The Last Campaign by Thurston Clarke

I had just turned 18 a week before Robert F. Kennedy was shot. I remember my father coming down to wake up my older brother and myself, and breaking the news that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It was somewhat devastating then, but being 18, I wasn't really into politics.

More than 40 years later, much more involved and informed, and reading this book by Thurston Clarke hasn't made it any easier. Clarke provides an insight into Bobby Kennedy, the man and the politician, that could only be obtained from the people that knew and campaigned with RFK in the last 82 days of his life. Anyone who would like to gain greater insight and a better understanding of this charismatic leader should pick this book up.

After JFK's assassination, Robert Kennedy--Jack's political warrior--almost lost hope. He was devastated by his brother's murder, and by the nation's inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country's pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise of a better time. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds in the thousands lined up along the country's railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby as his funeral train made its way from New York to Washington D.C.

Historian Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America's deepest despairs and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.