My father, Robert F. Kennedy, would have turned 100 this week. And were he alive, he would certainly be taking stock of the country he loved and served. Of course, there is no way to know precisely what he would have thought. But I do know what he cared about most deeply: the injustice of poverty in the richest nation in the world and our duty as citizens to make sure that no child goes to bed hungry.
And I know, specifically, that he would have been appalled by the cruelty the Trump administration has directed toward America’s neediest.
During the government shutdown, the administration put 42 million Americans at risk of losing food assistance through the SNAP program.
And while the recent budget offer has provided some relief, it won’t make up for the permanent changes Republican legislators made to SNAP with passage of the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” this summer — tightening eligibility requirements and all but ensuring that millions will lose benefits.
It’s a betrayal of all that my father worked for.
And all those complicit in that betrayal have lowered themselves — not least my brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who knows my father’s legacy as well as anyone.
My father grew up in one of the most privileged families in the United States. The Great Depression had no impact on his standard of living. His father and brothers graduated from Harvard, as did he.
But Robert and his brother John F. Kennedy saw poverty up close during John’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in West Virginia. And shortly after taking office, President Kennedy authorized a pilot food stamp program. It grew throughout his time in office, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ushered in a major expansion when he signed the Food Stamp Act as part of his War on Poverty in 1964.
That same year, my father was elected to the US Senate. And it was there that his fierce advocacy for the poor and the hungry began in earnest.
A key turning point came during Senate hearings on hunger in 1967. One of the witnesses was a young Black attorney named Marian Wright who testified that Black children in Mississippi were starving. Some were skeptical. But my father resolved to see for himself and headed south with three other senators.
In Jackson, Miss., the senators heard from civil rights leaders and conservative politicians, but the 27-year-old Wright was again the star. Against great odds, she had recently graduated from Yale Law School and dedicated her life to helping bring children out of poverty. My father piled into a late-model sedan with Wright and his aide Peter Edelman — Wright and Edelman would later marry — and motored into the Delta, one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the United States, where rich black soil grew some of the world’s finest cotton and where white supremacy still defined life a century after the Civil War.
Ellen Meacham in her book “Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi” detailed my father’s trip through the region and documented the terrible conditions for laborers in 1967. New pesticides meant that fewer hands were needed to chop weeds in May and June. Modern farm equipment meant that fewer hands were needed to plow. And most devastating of all, subsidies from the Department of Agriculture paid landowners to leave portions of their fields unplanted — eliminating even more jobs for laborers. Landowners prospered; their workers starved. Elderly people without cash to pay for heat froze to death that winter in the Delta.
The drive down Route 61 is one of the most striking transitions in America, from gently rolling pine country into the flat, ancient, and seemingly endless alluvial plain that people call simply the Delta. The road is straight as a razor — 30 miles at a stretch with no curves. Cotton fields panned to the horizon when my father took the trip, punctuated by cypress breaks and irrigation canals “shining,” in Paul Simon’s imperishable phrase, “like a national guitar.” It must have felt like moving into a different region — but it probably felt, too, like going back in time.
They stopped on Ethel Street in the town of Cleveland early that afternoon, at Annie White’s rented shack of hammered, unpainted boards with gaps that allowed in light, rain, and wind. The single sink near the back dripped tepid brown water — no hot, no cold. A hole in the floor served as the only toilet. The stench and the flies were inescapable. It was hot in summer, cold in winter, and wet when it rained. A wood stove was the only way to cook or provide warmth. Rent had recently doubled from $3 to $7 per month. State officials had twice turned down White when she’d applied for welfare.
White swept the dirt yard and gathered wildflowers to decorate indoors. She’d trained wild honeysuckle to climb the entry and help mask the odor from the open-pit toilet. For the baby’s diapers she used old cloth — difficult to clean. White’s parents and grandparents had picked cotton. As an infant, she’d sat atop the cotton sack as her mother picked, and pulled the sack to the next bush. Her mother died from a venomous snake bite in the fields. White, like many Black Americans growing up in the Delta, began chopping and picking cotton as a child and never attended school long enough to learn to read and write. Her children read borrowed books by oil-lamp light when they could afford the fuel.
The family rarely had more to eat than bread and molasses or beans, and often missed meals. My father was probably the first white man to set foot inside the house. In the back he found a toddler named David White, sitting silently on the dirty floor, staring at breadcrumbs.
David did not look up when my father made a clicking sound with his tongue that would have brought all of my siblings to attention, nor when he brushed the child’s cheek with his hand. Marian and Peter had entered the room and watched in silence. My father sat down beside David White. A tear slipped down his cheek. He made more attempts to connect with the boy. But David did not respond. He simply kept picking at the breadcrumbs on the floor and lifting them to his mouth. David and I were both about 20 months old that day, and it must have been shocking for my father to see a child so much like his own son, but doomed — literally starving.
When the trip began, Marian Wright didn’t trust Senator Kennedy. But watching this scene, she felt her distrust dissolve. She doubted she would have sat down on the floor in that stinking house, among the crumbs, and wondered whether she would have touched the child, with his little distended belly and open sores. She later said: “He could do almost anything after that, and I trusted him from that time on, just as a human being.”
I don’t know how it is that people change, sometimes overnight. But I believe my father was never the same after that trip. He flew back to D.C. with Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania that night, and arrived late for my mother’s birthday rave at our family home, known as Hickory Hill. My older siblings remember the night because of the new and different way my father entered the house. Normally he was full of vigor, motion, and energy. But that night he was quiet, his face somber, careworn, serious, as if something had shifted inside him.
The next morning when he walked into the office, he said to his aide Melody Miller, “This is unacceptable.” And when he said that word — “unacceptable” — everyone in the office knew he meant business.
My father pressed the Johnson administration to take action. He met with doctors and policy experts and traveled to more places that had been left out of the American dream. He visited Appalachian communities in rural Kentucky and Native American reservations like Pine Ridge in South Dakota, where suicide rates for teens were multiples of those in white communities. He met migrant farmworkers in small towns in California and Texas. My father listened, face to face, to the people who bore this country’s hidden hunger. He knew that empathy was at the root of wisdom in politics, that you cannot govern a people you refuse to meet. His power came not from commanding a crowd or speaking to the cameras but from showing up — from listening to a child. That is what set him apart from those who mistake cruelty for strength.
The insanity of the war in Vietnam led him to run for president, but it was poverty more than anything that motivated his conscience.
When my father announced his campaign on March 16, 1968, he said:
“I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts, young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they’ve lacked all hope and feel they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait out their lives in empty idleness in eastern Kentucky.”
President Johnson stopped advocating for poverty programs in his last year in office. The war in Vietnam dominated the headlines and the concern of young people. His aides were surprised when my father insisted on talking about poverty when he visited college campuses. But he spoke directly to the students about what was happening in America — and made clear that the injustice of hunger was unacceptable.
At Ball State he cautioned: “We speak not of statistics or numbers, but we speak of human beings.”
And at the University of Notre Dame he challenged: “These are our responsibilities. If we cannot meet them, we must ask ourselves what kind of country we really are; we must ask ourselves what we really stand for. We must act, and we must act today.”
As the world knows, we lost my father in the immediate aftermath of his victory in the California primary, a victory that likely would have propelled him to the presidency. After his death, Senator George McGovern took up the fight and helped win expansion of the three main pillars of federal policy — SNAP, WIC, and the National School Lunch Program — that provide sustenance for poor Americans. But it took the dedicated support of President Richard Nixon to expand food stamps to every state. And it was legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter that ended a requirement for beneficiaries to pay into the program.
My father and many others, from both parties, built a network of programs aimed at nourishing the country he imagined — a country where compassion was written into policy and where a nation’s strength was measured not in its markets or armies or applause for its leaders but in its willingness to care for its most vulnerable members and in the daily bread it shares with its children.
On the day my father’s funeral train passed through Washington, D.C., in June 1968, mourners Black and white, weary and proud, gathered along the tracks to wave goodbye. My brother Bobby remembers looking out at all of those dignified men and women, watching as the train carried my father’s body toward his final resting place across the bridge at Arlington National Cemetery.
Today hunger remains an acute problem in America and those programs my father fought for are being dismembered or dismantled.
With an almost Dickensian cruelty, the Trump administration is zeroing out funding for the poor, while handing untold riches to itself and to its wealthy donors. This is unacceptable. And it is unacceptable, too, that my brother Bobby stands side by side with Donald Trump as these programs, particularly SNAP, are diminished. Preventing hunger is the primary duty of every public health official. You cannot Make America Healthy while denying food to our most vulnerable citizens.
My father said: If we cannot prevent our fellow citizens from starving, “we must ask ourselves what kind of country we really are.” Those words are as essential today as they were then.
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