Robert F. Kennedy

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic primary on the 5th of June 1968, and around midnight a gunman shot him. Kennedy died 25 hours later.

  The shooter was Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian who acted in retaliation for Kennedy's support of Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War. At that moment Kennedy was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. His main rival was Senator Eugene McCarthy. His campaign drew poor voters, African American and Hispanic voters, Catholics, and the young.

  Six years earlier a different Kennedy had sat in the Oval Office, and this one had been the man at his elbow. So how did a son overlooked inside his own famous family earn a following that belonged to him alone? Why did he pursue some enemies without mercy and win over others who began as skeptics? And what did the people closest to him see behind the famous name?

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• 2. The Runt of the Family

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  Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on the 20th of November 1925. He was the seventh of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a politician and businessman, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a philanthropist and socialite. All four of his grandparents were children of Irish immigrants, and both families were active in the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

  Later he described his rank among the siblings with dry humor: "When you come from that far down, you have to struggle to survive." Joseph Sr. had built a fortune and set up trust funds that guaranteed each child lifelong financial security. Yet he dubbed Robert the "runt" of the family, wrote him off, and gave his attention to the two eldest sons, Joseph Jr. and John.

  At the Kennedy dinner table, talk of Franklin D. Roosevelt and world events crowded out almost everything else. Robert recalled that public life came to seem "an extension of family life."

  The family moved between the Kennedy Compound at Hyannis Port, La Querida in Palm Beach, Florida, and Bronxville, New York. They also lived in London, where Joseph Sr. served as ambassador to the Court of St James's from 1938 to 1940. Just before World War II broke out in Europe, the family returned home, and Robert was sent to boarding schools. He attended St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire, then Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island. In September 1942 he arrived at Milton Academy near Boston, and he graduated in May 1944.

  He remembered himself as awkward and quiet, forever making new friends, and he "didn't mind being alone." At Milton he befriended David Hackett, who saw in him a fellow misfit. Hackett admired how Kennedy redoubled his effort whenever something came hard, whether athletics, studies, or popularity. Kennedy disliked dirty jokes and bullying, and he once stepped in when an upperclassman picked on a younger boy. The headmaster's verdict was lukewarm: a "very intelligent boy, quiet and shy, but not outstanding, and he left no special mark on Milton."

  As a teenager Kennedy clerked at the Columbia Trust Company in East Boston, a bank his father had once presided over. The office routine bored him. The subway commute, though, gave him his first sustained contact with the people he called "common folk." His duties included collecting rent from Boston tenement houses, and biographers note what he saw there: large families packed into airless flats, and residents sleeping on fire escapes.

  Six weeks before his 18th birthday in 1943, he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve as a seaman apprentice. In March 1944 he left Milton early for the V-12 Navy College Training Program at Harvard. That November he moved to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he built a snow replica of a Navy boat for the winter carnival.

  In August 1944 his oldest brother, Joseph Jr., died when his bomber exploded during a volunteer mission known as Operation Aphrodite. What affected Robert most was his father's reaction, since the older man appeared completely heartbroken. A peer, Fred Garfield, said Robert slid into depression and briefly questioned his faith. After the loss, Robert moved higher in the family's attention.

  On the 15th of December 1945 the Navy commissioned the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Robert asked to be released from officer training to serve aboard her. From the 1st of February 1946 he sailed as a seaman apprentice on her shakedown cruise in the Caribbean, and he received an honorable discharge on the 30th of May 1946. Throughout that year he had also been working on his brother John's first campaign for Congress, for the seat James Michael Curley had vacated.

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• 3. Counsel and Campaigner

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  In September 1946 Kennedy entered Harvard as a junior, with credit for his V-12 months. He worked hard to make the football team as an end. He started and scored a touchdown in the first game of his senior year, then broke his leg in practice. He still earned his varsity letter, because his coach sent him in wearing a cast for the last minutes of a game against Yale. He graduated in 1948 with a degree in political science.

  That year he sailed on the RMS Queen Mary for a tour of Europe and the Middle East, accredited as a correspondent for The Boston Post. He filed six stories. Four came from Palestine shortly before the end of the British Mandate, and in them he criticized British policy and praised the Jews he met as "hardy and tough." He predicted that "before too long" the United States and Great Britain would want a Jewish state as a "toehold" of democracy. Still, he feared the hatred between Arabs and Jews was too strong to avoid war. In June 1948 he reported on the Berlin Blockade, writing home: "It is a very moving and disturbing sight to see plane after plane take off amidst a torrent of rain particularly when I was aboard one."

  In September 1948 he enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville. His classmates elected him president of the Student Legal Forum, which brought in speakers including William O. Douglas, Joseph McCarthy, and his brother John. He graduated in June 1951, ranked 56th in a class of 125. That September The Boston Post sent him to San Francisco to cover the convention that concluded the Treaty of Peace with Japan.

  Admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1951, Kennedy started work that November in the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, which prosecuted espionage and subversive-activity cases. In February 1952 he moved to the Criminal Division to help prepare fraud cases against former officials of the Truman administration before a Brooklyn grand jury. On the 6th of June 1952 he resigned to manage John's campaign for the United States Senate in Massachusetts. John's victory made him a national figure and a serious possible presidential candidate. For Robert it meant something more private: he felt he had erased his father's low opinion of him.

  In December 1952, at his father's urging, family friend Senator Joseph McCarthy named Kennedy one of 15 assistant counsels to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Kennedy disliked McCarthy's aggressive methods of gathering intelligence on suspected communists. He resigned in July 1953 but "retained a fondness for McCarthy." The months until January 1954 were what he felt to be a professional and personal low point, and he drifted while trying to prove himself to his family. Kenneth O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien, veterans of John's congressional campaigns, urged him to run for Massachusetts Attorney General in 1954. He declined.

  In February 1954 he returned to the committee staff as chief counsel for the Democratic minority. That month McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, subpoenaed Annie Lee Moss and accused her of Communist Party membership. Kennedy revealed that Cohn had named the wrong Annie Lee Moss, and he asked the FBI for her file. Director J. Edgar Hoover, forewarned by Cohn, refused, and called Kennedy "an arrogant whippersnapper." The episode made Cohn an enemy. During the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, Kennedy helped Democratic senators ridicule Cohn, and at one point Cohn had to be restrained after asking whether Kennedy wanted to fight. That year the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce listed Kennedy among its Ten Outstanding Young Men, a nomination his father had arranged. It was his first national award.

  At the 1956 Democratic National Convention Kennedy replaced Tip O'Neill as a Massachusetts delegate at his brother's request. The effort to win John the vice-presidential nomination failed. Kennedy then served as an aide to Adlai Stevenson II in that autumn's general election, learning how national campaigns worked. He was unimpressed with Stevenson, and a decade later said he had voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  From 1957 to 1959 Kennedy was chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, nicknamed the McClellan committee for its chairman, John L. McClellan. McClellan gave him authority over testimony scheduling, areas of investigation, and witness questioning. The chairman's aim was to draw labor's outrage toward Kennedy and away from himself. The committee exposed misuse of Teamsters pension funds, which led to the conviction of president Dave Beck and the indictment of his successor, Jimmy Hoffa. Kennedy's face-off with Hoffa drew national attention. Life ran a profile titled "Young Man with Tough Questions," and The Saturday Evening Post ran "The Amazing Kennedys." "Two boyish young men from Boston," wrote a Look magazine reporter, "have become hot tourist attractions in Washington."

  Not everyone applauded. Senators Barry Goldwater and Karl Mundt complained to each other that "the Kennedy boys" had hijacked the committee by fixating on Hoffa and the Teamsters. They believed he shielded Walter Reuther and the United Automobile Workers, a union that usually backed Democratic candidates. Kennedy wrote in his journal that the two had "no guts," since they never addressed him directly and only spoke through the press. He left the committee in September 1959 to manage his brother's presidential bid, and in 1960 he published The Enemy Within, about corrupt practices in the Teamsters and other unions.

  During the 1960 primaries Kennedy gave stump speeches and grew more confident as they went on. His strategy of winning "at any cost" led him to call on Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to attack Senator Hubert Humphrey as a draft dodger, and Roosevelt did make the charge. When backers of Lyndon Johnson told the press that John had Addison's disease, Robert denied it, saying John never had "an ailment described classically as Addison's disease." A diagnosis had in fact been made. John then chose Johnson as his running mate. Robert favored Walter Reuther and failed to talk Johnson out of accepting, and Johnson viewed him with contempt from then on.

  In October 1960, a few weeks before the election, Kennedy helped win the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from a jail in Atlanta. He spoke with Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver and later with Judge Oscar Mitchell, who had sentenced King for violating probation after a protest at a whites-only snack bar.

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• 4. The Attorney General

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  At the age of 35, Kennedy was named United States attorney general by president-elect John F. Kennedy, making him one of the youngest cabinet members in American history. Joseph Sr. pressed for the appointment despite fears of nepotism, arguing that the president needed someone in the cabinet he trusted absolutely. Both brothers had doubts at first. John came around to the idea, and then Robert was persuaded.

  The New York Times and The New Republic called him inexperienced and unqualified. He had never worked in any state or federal court, and the president joked: "I can't see that it's wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law." Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen doubted his legal background but found him otherwise competent.

  On the 13th of January 1961, Kennedy testified for two hours before the Judiciary Committee, in largely friendly questioning. Senator Roman Hruska pressed him on his lack of courtroom experience. Kennedy answered that he had gained "invaluable experience" and would not trade the years since law school for time practicing law in Boston. The committee approved the nomination unanimously, and the full Senate confirmed him on the 21st of January 1961 by a division vote, with only one senator opposed.

  For Deputy Attorney General he chose Byron White, who helped fill out the rest of the department. Archibald Cox became Solicitor General. Nicholas Katzenbach, Burke Marshall, and Ramsey Clark became Assistant Attorneys General, while Edwin O. Guthman and John Seigenthaler served as press aides. The historians Alexander Bickel, Jeff Shesol, and Evan Thomas have all observed that these picks showed Kennedy was comfortable surrounding himself with people more qualified than he was.

  His influence reached far beyond law enforcement. The president relied on his brother as political adviser, foreign affairs counselor, and most trusted confidant. Kennedy held sway over every cabinet department, and the Associated Press called him the capital's number two man. John Kennedy once said: "If I want something done and done immediately I rely on the Attorney General." He called his brother "very much the doer in this administration."

  In May 1961 Kennedy became chairman of the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, with his lifelong friend David Hackett as director. After visiting blighted communities, the two concluded that delinquency grew out of racial discrimination and a lack of opportunity. The committee held that government should empower the poor to craft their own solutions rather than impose them. The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act was signed into law in September 1961.

  At the president's direction, Kennedy used federal agencies to pressure U.S. Steel against raising prices, and he announced a grand jury probe into possible collusion and price fixing. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the administration had set steel prices "by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police." Charles Reich, a Yale law professor, wrote in The New Republic that the department had violated civil liberties by calling a grand jury so quickly and then disbanding it once the increase failed to happen.

  Kennedy also warned the country of a "private government of organized crime with an annual income of billions, resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion." He set up the first coordinated program that brought together all 26 federal law enforcement agencies against organized crime. Carlos Marcello was deported to Guatemala, and Joey Aiuppa was convicted of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Kennedy helped pass five anti-crime bills, among them the Wire Act and the Travel Act. Convictions of organized crime figures rose by 800 percent during his term.

  The campaign sometimes put him at odds with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who considered communism the greater menace. The biographer James Neff credits Kennedy's success in shifting Hoover's focus to his brother's position, which gave the attorney general pull over the director. Another biographer, Richard Hack, concluded that Hoover disliked Kennedy because he could not control him.

  Kennedy's pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa was the most personal part of the crusade. He created a so-called "Get Hoffa" squad of prosecutors and investigators, and Hoffa called the conflict a "blood feud." On the 4th of March 1964, Hoffa was convicted in Chattanooga, Tennessee, of attempted bribery of a grand juror during his 1962 conspiracy trial in Nashville. He received eight years and a $10,000 fine. Kennedy telephoned his congratulations to the three prosecutors. On the 26th of July 1964, a second jury in Chicago convicted Hoffa of conspiracy and mail and wire fraud over the Teamsters' pension fund, and he received five more years. After three years of failed appeals, Hoffa began serving his combined 13-year sentence on the 7th of March 1967 at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

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• 5. Civil Rights Crossroads

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  On the 6th of May 1961, Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia School of Law and made the administration's position plain. He said that he happened to believe the 1954 school decision was right, but added: "But my belief does not matter. It is now the law." If court orders were circumvented, he promised, the Justice Department would act.

  When the Freedom Riders met violence, Kennedy became deeply involved. After the Anniston bus bombing, he sent his aide John Seigenthaler to Alabama to calm the situation. He phoned the Greyhound Company and demanded a driver willing to take a special bus from Birmingham to Montgomery, on the way to Jackson, Mississippi. Later a white mob attacked and burned the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. and 1,500 sympathizers had gathered. Kennedy phoned King to get his promise that no one would leave until the U.S. Marshals and National Guard he had sent secured the area. King berated him for allowing the situation to continue, but later publicly thanked him for the forces that broke up an attack that might otherwise have killed him.

  Kennedy then negotiated safe passage for the Riders to Jackson, where they were arrested. He offered to bail them out, and their refusal upset him. On the 29th of May 1961 he petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban segregation. The commission ordered that, by the 1st of November, bus carriers and terminals serving interstate travel must be integrated.

  His push to end the Freedom Rides early was tied to an approaching summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. He feared that continued international coverage of race riots would tarnish the president before the negotiations. Many civil rights leaders came to see him as intolerant and narrow-minded. The historian David Halberstam observed that, had the brothers come from another part of the country, "they might have been more immediately sensitive to the complexities and depth of black feelings."

  The FBI's view of King added another strain. Hoover regarded King as an upstart troublemaker and called him an "enemy of the state." In February 1962 Hoover gave Kennedy allegations that some of King's close advisers were communists. Kennedy warned King, who agreed to ask Jack O'Dell to resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King refused to ask Stanley Levison, a trusted adviser, to do the same. In October 1963 Kennedy signed a written directive allowing wiretaps on King and other SCLC leaders. His approval covered King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so," but Hoover stretched it so that his men were "unshackled" to look wherever they chose. The wiretapping lasted until June 1966 and became public in 1968, days before Kennedy's death.

  On the 24th of May 1963, Kennedy held a private meeting in New York City with a Black delegation organized by the author James Baldwin. The talk turned antagonistic and produced no consensus. The delegation felt Kennedy did not grasp the extent of racism in America. He deepened the rift when he compared his family's experience of discrimination as Irish Catholics with the injustice faced by African Americans.

  In September 1962 he sent U.S. Marshals, Border Patrol agents, and deputized federal prison guards to the University of Mississippi to enforce a court order admitting its first African American student, James Meredith. Kennedy had hoped legal means and a federal escort would persuade Governor Ross Barnett to let Meredith enroll. He worried about a "mini-civil war" between federal troops and armed protesters. The campus turned violent, and the president reluctantly sent in troops. The Ole Miss riot of 1962 left 300 people injured and two dead, yet Kennedy held that Black students had a right to every level of education.

  Kennedy saw voting as the key to racial justice. He worked with the president on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in the spring of 1964 he joined Senator Hubert Humphrey and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen in hunting for language that Republicans could accept and that could overcome the Southern Democrats' filibuster. A May deal secured the two-thirds majority needed to close debate. He also warned that the problem was not only Southern, saying the North had "de facto segregation, which in some areas is bad or even more extreme than in the South." Between December 1961 and December 1963, he expanded the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division by 60 percent.

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• 6. Crisis Diplomacy

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  Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet GRU officer, was Kennedy's private backchannel to Moscow during the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Through him Kennedy passed diplomatic messages between Washington and the Soviet government. That channel helped arrange the Vienna Summit in June 1961, and it later helped defuse the October tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie. In February 1962 Kennedy and his wife visited West Berlin to show American support, which also helped mend the strained relationship between the administration and its envoy there, Lucius D. Clay.

  After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy oversaw the CIA's anti-Castro activities, including covert operations that targeted Cuban civilians. He also served as the president's personal representative in Operation Mongoose, the covert program established in November 1961 to incite a revolution that would topple Fidel Castro.

  Historians have long debated whether the Kennedys knew of, or approved, CIA plans to kill Castro. The "Family Jewels" documents, which the CIA declassified in 2007, suggest that before the Bay of Pigs the attorney general personally authorized one such attempt. Other evidence points the opposite way. Kennedy learned of an earlier plot involving the Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and John Roselli only at a briefing on the 7th of May 1962, and he directed the CIA to halt any existing efforts against Castro. The biographer Thomas concludes that the brothers may have discussed assassination as "a weapon of last resort," but did not know the details of the Harvey-Rosselli operation, or want to.

  In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy tempered the aggressive positions of the hawks and pushed for compromise. His role is today seen as vital in securing a blockade, which helped avert full military engagement between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the 27th of October he secretly met Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. They reached a basic understanding: the Soviet Union would withdraw its missiles from Cuba, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also informally suggested that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be removed "within a short time after this crisis was over." On the last night of the crisis the president summed up his gratitude in four words: "Thank God for Bobby." Kennedy later wrote his account in Thirteen Days, published in 1969 after his death.

  In February 1962 Kennedy landed in Tokyo, sent in the president's place after the decision to resume atmospheric nuclear testing forced John to postpone a promised visit to Japan. The mood was delicate, since the massive Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty had just exposed anti-American grievances. Kennedy won over a skeptical press and public with his cheerful, open manner and youthful energy. At a nationally televised speech at Waseda University, radical Marxist students from Zengakuren tried to shout him down. He calmly invited one of them onto the stage and debated him on the spot. Japanese media praised both Robert and, on his brother's behalf, the president.

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• 7. After Dallas

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  On the 22nd of November 1963, Kennedy was at home with Justice Department aides when J. Edgar Hoover called to say his brother had been shot. Hoover hung up before Kennedy could ask a question. Kennedy later said he thought Hoover had enjoyed delivering the news.

  His next moves were quick and protective. He phoned McGeorge Bundy at the White House and told him to change the locks on the president's files. He ordered the Secret Service to dismantle the hidden taping system in the Oval Office and the cabinet room. He also met CIA director John McCone and asked whether the agency had any involvement. McCone denied it, and Kennedy later told the investigator Walter Sheridan that he had asked "in a way that he couldn't lie to me."

  An hour after the shooting, the new President Johnson called before boarding Air Force One. Johnson expressed sympathy and then said he should be sworn in immediately. Kennedy objected because "it would be nice" for the president's body to return to Washington with John still the incumbent. They agreed Johnson would take the oath before flying back. Around the same hour, Kennedy confided to Edwin O. Guthman that he had thought he would be the one "they would get."

  In the days that followed he wrote to his two eldest children, Kathleen and Joseph, telling them that as the oldest of their generation they had a special duty to remember what their uncle had started. He first opposed Jacqueline Kennedy's wish for a closed casket, because he wanted a traditional funeral, but he changed his mind after seeing the cosmetic, waxen remains.

  The ten-month Warren Commission investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the president alone. On the 27th of September 1964, Kennedy issued a statement through his New York campaign office saying he was convinced Oswald had acted without outside help. He added: "I have not read the report, nor do I intend to." After a 1966 meeting with Kennedy, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that Kennedy thought the report a poor job but would not criticize it and reopen "the whole tragic business." Soviet archives record that Kennedy sent William Walton to the Soviet Union on a cultural mission, with a message for Bolshakov: Robert and Jackie believed a conspiracy was involved. Biographer Larry Tye saw a man left "more fatalistic, having seen how fast he could lose what he cherished the most."

  By April 1964 a Gallup poll found 47 percent of Democratic voters wanted Kennedy as the vice-presidential nominee, far ahead of Adlai Stevenson II at 18 percent and Hubert Humphrey at 10. Johnson's staff privately called this the "Bobby problem." Johnson said, "I don't need that little runt to win," and Kennedy called Johnson "mean, bitter, vicious" and "an animal in many ways." Kennedy's supporters ran a draft movement in the New Hampshire primary, and he received 25,094 write-in votes for vice president, well ahead of Humphrey. The Republican nomination of conservative Barry Goldwater ended the pressure, since any running mate would change a landslide by less than 2 percent. In July 1964 Johnson announced that no cabinet member would be his running mate.

  At the Democratic National Convention, Johnson feared delegates might draft Kennedy. He had the FBI monitor Kennedy's contacts and made sure Kennedy did not speak until after Humphrey was confirmed. On the final day, Kennedy introduced a short film, A Thousand Days, and delegates erupted in 22 minutes of applause that nearly brought him to tears. He quoted Romeo and Juliet about his brother: "When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."

  In June 1964 Kennedy had offered to succeed Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as ambassador to South Vietnam, and Johnson rejected the idea. On the 19th of June, his brother Ted broke his back in a small plane crash near Southampton, Massachusetts, and Robert considered leaving politics altogether. A warm reception during a six-day trip to Germany and Poland changed his mind. He asked speechwriter Milton Gwirtzman for a memo comparing the governorship of Massachusetts with a Senate seat from New York as launching pads for a future presidential run. Gwirtzman replied that invitations tied to President Kennedy's legacy would be easier to accept as a senator based in Washington.

  On the 25th of August 1964, two days before the convention ended, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Senate from New York, and he resigned as attorney general on the 3rd of September. He could not run in Massachusetts because Ted was seeking reelection there. His Republican opponent, incumbent Kenneth Keating, painted him as an arrogant "carpetbagger" who did not live in New York and was not registered to vote there. His wife Ethel joked that the slogan should be: "There is only so much you can do for Massachusetts." Crowds of hecklers held signs reading "BOBBY GO HOME!" and "GO BACK TO MASSACHUSETTS!" Even so, Kennedy won in November by about 700,000 votes, helped by Johnson's 2.5 million vote margin in the state. He and Ted became the first brothers to serve in the Senate together since Dwight and Theodore Foster.

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• 8. A Senator's Causes

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  In June 1965, a speech on nuclear proliferation drew more than 50 senators to the chamber to watch Kennedy. Celebrity set him apart, but he had gone from the president's most influential adviser to one of a hundred senators, and his impatience with slow, collaborative lawmaking showed. Senator Fred R. Harris expected not to like him, yet the two became what Harris called "each other's best friends in the Senate." Kennedy leaned on Ted, who had seniority, as a guide to Senate life. His blunt manner, though, made him unpopular with many colleagues.

  In May 1965 Kennedy co-sponsored S.1592, a bill to restrict mail-order gun sales. Backing it, he said: "For too long we dealt with these deadly weapons as if they were harmless toys." The bill and its successors, together with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and of Kennedy himself, paved the way for the Gun Control Act of 1968.

  His first year in the Senate followed an amendments-only strategy. He added 13 low-income New York counties along the Pennsylvania border to the Appalachian Regional Development Act. He amended the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect non-English speakers educated in the United States, mainly Puerto Ricans in New York City, from unfair literacy tests. He also delayed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act until it included an evaluation clause, worried that federal money would not reach disadvantaged children. Despite talk of a feud with Johnson, more than 60 percent of his roll call votes each year backed Great Society legislation.

  On the 8th of February 1966, Kennedy urged the United States to pledge never to be the first to use nuclear weapons against countries without them. China had made such a pledge, he noted, and the Soviet Union had signaled willingness. He made human rights a central theme of foreign policy and criticized the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. After a late-1965 trip to Latin America he warned: "if we allow communism to carry the banner of reform, then the ignored and the dispossessed, the insulted and injured, will turn to it as the only way out of their misery."

  In June 1966 Kennedy visited apartheid-era South Africa with Ethel and a few aides. At a time when few politicians dared touch South African politics, the tour won international praise, and the Black population welcomed him like a visiting head of state. At the University of Natal in Durban, he heard that the white population's main church taught apartheid as a moral necessity. His reply, published in a Look magazine interview, was: "But suppose God is black." He asked what the response would be if, after a lifetime of treating Black people as inferior, believers looked up in Heaven and found God was not white. "There was no answer. Only silence." At the University of Cape Town he delivered the annual Day of Affirmation Address. He also challenged the view of South Africa as a valuable anti-communist ally by asking what it meant to be against communism if one's own system denied the value of the individual.

  That same year he sponsored an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 that created the Special Impact Program. It concentrated on specific distressed communities and treated economic development as the route out of poverty. To demonstrate the idea, Kennedy and his staff created the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, the first community development corporation in the country. It built affordable housing, started job training, and persuaded IBM to open a major plant in the neighborhood employing over 400 people.

  In April 1967 Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta with a Senate subcommittee and was stunned to see children starving in substandard housing. He asked NAACP attorney Marian Wright Edelman to urge Martin Luther King Jr. to bring the poor to Washington, which led to the Poor People's Campaign. Earlier, in March 1966, Senate hearings in Delano, California, put him in touch with Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association. When the local sheriff said his deputies had arrested strikers who looked "ready to violate the law," Kennedy replied: "May I suggest that during the luncheon, the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?" He deplored poverty on Native American reservations and became chairman of a new Special Subcommittee on Indian Education. In February 1968 he toured eastern Kentucky, found conditions "intolerable, unacceptable, and unsatisfactory," and judged the federal antipoverty effort a dismal failure.

  In 1967 he introduced two complex bills, the Urban and Rural Employment Opportunities Development Act and the Urban Housing Development Act. They offered tax incentives and low-interest loans to private firms that invested in poor areas and hired local workers. The Senate Finance Committee approved neither, partly because of opposition from Johnson.

  On Vietnam, Kennedy had not been known as a voice in the debates during his brother's presidency, and in the Senate he first kept his disagreements with Johnson private. The bombing of North Vietnam began in February 1965, and by April he was privately urging a halt. Johnson acknowledged that Kennedy influenced his decision to pause the bombing in May. After Johnson committed large ground forces in July, Kennedy made repeated calls for a negotiated settlement. In December 1965 he advised Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to urge Johnson to declare a ceasefire, pause the bombing, and accept Algeria's offer to act as an "honest broker" in peace talks. On the 31st of January 1966, he told the Senate: "If we regard bombing as the answer in Vietnam, we are headed straight for disaster."

  His February 1966 peace plan would have preserved South Vietnam while letting the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong, join a coalition government in Saigon. Asked whether he spoke for Johnson, he replied: "I don't think anyone has ever suggested that I was speaking for the White House." The New York Times called the plan a break with the president, and a Chicago newspaper labelled him "Ho Chi Kennedy." Vice President Humphrey said the plan included "a dose of arsenic." Kennedy was displeased to hear anti-war protesters chanting his name, saying "I'm not Wayne Morse." He later conceded on the Today program that his views on Vietnam were "a little confusing." In April 1966 he met Philip Heymann of the State Department to discuss freeing American prisoners of war. Heymann said the administration weighed the "consequences of sitting down with the Viet Cong" more heavily than the captives' fate.

  Sirhan was convicted the year after the shooting and sentenced to death by gas chamber. That sentence was later commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 1972. Like the death of Kennedy's brother, the killing still draws widespread analysis and numerous conspiracy theories. At Arlington National Cemetery, Kennedy's memorial carries a line from his Cape Town address: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope."

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