Attending a wedding reception in Louisville, Kentucky, recently, I spotted an SUV with two bumper stickers that caught my eye: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President 2024” and “Make America Healthy Again.” The combination of support for RFK Jr. and the MAGA paraphrase explain President-elect Donald Trump‘s choice of the political scion for secretary of Health and Human Services.
Bobby Jr.’s vaccine skepticism is attractive to anti-vaxxers, and his conspiracy theories (including about his father’s 1968 assassination) appeal to Trump and his advisors. The 47th president and Senate should buckle up for what could be a bumpy ride to confirmation for the HHS nominee.
For good or ill, the Kennedy family has often made their personal medical experiences a basis for health policy. As far back as the 1920s, when future president John F. Kennedy (RFK Jr.’s uncle Jack) fell ill as a toddler with scarlet fever, a then-potentially deadly and incurable bacterial infection, JFK’s father, Joe, pulled political strings through his father-in-law, Boston’s former mayor John F. Fitzgerald, to get young Jack admitted to a local hospital. Otherwise, the family, which had just welcomed its fourth baby, would have been confined to their house under quarantine.
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Sadly, the Kennedys’ third child, Rosemary, born at the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic, would soon be diagnosed with what was then called “mental retardation.” Joe and Rose Kennedy, Bobby Jr.’s grandparents, refused to confine her to an institution, which physicians recommended. Instead, they “mainstreamed” her long before that term entered the vernacular for placing students with mental or physical challenges among their unafflicted peers.
When Rosemary grew into adulthood, however, and began exhibiting violent tantrums and a propensity to wander from caretakers in the early 1940s, her father worried that men might take advantage of her. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy was unthinkable for the Catholic Kennedys, who would not seek an abortion, nor would they tolerate sterilization, often applied to women of severely low intelligence. Rather, Joe subjected his daughter to a new treatment for anxiety and other mental disorders—pre-frontal lobotomy. Unfortunately, all the family’s efforts to let Rosemary reach her potential were undone when the surgery reduced her to a childlike mental capacity and affected her mobility.
In the late 1940s, Joe placed Rosemary in a Wisconsin convent where nuns cared for her, and he forbid his family from visiting her, fearing they would cause agitation. For public consumption, he reported that she was a teacher at the Catholic institution. Another tragedy had befallen the Kennedys when the eldest child, Joe Jr., died in the explosion of his Navy plane over the English coastline in 1944. The devastated family founded a charity in his name, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, that embraced a mission to benefit those with intellectual disabilities.
JFK’s mother, Rose, and sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, persuaded the new president to establish federal funding and awards for research in the “mental retardation” field. Shriver published a 1962 article about Rosemary in the Saturday Evening Post, and shortly after she started the forerunner of Special Olympics by opening her Maryland estate to summer day camps and athletic events for children with intellectual challenges.
But it was the youngest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Edward (Ted), who had the most consequential impact on health policy, often inspired by his family’s medical issues. Forty-seven years in the Senate (1962-2009) allowed him to mold legislation that changed health care and medical insurance for all Americans. Just seven months after President Kennedy’s assassination, Ted broke his back in a plane crash, requiring months in traction and rehabilitation. At the same time, his father fought to overcome the effects of a debilitating stroke.
In 1972 Sen. Kennedy’s 12-year-old son and namesake, Edward Jr. (Teddy), received a cancer diagnosis that necessitated amputation of his right leg. His father kept vigil at each agonizing chemotherapy treatment. Speaking to parents of other childhood cancer patients, the senator heard poignant stories of families with no health care coverage, mortgaging their homes and going into debt because of the hand fate had dealt them.
For the next three decades, Sen. Kennedy worked doggedly with fellow Democrats and willing Republicans to make any incremental progress possible, including health insurance for underprivileged children and portability of adult health coverage from job to job, as well as its applicability to preexisting conditions.
His son Patrick, a long-time member of the U.S. House of Representatives, suffered from drug abuse, and worked with his father to pass the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which requires insurers to cover physical and mental/addiction illnesses equally. Shortly thereafter, Sen. Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer. When the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama‘s solution for 40 million uninsured Americans, passed in 2010, Patrick left a note at his father’s Arlington Cemetery gravesite, “Dad, the unfinished business is done.”
What is Robert Kennedy Jr.’s unfinished business? Will his own drug addiction, brain-devouring worm, mercury poisoning, and fear of vaccines shape health policy should he become Trump’s HHS secretary? And, unlike his relatives, will his personal medical issues hurt America more than make it healthy again?
Dr. Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman professor and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at UVA’s Miller Center. She is the author of Edward M. Kennedy: An Oral History.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
