Kennedy, Robert

Kennedy, Robert (1925–1968), attorney general of the United States, senator from New York.Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, third son of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy, a wealthy businessman and former ambassador to Great Britain, Robert Francis Kennedy served in the navy during World War II, graduated from Harvard in 1948, and received a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951. He first came to public notice in the 1950s as a staff member of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red‐hunting Subcommittee on Investigations and later as the twenty‐nine‐year‐old chief counsel to the so‐called Rackets Committee headed by Senator John McClellan, which publicized criminal activity in organized labor.

In 1960, he successfully managed his brother John F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidency. To the surprise and disapproval of many, President Kennedy appointed Robert attorney general, joking that he wanted his brother, who had never tried a case, to get some experience before he practiced law. In fact, Robert won high marks as attorney general, orchestrating a campaign against organized crime that resulted in the conviction of the teamster president James R. Hoffa, among others, and definitively entering the civil rights struggle on behalf of racial integration. The Kennedy Justice Department was widely criticized, however, for illegal wiretapping, supporting segregationist judges for federal judicial appointments, and tolerating the Federal Bureau of Investigation excesses of J. Edgar Hoover.

After President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Robert emerged from a season of despair and in 1964 won election to the U.S. Senate from New York. As a senator, he investigated the underside of American life, including hunger in the Mississippi Delta, joblessness in northern ghettos, and squalid conditions in the migrant labor camps of California. In 1968, he campaigned for president as a law‐and‐order candidate, a champion of the disadvantaged, and an opponent of the Vietnam War. The Kennedy charisma won enthusiastic support from the young, the poor, the alienated, members of minority groups, and others. Yet he was resented by some on the left as an opportunist and by others on the right as an integrationist.

On 5 June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles, having just won the California primary. The assassin was Sirhan Sirhan, a supporter of the Palestinian cause. His murder shocked a nation already reeling from the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Robert Kennedy never got the chance to fulfill the possibilities he so eloquently described.
See also Civil Rights Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Justice); Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Victor S. Navasky , Kennedy Justice, 1971.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , Robert Kennedy and His Times, 1978.

Victor S. Navasky