Some guests come with a resume. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend comes with a legacy.
She is the eldest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy. She was the first woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. She is a managing director at Rock Creek, one of the largest women-owned investment firms in the country. She co-founded the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives. And, as she reminded me before we even got going, she recently served as a senior advisor on shipbuilding in the Biden administration. "I don't update my bio enough," she said with a laugh.
What struck me most wasn't the titles, though. Kathleen could have followed the dynasty playbook. Instead, she spent much of her career on unglamorous, hard, and often invisible work that has changed lives for millions of people who will never know her name.
Here is what I took away from our conversation.
I opened by asking Kathleen what she has changed her mind about when it comes to leadership. Her answer was simple: trust people.
"Trust people and listen to people. If they've got good ideas, let them go with it rather than think that you have to do everything."
She saw it in her father. As Attorney General, he surrounded himself with the brightest lawyers he could find, made sure they were smarter than he was, and put them in charge. She saw it in her mother, who could rally a hundred women from around Washington to put on a pet show.
And she lived it herself. When Kathleen pushed to make Maryland the first state to require community service for high school graduation, the odds were stacked against her. Twenty-two of 24 boards of education opposed it. So did the PTA and one of the teachers unions.
She didn't win alone. Over eight years, she visited nearly every high school in the state and trained 2,000 teachers. When the bill came before the legislature, 800 people showed up to the hearing: teachers, students, parents, nonprofits, and chambers of commerce.
"If it was just me, it wouldn't have been as powerful."
It's a lesson for anyone leading a team, a company, or a movement. Ideas that depend on one person stay small. Ideas that belong to many people grow.
Kathleen is the only woman among the Kennedy cousins of her generation to run for office. I asked whether working largely outside the spotlight shaped her sense of obligation.
"Some people like to be in the papers," she said. "Being in the papers was not something that was that important to me. Making a difference was important to me."
She was candid about what changed when she did step into the spotlight. The first major newspaper profile of her as Lieutenant Governor noted that she didn't wear lipstick. When she was put in charge of the State Police, the Department of Corrections, and $125 million in crime control funding, the first paragraph of the coverage was about her shoes.
Her larger point was cultural. "There's been a uniform for men for the last 100 years, and it's been a suit. There's not been a uniform for women." Countries with queens, or with traditions that honor powerful female figures, carry an image of what a woman in power looks like. America, she argues, is still building that picture.
We've come a long way, and there is more work to do. People like Kathleen are a big part of why the path is clearer for the women coming after her.
This is the work Kathleen is perhaps proudest of, and it started with a moment of honest self-reflection.
While working in investments, she heard that roughly half of all Americans had little or nothing saved for retirement. "I was horrified about my own ignorance, being a former politician," she told me.
She realized she sat at an unusual crossroads. She understood politics, and she understood investments, two worlds that rarely talk to each other. So she co-founded the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives with a Republican partner and built it on a bipartisan foundation.
The idea is elegant. Half of all businesses, especially small ones like hair salons and landscaping companies, don't offer retirement plans because they're too complex and expensive to set up. State auto-IRA programs let those employees save automatically through a state plan unless they opt out. In many states, including Maryland, workers can withdraw money penalty-free in an emergency, which mattered enormously during COVID.
When Kathleen started, zero states had these programs. Today, 18 do, and billions of dollars have been saved by people who never had the chance before.
She frames it as a social justice issue, but not only that. "It's not just a social justice issue, which it is. It's also a smart issue, which it is." When people can't save, the burden falls on their children or on the state, and that is far more expensive than helping people save from the start.
My favorite part? The financial industry originally fought her. Her response: "You're dumb. I'm creating all these customers for you." They've since come around.
The moment I will remember most came when I asked about her family's sense of obligation. Obligation to whom, exactly?
"To our country," she said. Then she paused, reached off camera, and held up a letter.
Her father wrote it to her the day President Kennedy was buried. She was 12 years old.
"Dear Kathleen, you seem to understand that Jack died and was buried today. As the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren, you have a particular responsibility now. A special responsibility to John and to Joe. Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy."
On one of the darkest days in American history, a grieving brother didn't write about anger or revenge. He wrote to his daughter about kindness, responsibility, and service.
Kathleen reflected on what she saw later in her career, working with families who had lost loved ones to violence. The pull toward revenge is natural. Her father chose differently.
"When terrible things happen to you, when somebody's been really mean to you, the reaction doesn't have to be, I'm going to be mean back. That's a waste of your energy."
She has spent her life answering that letter.
I asked whether her father and uncle got to finish what they started. She corrected me before I finished the question.
"There is no finish. The work goes on."
She quoted President Kennedy's inaugural address: it may not be finished in the first 100 days, or in this administration, "but let us begin." Injustice, unequal opportunity, and the struggle for a fair wage are as old as history itself. Each generation picks up the work where the last one left it.
As someone who spends every day helping companies adopt AI, I was especially interested in Kathleen's views on where technology is headed. She was direct: AI needs real oversight, and the people building it acknowledge they don't fully understand how it works.
She offered an image I haven't stopped thinking about. Countries are racing to build AI that beats their rivals, but the systems themselves don't recognize borders. "Birds don't know that they're American birds or Chinese birds. They're birds. They don't see country lines."
She was equally passionate about the upside. America has led the world in science, and she believes protecting that leadership, and the young scientists who will carry it forward, is essential. "There's so much that science can do, and we should not let that leap go."
And her final hope was the same idea that launched her career in community service: every person has the power to make a difference. That, to her, is what it means to be a citizen.
I've interviewed a lot of remarkable people on Unscripted, and this conversation was one of the most meaningful. Kathleen reminded me that leadership isn't about being in the papers. It's about trusting people, building something bigger than yourself, choosing kindness over revenge, and showing up for work that may never be finished.
Be kind to others and work for your country. It's good advice for all of us.
Watch the full episode of Unscripted with Jeff Pedowitz to hear my complete conversation with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, including her thoughts on faith, women in power, and the future of American science. https://vimeo.com/1243780310
Unscripted with Jeff Pedowitz features honest conversations with remarkable people from security and science, business and medicine, technology and the arts, about AI and where it's taking us.