Every Christmas, Kerry Kennedy makes a book for her numerous relatives. “There’s at least one photograph of every member of my huge family,” she says. “And yes, Bobby is in the book.”
“Bobby” refers to his brother, Robert Kennedy Jr, a sign of hope that the sibling bond will survive a coming storm. Robert is running as an independent candidate for US President in the November elections. Kerry is one of at least 15 members of the Kennedy clan who recently supported Joe Biden.
Robert’s long history of promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines and associating with racists and anti-Semites has been a source of distress for what was once seen as the American equivalent of a royal family. They have taken pains to distance themselves from the 70-year-old’s dangerously fringe and anti-science views.
Last year, Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, reported Roberto for “trading Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflicts for personal gain and fame” and described the candidacy as an “embarrassment”.
With Robert at around 10% of the vote, with the potential to have an impact in crucial swing states, the Kennedy family has closed ranks around Biden, who keeps a bust of former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Sr. in the Oval Office. Last month, they joined the president at a campaign stop in Philadelphia to support him publicly against Donald Trump, whom they considered a terrible threat to American democracy.
Robert responded on social media that his family was “divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other.”
Kerry, 64, the seventh of Ethel and the 11 children of Robert Kennedy Sr, recalls in an interview that the collective decision involved “a lot of texts, emails and phone calls and ‘let’s do this’”.
Several notable members of the dynasty did not endorse, including Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia and non-profit leader Maria Shriver, which the Biden campaign said was due to her apolitical professional roles. Kerry adds: “Then there’s my brother Bobby and a cousin, but 100% of everyone else supported Joe Biden.”
How did it feel to go against your own brother? After a pause, the human rights activist and lawyer says by phone from the family home in Port of Hyannis, Massachusetts: “I feel like there’s a lot at stake. When Dad ran for president, in part of his speech he said, ‘I can’t sit on the sidelines,’ and that’s how I feel. I just feel like there’s a lot at stake.
“I have spent the last 40 years working on national civil rights and international human rights and trying to hold governments accountable for the abuses of people, especially members of the press, and I cannot let this go. We can’t have Trump for another four years. And Biden is great. He accomplished so much more as president, which is incredible considering the Congress he had to work with.”
She points to historic legislation Biden signed to address the climate crisis and reduce child poverty, and to an economy that has had a better post-pandemic recovery than China, Europe or any other major competitor.
“Most Americans are much better off than they were before, and Trump would be a disaster for us. I felt, and all my brothers and cousins felt, that what is at stake here is our democracy, our freedom. our fight for the middle class and all of this means that Joe Biden must be re-elected.”
Robert, an environmental lawyer, has made false claims about the dangers of vaccines, linked antidepressants to school shootings and claimed last year that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people” and that “the people most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” (he later said his remarks were misinterpreted).
But Kerry, president of the organization Robert F Kennedy Human Rightsis reluctant to comment on his brother’s public statements or political agenda, citing the impossibility of an independent candidate breaking the Democrats’ and Republicans’ hold on the electoral college.
“I don’t think it matters because he can’t win,” she says matter-of-factly. “What he says on any subject is irrelevant. It is a nullity. He doesn’t get 270 electoral votes. The only question is not where you stand on a specific issue, but what your impact is on the campaign, and that to me is dangerous because this election, like any other presidential election, will be extremely tenuous and we cannot give in to luxury of losing. one vote – not one.
“We need every voter who is thinking about voting for a third party to vote for Biden, because otherwise it’s like you’re voting for Trump and that would be a disaster.”
Robert, who initially challenged Biden in the party’s primary election before running as an independent, could use the lingering Democratic mystique of his surname to siphon support from the president. A super political action committee supporting your campaign produced a TV advertisement during the Super Bowl, which drew heavily on footage from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. (Robert apologized if the commercial “caused pain to anyone in my family.”)
But there is some evidence that he could hurt Trump more. A Quinnipiac poll last month found that Robert won the support of 12% of voters who backed Trump in a two-way race, compared with 7% of Biden voters. An NBC poll found that Robert attracted 15% of Trump supporters, compared to 7% of those who supported Biden.
Kerry, formerly married to Democrat Andrew Cuomoa former governor of New York, responds: “That’s kind of irrelevant because I’m very happy for him to get all the votes he can get from Trump, but we want all the votes that would go to Biden to go to Biden because those margins are so close. that we can’t afford to lose them to Bobby or anyone else.”
Trump has been transparent about his ambitions for an imperial presidency. In a recent interview with Time magazine, he said he was open to using the national guard will deport undocumented migrants and allow states to monitor women’s pregnancies so they know whether to have an abortion.
Kerry offers a nightmarish vision of what a second Trump term would look like. “He has said that he will be a dictator on day one, that he will suspend the constitution, that he will use the justice department to go after his enemies, that he will have a litmus test for the thousands of government employees on their loyalty to Donald Trump and that test of loyalty will be: Was the election stolen or not? If you say the election wasn’t stolen, you won’t have a government job anymore.
“It would be generational bias in the courts, not just the Supreme Court, but the courts at all levels. He said he would create huge labor camps and forced detention centers for immigrants and that he would put not only the police but also the armed forces on our streets in order to enforce this.
“A Muslim ban from day one. It would be a disaster for global warming, as he indicated. It would be a disaster for women’s rights and women’s control over their bodies. We would see more librarians going to prison for allowing books to be on the shelves.”
At 43, Kerry’s uncle was the youngest person elected to the presidency. His father, a former attorney general, was just 42 when he was murdered while running for the White House in 1968. There could be no greater contrast with Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in history. Kerry, who spent time with him twice in the last two months, offers his assessment.
“He physically doesn’t have the grace of a 20-year-old, but in terms of his mind, if you talk to him about a range of issues – and I’m not talking about what you think about Gaza and the Middle East. or Ukraine in general or poverty, I’m talking about what do you think of the private prison systems that imprison young black men in Louisiana? – he will talk to you about it.
“And then it will tell you about three different accounts by name. ‘Well, HR 2732 would address that, but the Republicans don’t want it for that reason and they have a congressman in Alabama who is against it for that reason, but there’s a chance to change that in these two paragraphs.’ I mean, it’s unbelievable. This is a guy who knows what’s going on. That’s my experience.”
That’s why, Kerry insists, voters must stay focused on the binary choice before them and not be distracted by third-party candidates: Jill Stein, Cornel West – and Robert Kennedy Jr. I talked to him and made it clear very public,” she says.
“But the issue here is not a sister and a brother or a family or something like that. It’s what is the future of our country and what is the future of our world and do we have a democracy in the United States and do we have a liberal world order or not? That’s what’s happening here. Who cares about two brothers? It’s an absurd.”
