My assistant in the New York Times public editor’s office said Robert F Kennedy was on the phone. Did I want to take the call?
This was roughly a decade ago, but I still remember being momentarily confused. Assassinated in 1968, RFK was long gone, and though we did get some unusual calls in the public editor’s office, they tended to be from the living.
I quickly realized, of course, that the caller was the former New York senator’s son, an environmental attorney then in his late 50s. And, given his prominence, I took the call, only to endure an unpleasant screed from this anti-vaccine crusader. Once Kennedy had my ear, he spun out his pseudo-scientific theories, mostly about the causal relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Though these notions had been debunked, he was relentless in wanting the New York Times to give them more credence.
My job as public editor was to represent the readers of the paper and take their complaints seriously, often writing columns about them, but I didn’t do so in this case. As I recall, I just shook off the conversation and got back to work.
These days, I’m certainly glad I didn’t take up his cause. RFK Jr, now 69 and running for president as a Democrat, has proven himself to be even more divorced from reality.
The most recent example came just last week, and it was appalling. At a dinner on New York City’s Upper East Side, Kennedy (foolishly) thought he was talking off the record and therefore could drop his guard.
So he went full conspiracy theory – suggesting that Covid could have been a bioweapon intended to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while targeting “Caucasians and Black people”. The remarks, heard on a widely circulated video published by the New York Post, “feeds into Sinophobic and antisemitic tropes”, an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson told the Washington Post. The director of the Stop Asian Hate Project called them irresponsible and hateful.
Kennedy has denied any antisemitic sentiment, or even that he intended that the “ethnic effect was deliberately engineered”. But the recording tells a different tale.
It’s not as if this latest chapter is an aberration. RFK Jr has consistently spread Covid conspiracy theories and even once compared US vaccine mandates – unfavorably! – to “Hitler’s Germany”. (He later apologized for that one.)
The New York Times summed him up in a news story: “Mr Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from wifi, and a ‘stolen’ election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W Bush.”
Somehow, though, his presidential campaign has gained traction; although a long shot, he does have significant support among primary voters. (And we’ve seen what can happen with a supposed long shot, as Donald Trump was considered in 2015.)
The reasons are obvious. His crazy ideas – like Trump’s – are catnip for the media. They make news and generate clicks. And social media amplifies him, too. Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, put it bluntly: “The bots and trolls love RFK Jr. Because the bots and trolls hate a fact-based humanitarian society.”
All of this adds immeasurably to his prominence at a time when Democratic voters are looking for an alternative to Joe Biden, who they think is too old to endure a long campaign and a four-year presidency.
Which brings me full circle to that decade-old phone call. I wonder now why I so readily took that call and gave him a half hour that rightfully belonged to the ordinary readers of the New York Times? Not every phone call got patched through to me, any more than I personally answered every one of the 500 or so emails that the public editor’s office received each week.
And I know the answer: I did it because of his famous name. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s in the heavily Catholic steel city of Lackawanna, New York, any Kennedy was revered as something of a secular saint. And although we learned much more skepticism after Teddy Kennedy (RFK Jr’s uncle) drove a campaign worker to her watery death in 1969, the name still resonated decades later.
With his ugly theories and dangerous denials of reality, RFK Jr long ago sullied the family name. And these days, I would ask my assistant to have him send us an email. We would read it with interest – just like every other complaint we got.
• This article was amended on 18 July 2023 to correct the spelling of Mark Jacob’s surname.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
