Robert Kennedy Jr. stains family legacy with endorsement of Donald Trump

BALTIMORE – When the oddball political marriage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Donald Trump was announced the other day, many people thought about Kennedy’s father, up in heaven, whose ghost must be wondering where his legacy took such a bad turn.

Kennedy’s oldest sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, now makes it clear she’s wondering the same thing.

She and several other family members have expressed their embarrassment over Junior’s decision to endorse Trump’s re-election bid. They call it “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Townsend, who was elected Maryland’s first female lieutenant governor in 1994, knows a few things about sad political stories.

She ran for governor of Maryland in 2002 and lost to Robert Ehrlich, who thereby became the first Republican governor of Maryland since Spiro Agnew. Ehrlich didn’t cover himself with the same kind of ignominy as Agnew, but it was dreary enough.

Agnew became Richard Nixon’s running mate and then became the first vice president in U.S. history forced to resign in disgrace. He was taking money under the table when he was governor and kept the payoffs coming when he was veep.

Ehrlich had no crime attached to him, only public arrogance toward Democratic General Assembly members and laziness when it came to actual work. For this, he became the only sitting governor in the entire country who was defeated when he ran for re-election in 2006.

But Ehrlich made one smart gesture. He picked Michael Steele to run with him, and Steele became the first Black man elected lieutenant governor of Maryland. Later, Steele became national chairman of the Republican Party but later bailed out and became a commentator for MSNBC and one of the legions of those who believe Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

It was an irony of history that Ehrlich picked a Black running mate and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend did not. She picked a white man with a military background so that she wouldn’t be branded too liberal by Ehrlich.

But, if anybody was going to pick the first African-American for any political post, it should have been a child of Bobby Kennedy’s. Her father was one of the great 20th-century champions of racial justice.

So now we have Bobby’s son, his namesake, his peculiar reminder of how far the Kennedy name has now fallen. Junior is a one-man wrecking crew.

First, he said he was running for president when everyone in America knew he had no choice. Then little tidbits about his background dripped out like whale’s juice down the side of a car.

Reader, that’s not some lame simile. The “whale’s juice” really did run down the side of the Kennedy family minivan when Junior chain-sawed the head of a dead whale in Hyannis Port, Mass., bungee-corded it to the top of the vehicle, and carried it home. This, according to Junior’s 36-year-old daughter, Kick.

She is just one of the Kennedy clan telling everyone about her dad’s strangeness and their family’s embarrassment.

It comes in the wake of all these bizarre stories, some of them told by Junior himself.

He claims doctors found a worm in his brain. He recently acknowledged that he left a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014 because he thought it would be “amusing.”

In response to Junior’s highly-publicized anti-vaccine crusades, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote, five years ago in Politico, that her brother “has helped to spread dangerous misinformation and is compliant in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines…His work is having heartbreaking consequences.”

Townsend, 73, is no amateur on the subject of vaccines, or politics. She was chair of the Global Virus Network. She’s a Harvard grad with a law degree. She is a smart and serious woman who was unfairly branded a lightweight by the Ehrlich camp when she ran for governor.

The false branding stuck, and Kathleen Townsend – even with a Kennedy name attached to her – was beaten.

Back then, it was considered the family’s political low point.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hadn’t yet met – and endorsed – Donald Trump.