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    ‘A vivid distillation of a deeply fractured country’: a history of the United States in nine photographs

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    The American photographer Peter van Agtmael experienced a life-changing moment, aged 19, when he happened on a copy of Magnum Degrees, a photobook published in 2000 of dramatic images from the previous decade.“I got an instantaneous education in the beauty, violence, mystery, complexity and simplicity of photography,” he writes in his afterword to Magnum America, a much bigger, more mysterious and complex compendium of photographs spanning nine decades, from postwar 1940s to the present day.Magnum was formed as a cooperative by a group of renowned war photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1947. It’s cooperative nature was initially a reflection of its founders’ stoical postwar optimism in the face of the horrors and traumas they had witnessed, but also their shared spirit of creative independence.Magnum America traces the nation’s often turbulent journey from those tentatively optimistic postwar years to the existential anxiety of the present political moment in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Though punctuated by celebrated portraits and observational series on ordinary American lives, it is the hard-hitting photojournalism that arrests, from Capa’s blurred but powerful images from the D-day landing at Omaha beach to Van Agtmael’s eye-of-the-storm reportage of the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.Van Agtmael and his fellow editor, the curator and feminist academic Laura Wexler, have not attempted to create a definitive visual history of the United States as reflexed through the lenses of Magnum photographers, but instead deftly explore ideas of history, culture, myth and national identity. The book comprises 600 images – some famous, some relatively unknown – culled from a total of 227,450. The selection here reflects that mix, but concentrates on images of conflict and political drama that are pertinent to today’s fraught pre-election moment.The book is also a revealing social history of Magnum itself: the ideal and the often problematic reality. For too long, it reflected the predominantly white, male world of photojournalism, the exceptions being pioneers such as Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Inge Morath and, later, Susan Meiselas. And, though Magnum photographers made some of the most memorable images of the black civil rights struggle in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that Eli Reed became the first black photographer to enter the Magnum fold. That irony went unnoticed for a long time. Today, Magnum is a diverse organisation, but it is its relevance – and, by extension, photojournalism’s role – that is also at stake in a world of relentless image-making and instant image-dissemination, an environment unimaginable to its founders. The ongoing carnage in Gaza enters our consciousness daily on social media, where local photojournalists as well as ordinary people with mobile phones bear witness at great risk in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Not one photojournalist from Magnum or any other western photo agency has reported from Gaza because of Israel’s refusal to admit even embedded members of the international media. The integral act of bearing witness, which is at the core of Magnum’s collective being, continues just as powerfully all the same. The next big volume of retrospective Magnum images may have to find a way of grappling with that dilemma.1940s: Robert CapaAmerican troops landing on Omaha beach, D-day, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944View image in fullscreenOn 6 June 1944, Robert Capa was one of a handful of photographers granted permission to cross the English Channel with allied forces during the D-day operation to liberate occupied France. He travelled with American soldiers from E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. This blurred but evocative image was taken in the immediate wake of their arrival at Omaha beach, where they were met with cannon and small arms fire from embedded German troops as they leapt off their landing crafts into cold, choppy waters. It remains one of the most visceral images of that pivotal, but at times chaotic, operation, during which about 4,440 allied soldiers lost their lives and close to 6,000 were wounded.Intriguingly, the circumstances in which the 11 images that comprise Capa’s reportage from Omaha beach were created – which he described in characteristically self-mythologising fashion in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus – have recently been contested. Likewise his contention that they were all that remained of 106 pictures he sent to Life magazine on his return to England, the rest having been mysteriously destroyed after being left too long at a high temperature by an unfortunate lab assistant who was processing them.Whatever the truth, the photographs that were taken under extreme duress during his relatively short time on the beach – he made it on to a departing boat after a severe panic attack in which his hands were shaking so badly he could not reload his camera – are a powerful and up-close record of that day’s tumultuous events. There have been several attempts to identify the “soldier in the surf”, with Private Huston “Hu” Sears Riley the most likely contender. That he has not been definitively identified lends another level of poignancy to the image.Capa, one of Magnum’s founders, was arguably the most revered photojournalist of the 20th century. His most famous quote epitomised his cavalier approach: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In 1954, 10 years after this photograph was taken, he was killed, aged 40, by a landmine in Vietnam, while covering the first Indochina war.1950s: Elliott ErwittWilmington, North Carolina, 1950View image in fullscreenElliott Erwitt was invited to join Magnum by Robert Capa in 1953. Having studied photography and film-making at college in California, Erwitt, aged 25, had already made a name for himself as an editorial photographer for various commercial magazines. He would go on to become one of the world’s most famous image-makers, best known for his striking, slightly surreal pictures of the everyday. His similarly offbeat portraits of dogs have been the subject of five photobooks to date. It is fair to say that Erwitt’s dedication to being, as he put it, “serious about not being serious” has tended to shift attention away from his more unsettlingly powerful images. One of the most rawly observant is his photograph of a grief stricken and bewildered Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral.His photograph Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950 possesses a resonance that is at odds with its neutral geographical title. Like many images in Magnum America, it captures a significant moment, simultaneously evoking the darkness of the US’s past and signalling a turbulent future of hard-won progress. The tentative beginning of the civil rights movement was still four years away when this picture was taken, and it was 14 years before that struggle achieved one of its seminal victories when the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed segregation. The separate drinking fountains, marked “White” and “Colored”, the one modern and sleekly designed, the other makeshift and worn, speak of a time not that distant when discrimination was a given in certain states. The face of the man crouching over the sink beneath the Colored sign is blurred, and his stance suggests he is looking towards the other fountain that is so close yet out of bounds. As a signifier of the postwar era of US segregation in the south, Erwitt’s grainy image remains starkly affecting and deeply symbolic.1960s: Paul FuscoRobert Kennedy funeral train, USA, 1968View image in fullscreenIt was a year of sustained social and political turbulence in the US, the war in Vietnam dividing the country across generational lines and provoking widespread protests that often culminated in violence. The conflict on the streets reached a climax of sorts at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, when police brutally attacked activists and bystanders, the violence captured on TV cameras and broadcast nationally on news reports.By then, the already divided nation had been traumatised by the recent assassinations of two progressive leaders: the black civil rights figurehead Martin Luther King Jr and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. Paul Fusco boarded the train taking Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington focused on how he would cover the senator’s state funeral at Arlington cemetery for Look magazine. When the train emerged from a long dark Manhattan tunnel into daylight, he was taken aback by what he saw. Ordinary citizens, young and old, had gathered in clusters by the railway track, standing in silent homage to the young politician whose death, like his life, had echoed that of his older, more famous brother, President John F Kennedy.The train moved slowly, perhaps out of respect for the dead senator, taking eight hours rather than the usual four to complete its journey. Along the entirety of the route, people congregated trackside in their summer clothes. Fusco shot about 2,000 photos en route to Washington. In them, he freeze-framed for posterity a nation in mourning: families and friends holding hands, men standing to attention to salute, a woman kneeling in prayer. Mostly, though, a seemingly endless succession of ordinary Americans of every race, creed and colour gaze upwards as the train trundles past from city to suburb and on through sun-dappled rural neighbourhoods, their collective silence palpable in every frame.At the time, the editors of Look bafflingly decided not to publish any of Fusco’s extraordinary funeral train series. After the magazine ceased publication in 1971, they remained unseen for another 30 years, consigned to the vast archive of the Library of Congress until they were uncovered by a Magnum researcher. Almost six decades on, they evoke another now distant US, one united in grief but also, as Fusco later put it, “grateful for the commitment and hope Bobby nurtured in the legions of the poor, the black and countless other forgotten Americans”.1970s: Alex WebbNixon resignation, Washington DC, 1974View image in fullscreenOn 8 August 1974, at 9pm, Richard Nixon, who was facing impeachment and removal from office for his role in the Watergate scandal, announced that he was resigning as president of America. He was the first and as yet only US head of state to do so. “As president,” he told the country in a live television broadcast from the White House, “I must put the interests of America first.”The evidence of his misdemeanours, as uncovered by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the help of an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat”, suggested that sentiment had not been foremost in his mind two years earlier, when a break-in had occurred at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. It had been carried out by a group devoted to Nixon’s re-election, which included his former close associate G Gordon Liddy. Along with six others, Liddy was subsequently jailed for his part in the burglary.Woodward and Bernstein’s exhaustive investigation also uncovered evidence of wiretaps of the phones of those Nixon considered his most dangerous enemies. The break-in and cover-up was exposed in detail in the televised Watergate hearings that by turns enthralled and appalled the US public over 51 days in 1973.That Nixon hung on in office as long as he did was testament to his tenacity as well as his sense of entitlement. Tricky Dicky, as he came to be known, escaped the humiliation of impeachment and a possible prison sentence and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.When the news of his resignation broke, Alex Webb evoked the country’s collective response in his image of a single, anonymous individual intensely perusing the Washington Post on the streets of the capital. The front page headline, “Nixon Resigns”, resonates across the years, through the subsequent impeachments of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as the turbulence of the latter’s first term of office, the incendiary nature of his departure from it, and the possibility of his imminent return. “It changed history,” Woodward recently said of the crimes he helped to uncover. “It was a red light for presidents.” We may find out soon enough if that is still the case.1980s: Susan MeiselasUS/Mexican border, 8am: undocumented workers discovered in a “drop off” site, Interstate 5, Oceanside, California, 1989View image in fullscreenThroughout his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised his faithful that he would construct “a big beautiful wall” between the US and Mexico, one that stretched across its 2,000-mile length, thus ending once and for all the flow of illegal migrants that, he claimed, threatened the security and identity of the US. The construction of a border wall was already well under way long before Trump began his campaign, with more than 600 miles of the southern border barricaded and protected by immigration authorities. It signified the strategy of deterrence through military-style policing that had been officially sanctioned by President Clinton in 1995.This photograph by Susan Meiselas was taken in 1989, when the border was more porous and economic migrants regularly made the crossing, mainly to do the myriad low-paid menial jobs that helped keep the American, and in particular the Californian, economy afloat. By then, Meiselas had made her name with her documentary reportage from the long civil war in El Salvador and the Nicaraguan revolution.For her series Crossings, she worked with the migrants and the border security patrols tasked with apprehending them. Many of those sent back to their homeland would try to enter again by different routes, such was their dedication to the dream of reinventing themselves in the US. This image dramatically evokes the precariousness of the immigrant journey by capturing the moment some undocumented workers are discovered by a border patrol officer at the drop-off site they’ve been left at by smugglers after crossing the border. “When people are coming across the border, they are giving up on their homeland,” she said later of this photo and others like it. “That’s a very hard thing to do. There’s an uncertainty; maybe it’s that uncertainty that you are seeing.”1990s: Eli ReedMembers of the Nation of Islam among the ruins of the Rodney King riots, Los Angeles, California, 1992View image in fullscreenThe Magnum archive is rich in memorable images of the struggle – and solidarity – of African American activists during the civil rights era by the likes of Leonard Freed, Burt Glinn, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. It wasn’t until 1988, 41 years after the agency’s formation, that Eli Reed became the first black member of the organisation. “By signing him on, the agency granted loftiness to its existence,” Gordon Parks would later attest. Four decades earlier, in 1948, he had made a similar breakthrough when he became Life magazine’s first black staff photographer.From the moment he took up a camera as a young man, Reed’s ambition has been to capture the full range of black people’s experience, from the everyday to the politically seismic, the intimately tender to the collectively traumatic. To this end, his book Black in America, published in 1997, is punctuated throughout with moments of tentative optimism but also tempered by a deep anger and frustration that Reed, an activist with a camera, shared with many of his subjects.This striking image was made in the immediate aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been captured on camera a year earlier brutally beating a young black man, Rodney King. It features three besuited members of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist organisation that believes in the formation of a separate state for African Americans within the US. Despite their extremist views, they are regarded by some in the black community as role models who uphold the traditional values of discipline and self-respect, while espousing self-determination as the only alternative to endemic racism.Here, the three young men stand, alert and yet seemingly unconcerned by the proximity of Reed’s camera, in front of the ruins of a building destroyed in the riots. The stark contrast between their aura of calm authority and the wreckage that signifies chaos and disorder lends the image an edgy complexity. One of the underlying questions posed by Reed’s immersive reportage is how the black community should respond to often murderous police brutality. It has been answered in frequently dramatic fashion in the decades since, most resoundingly in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which became a global phenomenon after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.2000s: Thomas HoepkerYoung people during lunch break in Brooklyn with the twin towers burning across the river, 11 September 2001View image in fullscreenThe terrorist attack on the twin towers in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001 was captured by several Magnum photographers, and their images of the cataclysm and its aftermath were published in a large-format book, New York September 11, less than two months after the event. The exception was Thomas Hoepker’s complex and, for some, provocative portrait of a group of young people gathered by the river’s edge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while a dense plume of grey smoke billows from the familiar skyline in the middle distance. The image so disoriented its creator that he chose not to include it in the book, waiting until 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attack, before publishing it.Hoepker’s initial anxiety, it turned out, was justified. After its belated publication, Hoepker wrote a short article in response to a column in the New York Times that decried his “shocking” photograph and suggested that the five young people in it were relaxing, having already started to “move on” from the shock and horror of the attack. Hoepker admitted that he had initially found the image “ambiguous and confusing”, and had swiftly come to the conclusion that publishing it so close to the actual event “might distort the reality as we had felt it on that historic day”.This, in turn, prompted one of the people in the photograph, Walter Sipser, to respond, accusing both Hoepker and the NYT columnist of distorting his reality. He pointed out that the three people chatting to him and his girlfriend were passing strangers, the group having found themselves “suddenly bound together… in the aftermath of a catastrophe”. Rather than feeling relaxed, they were, he explained, united “in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day”. A scene that had initially appeared “ambiguous and confusing” to the photographer felt cynically manipulative to the subjects, for whom it is a stolen and distorted moment in which nothing but the unimaginable horror unfolding in the background is what it seems. Here, the idea of bearing witness that has traditionally underpinned photojournalism in general, and Magnum in particular, seems to collapse in on itself.2010s: Alec SothLockdown drill, Belle Plaine high school, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2014View image in fullscreenSchool shootings are a particularly American phenomenon, the deadliest of which have imprinted the names of their locations – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech – on our collective consciousness. According to a recent CNN report, there were at least 58 shootings on US school grounds and collage campuses between January and mid-October of this year, resulting in 28 deaths and more than 72 injuries.Alec Soth’s dramatic photograph was taken during a school lockdown drill that had interrupted an eight-grade gym class at Belle Plaine high school in his home town, Minneapolis. These kinds of drills are compulsory in more than 20 states. That they are now such a common feature in US schools, that they have become almost normalised, speaks volumes about US gun culture and the failure of legislation to control it. Kenneth Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, told the New York Times: “The majority of today’s generation of students and school staff view lockdowns as a routine part of the school culture, just as we have viewed fire drills for many years.”Soth’s deftly composed photograph is startling in its stillness and atmosphere of vulnerability. The young girls huddled together, faces hidden in hands, heads bowed in silent thought. Their pale limbs are in dramatic contrast to the deep red of their school T-shirts and the shiny gym lockers. The drama here lies in the dread possibility of what might one day come to pass, and one cannot help but ponder where the schoolgirls’ thoughts have wandered in this silent, confined space. It is an image neither violent nor transgressive but that disturbs all the same in its evocation of a singular kind of collective cognitive dissonance.2020s: Peter van AgtmaelStorming of the Capitol, Washington DC, 6 January 2021View image in fullscreenThe tumultuous events of 6 January 2021, when a riotous mob stormed the Capitol building after an inflammatory speech by Donald Trump, hang like a storm cloud over the imminent US election. As the election results pivoted towards a Democrat victory, Trump had urged his followers to converge on the Capitol to “stop the steal”. Many thousands responded, fighting their way into the Capitol building where they ransacked offices, smashed furniture and wandered the corridors in search of the politicians that Trump had demonised. Chief among them were Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mike Pence, his presidential running mate, who had refused to challenge the result. Both were perilously close to the rioters inside the building before they were safely evacuated.Peter van Agtmael, whose photojournalism over the past few decades has interrogated the US’s foreign wars and its concurrent domestic discontents was in the midst of the mob at Capitol Hill on the day. From the eye of the hurricane, he captured protesters clashing violently with outnumbered police armed with batons and pepper spray. This image distills the greater scattered disorder that erupted around the Capitol building and the dogged determination of the protesters, one of whom has scaled a high wall, his hand clinging to a marble ledge as he bends to help others beneath him. Only his baseball cap is visible and beyond it a panoramic of the unruly horde spread out across the grounds, many of them carrying US flags.In the background, the tall Washington Monument, built in honour of the first US president, points towards the sky, a symbol of the birth of US democracy. Beneath it, all is chaos and disorder. Van Agtmael’s dramatic image is a vivid distillation of a deeply fractured US. It may also be an augury of more turbulent times to come.

    Magnum America by Peter van Agtmael and Laura Wexler is published by Thames & Hudson (£125). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Ethel Kennedy obituary

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      Ethel Kennedy, who has died aged 96, was one of the most active and best-known US political wives of the 20th century. As her husband, Robert F Kennedy, campaigned first for the Senate and then for the presidency, she supported him while also bringing up their children. The 11th and last of them, her daughter Rory, was born after Bobby was assassinated in 1968. From the 1970s onwards, Ethel devoted herself to social causes and was latterly co-chair of the Coalition of Gun Control.Her life had been touched by tragedy earlier, when her parents died in a plane crash in 1955. Her brother-in-law, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963. Two of her children died prematurely – David of a drug overdose at the age of 28 in 1984 and Michael in a skiing accident in 1997, when he was 39. Her husband was shot at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles following his victory in the California primary for the US presidential race.Sustained by a strong Catholic faith, she remained, in the view of writer Hays Gorey, “an incorrigibly cheerful widow”, never permitting gloom to descend on the frenetic lifestyle that had always been found at Hickory Hill, the family home in McLean, Virginia. The place was strewn with footballs and tennis rackets, and no-one was allowed to sit around and mope.Ethel used sport to promote her husband’s legacy and raise money for the wide variety of charities that fell under the umbrella of the Robert Kennedy Foundation, which also administered what is now Robert F Kennedy Human Rights. This led to the creation of a memorial tennis tournament at Forest Hills, New York, a pro-celebrity event that for several years in the 1970s was played on the eve of the US Open.View image in fullscreenBorn in Chicago, Ethel was the sixth of seven children of Ann (nee Brannack), a devout Catholic, and George Skakel, who went from an $8 a week job as a railway clerk to selling coal and founding a company called Great Lakes Coal & Coke. When Ethel was five the family moved east, eventually settling in Connecticut, where she attended Greenwich academy. She became friends with Jean Kennedy, Bobby’s sister, while they were both studying at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York city. Meanwhile, Bobby – whom Ethel first met on a skiing trip in Quebec in 1945 – was dating Ethel’s sister, Patricia. When they broke up, Ethel began the partnership that would define her life.Ethel campaigned for John F Kennedy when he ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946. She married his younger brother in 1950, and the following year their first child, Kathleen, was born.“They had a wonderful relationship, full of banter and repartee,” recalled Donald Dell, a US Davis Cup captain in the 60s, who played tennis with the couple and became a family friend. “Ethel used to needle Bobby all the time and he gave as good as he got. But he was always very protective of her and she fiercely loyal to him.”View image in fullscreenWhen JFK ran for the Senate in 1952, Bobby managed the campaign. Throughout the rest of the 50s, Ethel supported Bobby as he climbed the political ladder, and when JFK went to the White House in 1960, Bobby was appointed attorney general.The assassination of JFK in 1963 changed Bobby and Ethel’s lives abruptly. Bobby continued the Kennedy story by successfully running for the Senate in 1964 and then decided to join the 1968 presidential race himself.Early in the campaign, that March, came the stunning news that President Lyndon B Johnson had decided not to run for a second term. It immediately made Bobby Kennedy a hot favourite to win the Democratic nomination and, in many people’s minds, the presidency. But that dream died after shots were fired in the kitchen of the Los Angeles hotel in June.Dealing steadfastly with her bereavement, Ethel drew on a wide and diverse array of “pals”, as she used to call them, to boost her charitable work. Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jnr and Charlton Heston were among the celebrities who were always available when she called. A friend remembers her phoning Heston, whom she always referred to as Chuckles, in an attempt to get him to persuade Roy Emerson, the Wimbledon champion, to play in her tournament. “In return I’ll take a part in one your movies,” she joked. “But I don’t want a maid’s part – I want some love interest!”There was some speculation about possible “love interest” between Ethel and the singer Andy Williams during the years following her husband’s death. This gossip continued until, citing her Catholic views, she announced a decision never to re-marry.In a later age, a new generation was swept up in the Kennedy lifestyle. Taylor Swift, the country music star, was 23 when she spent some time with the then 84-year-old widow at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 2012. Swift declined to go swimming because a couple of her friends had not brought their swimsuits. “Being that thoughtful, you’ll run the risk of being boring,” said Ethel. “Go on, get in the water!”“So I jumped in,” said Swift. “I took it as a metaphor for life. You have to jump in; you have to take your chances. Ethel taught me that.”In May 2014, the Benning Road Bridge, which links Washington DC to Anacostia in Maryland, was renamed the Ethel Kennedy Bridge in recognition of the decades of work she had put in to improve the lives of young people living alongside the Anacostia River, reportedly one of the most polluted in America. To kick start the project in 1992, Ethel had waded in to pluck old tyres and debris from the water.The Kennedy most in the news recently has been her son Robert F Kennedy Jr, who abandoned presidential runs first as a Democrat, and then as an independent. Ethel is survived by him, four other sons, Joseph, Christopher, Max and Douglas, and four daughters, Kathleen, Courtney, Kerry and Rory. More

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      Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan review – a lacerating exposé

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      “Ask not,” said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, “what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied.As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed. His wife, Jackie, whom he infected with a smattering of venereal ailments, lamented that his assassination deprived her of the chance to vent her rage at him. Nevertheless, she embraced his naked body before it was placed in a casket at the Dallas hospital, bestowing a final, perhaps frosty kiss on his penis.JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich. Not to be outdone, JFK shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother Bobby, his attorney general. Appointed ambassador to the UK in 1938, Joe declared democracy to be defunct and hailed Hitler’s new world order. He particularly admired Nazi eugenics, which weeded out human specimens he found “disgusting”, and he applied the sanitary theory to his own family. His daughter Rosemary seemed emotionally volatile and looked too chubby to appear in press photographs; deeming her a “defective product”, he had her lobotomised, which left her “functionally a two-year-old”. His wife was not consulted about the operation.View image in fullscreenA “negative life force”, Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls “technical sex”, short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death. During the showdown with Russia over Cuban missiles, JFK installed a nubile minion in his absent wife’s bedroom for amusement while he diced with “nuclear oblivion – a catastrophe of his own making”.The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr “dying was a high”, an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. “What a way to go,” he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized. In 1999, he bullied his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister into flying with him on a private plane he had not qualified to pilot; in bad weather he was baffled by the instrument panel, and all three died when the tiny Piper Saratoga spiralled into the ocean. The accident, in Callahan’s view, was “a murder-suicide”.View image in fullscreenAn angry sympathy for the women “broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead” by the Kennedys inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing. Her account of Rosemary’s unanaesthetised lobotomy left me reeling. It’s equally painful to read about the agony of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in Ted Kennedy’s overturned car at Chappaquiddick in 1969 while he wandered off to arrange for a fixer to finesse press accounts of the calamity: upside down, she contorted her body for hours to gasp at a dwindling pocket of air. Carolyn Bessette tormented herself to qualify as a blond Kennedy consort, enduring a makeover that left her scalp scorched by bleach. In case cosmetic scars seem trivial, Callahan adds a terse allusion to the state of Bessette’s corpse, severed at the waist by her seatbelt in the plane that John Jr so air-headedly crashed.After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, “just another New York woman on the go”. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called “lust demons” he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012.View image in fullscreenBut the longest shadow is cast by Ted, promoted as the family’s presidential heir apparent in 1980 even though he was “the runt of the litter, kicked out of Harvard for cheating” and a flush-faced alcoholic into the bargain. A psychiatric assessment quoted by Callahan discerns in sloppy, greedy Ted a “narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed”. Sound familiar? That diagnosis makes Trump an honorary Kennedy, with Boris Johnson as a kissing cousin. I sniffed a further connection when Callahan describes Ted arriving drunk at a royal dinner in Brussels with an equally plastered sex worker as his date; the pair appalled the company with their intimate antics, which at one point included urinating on an antique sofa. Could this episode have been reimagined in Christopher Steele’s debunked 2016 dossier where, without evidence, Trump is said to have watched sex workers in a Moscow hotel defile a bed in which the Obamas had slept by drenching it in a golden shower?Invented or not, such tales are fables about the pathology of politics. Forget the pretence of public service that these damaged men spout as they tout for votes. They seek electoral office because it licenses them to act out their fantasies – to randomly grab pussies or shoot passersby on Fifth Avenue with utter impunity. Having power over others makes up for their own quaking impotence, and all of us, not only those betrayed wives and disposable lovers, are their abused and casually obliterated victims. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr lists foreclosed New York home as voting address

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has listed a home in foreclosure for non-payment as his voting address, though he does not own the property and is not listed in public searches as one of its residents, according to online records.In a statement late Sunday to the New York Post, which first reported on the home in question and how neighbors have never seen him there, the independent candidate’s presidential campaign insisted that the property was his “official address”.“He receives mail there,” said the statement provided to the publication, which noted how the candidate’s father, Robert F Kennedy Sr, served as a US senator for New York before his assassination in 1968. “His driver’s license is registered there. His automobile is registered there. His voting registration is from there. His hunting, fishing, falconry and wildlife rehabilitation licenses are from there. He pays rent to the owner.”Kennedy went on the defensive about his ties to the luxury home on Croton Lake Road in the Westchester county community of Katonah as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have perceived him as a threat to their prospects in November’s race for the White House.Both the the Democratic incumbent and the former Republican president fear that the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist – who is averaging about 10% in national polls – could siphon off enough votes to swing the race.Voting records first reviewed by the New York Post show Kennedy used the Croton Lake Road address in eight primary or general elections between 2008 and 2020.Property records show the home’s owner is Barbara Moss, an interior and landscape designer who is married to Timothy Haydock – a doctor, Kennedy’s longtime friend and the father of the candidate’s goddaughter.Moss received notice in late April that the US Bank Trust company in March had filed to foreclose on the Croton Lake Road home, saying she owed more than $46,000 plus interest on the property. A conference to settle the matter was scheduled for 7 June.The Post said it interviewed neighbors of Moss – and even local authorities – who described themselves as “shocked” that the home was linked to Kennedy, also known for being the nephew of both John F Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.One police officer told the Post, “No … he doesn’t live here.” And publicly accessible property search records show Kennedy’s most recent addresses are in Los Angeles as well as Foxborough, Massachusetts.But in an interview that he granted to the Post, Kennedy’s brother, Doug, said Robert lived or at least stayed with Moss and Haydock “for a number of years”.The statement added that Kennedy moved to Croton Lake Road long term – at Haydock’s invitation – after his declaration as a presidential candidate in the spring of 2023 prompted the landlord at his old place in nearby Bedford, New York, to ask him to relocate over fears about “becoming embroiled in political controversy”.Kennedy had not been seen on Croton Lake Road since running for the presidency required him to constantly travel to other states, according to his campaign’s statement to the Post.Among other things, the campaign also claimed that Kennedy has always planned to resettle in New York permanently after his wife, the actor and comedian Cheryl Hines, retires from her film and television career.Kennedy, 70, grappled with Sunday’s revelations less than two weeks after the New York Times published a story about a 2012 deposition in which he said he had endured a previous neurological problem because a worm got in his brain, “ate a portion of it and then died”.He later boasted that he could “eat five more brain worms and still beat” both Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, in a staged debate. More

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      RFK Jr draws quite a crowd – what does it mean for 2024?

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      Wearing a Robert Kennedy Jr campaign T-shirt, Kevin O’Keeffe found there was standing room only as the candidate, introduced as “Bobby Kennedy”, walked on a sunbaked stage decked with hay bales to whoops and applause.“He supports freedom of speech, and he’s questioned the efficacy of the vaccine, which is legitimate at this point,” said O’Keeffe, 52, who works for a telecommunications company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “I like his views on foreign policy and keeping us out of the war. He cares about his fellow Americans in a way that a lot of the politicians nowadays I don’t think really do.”He was far from alone in rooting for Kennedy at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines last weekend. The longshot challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024 drew one of the biggest and most energetic crowds, outnumbering conventional politicians on the Republican side. The shouts of “We love you, Robert!” and “Thank you, Robert!”, and subsequent mobbing of Kennedy for handshakes and selfies, hinted at the stirrings of a movement.In a nation that has seen plenty of political convulsions over the past decade, Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer who has never before run for public office, is proof that Americans’ appetite for insurgents and outsiders, mavericks and populists, remains undimmed. Even when a campaign traffics in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has been hit by antisemitism scandals.Kennedy rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic because of his strident and widely condemned opposition to vaccines. He has styled himself as a hammer of the elites – quite a feat for a scion of one of America’s most storied political dynasties. He has scrambled old political allegiances, striking an anti-establishment nerve on the far left and far right over the Ukraine war and other issues.Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News, summed up his supporters as “anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, internet contrarians, billionaire tech bros, Camelot nostalgists and rightwing provocateurs who seem to be pumping Kennedy as a spoiler candidate”.In his speech from the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox, Kennedy wore blue jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He spoke of his father, former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and uncle, President John F Kennedy, as figures from a golden age when America was the envy of the world.His campaign chairman, Dennis Kucinich, held up a map as Kennedy railed against proposed pipelines that would run through Iowa to transport liquefied carbon dioxide away from ethanol plants for burial underground. It was a retro, 20th-century presentation but more locally targeted than many candidates offered.Such is the celebrity-style clamor for Kennedy that, for an interview with the Guardian, he slipped away from the crowds and sat in the back of a black limousine with security detail present. Kucinich, a former congressman and past presidential contender, offered to take an Uber back to the hotel but Kennedy insisted that he climb in too, then asked an aide for some fried bacon from the fair.His uncle, Ted Kennedy, was once floored by the simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” This Kennedy does have an answer for that one: “I’m running for president because I feel like I’m losing my country and because I feel like the Democratic party is going in a bad direction. In particular, it has become the party of war – the Ukraine war was an unnecessary war.“It has become the party of censorship. It’s become the party of a pugnacious neocon-driven foreign policy and a Wall Street-driven domestic policy. Those are all the opposite of the Democratic party that I grew up with, so I’m running to bring the party back to its traditional values.”The political class was rattled in 2016 by the two-headed insurgency of not only Donald Trump on the right but Bernie Sanders on the left, channeling frustrations with the status quo in very different ways. Kennedy argues that Democrats, once the party of the poor and middle class, now own most of the nation’s wealth and dominate its richest counties.“Americans feel ignored by both political parties,” he said. “Their wealth is being strip mined by large corporations, corporate interests, and you’re seeing a level of desperation that I’ve never seen in this country. They just don’t feel that anybody’s listening, and they felt like Bernie was maybe listening, and they felt like Donald Trump was maybe listening as well.”Many are disturbed by Kennedy’s flirtations with the far right, including racists and antisemites. He has appeared on Infowars, a channel run by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and granted interviews to pro-Trump extremists Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. A Super Pac supporting Kennedy’s presidential run owes half its money to a longtime Republican mega-donor and Trump backer, according to campaign finance reports.Kennedy insists that he is happy to receive support from across the spectrum and focus on issues that united Americans rather than divide them. He said: “My message is a populist message. The Republicans are appealing to a populist base and I appeal to the same base. I appeal to working people, middle class people and the poor.”So what did he make of Trump’s presidency? Kennedy seemed a little reluctant to reply and kept his answer short: “I don’t think it was the shining apex of American exceptionalism.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges across four cases, many related to an attempted coup after his 2020 election defeat. Democrats warn starkly that his return to the White House could spell the end of American democracy. But again Kennedy swerved: “There’s authoritarian impulses on both sides. On one side it’s the authoritarianism of rightwing demagoguery, and on the left it’s the authoritarianism of the elites, which is equally dangerous because it involves censorship.”Equally dangerous? “I would say equally dangerous,” he reiterated. “What do you think is more dangerous? The attack on the Capitol building on January 6 or the revelations that the White House has been using the CIA and the FBI to censor its critics? What do you think is more dangerous for the republic? Both parties are doing things that are equally dangerous.”He added: “Once a government can silence its critics it has licence for every atrocity and so it’s shocking to me that people in the Democratic party now think it’s OK to silence people. I’ve never thought that’s right. I’ve always spoken to people who I don’t agree with. That’s an important part of being American.”It is an exercise in false equivalence fueled by personal animus. Kennedy accuses the government of colluding with social media companies to deny his freedom of speech, making him the first person censored by the White House after Biden’s inauguration. In reality he was suspended from platforms such as Instagram and Twitter for spreading coronavirus vaccine misinformation.Without the pandemic, it might be argued, there would be no Kennedy candidacy. He has long promoted bogus theories linking vaccines to autism, antidepressants to school shootings and chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity. But now his anti-scientific views have moved from the fringe to resonate with millions of people, especially consumers of rightwing media.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings made with charity regulators. Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. In 2021 he published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused America’s top infectious disease expert of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy”.In his Guardian interview, Kennedy is unrepentant, saying: “Show me where I got one thing wrong.” He tossed out far-fetched claims that might have been plucked from dark corners of the web: “The British study that just came out said 98% of the people who died were triple vaccinated”; “If you look at the data, countries that were least vaccinated had the least Covid deaths”. He did not take the vaccine himself and did catch the virus but “it didn’t stop me from skiing”.Earlier this year the UN’s World Health Organization declared an end to Covid as a public health emergency, stating that immunity increased due to “highly effective vaccines” developed in record time. A modelling study by the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health at the end of last year found that Covid vaccines kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives.Kennedy’s own family have distanced themselves from him. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said in an Instagram video: “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”But at the state fair there was a significant constituency thrilled to hear Kennedy keep saying the unsayable, renewing questions about what the rise of such candidates tells America about itself and its yearning. Gail Buffington, 62, wearing a white “Kennedy 2024” cap and “RFK Jr for president 2024” T-shirt, said: “I believe in freedom of speech, peace and civil liberties. Trump drew a large crowd too, and I was in that crowd, and I got nothing but thumbs up from everybody.” More

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      The Guardian view on Robert F Kennedy Jr: from Camelot to conspiracy-mongering | Editorial

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency, likes to call himself a “Kennedy Democrat”. His own siblings disagree. His uncle’s presidency, like his namesake father’s career and presidential campaign, had an aura of hope and responsibility as well as glamour. RFK Jr talks vaguely of overcoming divisions, but in reality trades upon a peculiar blend of “cynicism and credulity”, as one commentator notes. Most recently he claimed that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” in comments reported by the New York Post.However jarring the remarks – he partially backtracked later – they sit comfortably with his long history of fomenting conspiracy theories and his nonsensical, anti-scientific views. He has falsely linked childhood immunisations to autism and wifi to cancer and “leaky brain”, claimed that HIV does not cause Aids, and suggested that chemicals in drinking water could make children transgender. One of his sisters warned that his latest comments put people’s lives in danger.So much for the Kennedy legacy. Nor does he look like much of a Democrat. He is being hyped by billionaires and rightwing broadcasters such as Sean Hannity, and has gained traction among Republicans rather than Democrats. Some see his campaign primarily as a vehicle for his ego and brand, which may be less damaging to President Biden’s chances than a possible third-party bid by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Republican former governor Jon Huntsman’s No Labels group. A poll this month suggested that a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” could gain about 20% of the vote and result in a second term for Donald Trump. But talk up Mr Kennedy enough and he might have a marginal effect in denting President Biden. Others suspect that Mr Kennedy wants the Republican vice-presidential slot. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have both floated the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket.None of this has prevented him finding up to 20% support among Democrats in polls. Camelot nostalgia and the celebrity factor have clearly played a large part in that. Mr Kennedy has never run for any public office, still less held it, but boasts that he’s “been around” politics since he was a little boy. The lack of enthusiasm for the sitting president is also potent: most Democrats do not want him to run again, although they indicate that they would vote for him over Mr Trump. Voters, including independents, are not giving Mr Biden credit for the improving the economy or other achievements. That may not be fair. But it’s a fact.Mr Kennedy’s appeal goes deeper, however. He has found a home in the world described by a new book, Conspirituality, where new age spirituality and the “wellness” industry overlap with the politics of paranoia, as well as alongside the Trumpian right. Distrust of institutions, suspicion at the marriage of state and corporate power, and fear and sadness at the despoliation of the environment are in themselves reasonable concerns. But the political ambition that feeds upon and mutates them into more poisonous beliefs is unpalatable.Mr Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracy-mongering has caused enough damage. His latest remarks show how easily conspiracy theories blur into bigotry and scapegoating. It may be farcical to hear a multimillionaire from the country’s most famous political dynasty railing against “elites”, but there is nothing funny about this campaign. More

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      I took RFK Jr’s phone call long ago. Now I regret it | Margaret Sullivan

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      My assistant in the New York Times public editor’s office said Robert F Kennedy was on the phone. Did I want to take the call?This was roughly a decade ago, but I still remember being momentarily confused. Assassinated in 1968, RFK was long gone, and though we did get some unusual calls in the public editor’s office, they tended to be from the living.I quickly realized, of course, that the caller was the former New York senator’s son, an environmental attorney then in his late 50s. And, given his prominence, I took the call, only to endure an unpleasant screed from this anti-vaccine crusader. Once Kennedy had my ear, he spun out his pseudo-scientific theories, mostly about the causal relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Though these notions had been debunked, he was relentless in wanting the New York Times to give them more credence.My job as public editor was to represent the readers of the paper and take their complaints seriously, often writing columns about them, but I didn’t do so in this case. As I recall, I just shook off the conversation and got back to work.These days, I’m certainly glad I didn’t take up his cause. RFK Jr, now 69 and running for president as a Democrat, has proven himself to be even more divorced from reality.The most recent example came just last week, and it was appalling. At a dinner on New York City’s Upper East Side, Kennedy (foolishly) thought he was talking off the record and therefore could drop his guard.So he went full conspiracy theory – suggesting that Covid could have been a bioweapon intended to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while targeting “Caucasians and Black people”. The remarks, heard on a widely circulated video published by the New York Post, “feeds into Sinophobic and antisemitic tropes”, an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson told the Washington Post. The director of the Stop Asian Hate Project called them irresponsible and hateful.Kennedy has denied any antisemitic sentiment, or even that he intended that the “ethnic effect was deliberately engineered”. But the recording tells a different tale.It’s not as if this latest chapter is an aberration. RFK Jr has consistently spread Covid conspiracy theories and even once compared US vaccine mandates – unfavorably! – to “Hitler’s Germany”. (He later apologized for that one.)The New York Times summed him up in a news story: “Mr Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from wifi, and a ‘stolen’ election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W Bush.”Somehow, though, his presidential campaign has gained traction; although a long shot, he does have significant support among primary voters. (And we’ve seen what can happen with a supposed long shot, as Donald Trump was considered in 2015.)The reasons are obvious. His crazy ideas – like Trump’s – are catnip for the media. They make news and generate clicks. And social media amplifies him, too. Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, put it bluntly: “The bots and trolls love RFK Jr. Because the bots and trolls hate a fact-based humanitarian society.”All of this adds immeasurably to his prominence at a time when Democratic voters are looking for an alternative to Joe Biden, who they think is too old to endure a long campaign and a four-year presidency.Which brings me full circle to that decade-old phone call. I wonder now why I so readily took that call and gave him a half hour that rightfully belonged to the ordinary readers of the New York Times? Not every phone call got patched through to me, any more than I personally answered every one of the 500 or so emails that the public editor’s office received each week.And I know the answer: I did it because of his famous name. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s in the heavily Catholic steel city of Lackawanna, New York, any Kennedy was revered as something of a secular saint. And although we learned much more skepticism after Teddy Kennedy (RFK Jr’s uncle) drove a campaign worker to her watery death in 1969, the name still resonated decades later.With his ugly theories and dangerous denials of reality, RFK Jr long ago sullied the family name. And these days, I would ask my assistant to have him send us an email. We would read it with interest – just like every other complaint we got. This article was amended on 18 July 2023 to correct the spelling of Mark Jacob’s surname.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Ignoring Robert F Kennedy Jr is not an option | Naomi Klein

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      When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plan to run for president in the Democratic party primaries this April, the dominant liberal strategy towards the once tough environmental lawyer – now spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories – seemed to be: ignore him and wait for him to go away. Don’t cover, don’t engage and don’t debate. Jim Kessler, a leader of the pro-Biden think tank Third Way, called him a “gadfly and a laughingstock”; Democratic consultant Sawyer Hackett brushed him off as “a gnat.”Well, if recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy. Kennedy honed his social media skills over years to spread his anti-vaccine message, so he has simply done an end-run around traditional media and party structures: a “Twitter Spaces” tete-a-tete with Elon Musk and a string of video streams, several with hundreds of thousands of views and listens, on every channel from Breaking Points on the left to Jordan Peterson’s podcast on the right (that one quickly broke a million views on YouTube).He has landed an apparent endorsement from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this week is being feted at a Bay Area fundraiser filled with heavy hitters. According to a CNN poll released in late May, support for Kennedy was at 20% among respondents who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning.It’s time to abandon wishful thinking and figure out what is going on. What are the reasons his campaign is resonating with a consequential slice of US voters? (And voters beyond the US, where he has a large following?) What pain, silence and rage is he tapping into? What important truths and realities is he concealing and eliding? And, given the near impossible odds of him winning the race which he is currently running in, what is his real end-game?Let’s start with the reservoirs of Kennedy’s appeal.The Power of StoryAfter the 2016 election, when many Democratic voters were struggling to make sense of Trump’s seemingly impossible victory, a theory made the rounds that I first heard from Color of Change president Rashad Robinson: that the Trump campaign was like a blockbuster movie, full of special effects and unconcerned with archaic ideas like facts, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a PBS-style documentary film. In a culture hooked on highly produced drama, of course the blockbuster won.There was some truth to that theory. So it’s worth noting that RFK Jr’s campaign is rooted in something with almost as much popular appeal: a true crime story. The traumas and mysteries that swirl around the assassinations of RFK Jr’s uncle, President John F Kennedy, and his father, Robert F Kennedy, are both American wounds and American pastimes.These preoccupations have, of course, been supercharged by the mass fantasy-making machine known as QAnon. The cult/subculture has a longstanding obsession with the Kennedy family, one that includes the earnest belief among many that JFK’s son, John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a plane crash in 1999, is actually still alive and living under an assumed identity, perhaps even helping to write “Q drops.” Last year, believers got so carried away that they gathered in Dallas, at the site of JFK’s assassination, sure that his deceased son was about to finally reappear and announce that he was going to be Trump’s running mate in the 2024 elections. He didn’t.RFK Jr benefits from all of that swirling narrative energy merely by showing up. (It helps that he has begun to openly support the claim that the CIA was behind the murder of his uncle and father, something he says he came around to only “five or six years ago.” )Tapping Into the RageIt’s not only the combined power of a dynastic family, violent crime and choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy culture that RFK Jr is riding. He is also tapping into a wellspring of real pain and outrage. These points may be obvious but they bear repeating: a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world – inflamed on every level – that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.RFK Jr’s campaign speaks directly to this outrage, with its central message about “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.” When he talks about drug companies controlling the national health agencies and polluters controlling environmental regulators, he is persuasive, which is why he was a good lawyer. When he rails against the corporations who made a killing during Covid, profiteering off the pandemic and using it to crush their rivals, he is speaking my language and it’s hard not to nod along.When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there.He also is tapping into rage at the Democratic party itself, which feels to many like a hostage situation. Inside its logic, there seems to be no acceptable way of challenging entrenched power. Not open primaries, not incumbent primaries, not third parties, not getting in and trying to change the system from the inside. All, we have been told since as long as I can remember, will help to elect Republicans. Of course this political straitjacket provokes rebellion, as well as some irrational behavior.None of this means Kennedy is running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth” – as he repeatedly claims. What it does mean is that a public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers. RFK Jr now leads the pack.Liberal analysts refuse to confront their own complicity in this dynamic. Instead, we have Michael Scherer in the Washington Post outrageously lumping together the baseless and dangerous conspiracies of the hard right with Bernie Sanders’s worldview, apparently because Sanders sees a society in crisis and “points to the ‘ultrarich’” – as if stratospheric wealth concentration and legalized corruption are mere figments of the Vermont senator’s imagination.Giving Voice to Ecological GriefAs a lifelong outdoorsman and longtime environmental lawyer, RFK Jr also does something very few politicians in modern life seem capable of doing: put into words our moment of shattering ecological loss and grief. “Environmental protection binds us to our own humanity and to all of creation,” he said on Earth Day. “When we destroy a species, when we destroy a special place, we’re diminishing our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is, and what our own potential is as human beings.”Kennedy is fluent in the language of heartbreak about dead rivers and devastated fisheries; of asthmatic lungs and increasingly silent springs. As smoke blots the sun across entire continents, this is not a skill to dismiss lightly. Who else has it? Not Joe Biden. Not Kamala Harris. Not even Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders was great on the facts of the climate crisis when he ran, and full of righteous fury at fossil fuel companies – but I don’t think I ever heard him speak with unabashed emotion about extinction. This is another vacuum that RFK Jr is skillfully filling.Given the undeniable strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum, and continue to find new audiences. Ignoring him is not an option. What is needed instead is a serious engagement with the myths that underlie the Kennedy performance and that are key to his progressive appeal.Myth #1: He would be a climate champion.Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.” He also says that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires” – a green-tinged reboot of the same, all-too familiar conspiracy theories he rode to pandemic stardom, when he opposed virtually every Covid public health measure, from masks to vaccines to closures. Now he is marshaling the same arguments against climate action.He told Breaking Points: “In my campaign I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like Covid that the Davos groups and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.”This about-face has earned him friends among the most prominent and dangerous climate-change deniers, including the Republican-aide-turned-disinformation-dealer Marc Morano, who says Kennedy is “undergoing a genuine transformation over his views on the climate agenda.” In podcast interviews, especially with rightwing hosts, RFK Jr now says he would leave energy policy to the market and describes himself as “a radical free marketeer.” It should go without saying that the markets are incapable of decarbonizing our economies in anything like the narrow slice of time left.Myth #2: He’s not that anti-vax.Since announcing his candidacy, Kennedy has seemed to back off his extreme views about childhood immunizations, which has been the major preoccupation of his organization, Children’s Health Defense, since well before Covid. This is research that has been debunked by countless medical experts and retracted by the publications that once gave him a platform.Kennedy didn’t mention vaccines in his two-hour-long campaign kick-off speech, and he told The Wall Street Journal: “I’m not leading with the issue because it’s not a primary issue of concern to most Americans.” More than that: for many voters, his views are a major liability.Except he can’t help himself. In almost every longform interview with him that I have encountered (and there have been many), he leaps to defend this debunked position, always by citing the same series of figures. “Why is it,” he asked the journalist David Samuels, “that in my generation, I’m 69, the rate of autism is 1 in 10,000, while in my kids’ generation it’s 1 in 34?” He added, “I would argue that a lot of that is from the vaccine schedule, which changed in 1989. But what nobody can argue about is that it has to be an environmental exposure of some kind.” In interview after interview, he comes back to that same point: something changed in 1989, something that acted as a mass poisoning.This has been left unchallenged in most interviews, so I am going to go into some depth here. Kennedy is right that something changed in the world of autism at the start of the nineties, just completely wrong about what. What changed was the medical definition of autism. The syndrome was first diagnosed by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who published a paper in 1943 about children with “extreme autism” who, though “unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities,” lived in their own worlds, engaged in repetitive motions, became obsessed with objects, often had limited speech, and struggled to perform the basics of self-care. The condition was so extreme that very few met the diagnostic criteria.Decades later the definition changed, thanks in part to British child psychiatrist Lorna Wing. Realizing that Kanner’s definition left out many children in need of support, she developed the idea that autism was not a fixed set of symptoms, but a spectrum, presenting in a range of different ways depending on the individual, and could include people who are very verbally and physically capable. In the 1990s, autism entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a “spectrum disorder” and many more people suddenly met the criteria, which is a big part of what accounts for the post-1989 spike that Kennedy blames, wrongly, on vaccines.And that’s not the only thing that changed at the dawn of the nineties. In 1990, the United States passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, a hard-won victory by the disability justice community that led to further legal protections and support for disabled children to have individual education plans, therapies and other supports in public schools. These laws incentivized parents to get their kids tested for autism, since a diagnosis would unlock these supports. This also helps explain the spike.Still, systemic racism in both health and education meant that it was overwhelmingly white, middle class parents who could hire lawyers to turn legal obligations into realities in the schools – far too many Black and brown kids were still more likely to be treated as troublemakers and met with harsh discipline rather than empathy. Recent advocacy has begun to close the race gap in autism diagnoses, leading to higher rates overall. We are still a long way from closing the diagnostic gender gap, however. If that happens, and rates go up still further, we shouldn’t panic: this is progress.In short, Kennedy, by hinting ominously about something nefarious happening in 1989, is committing that most common of analytic errors: confusing correlation with causation. And there is another important factor he consistently neglects to mention. In this same period, more people, both women and men, decided to become parents in their forties. This is relevant because multiple peer-reviewed studies show that children born to older parents are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.Acknowledging all of this – the change in diagnostic criteria, the disability rights victories, challenges to medical racism, aging parents – would give us a much fuller understanding of rising autism rates. But that is not nearly as dramatic or juicy as blaming vaccines and screaming about government cover ups.Kennedy’s decades-long anti-vax crusade has had serious impacts on autistic people by reducing them to mere pawns and data points in these information wars. Back in 2015, Kennedy caught flak for saying, of childhood vaccines, “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”He apologized for the Holocaust reference, but that only scratches the surface. Autistic people’s brains are not “gone,” they are different, often in beautiful and interesting ways. And during the real, non-rhetorical Holocaust, the Nazis in Germany and Austria murdered disabled children, many of them autistic, for precisely those differences. At Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic alone, almost 800 disabled children were murdered, and research on their remains continued well into the 1980s. Meanwhile Hitler opposed vaccination in the territories Germany seized because he was just fine with non-Aryans dying, the better to seize their land.Leaving out the most relevant facts in any given argument has sadly become an RFK Jr trademark. In speeches and interviews, for instance, he cites Sweden’s supposedly stunning success at combating Covid, without introducing lockdowns, as proof that lockdowns and closures were never needed in the US – even as US hospitals and morgues were so overcapacity that refrigerated trucks were filling up with bodies.He fails to mention Sweden’s far greater social welfare protections (generous paid sick leave, universal healthcare, better funded public hospitals, smaller class sizes…), which helped to control the virus, nor does he mention the relative health of Sweden’s population compared to the US. Most critically, he fails to share the fact that Norway, Finland and Denmark, which all took Covid more seriously in those early months marked by lockdowns, had significantly lower death rates than Sweden, proving the exact opposite of the point he is trying to make. Yes, the death rates eventually leveled out between the Scandinavian nations, but that had less to do with lockdowns than with very high vaccination rates – the very shots Kennedy has claimed are killing people in droves.We should be honest about the ways kids were impacted by school closures, and be transparent about vaccine risks, rather than dismissing all reports as conspiracy. We should also stay open to the possibility that environmental factors might be contributing to some forms of autism and other neurological conditions. We should insist on honest independent research and reporting about all of it.But we should also be clear: actively spreading terror on the scale that RFK Jr has done for two decades is itself a public health crisis. The vaccine-autism myth stigmatizes people who are neuro-atypical, presenting them as tragic, and distracts from the urgent need to fight for greater accessibility and lifelong supports. It also discourages vaccination, which is already leading to a resurgence of diseases we thought we had defeated, from measles to diphtheria.Kennedy complains that he used to be so marginalized for his conspiratorial views that speaking felt “like talking into a fucking tin can.” Well, thanks to his primary run, his tin can has been replaced with a global megaphone and millions more people are hearing his bogus theories. We will feel the ramifications of that for decades to come.Myth #3: He is anti-war and pro-human rights.Kennedy is most persuasive when opposing US military intervention abroad, or when he is discussing the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine, and calling for a peaceful settlement. But how seriously should we take his pacifism and human rights concerns? One hint rests in the blanket support he offers the Israeli government, one of the top recipients of aid from the US military industrial complex he decries, and a nation consistently unwilling to entertain peace with justice, while escalating tensions with Iran. Have a look at Antony Loewenstein’s latest, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, for an indispensable accounting.This position alone should cause Kennedy’s supporters to question his supposedly antiwar, anti-surveillance stance. So should his increasingly reactionary position on border controls. Kennedy talks a good game condemning the US for overthrowing democratically elected governments abroad and destabilizing entire regions.But that raises the question: what does the US owe to the people living in the parts of the world its policies have ravaged? Very little, according to Kennedy. He has taken to warning about the US’s “open border,” and he told Musk he is looking for ways to “seal the border permanently.” He has also cited Israel – with its network of walls and fences imprisoning Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – as a positive example of a country successfully controlling its borders.Myth #4: He is a populist.When you hear someone railing that “Our democracy is devolving into a kind of corporate plutocracy,” while telling heartwrenching stories about people having their food stamps slashed amid massive corporate bailouts and handouts, it’s easy to assume that this same person plans to do something bold and courageous to address those injustices.Kennedy says his campaign is one of “broad-based populism.” It isn’t. Progressive populists make tangible economic offers: tax the rich and give poor and working-class people more money and supports; some call for nationalizing key industries to pay for it.Kennedy is not actually proposing any of this. On Fox, he would not even come out in favor of a wealth tax; he has brushed off universal public health care as not “politically realistic”; and I have heard nothing about raising the minimum wage. Like Trump (and anyone wanting to get elected) he says he would protect Social Security and Medicare. But asked directly about raising taxes and whether Social Security faces bankruptcy, he dodges, claiming that to answer these straightforward policy questions, he would need to “study more” – something he never seems to feel when it comes to loudly claiming he knows more than epidemiologists about infectious diseases and more than neurologists about brain development.Meanwhile, his sycophantic treatment of Elon Musk is about as un-populist as a person can get, with Kennedy comparing the onetime richest man alive to the heroes of the American Revolution “who died to give us our Constitution.”In short, RFK Jr may sometimes sound like Bernie Sanders – but he is decidedly not Bernie.The question is: why? If you are running a longshot candidacy inside the Democratic party against a centrist incumbent, why not give the base what it wants?One possible explanation is that Kennedy is not actually running to be the presidential candidate for the Democrats. He would certainly not be the first person to use a primary race simply to raise the value of their own, highly monetized personal brand.We also have to consider the possibility that Kennedy may have a greater ambition, one that requires those carefully worded hedges, and which would explain his backpedaling on gun control (he has floated the idea that mass shootings in US schools are caused by Prozac), and make sense of his recent trip to southern border, seemingly for the sole purpose of dog-whistling that he is on board with the Republican war on migrants.Perhaps it’s a plan to run as an independent – or a hope for a spot in a Republican administration. Or … “Yeah. Trump-Kennedy. I said it,” Republican operative and Trump ally Roger Stone wrote on Twitter shortly after Kennedy announced his candidacy.Trump’s former campaign manager and top advisor, Steve Bannon, likes the idea, too. “Bobby Kennedy would be, I think, an excellent choice for President Trump to consider,” he told his podcast audience, adding that when he shared the idea at a function for fellow Trump diehards, it received a standing ovationAfter first seeming to leave the door open (“I would probably never end up there,” he said on Breaking Points), Kennedy now claims there are “NO CIRCUMSTANCES” under which he would join a Trump ticket. Of course, given his tumultuous relationship to the truth, nothing can be ruled out.Would Trump go for it? He does love men with famous names who look like they are “from central casting ” – and RFK Jr checks both boxes. He probably still needs an actual Republican for a running mate. On the other hand, to get back in the White House, he also needs more secular white women and more non-white voters. And Kennedy’s relentless Covid misinformation campaign made him a hero among white moms who were sure that online classes, masks and vaccines were destroying their kids, as well as among some Black voters, who Children’s Health Defense targeted with scaremongering about vaccines that exploited deep wounds created by medical racism and abuse. Because Trump supported and indeed greenlit the vaccines, this is an area of weakness for him.As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer – seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy.
      Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the bestselling author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine and professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia.
      Maggie O’Donnell and Kendra Jewell provided research assistance More