What Do Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Birds Mean?
The New York Times
As he seeks to lead the health department, Mr. Kennedy wore a thin tie dotted with feathered creatures to cap a classic suit.
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.
