THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN SCIENCE

WHY IS ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. SO CONVINCED HE'S RIGHT?

- MICHAEL SCHERER Photographs by ELINOR CARUCCI

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. somehow knew, even as a little boy, that fate can lead a person to terrible places. "I always had the feeling that we were all involved in some great crusade," Kennedy once wrote, "that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict." He was 9 years old when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his father suffered the same fate.

I happened to be sitting next to him this fall when he learned that his friend Charlie Kirk had been shot. We were on an Air National Guard C-40C Clipper en route from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and one of Kennedy's advisers, her eyes filling with tears, whispered the news in his ear. "Oh my God," he said.

National Guard stewards handed out reheated chicken quesadillas, which Kennedy declined in favor of the quart of plain, organic, grass-fed yogurt his body man had secured for him.

A few weeks earlier, a man who believed that he'd been poisoned by a COVID vaccine had fired nearly 200 bullets at the CDC's campus in Atlanta, hitting six buildings and killing a police officer. Kennedy, who as secretary of Health and Human Services oversees the CDC, had just told me that his security team recently circulated a memo warning him of threats to his own life. "It said the resentments against me had elevated 'above the threshold of lethality," he said. Kennedy greeted the threat assessment with remarkable equanimity. He put down his spoon in order to finish his yogurt in gulps directly from the container.