Michael Shearer

And almost literally the first thing he said to me when I walked in the room was, my staff doesn't want me to talk to you.

They think this is a mistake.

No one in your position ever treats me fairly.

And that was sort of the launching point.

We met, I think, in total for something like seven hours.

There are dozens of text messages on my phone going back and forth about particular studies.

I traveled with him to Chicago.

I mean, it ended up becoming a rather elaborate reporting process.

I think he's a very peculiar person, even among politicians who tend to be incredibly driven, incredibly self-focused people.

He has a ferocity to him that is unusual.

And I've been doing this a lot of years now in Washington, profiling people like this.

And my idea is that you cannot understand what he's doing now at HHS.

without understanding him as a person, where he came from, and that extraordinary journey, the extraordinary trauma he went through of losing his father and uncle at a very young age, of getting deeply into drugs starting at the age of 15, of spending 14 years as a heroin addict, of spending most of his life since then on a daily basis focused on overcoming his many addictions—

And on reclaiming the birthright he was born with.

I mean he was born as much a prince as America has ever had in that the Kennedy family in the 1960s was as much political royalty as the United States has ever had.

And he lost all of that.

His life course went way off track in his teen years and his 20s.

And it is a remarkable journey to go from that to someone who's running a hopeless campaign for president to literally the most powerful scientific policymaker probably in the world right now.

So he was nine years old when his uncle, President Kennedy, was shot.

And then 14 years old when his father, Kennedy's brother, Bobby Kennedy, was shot in California.