Conor Kennedy (1994) is the eldest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s four children with Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy (1959-2012), who committed suicide by hanging herself in her home in Bedford, New York, when he was 17 years old. Death and tragedy haunt that family like inevitable ghostly shadows.
Conor graduated from high school at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, one of the oldest and most prestigious educational institutions in the United States, opened in 1797 under the auspices of Samuel Adams, one of the founding fathers, to contribute “to the education of youth in the liberal arts and sciences, and to all other useful learning.”
He then studied at Harvard University, where he graduated cum laude with a BA in History and Literature (2018), and later earned his JD in Law from Georgetown University (2023) in Washington DC.
At 18, he made headlines due to his relationship with the already famous Taylor Swift, when she was 22 years old. The press claimed that she was “madly in love” with him after meeting him at a party in Massachusetts on a 4th of July. But the relationship did not last long. It is said that two of her songs are inspired by the young Kennedy: “Everything Has Changed” and “Begin Again.”
The following year, he was arrested alongside his father, stepmother and more than 40 Sierra Club environmentalists for participating in a demonstration outside the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a massive national protest movement. The $9 billion pipeline was first proposed in 2008 to carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to U.S. refineries, but has had a checkered history since then. The Trump administration, however, has just urged the company building it to “return to the United States.”
Three years later, Conor was back in the headlines when he was arrested for a brawl outside a club in Aspen, Colorado, for defending a gay friend who had been called a homophobic slur by two men.
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Several witnesses said they saw him punch a young man four or five times in the head before tangling with a police officer who tried to restrain him. They say he later apologized to the officer.
He was booked on a charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and released on a court summons, but the incident had no further repercussions. “Like any father, I don’t want to see my son fighting or involved with the police,” RFK Jr. told People magazine. “But on the other hand, I’m proud that he stands up to the bullies.”
Jardines de la Reina
In 2014, at age 20, Conor took a trip with his father and one of his brothers to Jardines de la Reina, one of the last marine protected areas in the Caribbean Sea and declared a National Park by the Cuban government in 2010.
In a text published by EcoWatch, a digital platform specializing in environmental news and one of the forums of the U.S. left, Conor wrote his impressions of this Cuban place that “is home to rare life forms such as marine mammals, three species of sea turtles, pink snails (a type of large mollusk) and extremely sensitive staghorn and elkhorn corals.” And above all, a reservoir of black corals, classified among the oldest living organisms in the world.
There he sets out his views on the environment and its preservation in Cuba:
In one sense, Cuba’s political and economic isolation has given it the opportunity to make good long-term decisions about its environment. Instead of responding to market pressures and the corrupting influence of corporate money and campaign contributions to sprout hotels and resorts on every spit of sand and open water, Cuba’s beaches and reefs have been largely protected.
He takes this idea as a background to delve into the subject of the embargo and its multilateral impacts. The fact does not mean, however, that the young Kennedy is a supporter of the government and the political structure in force since the 1970s, when under institutionalization (1971-1985) the Soviet model was adopted, albeit with adjustments and adaptations. Kennedy broadly shares the values and approaches present in the mainstream.
That is why he says:
The Cuban government restricts basic freedoms like freedom of speech and assembly. The government owns the media…. Elections, as in most old-school communist countries, offer limited options.
But what is interesting is that he distances himself from the hard lines of the spectrum, appealing to ideas that he takes from his father; in this case, by reaffirming the validity of an old problem: double standards in U.S. foreign policy:
Most Americans of my generation ought to look deeper into the justification for our longstanding embargo against this tiny island.
There are real tyrants in the world, with whom America has made close allies and many governments with much worse human rights records than Cuba — Azerbaijan, for example, whose president Ilham Aliyev boils his opponents in oil, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and many others where torture, enforced disappearances, religious intolerance, suppression of speech and assembly, medieval oppression of women, sham elections and non-judicial executions are all government practices.
Finally, he introduces the human dimension and the effects of that policy on ordinary Cubans, especially in the midst of the Special Period, which began in Cuba when the maps changed color:
It is clear to everyone that the embargo first implemented during the Eisenhower Administration in October 1960, unfairly punishes regular Cubans. Mostly due to the embargo, Cubans suffer a cataclysmic lack of medicine and medical equipment, and long lines outside their pharmacies. We saw some Cuban hospitals that looked like dilapidated ghettos. The embargo impedes economic development by making virtually every commodity and every species of equipment both cataclysmically expensive and difficult to obtain.
In 2022 he enlisted in the International Legion to fight against the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Like many people, I was deeply moved by what I saw happening in Ukraine over the past year I wanted to help,” he wrote. “When I heard about Ukraine’s International Legion, I knew I was going, and I went to the embassy to enlist the next day.” But he was turned down for lack of military experience and went straight to Poland, from where he went on to Ukraine. After serving for two and a half months, he concluded: “I liked being a soldier, more than I had expected. It is scary. But life is simple, and the rewards for finding courage and doing good are substantial.”
Today he is a lawyer with the Los Angeles law firm Wisner Baum and is engaged to Brazilian singer, songwriter and actress Giulia Bourguignon Marinho, better known as Giulia Be.
