Robert F. Kennedy

Biography

Robert F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1925, a younger brother of John F. Kennedy. He finished school at Milton Academy, graduated from Harvard in 1948 and took his law degree at the University of Virginia in 1951. He worked briefly as a newspaper correspondent and as a Justice Department lawyer, then managed his brother's successful 1952 Senate campaign. In 1953 he joined the staff of Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations subcommittee, and from 1957 to 1959 he was chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, where he confronted Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.

After running his brother's 1960 presidential campaign, he became attorney general at 35 and was the president's closest adviser. He pursued organised crime, intervened to protect the Freedom Riders in 1961, played a central part in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he later described in Thirteen Days, and authorised limited FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. He stayed on under Lyndon B. Johnson for some months after his brother's assassination.

In 1964 he won a U.S. Senate seat in New York, defeating Republican Kenneth Keating. As senator he opposed the Vietnam War, sponsored the Bedford-Stuyvesant renewal project and travelled widely on human rights, giving his Day of Affirmation Address in South Africa in 1966. He entered the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination and drew strong support from poor, Black, Hispanic, Catholic and young voters. Just after winning the California primary he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, and he died on 6 June 1968.