(Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)RFK Jr.The Fall and Riseby Isabel VincentWilliam Morrow, 304 pp, $30SOME YEARS BACK, WHILE TRAVELING with his family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came across a dead whale that had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He used a chainsaw to cut off its head, which he then strapped to the family minivan, family inside, for a five-hour ride.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” his daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, recalled in a 2012 interview. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”This bit of Kennedy family lore is not among the stories told in RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, Isabel Vincent’s new book about the tortured scion who now serves as President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

It does mention his attraction to roadkill, memorably illustrated by the episode involving the dead baby bear he scooped up in his van in 2014 and deposited in Central Park. But somehow, the whale tale did not make the cut, so to speak.No matter. Vincent, an investigative reporter for the New York Post, seems to have gotten to nearly all the rest, from Kennedy’s boyhood pranks of spiking family members’ drinks with laxatives to his bizarre but not entirely implausible claim to have a dead worm in his brain.

And that, let’s face it, is why people will want to read this book—to gain insights into Kennedy’s poor judgment and raging sense of entitlement as he fulfills Trump’s mandate to “go wild on health,” “on the food,” and “on the medicines.”RFK Jr. is serviceable if not always enlightening; some nuts, it turns out, are truly hard to crack. There are fresh interviews with named and unnamed sources, but the most important contribution that Vincent brings to the table is Kennedy’s personal diaries from 1999, 2000, and 2001, which she obtained in 2013 from “a trusted source who knew the Kennedy family well.” At the time, Vincent had been reporting on the May 2012 suicide of Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, during the couple’s nasty divorce.

Mary hanged herself in the couple’s barn, where she was found by Kennedy and one of Mary’s friends. Mary’s family blamed Kennedy for her death. (“You have killed my sister,” Nan Richardson charged.) Several days after Mary’s family buried her at a cemetery in Centerville, Massachusetts, Kennedy had her dug up and moved to a Kennedy family plot in the same cemetery, leaving Mary’s family enraged.Kennedy’s diary entries are a testament to, as Vincent puts it, “a lifetime spent grappling with the weight of his family’s legacy and his quest to carve out a distinct identity as an environmental crusader, public health critic, and political maverick.” He did so, it seems, by being unfailingly weird, relentlessly self-centered, and determinedly dishonest.“After daddy died I struggled to be a grown-up,” confided Kennedy, who was fourteen when his famous father, Robert F.

Kennedy, was assassinated, in one journal entry: “I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I began to lie—to make up a character who was the hero and leader I wished I was.”It’s an act of make-believe that seemingly continues to this day.ShareKENNEDY GREW UP IN MCLEAN, VIRGINIA on the family’s estate, Hickory Hill, which “doubled as an extension of the White House.” As he once wrote in a memoir, it felt as though “history was happening all around us”: Important government decisions were made “by men in swimming trunks on the pool-house patio.” His father spent almost two weeks straight at the White House in October 1962 tending to the Cuban Missile Crisis, with his family fully aware that if things went badly they could be “vaporized,” as Kennedy put it.When Kennedy was 11, he became fascinated with falconry.

He trained with a local falconer and eventually acquired a hawk of his own. He named her Morgan, after King Arthur’s half-sister. He also had a pet sea lion, named Sandy, who was fed a diet of fresh mackerel, which she devoured except for the eyes, leaving them “scattered like marbles across the pool, patio, and lawn.” The animal was a gift from Jimmy Skakel, one of Kennedy’s mother’s older brothers.

A sea lion.And when Kennedy traveled to Africa in 1964 with his uncle, Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, and others, he returned with a sixteen-pound leopard tortoise that went through customs undetected in a diplomatic pouch. The tortoise lived at the family’s Hickory Hill residence in McLean for the next two decades.Stay grounded amid today’s political chaos by signing up for a free or paid subscription.Kennedy’s use of illegal drugs got him booted from two of three prep boarding schools he attended during his high school years. His mother, Ethel, ord