Rory Kennedy

Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (born December 12, 1968) is an American documentary filmmaker, and youngest child of U.S. Senator Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.

Although her father was assassinated before she was born, Kennedy consciously relates to his philanthropic mission, and her core activity is the making of documentary films that centre on social issues. These include addiction, nuclear radiation, the treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the politics of the Mexican border-fence, and her films have been featured on many TV networks. It was to her wedding that her cousin John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were flying when they were killed in a plane crash.

She was born in Washington, D.C. six months after her father was assassinated. Her mother chose the name "Rory" because she felt it bore resemblance to her father's nickname "Bobby." On December 19, 1968, a week after Kennedy was born, her mother took her to her father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's older brother Michael LeMoyne Kennedy was assigned as her godparent by their mother. Friends of the Kennedy family said the pair spoke almost every day of their lives.

When Rory was a teenager, she was arrested outside the South African Embassy. When she was 15, her brother David died in 1984 from a drug overdose. Rory graduated from The Madeira School and then Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her sophomore year there, she organized a rally in front of a Providence, Rhode Island supermarket. She urged shoppers to boycott grapes in solidarity with migrant farm workers.

In the 1990s, Rory and fellow Brown classmate Vanessa Vadim (daughter of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda) formed May Day Media, a non-profit organization that specializes in the production and distribution of films with a social conscience, based in Washington, D.C. Kennedy's first documentary was Women of Substance. Released in 1994, the idea came out of a paper she wrote while a student at Brown on female addicts. In 1998 Kennedy and another fellow Brown graduate Liz Garbus founded Moxie Firecracker Films which specializes in documentaries that highlight pressing social issues. The television networks that have shown its films include: A&E, the UK's Channel 4, Court TV, Discovery Channel, HBO, Lifetime, MTV, Oxygen, PBS, Sundance Channel, and TLC.

She directed and co-produced American Hollow (1999) about a struggling Appalachian family which received critical acclaim and many awards. HBO broadcast the film and publisher Little, Brown and Company released Kennedy's companion book simultaneously. Kennedy presented the documentary at Wittenberg University on September 13, 2001. After the film's presentation, she answered questions. In October 2001, Kennedy traveled to Cleveland, Ohio to address the opening meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women. At the meeting, she spoke about her documentary film-production company Change the World Through Film.

Kennedy directed and co-produced the Emmy Award-nominated series Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2003), which premiered at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on July 8, 2002. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and it tells the real stories of Aids patients outside the Western world. It was broadcast in America as a five-part series on HBO in June 2003.

Kennedy directed and co-produced A Boy’s Life (2004), the story of a young boy and his family in rural Mississippi. It premiered to rave reviews at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Woodstock Film Festival; it was later broadcast on HBO.

When asked in a March 24, 2004, interview with Salon.comabout her interest in the American South, Kennedy cited her father's experiences in the region as an inspiration and starting point. In the same article, she goes on to mention that showing class differences in American culture also motivates her.

For HBO she directed and co-produced Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable (2004), which was broadcast on September 9, 2004. The film takes a "what if" look at the catastrophic consequences of a radioactive release at the Indian Point Energy Center, a three-unit nuclear-power plant station, located 35 miles (56 km) north of midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York.

Rory directed and co-produced Homestead Strike (2006) as part of The History Channel’s series, 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America (April 2006).

She was a co-executive producer for Street Fight (2005), which chronicles the 2002 Newark, New Jersey, unsuccessful mayoral campaign of Democratic Cory Booker — then a Newark Municipal Councilman — against Democratic eighteen-year incumbent Mayor Sharpe James. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary (Feature). (Booker later won the mayoral election on May 9, 2006, against Democratic Ronald Rice; James did not seek re-election for another four-year term in 2006.)

Kennedy directed and co-produced Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Best Documentary. Kennedy first learned of the Abu Ghraib prison when images came out in the media, which were accompanied by a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. According to Kennedy, she was "horrified and shocked and disgusted" by the images of the naked prisoners and laughing American soldiers. She conducted interviews with people who were present at the prison along with those directly involved in the abuse. Kennedy's opinion of the participants changed after she interviewed them, where she began feeling they "were very humane and very much like me" and discovered they "were not monsters."

She directed Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House (2008) for HBO Documentary Films, which premiered on HBO on August 18, 2008. According to reviews, the 40 minute long documentary provided an interesting, if brief, glimpse into the iconic journalist.

On June 30, 2009, Kennedy was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Kennedy directed "The Fence (La Barda)" which premiered at the opening night of The Sundance Film Festival 2010. The film made its debut on HBO on September 16, 2010. Favorably received, it details the woeful inadequacies of the border fence between the United States and Mexico, which has increased migrants' deaths, but does not deter illegal immigration.

In 2011 she produced and directed the documentary Ethel about her mother, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and aired on HBO on October 18, 2012. Reviews called the documentary a moving tribute, but criticized its lack of depth. Kennedy conducted interviews with her siblings over five days in Hyannis Port at the Kennedy family compound. For the finished film, she went through "some 100 hours" of archive footage, photos and home videos.

Last Days in Vietnam, directed by Kennedy and co-produced with Keven McAlester, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. During production of the film, she spoke with U.S. military and Vietnam nationals now in the U.S. and said the most exciting part of the film to her was "telling the untold stories about Americans and Vietnamese who were on the ground, who went against U.S. policy and risked their lives to save Vietnamese". Kennedy was reported to have signed with Nonfiction Unlimited in May 2014. In September 2014, Last Days in Vietnam opened at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles. Kennedy had difficulty getting some of the people featured in her film to get involved. Out of them, she believed Henry Kissinger had the most reluctance to the project. On their reluctance, Kennedy stated: "I think a lot of those folks suffered post-traumatic stress from that moment. When I asked them to relive it, it really took a toll. Many of the people told me it took them a week to recover from the interviews. I've gotten tons of emails from people in Vietnam who can't see the film because it's too traumatic for them." Last Days in Vietnam was nominated as Best Documentary Feature for the 87th Academy Awards.

Kennedy advocates for several social activism organizations and sits on the board of numerous non-profit organizations. In March 2010, Kennedy gave a presentation at The Ritz-Carlton, where she spoke on the effects of alcohol and drug use and concluded addiction and domestic violence "are intricately connected.” She also voiced her support of treatment options, calling them "more important than the criminal justice approach". Executive director and CEO of Comprehensive Alcoholism Rehabilitation Programs Robert Bozzone agreed with her opinion and added, "If you listen to Rory, treatment is more effective than incarceration. On the shooting of Michael Brown, Kennedy believed the reason it garnered national media attention "is that it’s a touch point that indicates a larger social challenge that we all need to mull over and try to grapple with in a thoughtful and considerate way, and I think it has to do both with race and class."

2008 Barack Obama endorsement

Kennedy announced her support of Barack Obama being the Democratic Party's nominee in the 2008 U.S. presidential election in an op-ed essay, "Two fine choices, one clear decision - Obama", in the San Francisco Chronicle stating:

Kennedy went on to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Kennedy moved to New York following graduation and then briefly in Los Angeles. Kennedy's brother Michael LeMoyne Kennedy died in late December 1997 as a result of a skiing accident. She was with him at the time of his death and tried to resuscitate him by giving mouth-to-mouth. Despite her efforts, he was fatally injured and his blood stained her mouth. Kennedy attended his funeral in January 1998. On August 2, 1999, Kennedy married Mark Bailey in Greece at the mansion of shipping tycoon Vardis Vardinoyiannis. Kennedy met Bailey in Washington through mutual friends after graduating from Brown University. The wedding was originally scheduled for July 17 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, but was postponed after the plane carrying her cousin John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed en route to the event. The tent intended for the wedding became a site for family prayers during the search for her cousin. In the months following John Jr.'s death, Kennedy declined to speak of his plane crash publicly. In October 1999, Kennedy and her husband moved with their dog Clementine to a new home in the West Village in a neighborhood they reportedly "loved."

Rory and Mark have two daughters, Georgia Elizabeth Kennedy-Bailey (b. 2002); Bridget Katherine Kennedy-Bailey (b. 2004); and one son, Zachary Corkland Kennedy-Bailey (b. 2007) The family resides in Brooklyn, New York. Around the time of the birth of her second daughter in 2004, Kennedy and her husband purchased a home. Kennedy went on maternity leave from her filmmaking career for the birth of her son in 2007. She sold her Shelter Island home in December 2009. Her nephew Conor dated Taylor Swift in 2012. According to her mother Ethel, Swift began associating with the family after Rory attended a concert of hers with her daughters, Georgia and Bridget. Kennedy said she loved the singer and her music. In July 2012, Kennedy's sister Kerry swerved her Lexus SUV into a tractor-trailer on Interstate 684. During the trial in February 2014, Kennedy defended her sister by insisting that she had "reputation for sobriety and general healthy living". According to Trulia.com, Kennedy purchased a home in Malibu, California in January 2013.

Prior to the 1990s, Kennedy was said to have been known solely for being the child of Robert F. Kennedy born after his death. Following the plane crash of her cousin John F. Kennedy, Jr., she established notability for being the relative whose wedding he planned to attend. Anita Gates of The New York Times wrote that Kennedy would understandably want to be known as "the one who became a filmmaker."

She has elicited sympathy in some corners, with Edward Klein writing in his book The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years that Rory Kennedy "had suffered more from the Kennedy Curse than any other member of the family." Klein then listed the deaths of her father and brother David, as well as her role in unsuccessfully attempting to prevent the death of Michael Kennedy.

Kennedy has spoken of her work and its relation to that of her father. "I don’t think of it as a continuation of his work, but I certainly think I was influenced by the person that he was and have made a range of choices because of what he contributed to the world. I have enormous respect for all that he accomplished in his short life and how much he was able to move people and touch people. I’ve certainly been inspired by that." On January 14, 2010, Full Frame announced Kennedy and Liz Garbus would be the recipients of that year's Career Award. In the press release, Full Frame called the duo's work "unique".

Bibliography

• Kennedy, Rory; Lehman, Steve; Bailey, Mark (1999). American Hollow. Boston. Bulfinch Press (Little, Brown). ISBN 0-8212-2631-2