Why RFK Jr. Might Bite the Dust

Bill Cassidy, Caroline Kennedy and how his lies could catch up with him

Visiting a senator’s official website is usually a waste of time. But the reason I am hopeful (optimistic would be too strong) that the public health menace known as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not be confirmed as secretary of health and human services begins with this from the office of Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana:

Bill also created a private-public partnership to vaccinate 36,000 greater Baton Rouge area children against Hepatitis B at no cost to the schools or parents.

Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell (a polio survivor who’s unhappy that until very recently Kennedy was against the polio vaccine) are likely “no” votes, as they were on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense. They need at least one more, and the best bet is Cassidy, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Cassidy, a thoughtful doctor and one of only seven Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, says he will make his decision over the weekend.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican. Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, expressed concerns about Kennedy's stance on vaccines.

The world heard this week that Kennedy is not just a liar and conspiracy theorist but a “predator,” as his courageous cousin, Caroline Kennedy, put it, in explaining how Bobby “preys on the desperation of parents of sick children, vaccinating his own kids while building a following, hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.

And yet, if his nomination tanks, it won’t be because of his poor character but because he is…inconclusive. The faux scientific, just-asking-questions M.O. of Kennedy, Tucker Carlson, and so many other Trumpists may have just blown up in this dangerous man’s face.

Cassidy, a liver specialist, framed Kennedy’s confirmation hearings with two personal stories: one about a young woman fighting for her life after contracting Hepatitis B, and the other involving a doctor friend who texted him recently about the deaths of two patients with vaccine-preventable diseases.

The conservative (in the old-fashioned sense) Louisianan wasn’t buying RFK Jr.’s bogus line on inconclusive data. “Will you reassure mothers that the measles vaccine doesn’t cause autism?” he asked in a mild tone. “Yes or no?” When Kennedy said, “If you show me the data,” Cassidy calmly replied, “The data has been there for a long time.” As his fellow Republican, Rand Paul, a know-it-all ophthalmologist, scoffed at the idea of vaccinating newborns against Hepatitis B, Cassidy interjected with an authoritative medical answer on why lack of knowledge about the mother’s health made it necessary to do so in many cases.

Cassidy asked Kennedy if he would “promise that vaccine standards will not depart from historical norms.” The witness squirmed. He had already been crushed by Elizabeth Warren for a glaring conflict of interest — his refusal to pledge not to continue making millions from lawsuits against vaccine makers. Cassidy’s question left Kennedy trapped between satisfying Cassidy and defending his own conspiracy-fueled greed. He chose the latter, though his answer was barely comprehensible amid the rotten tomatoes in his word salad.

Cassidy closed with a frank political analysis. If someone doesn’t get vaccinated “because of [RFK Jr.’s] policies or attitudes” and later dies of a vaccine-preventable disease, it would be bad news for Republicans. “The greatest tragedy will be her death. But I can also tell you an associated tragedy … that will cast a shadow over President Trump’s legacy.”

Before reprising other important moments in the hearing, let me give you a little fresh background on Caroline’s scathing statement:

When Bobby first started running for president nearly two years ago, I emailed Caroline about him. Then — and later — she was as warm and funny as ever but would not wade into politics while serving as ambassador to Australia, even off the record. That decorum stands in stark contrast to today’s MAGA warriors, who use their government platforms to trash people in public and private.

After resigning as ambassador, Caroline sent an advance draft of her statement to her cousin, Steve Smith Jr., who texted: “Eloquent, dignified, unarguably morally and factually correct. This is a [Joe]McCarthy moment; someone needs to stand up.” Yep, and let’s hope it encourages other decent people to break with their president as honestly as she did with her cousin.

I met Caroline, Bobby, and Steve in 1976 when we were all Harvard undergraduates. Caroline decided to try out for the Harvard Crimson, where her father — and, much earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt — had also learned to be reporters. I was already writing for the paper and we became friends, she later reminded me, in part because so many other students were afraid to talk to her. The Harvard Lampoon put out a parody issue of the Crimson that included a big front-page headline: BY CAROLINE KENNEDY. She took it in stride, as she did everything, and covered her shyness with a sharp intelligence and teasing sense of humor.

Even as I succumbed to helping Bobby study for an exam, I avoided the Kennedy boys (though Steve and I later became friends) on the theory that if we got into trouble, I’d get arrested or expelled, and they wouldn’t. The girls, by contrast, were wise to the debauchery around them.

“His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks,” Caroline wrote the Senate this week. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

By this time, Bobby — a dealer on campus, as Kurt Andersen explained — had turned his younger brother David on to heroin and other drugs. While Bobby hid his addiction under a charismatic allure, I remember David — a sweet-tempered lost soul whose father had pulled him from the surf and saved his life in Malibu just hours before he was assassinated in 1968 — walking around campus pale and strung out. In 1984, a worried Caroline and her cousin, Sydney Lawford, were in Palm Beach visiting their Grandma Rose and tried desperately to contact David at a local hotel. The next night, he was dead from a drug overdose.

“Siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness, and death,” she wrote, “while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”

Anyone who knows Caroline understands how hard it was for her to say all of this. For decades—as she wrote books about the Constitution, championed the Profiles in Courage Awards, and led an exemplary life — she has refused to discuss painful personal matters. But I have noticed over the years that Bobby has never been present at her parties and family celebrations.

Now, the family front has fully cracked. Ted Kennedy’s son, Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman with a history of substance abuse, has, in recent days, backed Bobby’s nomination. I hear that angered others in the family, including Patrick’s brother and only living sibling, Teddy Jr. This week, Steve Smith and Bobby’s sister, Kerry, an influential human rights activist who for years has criticized Bobby’s views on vaccinations, joined Caroline in denouncing him more forcefully.

Democrats on both Senate committees have done a good job explaining why Kennedy is a threat to public health. Bernie Sanders scored with a blown-up image of a kiddie merch item for sale by his non-profit — $26 onesies that read ”No Vax. No problem.” “Are you supportive of these onesies?” Bernie asked to laughter, though much of the audience was made up of MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) activists who broke the rules by applauding in the hearing room. Kennedy’s core promise is to address chronic illness, which he would prioritize over communicable disease or cancer research. But what would he actually do? While making sure to say that Trump’s access to McDonald’s and other junk food was safe, he never said whether he would build on Michelle Obama’s work advancing healthier school lunches. Kennedy repeatedly used the term “transparency” without noting that the government has required ingredient labeling since the 1990s. It seems his tenure as HHS secretary would mostly involve trashing our public health institutions from within.

In any other era, Kennedy’s nomination and confirmation would have been inconceivable. Chris Murphy nailed him for comparing the Centers for Disease Control to “Nazi death camps” and for saying that the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal was “the perfect metaphor” for vaccines. “Gardasil is killing girls,” Kennedy once wrote of the HPV vaccine against cervical and other cancers that have saved the lives of millions of women around the world. After Kennedy admitted that he’s said that Lyme disease was an “engineered bioweapon,” Michael Bennet worked up impressive indignation: “It’s too important for the games that you’re playing,” he said. These are “life and death issues.” Maggie Hassan, who has a child with cerebral palsy, personalized the point.

Then there was Kennedy’s line: “I won’t take sides on 9/11.” Tim Kaine could manage only a “Wow” on that one. Republicans trying to establish that he isn’t a conspiracy theorist had their work cut out for them.

RFK is a lawyer, not a scientist or health expert, and jargon-filled assertions and bullshit statistics (e.g., that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer; they aren’t even in the top ten) spew out of him — Trump-style lies with a gloss of “science” for the clueless.

His lack of qualifications for the job was evident when he didn’t even know the differences between Medicare Parts A, B, and C or that the states pay a large chunk of Medicaid, a critical program for the poor and seniors in nursing homes that he did nothing to defend. He refused to acknowledge that the COVID-19 vaccine has saved lives (three million is the current estimate), and he wouldn’t walk back his claim that it is “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” I wish someone had asked him why, then, so many fewer people are now dying of the disease.

After Kennedy dodged a question on the safety of the abortion pill (not long before he assured Republican Tim Scott that he would appoint only pro-life deputies), Tammy Baldwin reminded him that mifepristone has been proven safe and effective for 25 years. His rote, insincere response, repeated ad nauseam: “Every abortion is a tragedy.” To win confirmation, he has to veer hard to the right — and he did.

Kennedy repeatedly lied about the circumstances of his 2019 trip to American Samoa when he championed anti-vaxxers shortly before a measles outbreak killed 83 children. Ed Markey was right that this incident alone is disqualifying.

Peter Welch was the only senator who focused explicitly on Caroline’s letter, but Patty Murray also probed RFK Jr.’s character. She asked him about the case of Eliza Cooney, who accused Bobby of touching her without consent in 1998 when she was a 23-year-old babysitter for his kids.

In 2023, Cooney called me after reading my Old Goats piece about Kennedy’s upcoming presidential campaign and I urged her to go public, which she did in Vanity Fair. Kennedy, who before his second wife committed suicide kept a list of his extra-marital conquests, denied the charge. But I heard it directly from Cooney, in detail, and I believe it. I wish Murray had mentioned Cooney’s contemporaneous journal entry about the incident.

Let’s give the last word to Caroline, who stood up and told the painful truth when it counted, the first requirement for protecting democracy:

Bobby continues to grandstand off my father’s assassination and that of his own father,” she wrote to the Senate. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone who is willing to exploit their own painful family tragedies for publicity would be put in charge of America’s life and death situations.