The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest After JFK

Bohrer, a reporter, historian, and television news producer, follows the arc of Bobby Kennedy’s political career from November 1963, the month of J.F.K.’s assassination, to R.F.K.’s own assassination in June 1968. J.F.K.’s death marked the emergence of R.F.K. as an independent politician whose stature and influence grew—within the Democratic Party, with anti-Vietnam activists, and with progressives—significantly over this five-year span. Bohrer first concentrates on R.F.K.’s fraught relationship with President Johnson, which was complicated by both the public’s desire to see R.F.K. as an extension of his brother and Johnson’s uneasiness with the specter of his predecessor. Bohrer then turns to his core thesis: that R.F.K.’s political philosophy evolved to embrace a revolutionary domestic policy that focused on relieving poverty in rural as well as urban America and a desire to address racial injustice. R.F.K. also proposed an equally novel foreign policy that eschewed direct interference in Latin America, featured opposition to South African apartheid, argued for a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, and favored nuclear nonproliferation. Readers will see the issues R.F.K. raised in his fight for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination echoed in early 21st-century American politics. Well-written and well-documented, Bohrer’s work paints a picture of R.F.K. that is favorable, but not hagiographic. (June)