Caroline Kennedy told the Senate on Tuesday not to confirm her “perverse” first cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.
“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” Kennedy, the only living child of John F. Kennedy, wrote in a letter to senators. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator.”
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily Beast and first reported by The Washington Post, was sent on the eve of RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings as the Senate considers his nomination to become Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks,” she wrote. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
The former ambassador to Australia also alleged that her cousin is a hypocrite whose “crusade against vaccination” is a fraud: He vaccinated his own children while warning parents about the dangers of childhood vaccinations against disease, she said.
As the Daily Beast reported exclusively, RFK Jr. earned millions of dollars from a nonprofit he founded that has peddled anti-vax messaging, although he failed to disclose to federal auditors—as required by law of presidential candidates and Cabinet nominees—hundreds of thousands that he made off the group.
Kennedy said RFK Jr. is a recovering addict who survived after dragging some of his siblings and cousins into the horrors of substance abuse while he himself “has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life.”
The Kennedy family’s numerous tragedies have included the assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963 and his brother, RFK, in 1968 when he was running for president.
In her letter to the top Republicans and Democrats on the two Senate committees that will consider RFK Jr’s nomination, Caroline noted the impact the assassinations have had on her generation of Kennedys, and how she feels her cousin exploited them.
“Through his own strength - and the many second chances he was given by people who felt sorry for the boy who had lost his father - Bobby was able to pull himself out of illness and disease,” she said. “I admire the discipline that took and the continuing commitment it requires.”
The assassinated brothers' sister Rosemary Kennedy suffered a botched lobotomy, which had been approved by their father, Joseph Kennedy, at the age of 22. She was institutionalized for life.
John F. Kennedy Jr., Caroline’s little brother known as John John, died in a plane crash on a hazy summer night in 1999 when, as a new pilot at the age of 38, he began his descent to Martha’s Vineyard to attend the wedding of Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.
His death came two years after his cousin Michael, a brother of RFK Jr., died in a ski accident in 1997. He crashed head first into a tree while playing a beloved Kennedy family game on the slopes in Aspen, Colorado: football on skis.
RFK Jr.‘s older brother, David, died of a fatal drug overdose in 1984 at the age of 28.
A granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died of a drug overdose at the family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 2019. The 22-year-old was the daughter of RFK Jr.‘s sister, Courtney Kennedy Hill. Her father, Paul Michael Hill, was among the so-called Guildford Four who were wrongfully convicted in the deadly 1974 Irish Republican Army pub bombings in Birmingham, England.
A toxicology test found Hill died of a fatal mixture of methadone, four prescription drugs, and alcohol.
Caroline Kennedy told senators in her letter that she was reluctant to speak out until now.
“We are a close family and none of this is easy to say. It also wasn’t easy to remain silent last year when Bobby expropriated my father’s image and distorted President Kennedy’s legacy to advance his own failed presidential campaign - and then groveled to Donald Trump for a job,” she wrote. “Bobby continues to grandstand off my father’s assassination, and that of his own father. It is incomprehensible that someone who is willing to exploit their own painful family tragedies for publicity would be in charge of American life-and-death situations.”
The Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on RFK Jr.’s nomination Wednesday.
