Bobby Kennedy helped shape my Jewish values, so I wrote a biopic. Cue the RFK Jr. wrecking ball.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tarnished a name that long inspired me
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, with President-elect Donald Trump. Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
I grew up in a progressive Jewish community in New Jersey, where Robert F. Kennedy was a role model. His activism inspired me to march for Soviet Jewry and migrant farm workers, and to protest against draft registration. His early support of Israel, dating back to his trip to the British Mandate with his brother Jack in 1948, inspired me.
Then his son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entered the Trumposphere — endangering his father’s brave legacy, and scuppering a project that, for me, was the culmination of years of dreaming: a film, for Sony Pictures Entertainment, about the life of the elder RFK.
The Ascent of Bobby Kennedy, which I adapted from Larry Tye’s nonfiction bestseller Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, was set to trace RFK’s descent into anger and depression after the 1963 assassination of his brother President John F. Kennedy, and his subsequent emotional and political rebirth.
It was a dream project. Chris Pine, fresh off Wonder Woman, signed on to co-produce and star as Bobby. But after four years of development, RFK Jr.’s pivot to Trumpism made the script — built around the theme of the elder Kennedy’s dedication to uplifting all Americans — ring hollow. My dream project became a lesson in how far American politics has fallen. The Kennedys were canceled.
Getting any screenplay produced requires a lot more than personal passion. Many creative elements must come together, along with a strong tailwind from the national zeitgeist that hopefully aligns with your project in the three, five or 10 years it takes to get anything made.
I believed that the ideas grounding my film about RFK were universal. At its center is the story of how Kennedy, in the depths of his anguish over his brother’s death, accepted an invitation to attempt to summit the highest unclimbed peak in North America — newly re-named Mt. Kennedy after his brother. Although Kennedy, who was afflicted with a terrible fear of heights, had never mountain climbed, he nevertheless took on the ascent. With it came a near-biblical transformation that led to his visionary but ill-fated campaign for the presidency in 1968.
Then came President-elect Donald Trump.
Suddenly, in the entertainment industry, escapism is the new order of the day. Anything vaguely political is kryptonite. The Ascent of Robert Kennedy now risks sounding like a tribute to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier who insinuated the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a conspiracy to strengthen Jewish influence, whom Trump aims to have head the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Kennedy brand, which stood for progressive liberal values meant to uplift the underserved, has abruptly become toxic. RFK worked tirelessly for civil rights and drew attention to the plight of Native American peoples as well as to the root of many of these issues — wealth disparity. Now, his son is set to join an administration that aspires to roll back efforts toward equality while reorienting our financial system to further benefit the uber-rich.
This twist demanded more than a rewrite. Move on, my friends told me. There would be other scripts, other successes.
But while I mourn the prospects for a film I truly believe in, I am, more deeply, mourning the ways in which the country appears to be moving away from the elder RFK’s belief that, as a national community, we must all show up for each other, support one other, and at the very least bear witness to the pain of our brethren.
The elder Robert Kennedy’s deep connection to his fellow Americans was born of his own family’s tragedies, which taught him about empathy, giving him a deeply compassionate understanding of others who were also struggling.
But ego trumps empathy in the Trump era. It’s true that the Kennedys were legendary for a level of arrogant pride, bred in them by their patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr. But unlike Fred Trump, the father of our president-elect, Joe Sr. taught his children to use their inherited wealth to further their public service — not to build hotel casinos or housing developments that red-lined Black people from living there.
My choice, now, mirrors one that all of us must face: submit to a grim reality, or hold on to hope. I can resign myself to the idea that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s alliance with Trump — and his conspiracy theories about vaccines, Prozac and AIDS — will tarnish the great social justice values of his father, and doom my script from ever being produced. Or, I can hold onto the idea that aspiring to be of service will never go out of fashion, and that in the long run both Hollywood and the United States will once more find their true voice.
Until then, I may try my hand at cartoons.
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