In celebration of what would have been Robert F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy has penned an op-ed celebrating his father’s legacy—and savaging his brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for tearing it down.
Writing in The Boston Globe, Kennedy explicitly called out President Donald Trump and his administration, saying their policies are in direct opposition to what his father stood for.
“I know, specifically, that [Robert F. Kennedy] would have been appalled by the cruelty the Trump administration has directed toward America’s neediest,” Kennedy wrote.
Speaking to the near-suspension of the SNAP program during the recent government shutdown—which nearly cost 42 million Americans their food assistance—and the alteration to SNAP made by the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill, Kennedy said attacks on access to welfare are a “betrayal” of RFK.
“It’s a betrayal of all that my father worked for,” Kennedy wrote. RFK, the younger brother of former President John F. Kennedy, advocated for the expansion of JFK’s food stamps pilot program that eventually became SNAP.
“All those complicit in that betrayal have lowered themselves—not least my brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who knows my father’s legacy as well as anyone,” wrote Maxwell.
RFK Jr. also celebrated his father’s 100th birthday by sharing an image of the pair of them on his Instagram.
RFK Jr. has served as Trump’s HHS Secretary since January and has supported the president’s $33 billion in cuts to health programs while championing the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
In August, RFK Jr. argued that SNAP recipients are being “poisoned” by sugar and sweet drinks.
Maxwell Kennedy, one of RFK’s 11 children and younger sibling of RFK Jr., is a lawyer who campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008.
He writes that his father was “never the same” after a 1967 trip to the Mississippi Delta in which he witnessed extreme poverty and advocated for the creation of relief programs to alleviate similar poverty until he was assassinated in June, 1968.
“Today hunger remains an acute problem in America and those programs my father fought for are being dismembered or dismantled,” Maxwell wrote.
“With an almost Dickensian cruelty, the Trump administration is zeroing out funding for the poor, while handing untold riches to itself and to its wealthy donors.”
“This is unacceptable. And it is unacceptable, too, that my brother Bobby stands side by side with Donald Trump as these programs, particularly SNAP, are diminished.
“Preventing hunger is the primary duty of every public health official,” he continued. “You cannot Make America Healthy while denying food to our most vulnerable citizens.”
Kennedy concluded his opinion piece by writing that RFK Jr. saw the gathered mourners as their father’s body passed through Washington, D.C. and ought to remember what motivated them, “Black and white, weary and proud,” to pay tribute.
“My father said: If we cannot prevent our fellow citizens from starving, ‘we must ask ourselves what kind of country we really are.’ Those words are as essential now as they were then.”
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