Michael Wiser: The story of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a pretty remarkable one. In a lot of ways, if you think about where he is now as the Health and Human Services Secretary, a cabinet member, it might not be a surprising thing. His name is Robert F. Kennedy. He comes from a family of power and privilege. But in a lot of ways, it is a surprising rise.
His life has been marked by scandal, by drug use, by rejection from the mainstream press and a lot of politicians. He's been written off multiple times and yet he's managed to rise and to become this powerful figure inside the Trump administration. And so that was a fascinating story that we wanted to understand and to dig into.
I think that there's no way to understand RFK Jr. without understanding where he comes from. And it's not just the troubles that he had as a young man. It was the tragedy that really shaped him. He grew up a life of power and privilege, as I said, his uncle was the president of the United States. His dad was a powerful member of his cabinet and then a United States senator. But that was a childhood marked by tragedy. His uncle was assassinated. Then his dad was assassinated when he was still just a young boy. And I think that left a real impression on him and really was a searing moment for him and shaped him in a couple of ways.
One of them was obviously was the drug use, which followed that. After his dad was killed, it was only a couple of months later that he was sent off to boarding school and he really had to deal with those issues on his own. We talked to one of his friends at boarding school who described him as a lost soul during those years.
But he wasn't just somebody who had lost their dad. He was somebody who lost a dad who was a hero to so many Americans. And from the very beginning, there was this expectation put on him by the media, by his family, by himself, that he'd somehow step into the shoes of his martyred dad. And that's a lot for a young boy. And it's a lot for a grown man now to try to step into. And so, I think that tragedy is just really important to understanding who he would become, the kind of politician he would become, the kind of advocate he would become.
Patrick Center: You mentioned boarding school. What universities does he attend? And then how does he launch professionally?
Michael Wiser: What is really interesting because he doesn't just go to one boarding school. He sort of gets kicked out of two boarding schools. So, he ends up, his high school years, cycling through three different schools. But Harvard University is really the school of the Kennedy family. And one of the things that he was born into was not just the tragedy and was not just the power but was also the privilege that came with being a Kennedy.
And so, despite that sort of muddled academic record that he had, he got into Harvard and while he was there, he was still heavily using drugs by his own account, but he was able to compartmentalize his life.
So, at the same time that he was using heroin and other drugs, he was able to turn his senior thesis into a book. He was being interviewed on television as a future leader of the country and of the Kennedy family until it all ends up getting exposed when he has a drug overdose in an airplane and an arrest and it all becomes public. And it really becomes a moment where it seems like his political future has been destroyed. And the question is, what is he going to do? And that's one of many moments in his life where you find him rebuilding. He gives up the drugs and plunges into the environmental movement.
But those years when he's at Harvard and when he's in high school really are key for understanding him because you can see a duality to him, the way that he's able to separate one part of his life from another and the difference between the public Bobby Kennedy and the private one.
Patrick Center: When it comes to healthcare, what is that moment in his life when he becomes so involved in medicine?
Michael Wiser: It really is the issue of vaccines. At that point in his life, he had sort of rebuilt his reputation. He had become an environmental activist, an environmental lawyer. He was known for his work in the Hudson River and working with River Keepers Organization. And he was drawn into this very controversial issue about an alleged connection between autism and vaccines.
And we talked to some of the people who recruited him for that to a woman named Lynn Redwood, who said that her group was looking for someone to be an advocate for them, an advocate for bringing attention to this allegation that vaccines cause autism.
And in a lot of ways, I think that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was looking to be a savior for somebody. And the vaccine issue, though controversial, was one that he dove into. And in a lot of ways, the more controversial it was, the more determined that he was to prove his point, to prove that he wasn't wrong. It's from there that he's got involved in these issues around health, but especially around vaccines.
Patrick Center: But yet he still has these political aspirations.
Michael Wiser: He really does. And I think that they're not separate. I think, as I said, he felt this need to step into the legacy, the shoes of his father, to take on this legacy and the issue that he had found where he could sort of go up against evil forces as he saw them that were perpetrating a conspiracy. And the way that he saw to do that was to push on this vaccine issue. And as he does, he gets a lot of pushback.
His first article on it is retracted by Solon, which seems to be a searing moment for him where he decides to double down on the vaccine issue. He has a sort of another rebuilding during the COVID period when a lot of people are listening to RFK Jr. and saying he's making a lot of sense. And then he finds himself being deplatformed.
And the Biden administration pushing back against what they call misinformation and tech giants like Meta, Facebook at the time, taking him off of Instagram. And he has told people that one of the reasons he decided to run for president was so that he could get his voice out there.
So, I think it's all part of the same Bobby Kennedy, the same one that feels like he's on a mission, that he's important, that his voice needs to be heard.
He did use the COVID moment to really raise his profile, despite the fact that he was deplatformed. He found an audience. He had a name, the Kennedy name. He first runs as a Democrat and then runs as an Independent. But by the beginning of last summer, his campaign was definitely struggling. One of the ways he reached people was by going onto podcasts and these sort of unfiltered media. But that also produced a lot of controversy.
And so, his campaign was struggling when the assassination attempt happens on former President Trump at the time, candidate Trump. And that's the moment when the two of them really connect. As you know, he has a personal history with assassination and he connects with Trump over the telephone and parts of that conversation were recorded. And those close to him say that the idea of the phone call was really to just connect for him to check on how Trump's family was handling things because that's where Kennedy's mind went. But on that call, Trump does not lose the opportunity to say, I think we could work together. I think you should come over to my team. And the people who were close to Kennedy at the time say that they were surprised because he seemed to be thinking about it.
Patrick Center: How does R.F.K. Jr. view science?
Michael Wiser: I wouldn't say that he doesn't trust science or he doesn't believe in science. He would say that he does believe in science. He would say that it's the scientists who don't. He really has a diametrically opposed view to a lot of the scientists and public health professionals that we spoke to.
He sees himself as uniquely able to derive what the truth is. He goes through studies himself. He highlights things, but he also dismisses things that don't fit his view. And he doesn't only dismiss the science, he dismisses the scientists. He sees a lot of the scientists who work for him as part of a conspiracy. He sees them as corrupt as being connected to the pharmaceutical industry. So, his relationship with science is complicated because he sees himself as being the truth teller of science. But a lot of the scientists that we talked to say that's not who he is. He's a lawyer. He's somebody who's good at putting together arguments. He's somebody who's coming in with a certain perspective and certain things that he believes. And he's determined not to be pushed off of that.
And as we talk to people who are inside the CDC who are dealing with him, they say that they had some hope initially when they heard him talk about gold standard science, when they heard him talk about being open to alternative views. But over the months that he was serving as secretary and over the months as they saw the policies as they were coming down, they came to the conclusion that that wasn't what he was doing, that they felt that he had already made up his mind and wasn't there to be persuaded or to listen to contrary views. And a lot of the people we spoke to ended up either being pushed out or choosing to resign, saying that that was not something they could be part of.
Patrick Center: What should viewers take away from this documentary?
Michael Wiser: I think that the story of RFK Jr. is not just a story about RFK Jr. I mean, on one hand, it's incredibly consequential. The decisions that he's going to be making are going to have life and death implications for Americans, both in terms of whether the agencies that he's running can function, whether people have faith in vaccines and in medical science and in what public health professionals tell you.
But his story is also something that tells you something about America. His journey from being part of the most storied family in the Democratic Party to being someone who broke with it, somebody who embraced a real skepticism of institutions, of established science, and who found his way to power in our current political moment. I think he's a really good symbol of the times that we live in, and they tell you something about American politics.
Patrick Center: Tonight at 10 o'clock (Tuesday, October 21, 2025) on WGVU Public Television, FRONTLINE premieres The Rise of RFK Jr. Producer, writer, Michael Weiser, thank you so much for your time.
Michael Wiser: All right. Thank you.