The Kennedys have been through a lot. They don’t want to go through this.
No name has appeared on more ballots or lawn signs. Even across branches of the family that have grown distant and divided since the first generation rose to power in the 1960s, they celebrate each cousin’s achievement – whether that’s a seat in the House or a new children’s book or an expansion of the Special Olympics.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination – set to be announced Wednesday in Boston – is too much for a family that defined the modern Democratic Party. They’re frustrated, sad and completely opposed.
They say they love him. They use words like “heartbroken” and “tragic.”
It’s the vaccine skepticism, which includes a book about “The Real Anthony Fauci” and saying Anne Frank was better off than Americans under supposed vaccine mandates because she could at least hide from the Nazis. It’s insisting that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t actually shoot Kennedy’s father, and breaking with many in the family years ago to argue for the assassin’s parole. Now, it’s going up against a president whose administration is stocked with Kennedys in prominent positions and who has decades of personal and emotional connections to multiple members of the family.
They see the very namesake of one of the original brothers trying to leverage the most storied family legacy in Democratic politics, for what many of them have been saying privately is a vanity run that is doomed. And that they want to be doomed.
“They’re angry to be put in this position – because they always want to support the family, but they’re being put in a position that makes that impossible,” said one person who has spoken to several members of a family generally so guarded that even longtime aides often feel like…
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