Robert Francis Kennedy was born on November 20, 1925. Often called
“Bobby,” Robert was the seventh of Rose and Joseph Kennedy’s nine
children, and the smallest and shyest of the four boys. The Kennedys
were a wealthy and powerful family. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
(1890–1995) was the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald (1863–1950), one
of Boston’s most colorful mayors. Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888–1969)
was the grandson of middle-class Irish Catholic immigrants. The elder
Kennedy had made a fortune in shipbuilding, movie distribution, and
other investments.
The family
Full of ambition for his boys, Joseph demanded
toughness and competitiveness from them.
Bobby, born in 1925, was smaller than his two
older brothers, Joe Kennedy Jr. (1915–1944)
and future president John F. (Jack) Kennedy
(1917–1963; served 1961–63). Lacking Joe’s
strength and Jack’s cool wit, he had to work hard
for things that came easily to the older boys.
School, war, and politics
Kennedy was a poor student despite his best efforts. In school, he insisted on playing football,
though his small size and merely average coordination meant frequent
and painful bruises. While he was in his teens, his older brothers served
in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939–45), and Jack became a war
hero. Bobby enlisted in the Naval Reserve and reported for training before graduating from high school. In August 1944, the Kennedy family
was grief-stricken when Joe Jr. was killed in a plane accident.
After his discharge from the navy in 1946, Bobby helped with Jack’s
first political campaign, when Jack ran for a seat as a U.S. representative
from Massachusetts. Then Bobby attended Harvard, graduating in
1948, and set off for the Middle East, where Jewish leaders were in the
process of forming the state of Israel. He wrote several articles on the political situation there. On returning to the United States, he enrolled at
the University of Virginia Law School, earning his law degree in 1951.
He went to work as an investigative lawyer for the Justice Department.
Law and politics
In 1952, John F. Kennedy decided to run for a Senate seat and Bobby,
though reluctant to leave his post in the Justice Department, was persuaded to be his campaign manager. Working eighteen-hour days, he
reenergized and refocused the campaign and its staff. He also won the
nickname “ruthless Bobby” for his tough attitude toward local
Democratic leaders. Jack won the election.
In 1953, Bobby returned to Washington, working as an investigative
lawyer and taking a post as assistant counsel (junior lawyer) to the Senate Committee on Investigations. The committee’s chair was U.S. senator
Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) of Wisconsin. Six months into the job,
Kennedy resigned in protest over the methods used by McCarthy and his
helpers in their hunt for communists in the government. A year later,
McCarthy had fallen from power and Kennedy returned as the committee’s chief counsel (head lawyer). For six years, he worked on exposing
organized crime’s grip on the labor unions.
Civil rights in the JFK campaign
In 1960, Bobby managed Jack’s successful campaign for the presidency.
At the age of just thirty-four, Bobby had become a master political organizer.
The issue of civil rights emerged strongly in the campaign. Though
the Kennedy brothers were not in favor of segregation (separating blacks
and whites in public places), neither of them had given much thought to
the situation of blacks and other minorities in American society. Like
many other white Americans, they were just awakening to the anger that
had built up among black Americans after hundreds of years of racial discrimination.
In October 1960, at the height of the presidential campaign, police
in Atlanta, Georgia, arrested black civil rights leader Martin Luther
King Jr. (1929–1968). A white judge sentenced him to four months’
hard labor, and in the middle of the night King was taken in chains from
jail to a prison camp deep in the Georgia countryside, and his wife feared
for his safety. John F. Kennedy called her to offer his comfort and support. When Bobby found out about the call, he was initially furious.
Getting his brother elected came first, and Jack—Roman Catholic, a
northerner, and liberal—needed all the help he could get in order to win
the election, including support from the South.
Yet when Bobby learned that the judge had refused to grant bail for
King, he himself called the judge, complaining that King’s rights had
been violated. The next day, after both calls were reported in the newspapers, King was released. John F. Kennedy may have lost some white
votes in the South, but he won the black vote, and he won the election.
Attorney general
John Kennedy chose his brother to serve in his cabinet as attorney general. The U.S. attorney general heads the Justice Department and serves
as the highest law officer in the land, but Robert Kennedy would also be
his brother’s closest adviser on both foreign and domestic policy. It was
the first time a president had appointed a close relative to a cabinet position, and the appointment drew some criticism.
As attorney general, the issues of the civil rights movement weighed
heavily on Kennedy during his time in office. President Kennedy had
won his office with only a narrow margin, and he feared his influence
was too weak to push a civil rights bill through Congress. He decided to
focus instead on trying to make sure the civil rights laws that already existed were fully enforced. As attorney general, that was Robert Kennedy’s
job and he led the federal government into direct conflict with the leaders of the southern states over segregation.
Law enforcement
In 1961, civil rights leaders launched the Freedom Rides in an attempt
to desegregate buses in the Deep South. Black and white riders trained
in nonviolent protest took a well-publicized bus trip through the South
to exercise black peoples’ right to sit anywhere on the buses and in bus
stations. When they arrived in Alabama, white crowds beat the Freedom
Riders as police stood by. Robert Kennedy sent five hundred federal marshals to Montgomery, Alabama. There, reinforced by state troopers and
the National Guard, they broke up a violent white crowd that had surrounded Martin Luther King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. A year
later, Kennedy once again sent federal troops to stop a violent white
crowd when a court order required the all-white University of
Mississippi to allow a black student, James Meredith (1933–), to enroll
in classes in 1962.
Bay of Pigs
Robert Kennedy also aided his brother in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In
October 1962, the United States determined that Soviet nuclear missiles
were being established on secret bases in nearby Cuba, posing a dire
threat to the United States. For thirteen days, President Kennedy, his
cabinet, and his advisers met to discuss what to do. Some cabinet members and military leaders advocated an invasion of Cuba and bombing
the island. Robert Kennedy advised a more peaceful naval blockade of
Cuba; the president followed his advice. The blockade forced Soviet
ships bringing in more missiles and installation equipment to turn back.
The United States then made a truce with the Soviet Union, agreeing to
remove some of its own missiles from Turkey, a country that bordered
the central western border of the Soviet Union. Potential warfare was
averted.
JFK assassination
In June 1963, President Kennedy sent a bill to Congress that would ban
segregation in all public places. Robert Kennedy took the lead in talking
to as many senators as he could to try to win support for the bill. In
August, black leaders organized the March on Washington, in which
over a quarter of a million people gathered to demonstrate their support
for the bill. Yet as the brothers had feared, the bill was soon stalled in
Congress by southern senators.
In the midst of the turmoil, on November 22, 1963, John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Robert, utterly devastated by
his brother’s death, continued to serve as attorney general for a year
under President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973; served 1963–69).
During that time, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, John
F. Kennedy’s bill banning segregation in all public places.
Senator from New York
In 1964, Kennedy announced that he would run for one of two U.S.
Senate seats in New York. He won easily and served in the Senate during three years (1965–68) of social unrest that included major race riots
in northern cities. Kennedy began to focus heavily on the problems faced
by those who lived in poverty. In 1966, he announced a program to fight
poverty in the desperately poor Bedford-Stuyvesant area of New York
City. As President Johnson pushed through Congress new programs to
fight poverty, Kennedy pressed for more. In particular, he took up the
causes of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native
Americans. In his three years in the Senate, Kennedy became a champion of the powerless.
He also began to attack Johnson’s increasing involvement of U.S.
forces in the Vietnam War (1954–75). The bombing of Vietnamese villages by American planes disgusted Kennedy. By 1967, he openly condemned the war, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds when he spoke.
With his unruly hair and youthful appearance, he became a hero among
young Americans.
The campaign
Kennedy announced that he would run for the Democratic nomination
for president in the 1968 primaries. Soon after Kennedy decided to run,
Johnson dropped out of the race. Kennedy ran on a platform of peace,
antipoverty, civil rights, and social improvement.
In April 1968, Kennedy learned that Martin Luther King had been
assassinated. He gave an impassioned speech as riots broke out in dozens
of cities. Two months later, Kennedy won a crucial victory in the
California primary, making him the likely Democratic candidate for
president. Following a victory speech on June 5, 1968, Kennedy was shot
by Sirhan Sirhan (1944–), a Palestinian American who may have been
angry about Kennedy’s support for the state of Israel. He died a day later.