Robert F. Kennedy Jr's fascination with drugs and womanizing blunted his opportunity to become the political family's successor, according to a new book set to hit store shelves next week.
The unauthorized biography written by Jerry Oppenheimer details how Kennedy was left to his own devices as a young teenager as his mother, Ethel Kennedy, struggled with anger after the 1968 assassination of husband Robert F. Kennedy left her to
raise 11 children alone, the New York Post reported.
The book, "RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream," describes in detail the 61-year-old's upbringing and actions that the
New York Daily News says drove his second wife to suicide.
Kennedy is currently an attorney, environmental activist, and syndicated talk radio host. He divorced his first wife, Emily Ruth Black, in 1994 and his second wife, Mary Richardson, died of asphyxiation due to hanging in 2012.
The Post's Maureen Callahan wrote that the book also talks about how Kennedy was involved in drugs as a teenager while his mother retreated from life after RFK's death.
"Bobby wasn't even 15 and was already using drugs heavily," Callahan wrote, citing the book. "He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, 'You've killed a Kennedy!' He once spat in a cop's face."
"Ethel did nothing," Callahan continued. "She was sealed off in her McLean, Virginia, estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy, and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her attention for long, and that attention was usually negative."
According to the Daily News, the book claims that Kennedy used alcohol, marijuana, and LSD as a young man and, by the time he married the first time in 1982, he added cocaine and heroin to the mix.
At 30, when he started working as an attorney, he was embarrassingly arrested for heroin possession.
Richardson reportedly struggled with Kennedy's womanizing, and a friend of hers said in the book that he even once approached her about having a ménage à trois, according to the Daily News.
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