Books: "RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise" By Isabel Vincent

 

RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise

By Isabel Vincent

William Morrow; hardcover, 304 pages; $30.00

Isabel Vincent is an award-winning investigative journalist for the New York Post. This is her seventh book, with her most recent Gold Bar Bob: The Downfall of the Most Corrupt U.S. Senator on former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. Vincent's work has also appeared in The New Yorker, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Independent.

RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise is Vincent's examination of one of the most controversial figures in politics, who led the fight against Dr. Anthony Fauci and the measures taken during the Covid era, to his presidential run, and now serving as Health Secretary in the administration of President Trump.

Vincent delivers a complete portrait of Kennedy because she had exclusive access to three of his diaries that were entrusted to her in 2013, one year after his former wife, Mary Richardson, committed suicide.

While the diaries, whose salacious parts have been previously reported, such as his documenting of his affairs, they really unlock the key into who Kennedy is. In one entry, from May 21, 1999, he writes that his greatest fear was that his life would have no meaning unless he got into politics. 

Also, surprisingly, at that time, RFK Jr. needed the money, as his part of the Kennedy family was not nearly as wealthy as the others. When his father, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, the family was left bereft, as he spent most of their money on his run for President. 

Growing up in his father's shadow left RFK Jr. "tormented by his womanizing and agonized in his diaries over how to become a better person," Vincent writes. "In a particularly perceptive entry on July 25, 2001, he noted, 'I bought the ticket, as Hunter [S. Thompson] says, and I took the ride. The seeds of it were easy. The restlessness, the shattered dreams, the empty hole that had to get filled with women.' Through it all, he knew that he was failing the one person he had always wanted to impress. 'I knew daddy was watching me and that he loved me,' he wrote the same day. 'But I also felt I was disappointing him - when I told a lie, had a sexual thought, got a bad grade.'

"In fact, Kennedy's diary entries are evidence of a lifetime spent grappling with the weight of his family's legacy and his quest to carve out a distinct identity as an environmental crusader, public health critic, and political maverick. 'Still trying to be a political and moral force,' he wrote in his diary on October 14, 2000, during a hectic ten-day cross-country lecture tour, describing his conquests as an environmental lawyer suing corporations and others for polluting forests and waterways. 'I am letting slip the opportunity for real power, and fear that I will become a kind of gentleman environmentalist without any real import or prestigious office.'"

One part of Kennedy's life that should get more attention is brought to light here by Vincent, when Kennedy served a prison term of 30 days in the summer of 2001 in Puerto Rico after he was arrested for civil disobedience.

RFK Jr. was part of a group, along with actor Edward James Olmos and civil rights activists Reverend Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, among others,  protesting how Vieques, an island nature preserve off the Puerto Rican coast, was being used as a weapons training ground  for the United States Navy since 1941. The bombing played havoc with the biodiversity on the island, and it took over its eastern and western shores. Kennedy was joined on this protest by.

The one month Kennedy at the Guaynabo prison was transformative, as it gave him a necessary break he felt was needed, while still letting him spend the final month of the summer at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port.

"As he was driven off the prison with the other protestors, Kennedy was pleased with himself," Vincent writes. "During his first few days in the lockup, his wife, Mary, who was days away from delivering their fourth child, had managed to get through to him on the phone. She told him that she had received many calls from friends expressing their outrage at his sentence. Everyone except Kennedy's own family condemned his treatment, she said. 'Well, it's Bobby's own choice to be there,' his younger sister Kerry had told Mary following news of his sentence.

"Mary told her husband that his mother, Ethel Kennedy, was 'very proud of me' - likely for the first time in his life. His mother was planning to visit him at Guaynabo, Mary said. So was Hillary Clinton, who was six months into her first term as the junior senator from New York. His uncle Ted Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, was also planning a visit, as was Mark Green, New York City's public advocate and a fellow environmentalist who was running in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City."

Kennedy was at the peak of his powers with his organization, Riverkeepers, known for its efforts to clean the Hudson River dating back to the late 1980s. He would go around the country speaking to nonprofits and conventions globally. Vice President Al Gore wrote the introduction to the book The Riverkeepers, which was released in 1997.

Surprisingly, around this time is when his disenchantment with the Democratic party began. Toward the end of President Bill Clinton's time in office in late 2000, he gave a speech at Hyannis Port that brought Kennedy to tears, but in his final days in office, Kennedy had issues with Clinton's series of pardons of shady figures because he did not consult with the prosecutors who worked on their cases.

In his diary, Kennedy wrote, "I defended the Clintons to all comers on every issue and was never shaken. But now I'm disgusted. [Clinton] really is a flawed character - dramatically and for trinkets and whatever else he got for those pardons, and I think of all the good deeds he didn't do."

Kennedy very well could have been alluding to the fact the Clinton administration was no help in getting the Navy to end the bombings on Vieques. Hillary Clinton told Kennedy to get in touch with Donald Rumsfeld, who would be Secretary of Defense for the incoming George W. Bush administration. 

Rumsfeld called him on January 16, 2001, Kennedy wrote in his diary, and said he heard him out on what was happening on the island, as other Republicans, including New York Governor George Pataki, were taking up the cause. Soon after, Bush made the announcement that all military actions in Vieques would end by May 2003. Though the nation going into war after the September 11 attacks delayed that deadline, it ultimately held, and the practice range has since been turned into a nature reserve.

RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise is a book that will make you understand this complex individual more than ever, and what has motivated him to take on the causes that he has throughout his life, showing he has a real sense of the moment and where he can get concrete action done.