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Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), often referred to as RFK Jr. or Bobby Jr., is the third of eleven children born to Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. He is a noted environmental lawyer and co-host of Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network.

Personal life

An animal collector during his youth, Kennedy attended Georgetown Preparatory School, the Jesuit boys school in Bethesda, Maryland. On June 5th, 1968, he was pulled from classes by the rector to learn that his father had been shot following the California Democratic Primary.

Before Kennedy graduated from Harvard College with a major in political science (interrupting his stay at Harvard to for a year of study at the London School of Economics) and obtained a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia Law School, following a tradition started by his father and uncle Edward M. Kennedy. He also obtained an LL.M. from the Pace University School of Law. In 1983, he was arrested in South Dakota for heroin possession and went into drug treatment for his addiction; he has been clean for over twenty years. His younger brother, David Kennedy, died of a drug overdose in 1984.

Divorced from first wife, Emily Ruth Black, he is now married to Mary Richardson (born 1959), and has six children: Robert F. III (born 1984) and Kathleen Alexandra (1988) by Black, and Conor Richardson (1994), Kyra LeMoyne (1995), William Finbar (1997) and Aidan Caohman Vieques (2001) by Mary.

Legal career

In 1984, Kennedy joined the Riverkeeper organization as an attorney and worked with the group to prosecute polluters on the Hudson River. With fellow environmentalist John Cronin, Kennedy has created a partnership between the Hudson Riverkeeper and Pace University School of Law.

Kennedy serves as Professor of Environmental Law at Pace University School of Law and co-director of Pace's Environmental Litigation Clinic which, under a special court order, allows second and third year law students to try cases against Hudson River polluters. He credits the energy and intelligence of the students, as well as access to the Pace law faculty and library, for several legal victories over clients represented by New York's richest and most prestigious law firms. Kennedy also serves as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent lobbyist and legal firm that works to strengthen and enforce environmental laws.

The Hudson Riverkeepers, now part of the international group, The Waterkeeper Alliance, was founded in 1966 by a group of fishermen and residents from New York who were outraged by pollution in the Hudson. Since the formation of the group, the Hudson River has undergone a rebirth and today there are over 100 "Keepers" in the US, Canada and Costa Rica. In 1998, Kennedy, Chris Bartle and John Hoving created a bottled water company that donates all of its profits to clean water organizations. They decided to call the company "Keeper Springs" in support of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

In 1998, Kennedy was named the inaugural director of the Watershed Institute at Boston College, an urban ecology research center. He was considered to be a possible candidate for attorney general of New York in 2006, but on January 25, 2005, Kennedy announced that he had ruled out a candidacy for the office. Had Kennedy decided to run, he would have likely faced off against his former brother-in-law, Andrew Cuomo, in the Democratic primary.

Media work and public activism

Kennedy currently co-hosts Ring of Fire on Air America Radio with Mike Papantonio, despite suffering from spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder that makes speech difficult and causes the voice to sound quavery and strangled. He has written various books and articles on environmental issues, including The Riverkeepers and Crimes Against Nature. He contributes to Sierra Club publications, such as Sierra Magazine, as well as to reports authored by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Since May 2005 he's been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post, a blog run by progressive commentator Arianna Huffington. In September 2005, he wrote a piece on the blog entitled “For Those That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind,” in which he tied the increasing strength of hurricanes such as Katrina to global warming and cited President Bush’s refusal to limit CO2 output as contributing to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He has notably opposed the construction of the Cape Wind wind power project, which would be visible from the Kennedy Compound on Cape Cod, due to claims that it would destroy the region's scenic view and damage the sea ecosystem. Kennedy has also become a recent advocate for the scientific theory that there are connections between unneeded substances (most notably mercury and specifically, thiomersal) in innoculations and childhood autism.

In an article in the June 01 2006 Rolling Stone entitled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?", he stated his categorical belief that the Republican party stole the 2004 American presidential election:

After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.

Online magazine Salon.com, among others, has challenged this. *

Books

Notes

  1. Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, Rolling Stone, retrieved 01 June 2006 22:20.

External links

  • RollingStone.com - 'Deadly Immunity' (complete, updated version), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Rolling Stone (June 20, 2005)
  • Yahoo.com - 'Time for CDC to Come Clean', Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (March 1, 2006)

Video

1954 births | Air America Radio | Alumni of the London School of Economics | American radio personalities | Autism | Harvard University alumni | Kennedy family | Living people | People treated for drug addiction

Роберт Ф. Кенеди Млађи

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.".

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