Smith had denounced Bobby during the campaign, and while he didn’t relish attacking his cousin, he felt an obligation to do so. “Knowing how Bobby is, and what he’s standing for, and then the misrepresentation and manipulation of the family legacy, which is dishonest and hurtful — it’s not a difficult choice for me,” Smith said. But he also understood the hesitation to attack a relative: “Everyone went through a lot together, particularly the RFKs, so there is this tension, which is the epitome of a tragic conflict, between the loyalty to the family and the loyalty to the values the family stands for.” He said that he had grown closer to some of his cousins as they tried to think through, How do we handle this?
Even as the Kennedys made clear their opposition to Bobby’s politics, he was never fully ostracized. During the campaign against Biden, a Vanity Fair reporter was surprised to find Maria, Tim, and Mark Shriver pulling into Hyannisport on a boat with their cousin Bobby, returning from a trip to a seafood shack nearby. His siblings also steered clear of getting too personal in their attacks — they were pro-Biden and pro-Harris, they insisted, not anti-Bobby. Several Kennedys told me they had worried about affecting their relationship with Bobby’s six kids. “Just because their dad does things we disagree with doesn’t mean those kids don’t deserve to have relationships with their cousins,” one said. “They’re going through a lot that is complicated, and my family understands that when you go through a lot that’s complicated, the one thing you should be able to count on is your family.” While there were whispers that some of Bobby’s children were troubled by his antics, both of his daughters, Kick and Kyra, later showed up to his swearing-in.
The Biden-Harris campaign had a team dedicated to combating Bobby, and part of the strategy rested on letting the public know that his family wasn’t on his side. But multiple campaign staffers told me they were frustrated by the Kennedys’ desire to pull some of the more devastating personal punches they could have thrown. “They seemed extremely concerned with protecting and promoting the family brand without realizing that the biggest threat to the family brand was this nut-bag brother-slash-cousin,” one staffer said. Some in the family seemed to even hold out hope that they could bring him back into the fold: As Bobby weighed whether or not to endorse Trump, he reached out to his cousin Maria Shriver to ask if she could broker a meeting with the Harris campaign. Shriver encouraged the campaign to meet with Bobby, but the campaign declined.