teenager, Kennedy learns that he can earn “serious cash by trading on his last name” when his late uncle John F. Kennedy’s best friend secures him a lucrative publishing deal. Some who knew him as an environmental lawyer decades ago describe Kennedy as self-aggrandizing, “arrogant and nasty”—primarily useful because his fame netted big donations. When Kennedy pivoted to outspoken vaccine skepticism, he wrote a factually unsound article that was published in two well-known publications. As Vincent insightfully notes, the article’s retraction fueled suspicions among antivaxxers “that there was a media conspiracy to keep the truth” hidden. Though she adds little to what’s known about Kennedy’s record at HHS, Vincent finds room to characterize Kennedy family members’ opposition to his appointment as “unhinged” and “hysterical.”

A none-too-flattering portrait of a Kennedy scion scrutinizes his eventful personal life and divisive activism.