Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
	File:Robert F. Kennedy.jpg
Junior Senator, New York
	In office; January 1965–June 1968
Preceded by	Kenneth Keating
Succeeded by	Charles Goodell
Personal details
Nationality	american
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Ethel Skakel Kennedy

For the New Zealand cricketer, see Robert Kennedy (cricketer).

Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy, also called "RFK" (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968) was one of two younger brothers of President John F. Kennedy, and was appointed by his brother as Attorney General for his administration. As one of President Kennedy's most trusted advisors, RFK worked closely with the President during the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1964, after his brother's death, Kennedy was elected to the US Senate from the state of New York. He was assassinated shortly after delivering a speech celebrating his victory in the 1968 presidential primary of California at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Career to 1960

Born on November 20, 1925 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Robert Kennedy was the seventh child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy. While growing up, he was raised amidst the competitive yet loyal Kennedy family culture. Robert was combative, aggressive and emotional, but also very loyal to his father and elder brothers, even though he was very young by difference in age. During his political career, he was often described as "ruthless."

After a brief service in the Navy and officer training (V-12) at Bates College, Kennedy went on to attend Harvard. He became a three-year letterman for the Harvard College football team and graduated in 1948. He then enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law, and earned his degree in 1951. Following law school, Kennedy managed his brother John's successful 1952 Senate campaign.

Father Joe called on his close friend Senator Joseph McCarthy to make Robert the top staff member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy had promised the top job to Roy Cohn so he hired Robert for the number two staff position, Assistant Counsel. He quit in summer 1953 and moved to the staff of the Hoover Commission, of which his father was a member. In 1956 Kennedy wrote that "I have always liked Senator McCarthy." The Democrats regained the Senate in 1954 and Senator John McClellan of Arkansas took over McCarthy's Investigations Subcommittee. Kennedy, a rising star among conservative Democrats, now became chief counsel, the top staff position. (His brother John was not a member of the subcommittee and they did not work together.) Kennedy became even more involved in investigating Communist infiltration in the government but the subscommittee no longer made headline news, as it increasingly concentrated on problems in the federal bureaucracy. Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight D. Eisenhower a second time in 1956, brought Kennedy on board his campaign staff, giving Kennedy his first view of national campaign techniques.

Kennedy soon made a name for himself as the chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee hearings, which began in 1956. In a dramatic scene, Kennedy squared off against Jimmy Hoffa during the antagonistic argument that marked Hoffa's testimony. Kennedy left the Rackets Committee in 1959 in order to run his brother John's successful Presidential campaign.

Working for JFK

File:JFKRFK.jpg

Robert Kennedy with older brother John F. Kennedy, just outside of the Oval Office.

President Kennedy rewarded his younger brother's efforts by naming him to his Cabinet as Attorney General of the United States.

During the Kennedy Administration, "Bobby" played a key advisory role for President Kennedy. Among the weighty issues they faced were the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis 18 months later, the escalation of military action in Vietnam and the widening spread of the Civil Rights Movement and its retaliatory violence. Robert was his brother's most trusted advisor and political enforcer, outranking Lyndon Johnson, JFK's vice president and most Cabinet secretaries.

RFK was at the head of a coterie of young, inexperienced but well-educated White House officials who were loyal to JFK and his vision, and were viewed with scorn and suspicion from the bureaucracy, establishment politicians and the military's top officers. Robert was especially noted, and often criticized for cronyism, arrogance and combativeness and suspicion and rivalry with establishment figures in the Cabinet and the Democratic party, and several unsubstantiated charges of corruption and abuse of power. But all of Robert Kennedy's work, attitude, thought and conduct revolved around his loyalty to his brother and the future of his administration. Kennedy was a source of reliability and emotional strength to the President.

Robert Kennedy's appointment was criticized by many as representing nepotism on the part of his brother, and many saw him as being relatively inexperienced and young for the job. He was also criticized for functioning not just as an Attorney General, but as a co-president, exerting influence and power to an unprecedented degree on all aspects and branches of the U.S. government. However, Kennedy began a nationwide campaign against organized crime, mob violence and labor rackets, building on his work as Senate counsel. It is not clear if he gave J. Edgar Hoover permission to wiretap Martin Luther King, though it is certain that the FBI was required to ask the Attorney General for such permission.

Kennedy is perhaps most remembered for his work on civil rights, namely the integration of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi (whose first black student was James Meredith), and his support of the civil rights bill that passed in 1964. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Robert Kennedy remained the attorney general, though his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson was reported to be very distant.

The Assassination of JFK

The murder of President Kennedy, which happened two days after Robert Kennedy's 38th birthday, was a brutal shock to the world, the whole nation, the Kennedy family, but especially to Robert. For the rest of his short life, he never overcame the shock and personal grief of those days in 1963. Robert mourned John's youthful death and the fact that so much of the Kennedy vision and promise was left tragically and ultimately unfulfilled.

During the days following the assassination, but just before the funeral, Kennedy wrote to his two eldest children, Kathleen, and Joseph II, telling them about the tragedy and to follow what their uncle started.

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy was due to give a speech prior to the showing of a memorial film dedicated to the late President. As Kennedy was introduced, tens of thousands of delegates, party workers, young members, observing journalists and others broke into thunderous applause and an outroar of support for the nervous and emotionally fragile Robert, standing at the podium. He broke down and began to cry. Despite repeated appeals by him and the chairman of the convention, the audience did not stop their display of support for Robert. The applause continued for almost an hour.

Robert Kennedy mustered enough strength to deliver the speech, but broke down into tears backstage. He would remain personally devastated for many months. His elder brother's death meant that he was now the eldest living son of Joseph Kennedy, and the head not only of his own large family, but of his sisters, of the children of his brothers and sisters, and even of his younger brother, Ted Kennedy. Robert was now the young patriarch of the Kennedy family, which had been wracked by tragedies.

Senator from New York

Soon after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy left the Cabinet to run for a seat in the United States Senate representing New York. Even though Kennedy was his nemesis, Johnson helped his campaign, as he was later to recall in his memoir of the White House years. His opponent in the 1964 race was Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating, who initially portrayed Kennedy as an arrogant carpetbagger, but Kennedy gradually gained popularity during the campaign and emerged victorious in November.

During his three and a half years as a US Senator, Kennedy visited apartheid-ruled South Africa, helped to start a successful redevelopment project in poverty stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City, visited the Mississippi Delta as a member of the Senate committee reviewing the effectiveness of War on Poverty programs and, reversing his prior stance, called for a halt in further escalation of the Vietnam War.

As Senator, Robert endeared himself to the issues of African Americans, and of other minorities such as Native Americans and immigrant groups. He spoke forcefully, and tied himself with leaders of the civil rights struggle, and led the Democratic party to pursue a more aggressive agenda to eliminate discrimination on all levels. Kennedy supported busing, integration of all public facilities, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and anti-poverty social programs to increase education, offer opportunities for employment and provide health care for millions of disenfranchised and despairing colored Americans.

Kennedy also embraced opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968. Making this decision was difficult for him, for he knew that President Kennedy had increased military support for South Vietnam, and had envisioned a major U.S. commitment, if not exactly as it turned out during President Johnson's administration, to defending South East Asia and the Indochina region from Communist aggression. Many critics allege that Kennedy's switch in position was to reap advantage during the hotly contested Democratic primaries, and while this is true, it had more to do with Kennedy's own understanding of the war than merely a tactic to muster support for his candidacy.

Kennedy's presidential campaign was powered by an aggressive vision for civil freedom and justice, the expansion of social development programs beyond Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, active minority participation in American politics and outright opposition to the conservative attitudes of the American South and the aloof attitude of many Americans to serious social problems like poverty and racism.

Here Kennedy was at a remarkable contrast to his brother. JFK had been thwarted in his effort to pacify yet persuade the politicians of the Southern states to accept civil rights legislation, and his unwillingness to steamroll or appear arrogant to southern Americans. JFK had introduced a major tax-cut legislation to propel the economy, and had trimmed and transformed the workings of the U.S. government. His agenda was not half as committed to a major expansion of government institutions as RFK's social program was. And JFK backed U.S. involvement in South East Asia and other parts of the world against Soviet-sponsored communist aggression, while Robert ultimately committed himself against the war in Vietnam.

By these comparisons, it is easier to portray Robert Kennedy, instead of President John F. Kennedy, as a real icon of American liberalism and the modern political agenda of the United States Democratic Party.

Presidential candidacy and assassination

File:RobertKennedy.jpg

RFK, with security in tow.

Originally Kennedy had denied speculation that he was going to run for the Democratic nomination in 1968 against President Lyndon Johnson (The 22nd Amendment didn't disqualify LBJ from running for a second term because he served less than half of JFK's four-year term). Along with doubts of his ability to win the nomination, Kennedy feared that his candidacy would appear to be a product of a personal feud with Johnson. After Johnson won only a very narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968 against Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an anti-war candidate, Kennedy too declared his candidacy for the Presidency on March 16. On March 31, Johnson appeared on television to state that he was no longer a candidate for re-election.

On April 4, during a campaign stop in Indianapolis, Kennedy learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. During a heartfelt, impromptu speech in Indianapolis' inner city, Kennedy called for a reconciliation between the races. In the aftermath of King's murder, thousands of people were injured and 43 were killed in riots throughout the United States, but Indianapolis remained quiet. Kennedy's campaign relied largely on his ability to run an emotional and intensely personal campaign. Kennedy challenged students on the "hypocrisy" of draft deferments, visited numerous small towns, and made himself available to the masses, by participating in long motorcades and street-corner stump speeches (often in troubled inner-cities). Kennedy made urban poverty a chief concern of his campaign, which in part lead to enormous crowds that would attend his events in poor urban areas or rural parts of Appalachia.

A couple of months prior to Kennedy's assasination, he made a campaign stop in Topeka, Kansas at the Ramada Inn. The catholic Hayden High School Marching Band played at the reception and the band members got an opportunity to have their pictures taken on stage with the Democratic presidential candidate.

Kennedy won the Indiana and Nebraska Democratic primaries, but lost the Oregon primary. On June 4, 1968 Kennedy scored a major victory in his drive toward the Democratic presidential nomination when he won primaries in South Dakota and in California. After Kennedy addressed his supporters in the early morning hours of June 5 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he left the ballroom through a service area to greet supporters working in the hotel's kitchen. In a crowded kitchen passageway, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Los Angeles resident of Palestinian ancestry, fired a .22 caliber revolver directly into the crowd surrounding Kennedy. Several people were wounded, including Kennedy, who was shot in the head at close range. Kennedy never regained consciousness and died in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968 at the age of 42. A funeral mass was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on June 8, during which his brother, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy famously eulogized him with the words, "My brother need not be idolized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it." Following the mass, Kennedy's body was transported by train to Washington, DC where he was buried near his brother, John, in Arlington National Cemetery.

Sirhan confessed to the shooting, and is currently serving a life prison sentence for the crime although to this day he claims he has absolutely no memory of shooting at Kennedy. It is generally believed that Sirhan fired the shots that hit Kennedy. As with his elder brother John's death, however, many have suggested the official account of RFK's murder is inconsistent or incomplete, and that his death was the result of a conspiracy.

Personal life

In 1950, he married Ethel Skakel, who would eventually give birth to 11 children:

The last child, Rory, was born several months after her father's assassination. In contrast to his father's marriage, and the celebrated marriage of John and Jackie Kennedy, Robert and Ethel kept their life and family out of the public eye, and were comparatively very private and conservative.

Kennedy was always a loyal son, brother, and family man. Despite the fact that his father's most ambitious dreams centered around his elder brothers, Robert was fiercely loyal to Joseph, Joe Jr. and John. His competitiveness was admired by his father and elder brothers, while his loyalty bound them affectionately closer to each other than most brothers are. Working on the campaigns of John Kennedy, Robert was more involved, passionate and tenacious than the candidate himself, obsessed with every detail, fighting out every battle and taking workers to task.

Kennedy owned a home at the well-known Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts on Cape Cod but spent most of his time at his estate in Virginia, known as Hickory Hill, located just outside Washington, DC. His widow, Ethel, and his children continued to live at Hickory Hill after his death in 1968. Ethel Kennedy now lives full time at the family's vacation home in Hyannis Port.

His pallbearers included Robert McNamara, John Glenn, Averell Harriman, C. Douglas Dillon, Kirk Lemoyne Billings (schoolmate of John F. Kennedy), Stephen Smith (husband to Jean Ann Kennedy), David Hackett, Jim Whittaker, John Seigenthaler Sr., and Lord Harlech.

Actress Marilyn Monroe allegedly had an affair with John Kennedy during the 1960s, though persistent rumors that she had an affair with Robert have been discredited by most historians.

Honors

Justice Department building being renamed for Robert Kennedy

D.C. Stadium in Washington, D.C. was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.

In 1998, the United States Mint released a special dollar coin that featured Kennedy on the obverse and the emblems of the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate on the reverse.

In Washington, DC on November 20, 2001, U.S President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft dedicated the Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, honoring RFK on what would have been his 76th birthday. They both spoke during the ceremony, as did Kennedy's eldest son, Joseph II, who made reference to his uncle John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, when he said to the president as he spoke: "Mr. President, your strength since September 11 has been a profile in leadership." [1] [2] [3]

Numerous roads, public schools and other facilities across the United States were named in memory of Robert F. Kennedy in the months and years after his death.

Writing

Considered an eloquent speaker generally, RFK also wrote extensively on politics and issues confronting his generation:

The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee's Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions (1960)
To Seek a Newer World (1967)
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969)

References

Hilty, James M. Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector (1997), vol 1 to 1963.
Schlesinger Jr. Arthur M. Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978).
Shesol, Jeff. Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997),
Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy: His Life (2002)
RFK Biography
RFK (Documentary Film from the Public Broadcasting Service, USA)

External links

Preceded by William P. Rogers	Attorney General of the United States 1961–1964	Succeeded by Nicholas Katzenbach
Preceded by Kenneth Keating	U.S. Senator (Class 1) from New York 1965–1968	Succeeded by Charles E. Goodell