Kennedy magic: America's storied political dynasty roared back in 2025

WASHINGTON  – Stepping inside Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s sun-filled apartment is like stepping into American history.

A letter from her father, Robert F. Kennedy, hangs in the hallway.

"Dear Kathleen, as the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren you have a special responsibility: Be kind to others and work for your country,” RFK wrote his 12-year-old daughter, two days after the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.

For members of the Kennedy clan, that sense of responsibility is being tested by one of their own: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Townsend's younger brother and a top member of President Donald Trump’s administration.

“I would not say there’s a lot of peace in my family,” she says, alluding to the tragedies and scandals that have preyed on the Kennedy dynasty, including the assassination of her own father in 1968 while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That has certainly been true in 2025, the 100th anniversary of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s birth, which saw his namesake accused in a televised Senate confirmation hearing of spreading vaccine conspiracies and groping a babysitter, the release of government files on the JFK and RFK assassinations, and mass firings and scientific turmoil at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Townsend, 74, the oldest grandchild of the Kennedy family matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and power broker Joseph Kennedy, is unassuming and friendly. She often puts her arm on the shoulder of a reporter as she offers explanations of framed letters and memorabilia lining her long entryway.

There’s a large red leather swivel chair in the study that her father sat in when he was the U.S. attorney general. Townsend encourages the visitor to sit and get a feel for the well-worn chair.

Call it the Kennedy magic − the ability to connect with people that has kept America’s most storied political family at the heart of its politics for more than half of its 250-year history.

The clan experienced a generational handoff after Sen. Ted Kennedy, the youngest sibling of JFK and RFK, died in 2009 while in his 47th year serving in the Senate. RFK's oldest son, Joseph Kennedy II, a former congressman, declined to run for the open Massachusetts Senate seat. His son, Joseph P. Kennedy III – RFK's grandson – served in Congress for four terms but gave up his seat to run in the Democratic Senate primary in Massachusetts in 2020; he lost. There has been no Kennedy in Congress since then.

Now the Kennedy name is back, but in a manner that has horrified most members of an extended brood that maintains deep and historic ties to the Democratic Party. In April 2023, RFK Jr. launched a long-shot Democratic primary challenge against then-President Joe Biden. Six months later, he was running for the White House as an independent before ultimately abandoning his campaign to endorse Trump, the Republican nominee.

After Trump's election, RFK Jr. joined the new Cabinet and rolled out a slew of controversial actions as part of his Make America Healthy Again platform. Multiple Kennedy family members have called their relative out as complicit in “cruel” policies of the Trump administration. There have been newspaper opinion pieces, magazine articles and letters to senators from the family warning against his qualifications, character and policies.

It’s not just MAHA. The family has been buffeted by the release of the JFK and RFK assassination files, while seeing the Kennedy legacy diluted as Trump leveled former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's garden during his demolition of the East Wing and renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington the "Trump-Kennedy Center.”

Maria Shriver, a niece of RFK and JFK, said in a post on X that it was “beyond comprehension” that Trump had sought to “rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy."

In an interview with CBS, RFK’s grandson Joseph Kennedy III panned Trump’s renaming a “living memorial to a fallen president” as if it were a New York City skyscraper.

The year drew to a close with a millennial member of the Kennedy family, Jack Schlossberg − grandson of JFK and an ardent critic of RFK Jr. − announcing a run for an open U.S. House seat from Manhattan.

“SEND ME TO CONGRESS TO SMOKE THESE FOOLS – MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD LOUD AND CLEAR  I won’t back down or be drowned out," Schlossberg wrote Dec. 18 on social media.

'No Irish need apply'

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s father, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was elected a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts in 1894 and later became Boston’s first Irish-American mayor.

“I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, Rose Kennedy,” Townsend says. “And she would talk about how when she was growing up, there were signs still – even though her father was the mayor of Boston – that said, 'Help wanted − no Irish need apply.'

“And I think that she passed that on to her children as well − what injustice feels like.”

The Kennedy legacy that Rose Kennedy helped forge with her husband continues to shape American politics.

It’s that sense of justice that led JFK to initiate the push for a bill aimed at ending discriminatory quotas and a preference for northern Europeans, Townsend says. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, two years after Kennedy's assassination. Ted Kennedy, who won a special election in 1962 to fill the seat his brother vacated to become president, championed it in Congress.

Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history at Harvard University, is writing a multi-volume biography of John F. Kennedy. He says part of the reason the Kennedys are such an extraordinary American story is that the close-knit family shares a political philosophy and an optimistic view of what America could achieve.

Logevall describes JFK’s brand of Democratic politics as “pragmatic liberalism,” RFK as deeply committed to liberalism and Ted Kennedy as left of center.

'Betrayal' of Robert F. Kennedy's legacy

But the common thread was that “they had faith in America, in this flawed but real democracy,” Logevall says. “That’s why up until this moment, the Kennedys were in agreement with one another politically.”

With his role as a top lieutenant to Trump and his embrace of the bombastic MAGA movement, Logevall says, RFK Jr. “is out of step with what the Kennedy family has stood for politically and continues to stand for.”

In November, Maxwell Kennedy wrote a searing opinion article in The Boston Globe accusing his older brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of a "betrayal" of their father's legacy by supporting the Trump administration's cuts to food assistance programs for “America’s neediest.”

Because RFK Jr. was an environmental attorney for three decades, his embrace of Trump has mystified his family. During his first term, Trump's administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. Tapping RFK Jr. to join his second term, Trump promised to let him “go wild” on health care, food and medicine.

"Donald Trump is anathema to everything our family stands for," Kerry Kennedy, one of RFK Jr.'s siblings, told USA TODAY in August 2024. "I distance myself and reject everything that Bobby is doing and saying because I think that it's a rejection of our family's values and everything that I've spent my life working for. ... And, frankly, everything Bobby spent his life working for."

If her father and uncle were still alive, they’d have detested everything about Trump, Kerry Kennedy added in the interview, during which she described her plans to stump for Kamala Harris, who by then had replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Responding before Election Day 2024 to his family's criticism, RFK Jr. told Fox News that he understood his relatives were troubled by his decisions. "But, you know, I think we all need to be able to disagree with each other and still love each other,” he said.

'God sent me President Trump'

Less than 10 days after Trump won his second term as president, he tapped RFK Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy’s nomination faced fierce resistance from many in the scientific community over his promotion of unfounded claims about vaccines causing autism and antidepressants linked to school shootings. On the eve of Kennedy's confirmation hearing, his cousin and the only living child of JFK posted a video on social media calling Kennedy a "predator."

“I have known Bobby my whole life," Caroline Kennedy said in the video, in which she read aloud a letter she wrote to senators who'd be voting on RFK Jr.'s nomination. "We grew up together. It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator."

RFK Jr. did not respond to Caroline Kennedy's allegation.

After Senate approval as one of Trump’s Cabinet picks, RFK Jr. was sworn into his new job in an Oval Office ceremony surrounded by his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, and his children.

"For 20 years, I'm up every morning on my knees and praying that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country," he said. "God sent me President Trump."  

Over the past 11 months, Kennedy has made sweeping changes to policies on vaccines, food and prescription drugs. He also has targeted ultra-processed foods, linking them to chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes and certain cancers. 

RFK Jr.’s MAHA policies around food regulation and limiting animal testing have found broad bipartisan support from the American public, according to polls. That's in contrast to his policies around vaccines and severe funding cuts to HHS, which have been roundly criticized by scientists and lawmakers of both parties. In March, Kennedy announced the consolidation of divisions and elimination of 20,000 full-time employees in a major restructuring, saying it would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year.

In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's expert vaccine panel and filled many of the positions with people who have been vaccine skeptics or questioned COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Public criticism, once again, came from his family. In a New Yorker essay headlined "A battle with my blood," Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of JFK and daughter of Caroline Kennedy, revealed she had less than a year to live. She minced no words.

"As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers," wrote Schlossberg, 35, who has a rare form of blood cancer. "Slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research."

Schlossberg wrote that despite her mother’s letter to the Senate and her brother, Jack Schlossberg, speaking out “against his lies for months, I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government."

Just over a month later, on Dec. 30, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced Schlossberg had died.

"She will always be in our hearts," her parents, siblings, husband and children said in an Instagram post.

Holding on to the legacy of feeling others' pain

Given that RFK Jr. now holds the most high-profile political position in the famed family, where does that leave the Kennedy legacy?

For her part, Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, has made it her mission to advocate for strong regulations and accountability in the tech industry. She's an adviser for a nonprofit called Guard Rail Now to help states develop AI regulations.

The oldest of 11 children, Townsend was 16 when her father was assassinated. As far as the family legacy, she says, each member has the "obligation to make our country fairer, more just, and to give back."

Being the oldest, has she ever thought of herself as the peacekeeper in the family? Townsend says she didn’t see it that way. “I don't know if this search for peace is really an appropriate way to live,” she says. “I think it's more important to feel other people's pain and your own pain."

It’s also important to feel joy when joy is appropriate, Townsend says, a lesson she learned from her mother, who with a sense of humor and a zest for life raised the large family after her husband’s assassination.

“Joy is not peaceful. Joy is enthusiasm," Townsend says, adding with a laugh: "My mother didn't go around looking for peace. She felt joy and excitement and thrill and a desire to win at tennis − that's not peace."

Though family members might have differing definitions of patriotism, one thing is clear: The Kennedys do not shy away from being public about what they believe is right. Maintaining family peace is not the priority.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal