The story
He could have done anything.
He chose to take on the powerful.
Born into the most consequential political family in modern American life, Bobby Kennedy Jr. chose the harder road: a law degree and a career spent standing between ordinary families and the institutions that had stopped answering to them.
He learned the method early, working alongside commercial fishermen who had lost their livelihoods to industrial polluters — read the documents, follow the money, put the powerful under oath. It made him one of the most persistent litigators in the country, and it made him enemies in every industry he touched.
He has spent the four decades since saying out loud what agencies and industries would rather not hear: about captured regulators, about what is in the food and the water, about the chronic disease carried by American children. That work now runs from inside the federal government as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
