Joe Kennedy III

Joseph Patrick Kennedy III (born October 4, 1980) is an American politician and former diplomat who served as the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland from 2022 to 2024. From 2013 to 2021, Kennedy served as the U.S. representative for Massachusetts's 4th congressional district. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented a district that extends from Boston's western suburbs to the state's South Coast. He worked as an assistant district attorney in the Cape and Islands and Middlesex County, Massachusetts, offices before his election to Congress. In January 2021, he became a CNN commentator.

A member of the Kennedy family, he is a son of U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, a grandson of U.S. Senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a nephew of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a grandnephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, and a great-grandson of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

Born in Boston, Kennedy was raised in the area with his twin brother, Matthew Rauch Kennedy. After graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree, he spent two years in the Dominican Republic as a member of the Peace Corps before earning a Juris Doctor at Harvard Law School in 2009. He resigned as assistant district attorney in 2012 to run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by the retiring Barney Frank. Kennedy was sworn into office in January 2013, and sat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. In 2020, he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Senator Ed Markey for the Democratic nomination in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate election. He was succeeded by his distant cousin-in-law Jake Auchincloss.

Since leaving office, Kennedy has founded Groundwork Project, which focuses on boosting local community organizing efforts nationwide. He has also joined several advisory boards and appeared as a political commentator for CNN. On June 4, 2021, President Joe Biden appointed him to the President's Commission on White House Fellowships. In December 2022, Biden named Kennedy the United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs.

Early life and career

Kennedy was born on October 4, 1980, in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, to Sheila Brewster (Rauch) (b. 1949) and Joseph P. Kennedy II. He was born eight minutes after his fraternal twin brother, Matthew. The twins are the eldest grandsons of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy. Kennedy is also the great-great-grandson of Benjamin Brewster, one of the original trustees of Standard Oil, and a direct descendant of Mayflower Pilgrim William Brewster. They were raised in Brighton and the coastal town of Marshfield, Massachusetts, also spending summers on Cape Cod. From birth, Kennedy was surrounded by politics; in 1980, his parents worked on the presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, the boys' grand-uncle. Kennedy's father was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986. His parents divorced in 1991. The twins spent the following years moving between Brighton and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After graduating from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Kennedy and his brother enrolled at Stanford University, where he majored in management science and engineering. Kennedy's reputation as a teetotaler earned him the college nickname "Milkman", as his teammates on the club lacrosse team would jokingly order him glasses of milk at bars. At Stanford, Kennedy roomed with future NBA player Jason Collins.

After graduating in 2003, Kennedy joined the Peace Corps; a fluent Spanish speaker, he worked in the Dominican Republic's Puerto Plata province from 2004 to 2006, helping local tour guides in the 27 Charcos reserve in the Río Damajagua Park. He reorganized the group with some outside backing, directing the guides to rebuild parts of the park and develop skills to make the operation more attractive to tourists. "We basically created a union," said Kennedy, who reported that the group's efforts won higher wages for employees while increasing the tour companies' revenue. According to a press release, his other activities in the Peace Corps included "stints as an Anti-Poverty Consultant for the Office of the President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste and a Research Analyst for the United Nations Development Program."

Entry into law and politics

In April 2006, Kennedy returned to Massachusetts, where he and his brother co-chaired Ted Kennedy's re-election campaign. The same month, Kennedy enrolled in Harvard Law School. There, he worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, providing legal aid to low-income tenants with foreclosure cases during the 2008 financial crisis, and as a technical editor for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, on a staff with his classmate and future wife, Lauren Anne Birchfield. In 2007, he and Birchfield co-founded Picture This: Justice and Power, an after-school program for youths in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. He began an internship at the Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office in 2008.

After earning his Juris Doctor in 2009, Kennedy was hired at the Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office as an assistant district attorney (ADA). He considered running for the Cape-based U.S. House seat held by retiring Rep. Bill Delahunt in early 2010 but decided against it. In September 2011, he joined the Middlesex County, Massachusetts District Attorney's Office, also as an ADA. He resigned several months later, in preparation for the announcement that he would seek political office.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2012

In January 2012, Kennedy announced he would form an exploratory committee to run in the newly redrawn 4th congressional district of Massachusetts. Kennedy explained, "I will then begin to reach out to the people of the Fourth District, in order to hear directly from them about the challenges they are facing and their ideas on how we can restore fairness to our system. I will make a final decision about entering the race in the weeks thereafter."

He officially entered the election in February 2012. In an announcement video, Kennedy declared, "I believe this country was founded on a simple idea: that every person deserves to be treated fairly, by each other and by their government". In the same video, Kennedy vowed to fight for a "fair job plan", a "better educational system", a "fair tax code", and a "fair housing policy".

While several Democratic candidates had prepared to enter the race, the field nearly cleared once Kennedy announced his candidacy. His family roots made him the overwhelming favorite among Massachusetts Democrats. In the September 6 primary, he faced Rachel Brown, a Lyndon LaRouche acolyte, and Herb Robinson, an engineer and musician, winning the primary with around 90 percent of the vote. He was elected to the House of Representatives on November 6, 2012, defeating Republican candidate Sean Bielat, winning over 60% of the vote.

2014

In the 2014 election, Kennedy ran unopposed in the primary and general elections. On November 4, 2014, he was re-elected to a second term with 184,158 votes (98%).

2016

In 2016, after running unopposed in the Democratic primary, Kennedy was re-elected to a third term, defeating Republican David Rosa by more than 40 percentage points.

2018

Kennedy was mentioned as a potential candidate for the 2018 Massachusetts gubernatorial election but declined, running for re-election to the House and saying he had no plans to run for any other office. He was re-elected unopposed.

Tenure

Kennedy was sworn in to the 113th U.S. Congress on January 3, 2013, and assigned to the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He praised the technology committee assignment as an opportunity to secure federal funding, including National Science Foundation and Small Business Innovation Research grants, for life sciences companies in his district. As a freshman in his party, he was unable to secure a seat he had sought on the Education Committee.

During a February science committee hearing, Kennedy questioned Texas Instruments president Richard Templeton about the company's efforts to compensate cancer-stricken former employees of its Attleboro, Massachusetts, nuclear facility. A prolific fundraiser, he launched his political action committee, the 4MA PAC, in April. As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he traveled in May with four other legislators to Afghanistan, where they met with President Hamid Karzai and members of the military. That month, he was named chairman of Governor Deval Patrick's STEM Advisory Council.

On July 24, 2013, Kennedy was one of seven members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) to vote against the Amash-Conyers amendment to limit Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which tried to restrict NSA surveillance programs. In contrast, a majority of both CPC members and of Democratic members of Congress voted for the amendment, while Kennedy stood out as a supporter of the party leadership. His vote has been criticized as a sign for a lack of commitment to civil liberties.

Kennedy was a member of the U.S.-Japan Caucus.