THE NEW YORK TIMES – Kerry Kennedy remembers how much she admired her older brother Robert as they grew up in Hickory Hill, the family estate in McLean, Va.
“He was an extraordinary older brother,” she said the other day.
She still talks about how he took her along to ford streams, crawl through drainpipes and catch frogs and snakes, ignoring his friends who did not want a 6-year-old girl tagging behind on their outdoor adventures.
“He’s brilliant, he’s well read, he cares deeply, he is extremely charismatic. He has a childlike buoyancy and lightness to him. He’s a beautiful person in a million different ways.
“And then he has this.”
Nearly 60 years after Bobby took his sister along for the excursions into the woods, the son and namesake of Robert F. Kennedy, the New York senator, attorney general and Democratic presidential candidate assassinated on June 5, 1968, has become an unimaginably polarizing figure in this tight-knit political family.
Once a top environmental lawyer who led the charge to clean up the Hudson River in New York, the third eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy has emerged as a leading voice in the campaign to discredit coronavirus vaccines and other measures being advanced by the Biden White House to battle a pandemic that was, near the end of February, killing close to 1,900 people a day.
“The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates,” he told a cheering crowd at a rally against vaccine mandates in Washington last month. “It will make you a slave.”
Mr. Kennedy’s rise as the face of the vaccine resistance movement has tested as never before the solidarity of a family that has for decades remained resolute in the face of tragedy and scandal … read more [subscription may be required]
