The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America

I worked on RFK's '68 campaign and have always been interested in accounts of it. Two journalists who covered the campaign, Jack Newfield and Jules Witcover, wrote excellent memoirs about it at the time. Forty years later, one has to ask what remains to be told.

A great deal, it turns out. Mr. Clarke's account is extraordinary in its depth and balance. For me, he has recreated the time and the man better than anyone else ever has. Reading this book, for me, was like reliving the campaign, with its exultation and ultimate desolation. An extraordinary achievement.

Less than a month into Bobby Kennedy's campaign for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down. Bobby was in Indianapolis at the time, and said a few words. He didn't make a political speech. He didn't read from a script. He just said a few heartfelt words that expressed his horror at the assassination and his vision for a better nation, a nation dedicated to taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of the world (p. 96).

In this moving, eloquently written, and well researched narrative of the 82 days of Bobby Kennedy's last campaign, Thurston Clarke provides a much-needed reminder of what presidential politics could look like but hasn't for four decades. Kennedy was a genuine progressive, a man who intensely believed that the purpose of government was to protect the least advantaged in society, to set a high moral standard, and to speak the truth courageously. As Barack Obama is quoted near the book's end, it's hard to place Kennedy in the categories that "constrain [today's presidential candidates] politically...[he wasn't] a centrist in the sense of finding a middle road" (p. 279).

Kennedy ran for president saying that he wanted to end the Vietnam war and poverty. In the process, he dared to speak unpleasant truths to the American people, something rarely done by political candidates. Kennedy's famous speech at Creighton University, in which he challenged the all-white student body about their indifference to the Vietnam war, is a typical example. "Look around you," he said. "How many black faces do you see here? How many American Indians? The fact is, if you look at any regiment or division of paratroopers in Vietnam, 45% of them are black. How can you accept this!?" (p. 190). Creighton students booed him.

Kennedy insisted that the populace which elects a president who pushes through irresponsible public and foreign policy must share moral responsibility for that policy's consequences. He recognized that unwise laws and social policies can institutionalize and legitimize violence, and called for sweeping reform (p. 108). But he also offered hope, assuring voters that they and the country had an opportunity to heal. He himself forthrightly admitted to past complicity in mistaken and even immoral political decisions, such as his early support for the Vietnam war, and humbly expressed regret (p. 45). And he assured the electorate that both they and the country could seize the moral high ground and change (p. 12).

He told the country that the existence of poverty among blacks, Chicanos, southern whites, and Native Americans was a blight, and that in allowing it to endure we mocked Thomas Jefferson's claim that the U.S. was the last, best hope. Bobby's 1967 trip to Cleveland, Mississippi, where he saw some of the country's worst poverty, shook him as nothing had since his brother's assassination, and he vowed to dedicate himself to ending it. As Cesar Chavez said, Bobby Kennedy "could see things through the eyes of the poor" (p. 79). No other presidential candidate except John Edwards has so emphasized poverty in his or her campaign.

Clarke's account of Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign leaves the reader with mixed emotions. On the one hand, Clarke points out that a presidential candidate today could run on nearly all the issues that Bobby did because "little has been done to address them" in the 40 years since his murder (p. 280). Clarke also invites the reader to think about how different the nation would be today if Kennedy had lived and become president: the Vietnam war would've ended 6 years earlier with 20,000 fewer American casualties, for example, and Watergate wouldn't have eroded trust in government. That's the bad news. But on the other hand, Clarke reminds us, Kennedy showed that an idealist who courageously spoke truth to power could appeal to the American people--Kennedy's supporters came from all constituencies--and that Jefferson's high estimation of the country's promise needn't be empty rhetoric. That's the good news, the hopeful news.

Highly recommended.

With so many RFK books already out there, I was hoping that this one would be worth the wait....and it was. In great detail, we are taken back in time to a two and a half month period of 1968 that was full of incredible drama and intensity.

The chapter covering the Indianapolis speech was especially moving. I think anyone reading it would just get goose-bumps as it goes into more backround detail than was previously told. My God....that speech actually changed history in that city.

That story....and the whole book tries to tell us what IT was that Robert Kennedy had or did that made over 2 MILLION people cry or stand at attention or just look shattered as his funeral train traveled from New York to Washington. Heart-wrenching and at the same time so uplifting....that there was once a real politician who was a human being who grew and changed and could set this kind of example for the country. Highly recommended for anyone who loves history and / or incredible life-changers.