Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Francis Kennedy was born on November 20, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy ^[1]. His father was a wealthy businessman who later served as ambassador to the United Kingdom, and his mother came from a Boston political family: her father, John Francis Fitzgerald, had been mayor of the city. The household prized competition, Catholic devotion, and public ambition, and the younger children grew up measuring themselves against accomplished older siblings ^[2].

Any reliable Robert F. Kennedy biography has to reckon with his position in that crowded family. Smaller and quieter than his brothers Joseph Jr. and John, he moved through a string of schools as the family shifted between Massachusetts, New York, and London, eventually finishing at Milton Academy ^[1]. Toward the end of the Second World War he enlisted in the Navy, and in 1946 he served briefly as a seaman aboard the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a ship named for his eldest brother, a naval aviator killed in 1944 ^[3].

After the war he completed his degree at Harvard College in 1948, where he played on the varsity football team, then earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951 ^[1]. In 1950 he married Ethel Skakel, whom he had met through his sister Jean. The marriage anchored the rest of his life; the couple settled at Hickory Hill in Virginia and eventually raised eleven children ^[2].

Kennedy's legal career began at the Justice Department, but politics pulled him in quickly. In 1952 he managed his brother John's successful campaign for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, an upset victory over the incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. that established Robert's reputation as a relentless organizer ^[2]. The following year he joined the staff of Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations subcommittee, a short and controversial stint he later left after clashing with McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn ^[1].

His national profile grew in the late 1950s as chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, widely known as the rackets committee. There he pursued corruption in the Teamsters union and engaged in famously combative exchanges with its leaders, Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa ^[4]. The experience produced his 1960 book, The Enemy Within, and fixed organized crime as one of his lasting preoccupations ^[4].

In 1960 he ran his brother's presidential campaign, coordinating a narrow victory over Richard Nixon. When the president-elect then named the 35-year-old Robert as Attorney General, critics objected to the appointment of a brother with no courtroom experience. John Kennedy defended the choice, and the two formed the closest partnership between a president and a cabinet officer in modern memory ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Robert F. Kennedy usually meets him first in this role. As Attorney General from 1961 to 1964, he ran the Justice Department with unusual reach, serving simultaneously as his brother's most trusted adviser on matters far beyond law enforcement, including the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, during which he argued against an immediate air strike and helped negotiate the resolution ^[5]. His memoir of those thirteen days was published after his death and remains a primary account of the crisis ^[5].

At the department itself he expanded the drive against organized crime, sharply increasing prosecutions of racketeering figures and continuing his pursuit of Hoffa, who was eventually convicted of jury tampering in 1964 ^[4]. He also confronted the enforcement of civil rights in the South. In 1961 he sent federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders in Alabama, and in 1962 the administration deployed troops to enforce James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi ^[6]. He pressed for the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though critics then and later noted his caution, including his approval of FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. ^[6].

The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, devastated him. He stayed on under President Lyndon Johnson for several months, but the two men distrusted each other, and in September 1964 he resigned to run for the Senate from New York ^[1].

Kennedy defeated the Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating in November 1964 and entered the Senate in January 1965, brushing aside charges of carpetbagging from opponents who noted his Massachusetts roots ^[1]. In office he built an identity distinct from his brother's, concentrating on poverty, hunger, and the conditions of Americans the postwar boom had left behind.

Among the clearest Robert F. Kennedy achievements of these years was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, launched in 1967 as an experiment in community-led redevelopment in Brooklyn that paired local leadership with private investment ^[7]. He toured the Mississippi Delta in 1967 and was visibly shaken by the malnutrition he found among children there; he made similar visits to Appalachia, Native American reservations, and California's farm fields, where he backed Cesar Chavez and the farm workers' movement ^[7].

On foreign policy he moved, gradually and then openly, into opposition to the Vietnam War. Having supported early commitments under his brother's administration, he began by 1966 to call for a negotiated settlement, and by 1967 he was one of the most prominent Democratic critics of Johnson's escalation ^[2]. His 1966 speech to students in Cape Town, South Africa, with its image of ripples of hope sent out by individual acts of courage, became one of the most quoted addresses of his career ^[8].

Kennedy hesitated before challenging a sitting president of his own party. Only after Senator Eugene McCarthy's strong showing against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary did he declare his candidacy, on March 16, 1968, in the same Senate Caucus Room where his brother had announced eight years earlier ^[2]. Two weeks later Johnson withdrew from the race, and the contest became a three-way struggle among Kennedy, McCarthy, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

His campaign drew enormous, sometimes frenzied crowds, particularly among Black, Latino, and working-class white voters, a coalition few politicians of the era could hold together ^[7]. On April 4, 1968, hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Kennedy broke the news to a largely Black crowd in Indianapolis. Speaking without a prepared text, he appealed for compassion and quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus; Indianapolis stayed calm that night while riots broke out in more than a hundred other cities ^[8].

He won primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, lost Oregon to McCarthy, then took the decisive California primary on June 4. Shortly after midnight on June 5, having addressed supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot in a kitchen pantry by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant angered by Kennedy's support for Israel. He died early on June 6, 1968, at age 42 ^[1]. After a funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, a train carried his body to Washington past crowds lining the tracks, and he was buried near his brother at Arlington National Cemetery ^[3].

Kennedy's marriage to Ethel Skakel Kennedy lasted from June 1950 until his death. Their eleventh child, Rory, was born six months after the assassination ^[2]. Home life at Hickory Hill was famously chaotic and open, filled with children, dogs, touch football, and a steady traffic of journalists, athletes, and government officials.

He was a devout Catholic, arguably the most religiously serious of the Kennedy brothers, and friends traced much of his political intensity to that faith ^[2]. Physically restless, he climbed the newly named Mount Kennedy in the Yukon in 1965, becoming the first person to reach its summit, and he ran rivers and skied with the same appetite for risk ^[3].

Contemporaries described a man of contrasts: ruthless in his brother's campaigns yet unusually tender with children and the poor, shy in private yet capable of confronting hostile audiences without notes. The grief that followed Dallas changed him visibly, drawing him toward Greek tragedy and the writings of Albert Camus, and observers of his last years often remarked on the difference between the hard young counsel of the 1950s and the searching public figure of 1968 ^[2].

Robert F. Kennedy's death at 42 left one of the great unanswered questions of American politics: whether he could have won the 1968 nomination and the presidency. Humphrey took the nomination at a violent Chicago convention and lost narrowly to Nixon that November, and historians have debated the counterfactual ever since ^[2].

His institutional legacy is concrete. The Justice Department headquarters in Washington was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in 2001 ^[6]. Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, founded by his family and friends in 1968, continues to give annual awards for human rights advocacy and journalism ^[8]. The Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation still operates in Brooklyn as the country's first community development corporation ^[7]. His gravesite at Arlington, marked by a plain white cross, draws visitors alongside his brother's eternal flame ^[3].

Among the basic Robert F. Kennedy facts worth remembering: he served three presidents in some capacity, wrote several books, fathered eleven children, and spent barely three and a half years in elected office. Yet his reputation rests less on offices held than on the coalition he assembled and the language he used about poverty, race, and national purpose. For many Americans he remains the emblem of a political road not taken ^[2].