Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looped on a blue tie with embroidered birds. It appeared to be a nod to Mr. Kennedy’s hobby of raising birds, something he has shared with his followers in some affable missives on social media. A falconer, Mr. Kennedy has raised ravens for years, but his tie’s molted yellow, red and green birds looked more like a flock of parrots.
Here was some subtle sartorial diplomacy in action: Mr. Kennedy was not the predator that his cousin Caroline Kennedy called him in a letter on Monday in opposition to his confirmation, but instead a nature-loving softy. (The brand of Mr. Kennedy’s tie wasn’t immediately clear, though based on past photos he does seem to have a thing for ties with embroidered critters.)
This wasn’t the only message Mr. Kennedy, 71, broadcast through his clothes on Wednesday. Beneath his nothing-to-it navy suit, he wore a button-down shirt, his tie twisted into a nimble knot about the size of an organic strawberry. It was a proportional, preppy combo that could have been just the thing his father, Robert F. Kennedy, or even his uncle John F. Kennedy, the paragon of the Ivy League look in the 1960s, might have worn.
If Mr. Kennedy was sending some unspoken signal of familial coziness here, it landed more loudly because of the way everyone else from the Hill dressed. The phalanx of lawmakers he faced wore spread-collar shirts and distended Windsor-knotted ties — what seems to be the uniform of today’s senators.
Mr. Kennedy’s attire was, instead, a silk and cotton reminder that through it all, even with some of his family distancing themselves from him, he still carries, if not the values, then at least the aesthetic sensibilities of America’s weightiest political dynasty.
Still, Mr. Kennedy remains unlike any Kennedy seen before.
As he hunched forward in his chair, Mr. Kennedy’s biceps pressed against his suit, hinting at the gym-rat physique that has become central to his singular image. Some online opined that Mr. Kennedy’s tie was too skinny. It’s certainly more reedy than Donald J. Trump’s squat red ties, but Mr. Kennedy’s broad build only emphasized the stringiness.
His face, tanned to toasted pumpkin, bore the fruits of living in California for decades. (Mr. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, her kohl eye shadow matching her dark suit, could be spotted over his shoulder throughout the hearing.)
This hearing was, like so many of the administration’s confirmation hearings, a tonal roller coaster. While Republican senators piled praise on Mr. Kennedy, Democratic senators, armed with stacks of Mr. Kennedy’s past statements on vaccines, Lyme disease, AIDs, processed foods and so on, cast him as radical, well outside the conventional thinking on health in this country. When it was their turn, the hearing took on the air of a rhetorical prize fight. (It was fitting that Mr. Kennedy, like Mike Tyson storming the ring, was greeted by chants from the gallery of “Bobby! Bobby!” as he entered the hearing room.)
As he strove to explain his own words, Mr. Kennedy blinked steadily and spoke emphatically in a rasp caused by the condition spasmodic dysphonia. Pushing against Democrats’ depictions of him, he punched exclamation points in the air with his index finger.
By midday, it was the sundry subjects of the hearing — the discussion of the origins of Lyme disease, the squabbling over vaccines — that made evident to anyone watching that this hearing was happening here, in Trump’s America in 2025, not Kennedy’s America in 1960. No twee tie or throwback button-down collar was going to change that.
