Who is the real RFK Jr?

Time magazine once dubbed RFK Jr a "hero for the planet" in recognition of his achievements as an environmental campaigner but others regard him as a grifter and peddler of anti-vax pseudo-science.

In May 2023 a video dropped into my YouTube feed showing RFK Jr surfing in Hawaii with Kelly Slater, the world surfing champion. Gliding on a longboard on a 3 foot swell, Kennedy, who suffers from multiple health problems, including mercury poisoning due to having eaten too much tuna fish in his youth, looked surprising fit and vital for a 70-year-old.

Judging by the muscles rippling under his T-shirt, he also looked like he’d been doing some serious work outs. But Kennedy had more on his mind that day when to paddle hard for a wave, telling Slater, as they chatted on the beach before waxign their boards: “I’m surprised that you weren’t involved in politics because you’re clearly engaged and thinking about the impact of government on your life”.

“Yeah, maybe we’re not always being told the truth,” responded Slater. “At the end of the day, I want to be in control of my health and the direction of my life”.

The video ends with Kennedy and Slater riding a party wave on 10-foot longboards. The video, which you can still find on YouTube, is titled: “Do you want a president who surfs?” and closes with an appeal for donations to support his Kennedy’s then campaign as an independent, third-party candidate.

Except for surfing (a passion I share) I couldn’t care less about Slater’s political views or for that matter at the time Kennedy’s. But a month later another video popped into my feed. This one also had clips of Kennedy surfing but ran to almost 40 minutes and featured archival footage of his father Bobby and uncle Jack, as well images from his days as an environmental lawyer. In the 1980s Kennedy fought to restore clean water to New York by suing corporations that were polluting the Hudson River – an achievement that saw Time magazine name him one of its “Heroes for the Planet”. He also travelled to Latin America to assist indigenous peoples opposed to damn construction and oil exploration projects in lands they had occupied long before Columbus’s arrival in the Americas (Kennedy was a particularly vocal critic of Texaco for polluting the Ecuadorian Amazon). What surprised me most, however, is that it featured several people on the Left whose opinions I do care about, including Wade Davis, a Canadian botanist and Explore-in-Residence at the Royal Geographic Society.

“It’s wonderful to be with you,” Davis told Kennedy at one point. “You and I have so much in common, you know, and not just our Irish background and our storytelling abilities, but our love of the diversity of the world, both in terms of biological diversity, cultural diversity.”

I’ve long admired Davis. As well as being an authority on psychoactive rainforest plants and an advocate for the medical and spiritual benefits of coca, he is a superlative writer. I have several of his books above my desk, including One River, his account of two generations of scientific explorers in South America, and The Serpent and the Rainbow, his anthropological investigation into voodoo and zombie cults in Haiti.

We also share a passion for Richard Spruce, a Victorian plant-collector who spent 15 years in the Amazon and the Ecuadorian Andes and who by the time he returned to England in 1864 had documented thousands of new species of plants and trees (Spruce was also the first to describe indigenous use of the hallucinogenic vine, ayahuasca).

Later, I discovered that Davis and Kennedy had taken the same anthropology class at Harvard and shared a passion for the rights of indigenous peoples. They’re also fans of psychedelic plants and fungi. Still, I was puzzled as to how Davis could lend his endorsement to Kennedy, given his reputation as an anti-vaxxer and promoter of pseudo-scientific beliefs.

What was going on? How had Kennedy, who had repeatedly called into question the safety of the polio and measles vaccines – vaccines that, with the exception of smallpox , have saved more lives than any other vaccines in history – persuaded his former college budy to back his candidacy for president?