At 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 paraphrasing of MAGA explains President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of the political scion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Bobby Jr.’s vaccine skepticism appeals to anti-vaxxers, and his conspiracy theories (including about his father’s assassination in 1968) appeal to Trump and his advisers. The 47th The president and the Senate are expected to embark on what could be a rocky road to confirmation of the HHS nominee.
For better or worse, the Kennedy family often made their personal medical experiences the basis of their health policy. As early as the 1920s, when future President John F. Kennedy (RFK Jr.’s Uncle Jack) fell ill as a child with scarlet fever, a then potentially fatal and incurable bacterial infection, JFK’s father , Joe, pulled the political strings. through his father-in-law, former Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, to have young Jack admitted to a local hospital. Otherwise, the family, who had just welcomed their fourth baby, would have been confined to their house in quarantine.
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Unfortunately, the Kennedys’ third child, Rosemary, born at the height of the 1918 flu 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 a facility recommended by doctors. Instead, they “mainstreamed” it long before that term entered the vernacular to place students with mental or physical challenges among their non-afflicted peers.
However, when Rosemary became an adult and began exhibiting violent tantrums and a propensity to distance herself from caretakers in the early 1940s, her father feared that men would take advantage of her. Pregnancy outside of marriage was unthinkable for the Catholic Kennedys, who did not seek abortions nor did they tolerate sterilization, which was often applied to women of very low intelligence. Instead, Joe subjected his daughter to a new treatment for anxiety and other mental disorders: prefrontal lobotomy. Sadly, all of the family’s efforts to enable Rosemary to reach her potential were in vain when the operation reduced her to a childlike mental capacity and affected her mobility.
In the late 1940s, Joe placed Rosemary in a convent in Wisconsin where nuns cared for her, and he forbade her family from visiting her, fearing they would cause unrest. For the public, he reported that she was a teacher in a Catholic institution. Further tragedy befell the Kennedys when the eldest child, Joe Jr., died when his Navy plane exploded off the coast of England in 1944. The devastated family founded a charity in his name, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which embraced a mission to benefit people with developmental disabilities.
JFK’s mother, Rose, and his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, persuaded the new president to establish federal funding and awards for research in the field of “mental retardation.” Shriver published an article in 1962 on rosemary in the Saturday evening messageand soon afterward, she launched the precursor to the Special Olympics by opening her Maryland estate to summer day camps and sporting events for children with intellectual disabilities.
But it was the youngest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Edward (Ted), who had the greatest impact on health policy, often inspired by his family’s medical problems. Forty-seven years in the Senate (1962-2009) allowed him to craft 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 of traction and rehabilitation. At the same time, his father struggled to overcome the effects of a debilitating stroke.
In 1972, Senator Kennedy’s 12-year-old son and namesake, Edward Jr. (Teddy), was diagnosed with cancer that required the amputation of his right leg. Her father watched over every agonizing chemotherapy treatment. Speaking to parents of other children with cancer, the senator heard harrowing stories of families going without health coverage, mortgaging their homes and falling into debt because of the hand fate had dealt them.
Over the next three decades, Senator Kennedy worked doggedly with his Democratic and Republican colleagues to achieve every possible incremental advance, including health insurance for disadvantaged children and portability of adult health coverage. from job to job, as well as its applicability to pre-existing conditions.
His son Patrick, a longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives, suffered from drug addiction and worked with his father to pass the Mental Health Parity and Substance Abuse Equity Act of 2008 , which requires insurers to cover physical, mental illness and addiction. also. Shortly thereafter, Senator Kennedy died of brain cancer. When the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s solution for 40 million uninsured Americans, was passed in 2010, Patrick left a note on his father’s grave in Arlington Cemetery: “Dad, the unfinished business is over. »
What is Robert Kennedy Jr.’s unfinished business? Will his own drug addiction, brain-eating worm, mercury poisoning and fear of vaccines shape health policy if he becomes Trump’s HHS secretary? And unlike those close to him, her Are personal medical problems harming America more than making 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 opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
