Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today, how RFK Jr.
Chapter 2: How did RFK Jr. become a powerful figure in public health?
became the most powerful man in public health. Earlier this year, journalist Michael Shearer set out to profile health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kennedy agreed to sit down with him.
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.
Michael first wrote about Kennedy back in 2023 when he was at The Washington Post. Kennedy had taken issue with some parts of that coverage, but the two stayed in touch. And for this new story for The Atlantic, Kennedy granted Michael a remarkable level of access.
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.
Michael's piece is out now. It explores how Kennedy's background — the privilege, the trauma, the years of addiction and recovery — shaped the worldview he brings to his role at HHS and what that means for federal public health policy, including rollbacks to the CDC's longstanding guidance on childhood immunization and generally shifting American attitudes toward vaccines.
Michael told me that to understand the choices Kennedy is making today, you have to start with the story of how he became who he is.
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.
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Chapter 3: What experiences shaped RFK Jr.'s worldview and beliefs?
He goes every day, he said. And he went every day when he was running for president. No matter what city he was in, he would tell his security, you have to find me a meeting. I need to be able to go. I asked him how much his recovery affects who he is now. He said it affects everything. I mean, I think it is impossible to separate any part of him now from the recovery journey.
Part of it has to do with... a sort of transparency that people in recovery have. I mean, the process of going to meetings is telling your story over and over and over again to other people in a way that makes sense and allows you to sort of forgive yourself for the things you've done to other people, for the way you've mistreated other people. But the way he has come out of that is through...
a sort of, you know, very dramatic storytelling that puts him on a sort of heroic path. I mean, when he was a young boy before his father died, Once and Future King, which is a story of young King Arthur being trained by Merlin in the woods, was one of his favorite books. And the first red-tailed hawk he gets from his father, he names after a character in Once and Future King. So he...
From a very early age, saw himself as a sort of King Arthur-like figure, right? You know, orphaned future king who has to fight demons and evil forces and fight his way back. And that force, that fierceness, I think explains why...
I think he's been successful in the ways he's been successful, but also why he has been so willing to divert entirely from the sort of accepted wisdom of the scientific community. Mm-hmm. And his mission is to sort of destroy and disrupt corrupt institutions. And that begins, you know, after his recovery in the early 80s, he becomes an environmentalist.
And he has a number of successful lawsuits against big corporate polluters starting in New York State and the Hudson River. And so that was the frame of reference that Kennedy had in his adulthood. Right. that he really was someone who could take on these evil institutional forces.
Which, just to say, in his environmental activism, a lot of it was more aligned with left-leaning, progressive, liberal ideology. I remember there was talk, there were rumblings when Obama was heading into office that he might be appointed EPA head, for example, right? Which did not seem like, at the time, a role that he was unqualified for. He had a really strong track record.
Yeah, and he was—he, you know, has always considered himself a liberal. Right. And I think still considers himself a liberal. I mean, he described himself as an FDR Kennedy liberal.
You know, in the early 2000s when George W. Bush was president, he wrote a whole book about the fascism of the Republican Party and how their environmental record—the environmental record of Bush in sort of like handing over environmental policy to corporations— was similar to what Mussolini did in Italy. It sort of echoed a lot of the liberal rhetoric that you now hear about President Trump.
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Chapter 4: What traumatic events impacted RFK Jr.'s early life?
I mean, he serves now with an energy secretary who formerly worked for an oil company. That was still part of this liberal crusade that Kennedy still believes he's fighting against entrenched power, corrupt bureaucracies, and sort of institutions that are... I mean, in the case of public health, quite literally, he believes killing kids or hurting kids. And so... That's a journey he took.
And we talked quite a bit about how he got from describing Trump as someone who preyed upon the darkest impulses of American history. He was doing that in 2024 to standing on a stage in August of 2024 with Trump and endorsing his campaign and then spending the next several weeks fighting to get Trump elected.
I mean, what did Kennedy have to say when you pressed him on these issues exactly? The company that he's keeping in this administration and the ways in which they conflict with some of his past stated values.
Yeah, he admitted it was complicated. And he said his relationship with Donald Trump is kind of like when you're dating a girl and you find out you keep liking her more and more.
Well, I read that and I thought, well, you have to start from a point, though, of actually actively not liking the girl for this metaphor to work, right? Which is really the place where he seems to have started on Trump.
I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, the simplest way to answer that question is that Kennedy decided— that Trump was at heart not a conservative, but a populist. So they were aligned in this sort of populist health crusade to break up the sort of established scientific view of how things like vaccines work, how chronic disease is approached, how chemicals are regulated.
I mean, there's a whole long list of things he's done at HHS since then. And I think, you know, the simplest explanation for what he did was this was a transaction. Trump was offering him power, real political power in his administration to make some of the changes that Kennedy had been arguing for for a long time. And he took the deal.
Mm hmm. So now that he is health secretary, which just to say, I mean, you point this out in the piece, just how powerful of a role it really is. He oversees one out of every four dollars in the federal budget. He's in charge of about 17 percent of the nation's economy in this role. Not to mention the hugely influential impact of health policy, public health policy in America.
I mean, what has he managed to accomplish so far in this role? What have seemed to be his biggest priorities? What did he tell you about how he feels about what he's accomplished so far?
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Chapter 5: What was the turning point for RFK Jr. in overcoming addiction?
You know, I wanted to ask you, Michael, it just feels hard to ignore some aspects of the Kennedy coverage, which is the salacious ones, right? I mean, there have been some really truly out there stories about him. I mean, I'm talking also about during campaign times. The worm in his brain stories, a story about the bear.
And then even more recently, the details that are coming forward about his relationship with the reporter, Olivia Newsy. I know that you asked him to some degree about some of these stories, including the Newsy stuff, and he didn't want to comment on it. But what do you make of all of that?
That reporting there's this other like it just feels like there's so much happening in the health sphere, which is what he's actually officially in charge of. But then there's this other kind of sideshow to the RFK story that's happening.
Right. Well, some of those are just things that happen. I mean, he swims in lakes and rivers and travels the country and he had a parasite in his brain. And he has this very unique relationship with animals.
So I think he just approaches the idea of finding a bear on the side of the road that's been hit by a car differently than almost anyone else would or finding a whale on a beach differently than anyone else would.
The other category of that, though, especially his relationship with women and sex, is something that, I mean, we didn't discuss it much in detail, but he has also been very clear that his addictions, he describes his brain as a formulation pharmacy, which is basically a way of saying that he can turn anything into a drug. It's rock climbing, it's, you know... working with birds, or sex.
And so he's still very much someone who struggles with his demons. And I think, I mean, he has not commented at all on the relationship with Olivia during the campaign last year. He has said when he's been confronted with other claims about infidelity, there was a babysitter who, you know, worked with his family who said he inappropriately touched her at some point and sort of propositioned her.
He's apologized for that. And he'll say, I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I'd be king of the world. And he'll make kind of jokes about the things he's done in the past that are not honorable. But I think the main takeaway from that for me was this is a person who still very much struggles.
He's not someone who's ever presented himself as being cured from the demons that haunted him during his teen years and 20s. And I think that is actually something that also explains his actions in other areas as well. It's what drives him forward.
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Chapter 6: How does RFK Jr. view his recovery journey today?
But we don't know everything about— almost everything in our lives. And the question is, how skeptical do we want to be about vaccines? How much do we want to devote our resources and time and to pull back on using vaccines while we find out? And there were vaccinologists I talked to who said, look, I am open to... you know, a new study about autism and the first-year vaccines. We can do that.
We just have to structure it in the right way. There are confounding variables we have to account for. They don't trust that Kennedy will do it. They don't believe Kennedy has the scientific training or the people he is appointing have the neutrality needed to do that study properly. But there is openness to the idea that we need more science. He's now going to do that.
The question is—the open question is— Will Kennedy discover what he believes to be there, this clear causal connection between vaccines and harm to children that has not yet been discovered? Or will his efforts to discover that cause far more harm? to American health in the meantime? And we don't know the answer to that.
And I asked him at the end of the, you know, our time together, I said, well, what if you're wrong? You know, what if all you're doing here doesn't work out and off it's right and the vaccines and the bacteria do the education and we have... you know, measles and whooping cough outbreaks and, you know, kids are put in the hospital.
And his answer was we would listen, which was, you know, a hopeful answer. And then he went on to sort of list out all the reasons that he was not wrong. So he's not in any way conceding that he's wrong. But I think, you know, we're now on this journey as a country, as a public health apparatus, and we're going to see what happens.
Yeah. Michael, really fascinating piece and one of those rare pieces where you really, really sat with the subject and let us sit with you. So thank you for writing it. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
Thanks so much for having me.
We'll include a link to Michael Shearer's profile on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on our show notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in Conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab. That's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.
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