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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s endorsement of Donald Trump after suspending his own 2024 Presidential election campaign bid has met with significant criticism — none harsher than that coming from his own family.
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” Kennedy’s siblings wrote in a joint statement. Some context for those unfamiliar with RFK Jr.’s namesake: The late Robert F. Kennedy senior’s legacy is of unity, anti-racism, and equality, and his policy stances differed starkly from his son’s.
The Kennedy family previously condemned his campaign as well, writing that “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” even going as far as labeling his views as “perilous” to the country. RFK senior’s own election campaign in 1968 was cut short by his assassination, at the age of 42, but any other political similarities stop there.
Who was Robert F. Kennedy?
Robert Francis Kennedy (born 1925) was the seventh of nine children born on the outskirts of Boston, to Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He has six older siblings — Joseph Jr., Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, and Jean — and a younger brother, Edward.
Robert Kennedy went from childhood in a middle-class, but upwardly-mobile Irish Catholic family, to adolescence as a member of one of Massachusetts’ wealthiest, most socially prominent families. Robert later cited his family’s socioeconomic change helped him recognize the inequalities faced by American families on the poverty line.
Like his older brother, John F. Kennedy, Robert attended Harvard and served in the U.S. Navy. Robert graduated from the University of Virginia Law School in 1951. His legal background led to working as an assistant counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under Joseph R. McCarthy, before becoming chief counsel to the Senate select committee conducting investigations into labor racketeering.
After working on his brother’s presidential election campaign in 1960, Robert was hired as Attorney General of the United States. Bolstered by the national and personal grief following his brother’s assassination in 1963, Kennedy successfully campaigned to be elected a Senator for New York.
Kennedy married Ethel Sakel in 1950, and the couple had 11 children: Kathleen (born 1951), Joseph (born 1952), Robert Jr. (born 1954), David (born 1955), Courtney (born 1956), Michael (born 1958), Mary (born 1959), Christopher (born 1963), Maxwell (born 1965), Douglas (born 1967), and Rory (born 1968).
Robert F. Kennedy’s political positions and progressivism
Robert F. Kennedy’s views were more progressive than most of his Democratic contemporaries, particularly in the final years of his life. Kennedy was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, and supported federal legislation and deployment of troops to speed up racial desegregation in the American South.
Kennedy often had a close working relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., having secured his release from prison and deployed security for King’s safety during civil rights marches. Kennedy supported various labor movements in the 1960s, notably the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and United Farm Workers (UFW) unions — the latter granting him the support of UFW leader and Latin American civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, and a large Latin-American following as a result.
Kennedy also took a keen interest in tackling poverty and was an early supporter of the notion that poverty was a social disease, rather than a simple economic misfortune, and required far-reaching legislation. The senator-turned-presidential hopeful visited many African-American neighborhoods and Native-American reservations to highlight that alleviating wealth inequality was the key to implementing racial and social equality.
During his tenure as a Senator for New York, Kennedy helped create the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation for the Brooklyn neighborhood of the same name — the first-ever non-profit community development program in U.S. history.
Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and legacy
In March of 1968, Kennedy announced his run for President of the United States for the upcoming November election. On June 5th, having spoken to supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, Kennedy entered the hotel kitchen and shook hands with Juan Romero, a teenage busboy, before being shot multiple times by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant.
Kennedy died later in hospital after succumbing to his injuries a day later. Several witnesses and those wounded have doubts about Sirhan’s involvement, accusing the trial and investigation of the assassination as a potential cover-up. Sirhan remains in prison as of 2024, having been denied parole on multiple occasions. Robert is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near his brother John. As of 2024, Kennedy’s widow Ethel is still alive and well.
Kennedy is now viewed as an icon of American liberalism and progressivism, having advocated for greater government intervention to tackle social inequality than many of his contemporaries were willing to do during the political upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s. His assassination is often viewed as a loss of what could’ve been an era of peace and progressivism in comparison to the Nixon era that followed.
Compared to the revolution he was striving to establish, his son’s life decisions, whether it is staging a bear cub murder or endorsing Donald Trump, have failed to live up to the legacy he left behind.