Attending a wedding reception in Louisville, Kentucky, recently, I spotted an SUV with two bumper stickers that caught my eye: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President 2024" and "Make America Healthy Again." The combination of support for RFK Jr. and the MAGA paraphrase explain President-elect Donald Trump's choice of the political scion for secretary of Health and Human Services.

Bobby Jr.'s vaccine skepticism is attractive to anti-vaxxers, and his conspiracy theories (including about his father's 1968 assassination) appeal to Trump and his advisors. The 47^th president and Senate should buckle up for what could be a bumpy ride to confirmation for the HHS nominee.

For good or ill, the Kennedy family has often made their personal medical experiences a basis for health policy. As far back as the 1920s, when future president John F. Kennedy (RFK Jr.'s uncle Jack) fell ill as a toddler with scarlet fever, a then-potentially deadly and incurable bacterial infection, JFK's father, Joe, pulled political strings through his father-in-law, Boston's former mayor John F. Fitzgerald, to get young Jack admitted to a local hospital. Otherwise, the family, which had just welcomed its fourth baby, would have been confined to their house under quarantine.

Sadly, the Kennedys' third child, Rosemary, born at the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic, would soon be diagnosed with what was then called "mental retardation." Joe and Rose Kennedy, Bobby Jr.'s grandparents, refused to confine her to an institution, which physicians recommended. Instead, they "mainstreamed" her long before that term entered the vernacular for placing students with mental or physical challenges among their unafflicted peers.

When Rosemary grew into adulthood, however, and began exhibiting violent tantrums and a propensity to wander from caretakers in the early 1940s, her father worried that men might take advantage of her. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy was unthinkable for the Catholic Kennedys, who would not seek an abortion, nor would they tolerate sterilization, often applied to women of severely low intelligence. Rather, Joe subjected his daughter to a new treatment for anxiety and other mental disorders—pre-frontal lobotomy. Unfortunately, all the family's efforts to let Rosemary reach her potential were undone when the surgery reduced her to a childlike mental capacity and affected her mobility.

In the late 1940s, Joe placed Rosemary in a Wisconsin convent where nuns cared for her, and he forbid his family from visiting her, fearing they would cause agitation. For public consumption, he reported that she was a teacher at the Catholic institution. Another tragedy had befallen the Kennedys when the eldest child, Joe Jr., died in the explosion of his Navy plane over the English coastline in 1944. The devastated family founded a charity in his name, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, that embraced a mission to benefit those with intellectual disabilities.

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