An environmental leader’s bizarre journey from hero to pariah
Peter Dykstra for the Environmental Health News
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| Daniel Schwen, via Wikimedia Commons |
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was 14 when his father was murdered during the 1968 Presidential campaign.
As a child of America’s most storied political dynasty of the 20th Century, he could not have avoided a high-profile life even if he wanted to.
RFK Jr. became a superstar environmental lawyer, first for New York City, then for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
He investigated and litigated
cases for the Hudson Riverkeeper, helping to bring the local group to worldwide
renown. Municipal landfills, industrial waste sites, and corporate giants like
Exxon and General Electric soon found it much harder to pollute unchallenged.
News organizations discovered a next-generation Kennedy.
Riverkeeper
In
1997, I produced a documentary on Bobby and The Riverkeeper, John Cronin, for
Japan’s TV Asahi.
I
spent a day with RFK Jr as he took water samples from an outfall that emptied
into a drinking water reservoir in the New York suburbs. I was impressed by how
he simultaneously kept his focus on the sample jars that carried the day’s
mission, and the long, daunting tasks that awaited the environmental movement.
RFK Jr.'s divergent path
Around
the year 2005, RFK Jr began to make two significant breaks with much of the
mainstream environmental movement.
An
ambitious proposal for a windfarm along Cape Cod’s South Shore divided some
locals. Blue-collar fishermen joined some well-heeled sailors in opposing Cape
Wind. They found an enthusiastic funder in Bill Koch, estranged brother of
Charles and David Koch; and a dynamic mouthpiece in Bobby Kennedy.
RFK
Jr said he was sticking up for the fishermen. Green colleagues, feeling
betrayed, saw a cynical effort to preserve the view from the Kennedy family
compound. After more than 16 tortuous back-and-forth years, Cape Wind’s backers
threw in the towel.
Also in 2005, Bobby Kennedy lent his name to a cause whose roots in science denial would end up costing tens of thousands of lives. Concern over a potential link between vaccines and autism went viral (sorry) despite a thorough discrediting within the larger science community. RFK Jr’s more mainstream links began to vanish.
By 2017, his name disappeared from the mastheads of NRDC, the
Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance groups, the Pace University Environmental
Law Clinic, and more.
Anti-vaxxer
His
other legal work continued, including winning a whopping nine-figure judgement
against Monsanto and its glyphosate herbicide in 2018.
These
days, RFK Jr. is Counsel at Morgan & Morgan, which bills itself as the
largest personal injury law firm in the U.S.
But
last weekend, Bobby Kennedy took another big step into the rabbit hole: In
describing how COVID vaccine advocates have conquered the world, he played the
Hitler card:
RFK Jr. told an anti-vaxx rally at the Washington Monument that Anne Frank, the noted Holocaust victim, had it better than today’s employees facing a vaccine mandate.
'Reprehensible
and insensitive'
RFK drew predictably strong criticism. His tweet also drew one of the harshest slap-downs in the brief-but-colorful history of Twitter: Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, came after him like nobody’s business:
My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a
mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive. The atrocities that
millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or
anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own.
Hines ripped her hubby’s “reprehensible” remarks, for which he apologized.
Progress, with baggage
I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to
families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples
of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the
extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.
(Major irony alert: Hines’s best-known
TV role is that of Larry David’s wife in the angst-ridden hit comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm.)
And
whatever baggage is attached to his anti-science quackery and bizarre
Hitler-baiting, the world is now home to hundreds of River-, Bay-, Lake Keepers
and more, thanks to RFK Jr and his colleagues.
So
– Larry David joke scouts take note—we may just have to take our medicine on
the curious case of Bobby Kennedy, Jr.
Peter
Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.