They share a propensity to make wild claims, lie and attack those who disagree with them

By Herbert Rothschild

The most frequent ways that people in public life ruin their reputations are sexual and financial misbehavior. When I was a public figure in Louisiana, I used to tell my kids that if you’re in the public eye, you have to keep your hand out of the cookie jar and your fly zipped. All too many don’t.

Occasionally, public figures fall from grace in less common ways. Currently, Rudy Giuliani is the salient example. He came to prominence as a skilled and fearless prosecutor of mob bosses when he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989. That led to his becoming the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, first in 1989, when he narrowly lost to Democrat David Dinkins, and then in 1993, when he won the rematch.

Giuliani’s performance as mayor wasn’t universally admired, especially his “tough on crime” policies. But the respect in which he was held was given a large boost by his leadership during and after 9/11. He came to be called “America’s mayor,” and Time magazine named him Person of the Year for 2001.

Fast forward to 2016, when Giuliani threw in his lot with Donald Trump. So began his collusion in such scandalous behavior as Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to disgrace Joe Biden by withholding congressionally appropriated aid, and later the extensive campaign to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Giuliani now finds himself disbarred in the state of New York, on the hook for a $148 million judgment for doing serious harm to two election workers in Georgia, and a defendant in at least one criminal prosecution for his lies and machinations on behalf of “Stop the Steal.”

Probably we can account for Giuliani’s self-destruction by a desire to be in the inner circle of political power, a desire thwarted by his hapless race to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008. It’s more difficult to understand what motivated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s less complete but similarly sad loss of public stature.

I preface this discussion by disclosing that I was never a fan of the Kennedys. The one exception was RFK during the five years between the assassination of his brother John F. Kennedy and his own assassination in 1968. During that time he rapidly matured in moral depth and political purpose. The posthumous documentary about him shown at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was a moving moment amid a disgusting display of raw power by President Lyndon Johnson and Chicago Mayor Richard Daly.

Among the reasons I’ve been put off by the Kennedys is their use and abuse of women. It runs like a dominant gene through the men of the Kennedy clan. Maureen Callahan chronicles its expression and its trail of victims in “Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed,” released in July.

RFK Jr. has been no exception. To get out in front of what was sure to surface, at the start of his campaign for the presidency he acknowledged struggling with sex addiction in the past. He didn’t disclose that during his second divorce, Mary Richardson Kennedy, reduced to poverty, hanged herself.

Remarkably, such behavior hasn’t ruined any Kennedy’s political fortune, although Ted Kennedy’s responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969 probably kept him from securing the Democratic nomination for president. Whether RFK Jr.’s sex and heroin addictions had anything to do with his going off the rails I have no way of knowing. What we do know is that in 2005 he began spreading dangerous disinformation about vaccines.

Before that, Kennedy had earned distinction as a defender of the environment. Here’s how his entry in Wikipedia reads: “In the mid-1980s, he joined two nonprofits focused on environmental protection: Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council. His work at Riverkeeper set long-term environmental legal standards. At both organizations, Kennedy won legal battles against large corporate polluters. . . . He founded the nonprofit environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance in 1999, serving as its board president until 2020.” That last organization has become a global network of some 350 groups protecting rivers, lakes, bays and other bodies of water in 46 countries.

Once he came to believe that vaccines were dangerous, Kennedy didn’t scruple to go beyond reasonable assertions. He espoused the thoroughly debunked claim that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism, a claim made by British physician Andrew Wakefield in 1998 while Wakefield was a party to a suit against the makers of the MMR vaccine. Wakefield also was involved in a venture to develop and sell diagnostic kits for “autistic enterocolitis,” which he claimed was linked to the MMR vaccine. Wakefield’s gross manipulation of evidence and his conflicts of interest quickly were exposed, and he lost his medical license.

Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, which attacked the COVID-19 vaccines on spurious grounds. In 2021, he published “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” In it he charged Fauci with abusing his power for 30 years. He maliciously asserted that Fauci didn’t approve hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment because he wanted to increase deaths and promote patented vaccines (He falsely claimed that Fauci is an investor in Moderna).

Actually, it’s been the malign influence of people like Kennedy that has caused avoidable deaths and still do. One data point: According to the Centers for Disease Control, unvaccinated adults with compromised immune systems are three times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 as those who’ve been vaccinated.

Given Kennedy’s propensity to make wild claims, dismiss factual evidence, lie and attack the characters of those who disagree with him, it wasn’t surprising that he decided to endorse Trump when his own presidential candidacy got little traction. If Trump wins, perhaps he’ll be appointed secretary of Health and Human Services.

With those in Ashland who were excited about Kennedy’s candidacy, I’ll agree that the man is gifted, espouses some decent public policies, and at one time promised to be a force for good. You just failed to grasp that he got on the down escalator two decades ago.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.