Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s healthiest watershed and winning billions of dollars in fines from corporate polluters in hundreds of lawsuits that have served as a powerful counterweight to avarice and greed.

Kennedy’s emergence this summer as a dark-horse challenger to Biden only surprised people who make a habit of not paying attention. To them, Kennedy was a marginal weirdo and probably a nut, an aging Prince Hal who had disqualified himself from serious politics by tilting at too many windmills to count. Most recently, Kennedy had made a name for himself as an “anti-vaxxer,” a designation that signifies a worrying inclination to question large pharmaceutical companies about the safety of their products. 

The meteoric rise of Kennedy’s candidacy has provided yet another proof that the respectability politics of America’s elite has very little traction in the rest of the country, in part because they have a habit of being proved wrong on nearly everything. What’s surprising is that no one on Wall Street has started a hedge fund devoted to betting against these people. I mean, what could be more far out than the idea that a handsome, charismatic guy with the last name Kennedy might gain traction in a Democratic primary, running against an incumbent President who seems to be held together by taxidermy glue? Especially when the challenger suggests that the same big pharma companies that gave America the oxycontin epidemic might not be telling the whole truth about the chemicals they are pumping into our kids. It’s not like every mom in America isn’t already suspicious that their kids are being poisoned by something in the air, the water, maybe plastics or ADD medication, or God knows what else. 

What the High Pelosis of the Democratic Party and its opinion-minders missed is that the things they see as disqualifying look more like pluses than minuses to most of their countrymen. First off, Americans don’t like politicians. Second, they don’t trust experts. They do like celebrities, though. And being a Kennedy is as close to the political equivalent of being a celebrity as any politician not named Trump is likely to get.   

Yet there is also something deeper worth understanding, which is that the Kennedys were never beloved because they are famous. The Kennedys represent an American ideal of family, just like the Corleone family in the Godfather movies. They sinned, yes, but they stayed together. Their sacrifices were written in blood — on the streets of Dallas, and then in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. 

Of course Bobby has plenty of high-born relatives who share his famous last name but will never be elected to anything. What makes this Kennedy a legitimate contender for the Presidency, regardless of the ultimate rightness or wrongness of his positions on any particular issue, is his deep intuitive grasp of the nature and sources of the family’s charisma, and his ability to channel that force in the context of a new America where JFK and RFK have become bland corporate acronyms for airports and football stadiums.

What made the Kennedys special was not Joe Kennedy’s cash or his connections to Hollywood, or even JFK’s war heroism or his dalliance with Marilyn Monroe. It was that their suffering was ours, played out on a bigger screen. Joe Kennedy Jr., the family’s first great hope, was a bomber pilot killed in battle during World War II, during which his sister Kick and her husband also died. Jack Kennedy saved the lives of some of his men in the Pacific by dragging them to safety when their boat was torpedoed by the Japanese. Robert F. Kennedy picked up his brother’s torch after he was murdered, and then he was assassinated, too. 

Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s famous name would mean little if not for his scars. When America lost a President and a healer, Bobby lost his uncle and then his father. Addiction followed, the way it does for many Americans whose losses are more than they know how to handle. Bobby’s decades-long embrace of AA — he attends 7-10 meetings a week — has made him fluent in the shared language of the recovery movement, which demands faith in a higher power, making it the most powerful American religious movement of the past half-century. His scars are ours, too. 

Bobby’s inheritance of the Kennedy charisma also stems from his embrace of the shared philosophy which lay at the root of his uncle and his brother’s appeal. What set the Kennedys apart, and made them appealing to thinkers and writers, was the brothers’ merger of old-fashioned stoicism with late 1950s existentialism. There are worse things than death, the Kennedy philosophy insisted. The idea that man can entirely control his fate is an illusion. What matters is your ability to muster your highest and best qualities when facing the unknown. 

A philosophy that emerged in the face of shattering losses, both shared and personal, the Kennedy brothers’ creed resonated with a nation of ex-soldiers who knew that JFK was in fact one of them. It resonated even more broadly a decade later with RFK’s coalition of the young and unwanted combined with ethnic Democrats and union men. When RFK was assassinated, the note of courage that they sounded in the face of uncertainty faded, and was replaced by a queasy chorus of establishment know-it-alls who saw their mission as increasing profits, invading other countries, and spying on the rest of us.  

Bobby Kennedy Jr. understands his own life within the frame established by his uncle and his father. It’s the religion he has lived by all his life. The update Bobby has provided is a healthy dose of paranoia, which assures us that he is on our side and not their side. 

When Bobby says that the CIA killed his uncle, and quite possibly his father, he is always careful to stick to the evidence; yet the emotional charge of his words comes from a profound act of identification with the three quarters of Americans who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. When Bobby allows for the possibility of alien life forms, or criticizes vaccine makers, he is operating along the same paranoid-existentialist axis, allowing much greater space for the unknown than the elites are willing to credit, while advertising his willingness to bear the slings and arrows of their scorn. He renews his family’s charisma by demonstrating his willingness to risk his name in pursuit of the truth. He is what we would want to be if we were richer and better-looking, and bore the Kennedy name.  

Recently, I met the last true Kennedy at his house in Los Angeles where we had a long conversation about his family’s legacy, his decades-long career as one of America’s most distinguished environmental lawyers, preserving America’s wild places, his suspicions of CIA involvement in the murders of his father and uncle, and why large pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to be any less dangerously corrupt than other big corporations. 

Another part of my interest in Bobby Kennedy Jr. stems from the fact that he is one of 4,000 licensed falconers in America. To obtain a falconry license in most states, a would-be falconer must be at least twelve years old. They must train a bird of prey to fly free, hunt under the guidance of a human being, and accept a return to captivity as well as erect a proper shelter for their companion. The falconer must also pass a written exam and pay a licensing fee of anywhere from $10 to $75 to the appropriate state licensing board. 

American falconers come in three classes: apprentice falconer, general falconer and master falconer – the latter being a distinction that generally acquires five to seven years of apprenticeship and written testimony from a licensed master falconer. Mr. Kennedy, a master falconer, began hunting with birds of prey when he was nine. Since then, he has hunted with hundreds of birds. He is the co-author of the 94-page manual of multiple-choice questions and answers that applicants must study in order to pass the New York State apprentice falconry exam. 

My thinking, when I first spoke to Mr. Kennedy, was that I could convince him to write a book about falconry. Instead, he decided to run for President. I still think there is a great book in it.

David Samuels: Did your parents encourage your love of the outdoors and nature?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: My father was always very encouraging of me. My mother grew up in a family of hunters and fishermen. Her family was always in the woods, and her brothers were all fishermen and hunters. They did everything — fly-fishing on the flats and the rivers, trolling on the ocean for striper, bowing fish, and hunting.

Then when I was nine years old, I read The Once and Future King, which was T.H. White's book about King Arthur as a young kid. T.H. White himself was a falconer and he had a chapter with a very graphic description of falconry. And at that moment I knew that that's what I wanted to do in my life. 

Samuels: How did you first acquire a falcon? 

Kennedy: Well, it turns out my father knew a falconer who lived only a couple miles from us, who was one of the pioneers of American falconry. He was a guy called Alvin Nye and he was an all-American football player at Penn State. And he had pioneered a lot of techniques in falconry. He was at that point designing jets for the Pentagon, but the State Department knew about him because whenever there were visiting Arab dignitaries, they would take them out to see him in Virginia, because the Arabs are all crazy for falconry. So my father knew him from that. 

Nye invented a way of catching peregrines that was sort of unique to America. And he had discovered the big migration on Assateague Island and all of these things that for falconers are big deals. I apprenticed under him beginning when I was nine years old, and then by the time I was 14, I was seriously hunting with hawks and taking a lot of game.

Samuels: What did it feel like for you as a child to have control of a large, airborne predator? 

Kennedy: I cannot tell you the amount of excitement and joy that brought me, to be able to walk through the woods with a hawk or two hawks following me like dogs and then hunting and taking game, taking rabbits for the first time, and squirrel and pheasant and turkeys.

Samuels: Do you feel like they're a weapon? Is it a feeling of control from the sky?

Kennedy: No, I'll tell you what it feels like. It feels like you're in the arctic with a wolf pack and that they have allowed you to go on a hunt with them, because the hawk does not change any of its behavior. The only thing that changes, when you call it comes to you. Otherwise, it's doing everything it would normally do, but it uses you as a companion, as an instrument. 

Because when you're walking through the woods, normally it's up there alone, hunting, waiting for something to move. And I always had a dog, too. So instead of paying attention to the hawk, the game in the forest is focused on you, your footsteps, and on hiding from you. The hawk knows that.

Samuels: So you become an instrument for the hawk. 

Kennedy: Yeah. You become a partner in the hunt with it. There's something really atavistic about it, in this kind of wonderful, primal way of being the companion to a wild animal during a hunt.

Samuels: Its wildness is undiminished, it's not domesticated—

Kennedy: And you lose them all the time. We would trap them in September and then train them. It takes two or three weeks to train them, then you hunt with them through March and then release them. But a lot of times you lose them during the hunting season, because they are wild animals.