Best of the Month, June 2008: When Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the presidential race during the chaotic year of 1968, anarchy appeared to be gathering on the horizon. America was coming to grips with an unwinnable war in Vietnam and unacceptable social policies at home. The Last Campaign examines Kennedy's bold (and tragically shortened) efforts to awaken his country's social conscience and moral sensibility. In contrast to the cocksure attitude of Thirteen Days (RFK's own 1962 memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis), Thurston Clarke reveals a very human politician who often trembled at the podium and scanned crowds for an assassin's glare. Though motivated to serve by an unwavering desire to help the poor and oppressed, Kennedy also lived with a deep fear that his life would be cut short by violence. "I'm afraid there are guns between me and the White House," he prophetically remarked during the spring of '68. Yet The Last Campaign chooses not to explore what could have been. Instead, Clarke focuses on what is certain: for an 82-day period, Kennedy "convinced millions of Americans that he was a good man, perhaps a great man." --Dave Callanan
Exclusive Q&A with Author Thurston Clarke
 | | Kennedy during a 1967 visit to the Mississippi Delta where he found children starving in windowless shacks. |
|  | | Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, conferring at the White House. |
|  | | Kennedy discussing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. with press secretary Frank Mankiewicz on April 4, 1968. | |
: He was a Presidential candidate for less than 100 days - why does the name Bobby Kennedy continue to resonate today?
Clarke: The fact that he was the brother of a beloved and martyred president, and that he was also assassinated are of course important factors. But I think Bobby Kennedy continues to be relevant because he tackled issues such as race, poverty, and an ill-advised and unpopular war that remain relevant. And not only did he address these issues but he addressed them with an honesty and passion that no other president or politician has equaled since 1968.
: Despite his own fears, Kennedy made himself dangerously accessible to crowds. Was this an act of defiance or conviction?
Clarke: It was both defiance and conviction.
Speaking of President Johnsons bubble-topped, bulletproof limousine, he told a reporter, "Ill tell you one thing: if Im elected President, you wont find me riding around in any of those God-damned cars. We cant have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people." When his aides (who were worried about his safety throughout the campaign) urged him to spend more time campaigning from television studios and less time plunging into crowds, he told them, "There are so many people who hate me that Ive got to let the people who love me see me." Kennedy also knew that crowds revived him"like a couple of drinks," according to aide Fred Duttonand that letting people see him in person was the best way to prove that his reputation for being "ruthless" was unmerited.
: Hypothetical questions achingly surround Bobby Kennedy and his legacy. Did any single "What if?" occupy your thoughts as you researched this book? Kennedy campaigning in Los Angeles during 1968
Clarke: Several "What ifs" haunted me.
Kennedy had wanted to avoid going to the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of June 4, 1968 and instead watch the returns at the home of John Frankenheimer. The networks, however, protested that they needed him at the hotel for interviews and wanted to cover the victory celebration live if he won. Kennedy caved in and went to the hotel.
Kennedy always went through the crowd in a ballroom or auditorium after speaking, and became angry with aides who tried to hustle him out a back door. But on the night of his assassination, he broke his own rule and went through the hotel pantry where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting.
And what if he had won the nomination and become president? I doubt that there would have been riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year -- riots that helped elect Richard Nixon to the presidency and that have proven to be an albatross around the neck of Democrats for forty years. A President Robert Kennedy would have withdrawn America from Vietnam soon and there would be fewer names on the Vietnam wall. There would have been no bombing of Cambodia, Kent State, or Watergate, and so on, and so on.
: Kennedy's campaign strategy was fraught with risk, as one observer remarked that "he kept hammering away at the plight of the poor when there was more chance for political loss than gain." Had Bobby simply had enough with politics as usual?
Clarke: Kennedys obsession with the plight of Americas poor was more the result of his own personal experiences than any rejection of politics as usual. He had held a starving child in his arms in Mississippi. He had visited the appalling schools on Indian reservations where students learned nothing about their own culture and history. He had tramped through tenements in Brooklyn and come upon a girl whose face had been disfigured by rat bites. He believed that he had a responsibility to educate the American people about these conditions.
During a flight on his chartered campaign plane he told Sylvia Wright of Life magazine, ". . . for every two or three days that you waste time making speeches at rallies full of noise and balloons, theres usually a chance every two or three days . . . where you get a chance to teach people something; and to tell them something that they dont know because they dont have the chance to get around like I do, to take them some place vicariously that they havent been, to show them a ghetto, or an Indian reservation." And it was moments like these, Kennedy told Wright, that made a political campaign, despite all its banalities and indignities, "worth it."
: In your opinion, will we ever see another Bobby Kennedy? Have we become too jaded to embrace a candidate like RFK or has campaigning simply become political theater?
Clarke: One of the aides who scheduled many of Kennedys appearances that spring, told me, "What he did was not really that mystical. All it requires is someone who knows himself, and has some courage."
The definitive account of Robert Kennedyâs exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for presidentâa revelatory history that is especially resonant now
After John F. Kennedyâs assassination, Robert Kennedyâformerly Jackâs no-holds-barred political warriorâalmost lost hope. He was haunted by his brotherâs murder, and by the nationâs seeming inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the countryâs pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed eighty-two days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedyâs promise to lead them toward a better time. And after an assassinâs bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds lined up along the countryâs railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby.
With new research, interviews, and an intimate sense of Kennedy, Thurston Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of Americaâs deepest despairsâand most fiercely held dreamsâand tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.
| Isn't quite doing it for me... | 2010-03-07 | 3 / 5 |
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I bought this book hoping to find some inspiration and enlightenment from another time. I like to read various books that seem to offer a different perspective or open me up to something I may have been unaware of before. I am only 23 so I did not live during the 60s (obviously) but I have lately become interested in the latter part of the century and how America has changed. I thought this book would offer an interesting history lesson since I am no too knowledgable on the RFK's assasination or his accomplishments. I am about halfway through and I find it hard to keep reading. The author does have a HUGE man crush on Robert Kennedy and is not nearly objective enough. The book could be much shorter and is constantly referencing how everyone seemed to expect him to get shot.
I guess I should have bought a book that was more of a biography of his life and accomplishments where I could have gained more of an appreciation for him. But unfortunately this book is not giving me enough and I am going to start reading another one that will give me a little more relative value.
If you have a solid understanding of the time and are looking for a book that will give you more insight into Robert Kennedy's assasination and the time leading up to it, then I would suggest this book. |
| Wonderful Narrative on RFK | 2010-01-17 | 4 / 5 |
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| Thurston Clarke's book on Robert Kennedy provides a narrative account of the 82 days that he ran for President until he was killed at the ambassador hotel in early June 1968. It is a concise and well written account that goes over what happened on the campaign trail showing the triumphs and the struggles of RFK's campaign. From the rallies in Oakland to woo the African American vote to the triumphs in Indiana with the backlash vote that wanted "law and order" you are presented with a person who has belief in his convictions and represents them on the campaign trail (sometimes to his handlers disappointment). There is little doubt that after winning California RFK was on the way to winning the democratic nomination (based off primary totals) and would have raced a though fight against Nixon that may have led to an RFK victory which this book does dabble in speculation about. That leads to my number one complaint about this book and the reason it is only four stars. This is a wonderful narrative and tells the story very well but there is no interpretation and almost no analysis to go along with the narrative. It is simply an account of what happened and while interesting to read if you have not read a lot about the time period you will have a hard time placing the significance of some of the events. Nonetheless still an excellent book on RFK and very well written. Highly recommend. |
| 1968: a time it was... | 2010-01-17 | 4 / 5 |
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Released at a time that corresponds with both the 40th anniversary of RFK's run and the last presidential election, it make for an engaging read. As Kennedy stated he didn't "...lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties...but these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election." True words of the turbulent era. Vietnam was in its 3rd year as far as direct involvement of US combat troops, racial tension and riots continued at home and Americans were looking for leadership out of the morass.
The author does a good job of setting up the climate of those days and insight as to RFK thoughts and the hopes/goals he deeply wanted to come to fruition. The matter of running was not a easy decision, the agony over it went on for a long time and the debate is covered in the book from many sides; including both inside the Kennedy family and outside of it. There were many to contend with, including, President Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, the fractured Democratic party, Nixon and the Republican party. Finally, in February 1968, Kennedy tells his friends and advisers he felt he had no choice but run or he would be "nothing. "It was a "moral obligation". The author shows the dark clouds that formed in reaction to Kennedy's decision to run.
The book reads like a political thriller but of-course this was not a story of fiction. Like a book or film on the "Titanic" we all know have things ended. It is getting to that point in time that is interesting. The author has not written a book that is some fuzzy, glowing highlight reel but one that shows the human side of Kennedy and the drama (and divisiveness) that marked that year. Lastly, one cannot read this book without drawing a few parallels to the more recent history of our nation with the presidency of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq and the election of 2008.
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| Inspiring a new generation | 2009-10-29 | 4 / 5 |
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| Robert Kennedy was an amazing man who would have made a wonderful president. Hearing about his ideas and the way that he inspired so many different types of people all across our country inspired me. Thinking about his assassination and the idea of assassination in general is disturbing and depressing, and hearing the eyewitness accounts of what happened when he was killed had tears streaming down my face in the car (I listened to this one on audiobook). That said, this book is not to be missed. Who would want to miss a chance to be inspired? If he had lived to become president I believe that the world we live in would be a very different place. A wonderful book, especially for those of us who were not alive during this campaign; it was so full of interesting details that I felt like I was there. |
| Barak Obama you are no Robert Kennedy! | 2009-10-25 | 5 / 5 |
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Growing up in Massachusetts, you think you know the Kennedy's. After reading this I realized I knew nothing of RFK.
You know how it ends, but you just don't want to turn to that page. You want to pretend he lived and things today
were different. This is a great book. Im only sad it has made me jaded about our current crop of do nothings in Washington.
Must read |
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