Follow live updates about RFK Jr.’s second confirmation hearing.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the Senate Financing Committee on his confirmation hearing to be a health secretary, ran on a blue draw with embroidered birds. It seemed to be a nod to Mr.’s hobby. Kennedy to raise birds, something that he has shared with his followers in some Sustable missives on social media. A falconer, Mr. Kennedy raised Ravens for years, but the melted yellow, red and green birds of his draw looked more like a swarm of parrots.
Here a subtle tailor’s diplomacy was in action: Mr. Kennedy was not the predator that his cousin Caroline Kennedy called him in a letter on Monday in contrast to his confirmation, but instead a nature -loving Softy. (The brand of Mr. Kennedy’s das was not immediately clear, although on the basis of photos from the past he seems to have something for ties with embroidered critters.)
This was not the only message that Mr. Kennedy, 71, broadcast on Wednesday by his clothes. Under his non-to-it Marine suit, he wore a button-down shirt, turned his tie in an agile knot over the size of an organic strawberry. It was a proportional, preppy combo that could have been exactly the thing that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, or even his uncle John F. Kennedy, the paragon of the Ivy League look in the sixties, perhaps had worn.
If Mr. Kennedy sent an unspoken signal of family cosiness here, it landed loudly because of the way everyone dressed out of the hill. The Falanx of legislators with whom he was confronted wore spread-collar shirts and stuffed Windsor button tire-what seems to be the uniform of contemporary senators.
The clothing of Mr. Kennedy was a silk and cotton reminder instead that through all this, even with a part of his family, distanced themselves from him, he still carries the values if not, then at least the aesthetic sensitivities From the toughest political dynasty in America.
Yet Mr. Kennedy differently than every Kennedy who has been seen before.
While he brought forward in his chair, Mr. Kennedy’s biceps pressed against his suit and indicated the gym ratlyque that has become central in his single image. Some online were of the opinion that Mr.’s draw. Kennedy was too thin. It is certainly more Reedy than the Squat Red Ties of Donald J. Trump, but the broad build of Mr. Kennedy only emphasized the strictness.
His face, tanned into roasted pumpkin, has been bearing the fruits of life in California for decades. (The wife of Mr. Kennedy, the actress Cheryl Hines, her Kohl Eye Shadow who fits her dark suit, could be seen over his shoulder during the hearing.)
This hearing was, like so much of the confirmation hearings of the administration, a tonal roller coaster. While the Republican senators have praised Mr. Kennedy, Democratic senators, armed with piles of earlier statements by Mr. Kennedy about vaccines, Lyme disease, AIDS, processed food, etc., as radical, far beyond the conventional thinking about The health in this country. When it was their turn, the hearing took the air of a rhetorical price fight. (It was appropriate that Mr. Kennedy, just like Mike Tyson who stormed the ring, was greeted by songs from the gallery of “Bobby! Bobby!” When he entered the hearing room.)
As he strived to explain his own words, Mr. Kennedy blinked and spoke emphatically in a grater caused by the spasm dysphony. He pushed against the images of Democrats of Him and broke exclamation points with his index finger.
By noon, it was the various topics of the hearing – the discussion about the origin of Lyme disease, the bickering about vaccines – that made clear to anyone who was in this hearing, in 2025 in Trump’s America, not in America of Kennedy in 1960.
