RFK Jr. and the Health of Print

The first issue of County Highway, dated July–August 2023, features an interview between David Samuels, the editor, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., identified variously as “Bobby,” “the last true Kennedy,” “the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President,” and “a master falconer.” Samuels had written about RFK Jr. before, noting that he had first seen him the day he knocked on the door of his house in 1976, when RFK Jr. was working on the campaign of a friend running for the New Jersey Legislature. In County Highway, Samuels remarked that RFK Jr. is “the co-author of the 94-page manual of multiple-choice questions and answers that applicants must study in order to pass the New York State apprentice falconry exam” and relayed that when they first spoke, Kennedy had wanted to “convince him to write a book about falconry.” That hasn’t come to pass, but RFK Jr. has since gone on to write for County Highway, contributing a four-thousand-word remembrance of his mother, Ethel—who, with his father, he writes, “shared a conservative nineteenth-century sensibility that children should be toughened by constant exposure to the elements and physical challenge.”

RFK Jr. is at home in County Highway, a twenty-page broadsheet that hired Pentagram, the design firm, to comb through nineteenth-century newspapers in search of fonts, and which Samuels described to me as an aesthetic object as much as a portal for information. (“We love RFK Jr.,” County Highway posted on X late last year. “We think that he will help make our children healthier and our air and water cleaner.”) The paper is produced six times a year by Samuels and his cofounder, Walter Kirn, supported by a staff of editors and contributors, along with Donald Rosenfeld, their publisher, who used to run Merchant Ivory Productions, the movie company, during the era of Howards End (1993) and The Remains of the Day  (1994). Rosenfeld raised County Highway’s initial funding, though it is now self-sustaining, even turning a small profit. Some fifteen thousand people subscribe; seven to eight thousand more copies are sold via a “network of stockists” that Samuels described as “general stores, record stores, feed stores.” There is also an online presence, largely behind a paywall—though the RFK Jr. content is freely available. “Congrats to County Highway,” RFK Jr. posted on X on its first anniversary. “Finally an article that let me speak about my passion, falconry, rather than another paper trying to hunt me down.” He called the paper an inspiration “for all those who are sick of scrolling,” and added, “Please subscribe to County Highway today!” (Kennedy did not respond to my requests for comment.)