In September 1983, Robert F. Kennedy Jr fell ill on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota. The pilot radioed ahead for medics. By dint of his famous name, Kennedy, then 29 and fresh out of law school, was taken to a VIP room at the airport, where investigators found heroin in his luggage.

By his own account, Kennedy, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of possessing heroin, had become addicted to the drug in his teens, as he struggled to cope with the assassination of his father. Two days after the plane episode, he checked himself into a New Jersey drug treatment centre. He says he has been sober ever since.

Now Kennedy is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, a nomination he landed after a renegade presidential campaign in which he cast his life as a redemption story. He told a conservative Christian radio host this year that as an addicted and troubled young man, he had undergone a “spiritual awakening” and “knew he had to change at a deep, fundamental way”.

Yet Kennedy’s early fight for sobriety was far from the end of his battles with demons and self-destructive impulses. An examination of his life, gleaned through interviews with more than a dozen people, court filings and his own statements, reveals his distinct pattern of cycling through extremes – including his early drug addiction, compulsive sexual behaviour and deep dives into conspiracy theories – all while under the microscope of fame.

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At midlife, Kennedy won public acclaim as a crusading environmental lawyer who sued corporate polluters, cleaned up rivers and lobbied to protect New York’s drinking water. But he was also a serial philanderer who kept a journal chronicling his encounters and assigned numerical scores to women, even as he berated himself for his inability to control his actions.

His infidelities contributed to the breakup of his second marriage, according to interviews with people who knew the couple. A former nanny who worked for his family during this time has also accused Kennedy of making sexual overtures towards her and touching her without consent.

As an anti-vaccine advocate, Kennedy has plunged into dark and conspiratorial views of government, the press, scientific institutions and especially the drug industry. He has promoted wild and debunked theories.

Kennedy declined a request for an interview. Friends and close associates say his choices are best understood as a quest to live up to the legacy of his father and namesake, Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney-general, senator and liberal icon who was assassinated while running for president in 1968.

One friend, who like many others interviewed for this article declined to be named, said Kennedy’s self-aggrandising drive to emulate his father was a “tragic flaw” that gave rise to “the need for adulation, the need for recognition, the need for followers”. The younger Kennedy has long embraced his family mythology and imagined himself as a new hero.

“Everything that has happened in my life,” Kennedy said in a campaign video, “has led me to where I am right now – the deaths, the tragedies, the addiction, the recovery, finding a deep belief in God.”

But the road Kennedy travelled led him to an alliance with a man his family and fellow Democrats regard as anathema. Trump brought him into his fold to consolidate his base, and Kennedy entered, telling uneasy allies it was his best chance of effecting real change.

Other Kennedys have repeatedly denounced him. His sister Kerry Kennedy says her brother has “set fire” to their father’s legacy and called the decision to back Trump “a sad ending to a sad story”.

Close friends and supporters see him as a revolutionary, speaking truth to power. They also say he should not be defined by addiction, but by recovery: they note he is disciplined and focused. He has thrown himself into exercise and adheres to a strict diet known as intermittent fasting. More than 40 years after the flight to South Dakota, he still attends daily 12-step meetings, he says.

Del Bigtree, his former communications director, described Kennedy as deeply spiritual, and said he feels “called to make a difference”. Gavin de Becker, Kennedy’s security consultant and close adviser, said Kennedy’s sobriety is a source of his “stamina and commitment and resilience” – “an absolute golden qualification”, he said, for a health secretary.

Kennedy himself leans into his troubled past. “I got so many skeletons in my closet,” he said while campaigning for president, “that if they could vote, I could be king of the world.”

A complex inheritance

Bobby Kennedy was nine years old when an uncle, president John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. The third of his parents’ 11 children, Bobby wanted to be a scientist or a veterinarian.

Five years later, in June 1968, his father was killed. He was 14. That fall, he entered ninth grade at Millbrook, a boys’ boarding school in New York’s Hudson Valley. The school was isolated and bucolic; Kennedy, fascinated by animals, was attracted to its small zoo.

In 1970, when he was 16, Kennedy was expelled from Millbrook for drug use, according to his memoir American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family. That summer, he was arrested for marijuana possession in Massachusetts. The following summer he was arrested again, accused of spitting ice-cream in a police officer’s face. He denied the accusation but paid a fine.

Kennedy cycled through two more high schools before graduating, and despite his troubles, was able to follow in his father’s footsteps to Harvard.

He continued to battle a growing drug addiction – a problem that plagued other family members, including a younger brother, David, who died in 1984 after ingesting cocaine and other drugs, and his cousin Patrick, who served in Congress and is today an advocate for people with mental illness and drug addiction.

One Harvard classmate remembers buying cocaine from Kennedy when they were in college. At some point, Kennedy contracted hepatitis C by sharing needles, he said in a 2023 interview with The New York Times.

After graduating with honours in American history from Harvard, Kennedy went on to law school at the University of Virginia – again, as his father had done. “When he died, I felt kind of an obligation to pick up the torch that he had dropped,” Kennedy said in a video produced for his presidential campaign, “and so I changed my career trajectory to align it more with his.”

In 1982, Kennedy, then 28, landed a plum job in the Manhattan district attorney’s office but had to resign when he failed the bar exam. Then came his arrest and conviction for heroin possession. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and community service.

By the time Kennedy arrived at the Open Space Institute, a land preservation organisation, to complete his service work, he was visibly unhealthy, according to one person who knew him then.

Being ‘the Kennedy who matters’

The institute put Kennedy to work, helping renovate an old farmhouse in Garrison, New York. The house was later rented by the Hudson Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to cleaning up the polluted Hudson River. Kennedy became passionate about its cause and soon signed on.

Once he was admitted to the bar, in 1985, he got a master’s of law in environmental studies. He kept a low profile at first, but by the early 1990s, he was back in the spotlight, his name a magnet for reporters. He seemed to embrace it.

In 1995, New York Magazine crowned him “The Kennedy Who Matters”. He circulated the article widely, according to someone who knew him at the time. In 1997, he was a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy! and rumours began to swirl that he might run for a US Senate seat.

At his office at Pace University, where he got his master’s and ran the environmental litigation clinic, the wall was covered with photos of him posing with celebrities. He would eventually marry one – actress Cheryl Hines, his third wife.

Kennedy became a nationally recognised environmental lawyer. In 1999, he was named a hero of the planet by Time magazine for his work with the Riverkeeper organisation.

‘Wild impulses’

In the mid-1990s, his first marriage, to Emily Black, a law school classmate, fell apart. And soon after the divorce was official, Kennedy married Mary Richardson, a close friend of his sister Kerry.

The tensions in his second marriage were apparent immediately to Eliza Cooney, who in 1998, at 23, moved to New York to work with Kennedy at Pace – an offer that included room and board, commuting to the office with Kennedy and working as his children’s weekend nanny.

She has since described – in an article in Vanity Fair, and in interviews with The New York Times – several instances in which Kennedy, then in his mid-40s, made physical passes at her: during a meeting with a Pace colleague in the family kitchen, he moved his hand up and down her leg, she has said. Once, he came into her room, shirtless, and asked her to rub lotion on his back. And once, he stepped into the kitchen pantry behind her and moved his hands up and down the sides of her torso, she said.

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Kennedy declined to comment on the claims. When Cooney’s allegations first surfaced in mid-2024, he sent her an apologetic text message, saying he had no memory of the episodes.

As part of his 12-step recovery programs, Kennedy kept a journal. In it, he chronicled sexual encounters with more than three dozen women in a one-year period in around 2001, assigning them rankings, 1 to 10, that corresponded with different sexual acts, The New York Post reported. The journal reportedly includes entries suggesting his behaviour filled him with self-loathing.

“After daddy died I struggled to be a grown-up,” Kennedy wrote, adding, “I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie – to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”

Kennedy filed for divorce nine years later. Richardson, who struggled with depression and alcohol abuse, died by suicide in 2012, at age 52. Her death, and Kennedy’s public falling out with Richardson’s family, brought a stream of negative press attention to Kennedy.

By then, he was taking his activism in a new direction.

Battling the public health establishment

One summer in the early 2000s, Sarah Bridges, a Minnesota psychologist who had gone to college with a sister-in-law of Kennedy, showed up unannounced at his home at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Bridges said her son had suffered a brain injury and received an autism diagnosis, after being vaccinated with a pertussis vaccine that is no longer in use in the United States.

Kennedy had been working on getting mercury out of waterways; Bridges wanted him to investigate thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that has been largely removed from childhood vaccines in the United States.

Once he dived in, there was no stopping him. Using “my name and my family’s relationships”, he said in a speech at Hillsdale College, he secured meetings with Dr Anthony Fauci, then the government’s top infectious disease specialist, and Dr Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Their answers, he has said, left him convinced that the NIH was little more than “an incubator” for the drug industry. “It was regulatory capture on steroids,” he has said.

In 2005, Kennedy wrote an article, published in Rolling Stone and Salon, that blamed thimerosal for a rise in autism in children. Both news outlets later withdrew the article after finding that some of its claims were wrong or dubious, and Kennedy was widely criticised by the scientific community. The theory that vaccines cause autism has been widely debunked.

Yet, Kennedy only saw this as more evidence of the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry had on the government and on the mainstream media.

He churned out books and founded a nonprofit, Children’s Health Defence, turning it into an anti-vaccine behemoth that raked in millions.

It was the beginning of a new public persona for Kennedy: the hostile anti-media, anti-establishment warrior. In the eyes of his supporters, Kennedy was taking on the powerful, as his father had done.

“I think that he really thinks that things are wrong, that there’s this deep-seated corruption, which is very much the way his father and his uncle viewed the world,” said Tony Lyons, Kennedy’s publisher.

Finding an audience

The coronavirus pandemic gave Kennedy the following that he had long sought. The core of his message – that the federal government was bent on restricting personal liberties, and that pharmaceutical companies were seeking to profit off a crisis – suddenly appealed to a new audience of Americans frustrated by lockdowns and sceptical about a vaccine that was developed and marketed at an extraordinarily fast pace.

Traffic to the Children’s Health Defence website exploded. Kennedy sold books. He was welcomed at events filled with Trump supporters and appeared with election deniers and Christian nationalists.

When the Centre for Countering Digital Hate labelled him a member of “The Disinformation Dozen”, he was suspended from Instagram – a move that reaffirmed his conviction that big tech was conspiring with the Biden administration to suppress free speech.

Last spring, when he was considering challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, he told advisers that he heard the echoes of history in the decision: his father, disillusioned with Democrats over the Vietnam War, defied party leaders in 1968 to mount a primary against an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson. His life appeared to have come full circle, he suggested.

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He began his presidential bid as a “Kennedy Democrat” but later left the party to run as an independent, accusing Democratic leadership of corruptly stifling his primary challenge.

By this past summer, with his poll numbers in the single digits and his campaign coffers running dry, Kennedy was faced with a choice: continue his quixotic effort, or bow out of the race and endorse Trump. The former president’s allies, concerned that Kennedy would pull support from their ranks, had long been interested in an alliance, the Times has reported.

Conversations between the two camps began in earnest after an assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, an event whose echoes in Kennedy’s own life seemed to open the door to unity. And Kennedy felt assured that he would get a powerful seat at the table.

His power is now poised to grow. Some of Kennedy’s allies believe he will run for president again.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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