I interned for RFK Jr. when I was 18

A story about a man who very obviously shouldn't be president

In the summer of 2005, I took an internship at Air America Radio because I was a high school newspaper editor who had been radicalized by Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and wanted to work for Al Franken.

I saw Franken exactly once as he breezed through the lofty office in downtown Manhattan, but I saw RFK Jr. regularly, because I was assigned to work specifically for his show.

This ended up being an education in what it meant to work for a very powerful man who had never once, from the first time he breathed air, for any reason, heard the word, “No.”

This is not a salacious story. This is a story about someone very charismatic and very passionate who did breathtakingly little research when it wasn’t convenient for him. It is also not the most damning thing you will read about him this election cycle. He has done and said and confessed far more batshit bonkers shit than I could ever divulge, but this a short and poorly recalled story about a man who should not be entrusted with a task more serious than having a spirited conversation at a Martha’s Vineyard cocktail party.

After intern orientation, the handful of New York City teenagers were divided into groups — kids with connections got Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, and I was assigned to Ring of Fire, hosted by the wonderful Mike Papantonio and the now infamous Bobby Kennedy Jr.. It’s worth noting: Even though Air America no longer exists, Ring of Fire still does, and Mike still hosts it with great zeal and rigor. Kennedy was fired from the show in 2020 when he came out against the COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2005, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was culturally accepted as normal and great. He was an environmental justice advocate and law professor who was a senior attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council and was on the board of River Keeper. It’s astonishing to look back and see how this man’s singular (and noble) obsession with clean water devolved into redpilled madness about hormone-contaminated tap water making kids trans, but here we are.

I’ll also say, these are nearly two-decade-old recollections, and lack any sharpness or note-perfect-transcribed accuracy, but the overall impression has stayed with me in the way meeting a member of the American Royal Family might stay with anyone with a reasonably decent memory.

I was excited to work for a Kennedy because I am the granddaughter of assimilationist Massachusetts Jews who carried L.L. Bean boat totes and wore red chinos to the golf course. I remember telling my grandma I was assigned to Bobby and she got very serious, speaking as if he were a dear friend: “Tell him we are so sorry about Jon-Jon.” (I did not.)

I remember Bobby as humble and gravel-voiced and soft-spoken and kind, and as someone who was completely uninterested in background research.

This was frequently frustrating for me because a significant part my job was to research.

During the summer between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I read several extremely dense books about the environment by authors who were set to be interviewed on the show, summarized them in bullet points, and handed them to RFK Jr. at his recording studio office at Pace University in Westchester, and watched him tuck away the cards and interview the author without even acknowledging the material in the book.

I remember reading one enthusiastically-written but nevertheless boring book about the migration of striped bass, distilling the book into a report for my direct manager, turning her edited report into a few bullet points, and watching him tuck the bullet points into the book as he shot from the hip and just talked about what he already knew.

The producer shrugged at me as if this were normal. I wouldn’t dream of shit-talking the boss to my supervisor, especially since I was raised to believe in the dynastic wisdom of this person.

When I transcribed the interview, highlighting the time codes for “um”s and “uh”s so the editor could remove a believable amount of them, I remember being amazed by how he spoke with this total authority, a sheer confidence I couldn’t fathom, without so much at glancing at the book beyond its cover. When the expert gently corrected him during the interview, he replied, “That’s not what I read.” He wasn’t lying.

This is an innocuous story about a busy person with five jobs and a probably a lot on his mind. It is also the seed of something that would one day grow to be an insidious threat to public safety. For all his initial good intentions, Bobby Kennedy has become the living embodiment of not doing the research. Of affirming only what fits within a specific hunch, a sliver of an instinct of a worldview. Of the confidence to go boldly in the direction of your stream of consciousness no matter what is written in clear bullet points on index cards directly in front of you.

The RFK Jr. candidacy is what happens when nobody corrects the upstart activist son with an endless stream of blank checks to move through the world unimpeded. I couldn’t rush into the recording studio and insist he see the migratory path of striped bass for what it was. And if I had, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

I’d be crazy. And he’d be the Kennedy. And now he’s both.

In 2024, I have college friends who repost his tweets. I signed a book for a kid accompanied by a parent wearing his campaign merchandise. And I see this former boss as he was when I first met him: Doggedly passionate, self-isolated, and completely uninterested in the truth.

And as the parent of a preternaturally confident kid who loves nothing more than explaining to people whatever he thinks is true, I remember this cautionary tale, and whenever I need to correct him — gently, leading him to figure it out himself, helping him become interested in facts — I think of the migratory patterns of striped bass.