Bobby

According to the historian Suetonius, who wrote early in the second century, the Roman emperor Caligula planned to name his favorite horse, Incitatus, a senator. There is no evidence that he actually ever did so. Suetonius eagerly repeated every nasty story he could find about the famously debauched emperor, who had ruled nearly eighty years earlier. More likely, Caligula had just quipped that his horse would do a better job than the incumbent senators. And he might have even had a point. In any case, a horse in the Senate might have trampled on a toga or two but otherwise probably would not have done much damage.

We can’t say the same about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s rise to head the Department of Health and Human Services. In his second term, Donald Trump has already compiled a stunning record of actions that are corrupt, illegal, senseless, destructive and cruel, but the appointment of Kennedy stands out the one that is, by any measure, most purely and utterly insane. Kennedy is a former heroin addict and drug dealer with a very long record of bizarre actions and statements. His ideology, if you can call it that, amounts to a farrago of fringe ideas and conspiracy theories taken alternately from the extreme left and the extreme right. There is no question about his mental stability: he has none. Trump likes him because he appeals to the conspiracy-theorizing QAnon constituency that saw both COVID and the measures used to combat it as a sinister woke plot; because he promises to smash an elite institution—the scientific establishment; because he flatters Trump outrageously; and, finally, of course, because of his name and face. Bobby Junior is the portrait of Dorian Grey of Bobby Senior; a zombie Bobby right out of World War Z, complete with a craggy face and croaking voice that both seem on the point of breaking into pieces. The resemblance to the father is both remarkable and sinister.

The original Robert F. Kennedy was a complicated figure who by no means fully deserves the halo of martyrdom he has worn since his assassination in 1968. A man of ferocious ambition, he worked for Joseph McCarthy, probably had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, was a latecomer to the civil rights movement, and swooped in as a carpetbagger to a New York senate seat. But by the time of his run for president in 1968 he had become a brilliantly eloquent and charismatic defender of liberal causes. During his campaign, the story goes that a voter aggressively asked him who was going to pay for all the social initiatives he was proposing. Kennedy answered: you, you and people like you, because it is the right thing to do.

The Kennedys stand as the most prominently reckless, damaged and dysfunctional family in American history. Even if only a third of the stories told by Garry Wills in his great book The Kennedy Imprisonment were true, they would still deserve this title. From the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, onwards, the record of broken marriages, addiction, fatal accidents due to recklessness, and sheer lust for power is astonishing. In Bobby senior, the family produced a scion who eventually overcame this legacy to embody genuine, powerful political hope. In his namesake, it has produced a lunatic who promises to undermine the greatest bio-medical research operation the world has ever seen, and to replace serious policies aimed at curbing disease and promoting public health with a program of quack remedies worthy of a nineteenth-century charlatan peddling magical healing powders from the back of a wagon. We would be better off—much better off—with a horse.