Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight. But Kennedy—nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father—started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting, table-thumping Senator Joseph McCarthy.A bare-knuckled political operative who masterminded his brother’s whatever-it-takes bids for senator and president, Kennedy okayed FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. and cloak-and-dagger operations against communist Cuba that included blowing up railroad bridges, sabotaging crops, and plotting the elimination of President Fidel Castro.Remembered now as a rare optimist in an age of political cynicism, RFK’s profoundly moving journey from cold warrior to hot-blooded liberal also offers a lens into two of the most chaotic and confounding decades of twentieth century America.

    Kennedy that gets closer to the man than any book before, by bestselling author Chris Matthews, an esteemed Kennedy expert and anchor of MSNBC’s Hardball.With his bestselling biography Jack Kennedy, Chris Matthews shared a new look of one of America’s most beloved Presidents and the patriotic spirit that defined him. Now, with Bobby Kennedy, Matthews returns with a gripping, in-depth, behind-the-scenes portrait of one of the great figures of the American twentieth century.Overlooked by his father, and overshadowed by his war-hero brother, Bobby Kennedy was the perpetual underdog. When he had the chance to become a naval officer like Jack, Bobby turned it down, choosing instead to join the Navy as a common sailor. It was a life changing experience that led him to connect with voters from all walks of life: young or old, black or white, rich or poor. They were the people who turned out for him in his 1968 campaign. RFK would prove himself to be the rarest of politicians—both a pragmatist who knew how to get the job done and an unwavering idealist who could inspire millions.Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy. He shines a light on all the important moments of his life, from his early years and his start in politics to his crucial role as attorney general in his brother’s administration and his tragic run for president. This definitive book brings Bobby Kennedy to life like never before and is destined to become a political classic

    Schlesinger, Jr., chronicles the short life of the Kennedy family's second presidential hopeful in "a story that leaves the reader aching for what cannot be recaptured" (Miami Herald). Schlesinger's account vividly recalls the forces that shaped Robert Kennedy, from his position as the third son of a powerful Irish Catholic political clan to his concern for issues of social justice in the turbulent 1960s. ROBERT KENNEDY AND HIS TIMES is "a picture of a deeply compassionate man hiding his vulnerability, drawn to the underdogs and the unfortunates in society by his life experiences and sufferings" (Los Angeles Times).

    . . saw suffering and tried to heal it." And "Bad Bobby," the ruthless and manipulative bully of countless conspiracy theories. Thomas's unvarnished but sympathetic and fair-minded portrayal is packed with new details about Kennedy's early life and his behind-the-scenes machinations, including new revelations about the 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his long struggles with J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson.

    In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., set the nation's sights on the city when he said, If we crack Chicago, then we crack the world. Black empowerment would take off like a prairie fire across the land. Here is the story of Harold Washington's election in 1983 as the city's first black mayor. Photographs.

    Kennedy transformed horror into hope between 1963 and 1966, with style and substance that has shaped American politics ever since.On November 22nd, 1963, Bobby Kennedy received a phone call that altered his life forever. The president, his brother, had been shot. JFK would not survive.In The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, journalist John R. Bohrer focuses in intimate and revealing detail on Bobby Kennedy's life during the three years following JFK's assassination. Torn between mourning the past and plotting his future, Bobby was placed in a sudden competition with his political enemy, Lyndon Johnson, for control of the Democratic Party. No longer the president's closest advisor, Bobby struggled to find his place within the Johnson administration, eventually deciding to leave his Cabinet post to run for the U.S. Senate, and establish an independent identity. Those overlooked years of change, from hardline Attorney General to champion of the common man, helped him develop the themes of his eventual presidential campaign.The Revolution of Robert Kennedy follows him on the journey from memorializing his brother's legacy to defining his own. John R. Bohrer's rich, insightful portrait of Robert Kennedy is biography at its best--inviting readers into the mind and heart of one of America's great leaders.

    Kennedy or his brother Robert Kennedy have woven either a tale of Camelot or a tawdry tale of ambition & reckless personal behavior. But the real story of the Kennedys in the 1960s has been submerged. "Brothers" sheds light on the inner life of the Kennedy presidency & its aftermath. Talbot, founder of Salon.com, has written a political history sure to be talked about. It begins on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, as a stricken Robert urgently demands answers about his brother's assassination. His suspicions focus on the nest of CIA spies, gangsters & Cuban exiles who'd long plotted a violent regime change in Cuba. The Kennedys had struggled to control this swamp of anti-Castro intrigue based in South Florida, but with little success. It then shifts back in time, revealing the shadowy conflicts that tore apart the Kennedy administration, pitting the president & his brother against their own national security apparatus. The brothers & a small circle of their trusted advisors -- men like Theodore Sorensen, Robert McNamara & Kenny O'Donnell, who were so close as to be regarded as family -- repeatedly thwarted Washington's warrior caste. These hard-line generals & spymasters were hell-bent on a showdown with Communism -- in Berlin, Laos, Vietnam & especially Cuba. But the Kennedys frustrated their militaristic ambitions, pushing for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. The tensions within the administration were headed for an explosive climax, when gunfire in Dallas terminated JFK's presidency. Based on over 150 interviews -- including many of the Kennedys' aging band of brothers, whose testimony here may be their final word on this political story -- as well as newly released government documents, "Brothers" reveals the untold story of those years, including JFK's efforts to keep the USA out of war & RFK's secret quest to solve his brother's murder. Bobby's subterranean search was a dangerous one & led, in part, to his own campaign in 1968 leading to his own death. RFK may have been the victim of the same plotters he suspected of killing his brother. This is history at its best -- meticulously researched, movingly told. It's a sprawling narrative about the clash of powerful men & the darker side of the Cold War -- a tale of tragic grandeur that will change understandings of the Kennedy saga.

    Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy--formerly Jack's no-holds-barred political warrior--almost lost hope. He was haunted by his brother's murder, and by the nation's seeming 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 eighty-two days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise to lead them toward a better time. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds lined up along the country's 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 America's deepest despairs--and most fiercely held dreams--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.

    Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Nasaw—the only biographer granted unrestricted access to the Joseph P. Kennedy papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy's seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War I shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal presidential adviser, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading up to and following America's entry into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste.The Patriarch is a story not only of one of the twentieth century's wealthiest and most powerful Americans, but also of the family he raised and the children who completed the journey he had begun. Of the many roles Kennedy held, that of father was most dear to him. The tragedies that befell his family marked his final years with unspeakable suffering.The Patriarch looks beyond the popularly held portrait of Kennedy to answer the many questions about his life, times, and legacy that have continued to haunt the historical record. Was Joseph P. Kennedy an appeaser and isolationist, an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer, a stock swindler, a bootlegger, and a colleague of mobsters? What was the nature of his relationship with his wife, Rose? Why did he have his daughter Rosemary lobotomized? Why did he oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and American assistance to the French in Vietnam? What was his relationship to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI? Did he push his second son into politics and then buy his elections for him? In this pioneering biography, Nasaw draws on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends to tell the life story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and a cold war, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive with him the history of the American Century.  2013 Pulitzer Prize FinalistNew York Times Ten Best Books of 2012

    The author, Richard D. Mahoney, whose father was a friend of Bobby's and an appointee of Jack's, has both the academic and political experience necessary to evaluate evidence of the Kennedys' relations with the Mafia, anti-Castro rebels, and other groups lurking in the shadows of American life. He also has a sharp eye for the brothers' differing yet complementary personalities. Jack was intellectual and cheerfully cynical, with a zest for pleasure increased by a life-threatening illness concealed from the public. He looked to passionate, partisan Bobby for bulldog-like political support and used his brother as a "moral compass" when planning his administration's actions on civil rights, the corruption of organized labor, and the containment of Communism. Their powerful father, Joseph--whose deep pockets basically bought Jack the presidency and at the same time compromised it because of Joseph's links to organized crime--looms over the brothers as the author of a Faustian bargain that may well have played a role in JFK's assassination. Mahoney's vivid, compulsively readable text offers suggestive questions rather than definitive answers, but it certainly succeeds as a bracing corrective to "America's inability to see its history as tragedy," a failure Jack and Bobby emphatically did not share. --Wendy Smith

    Perlstein's account begins with the '65 Watts riots, nine months after Johnson's landslide victory over Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed from Congress, America was more divided than ever & a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback. Between '65 & '72, America experienced a 2nd civil war. From its ashes, today's political world was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Agnew, Humphrey, McGovern, Daley & Geo Wallace but Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Chas Manson, John Lindsay & Jane Fonda. There are glimpses of Jimmy Carter, Geo H.W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry & even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove & Bill Clinton--& an unambitious young man named Geo W. Bush. Cataclysms tell the story: Blacks trashing their neighborhoods. White suburbanites wielding shotguns. Student insurgency over the Vietnam War. The assassinations of Rbt F. Kennedy & Martin Luther King. The riots at the '68 Democratic Nat'l Convention. The fissuring of the Democrats into warring factions manipulated by the dirty tricks of Nixon & his Committee to ReElect the President. Nixon pledging a dawn of nat'l unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office. Then, in 11/72, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness & resentment born of turmoil, was reelected in a landslide, not only setting the stage for his '74 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide characterizing America today. Filled with prodigious research, driven by a powerful narrative, Perlstein's account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.

    An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.

    Halberstam shows how Kennedy in his role as leader of the honorableopposition in the Democratic party became the caustic critic of the administration's ghetto policies as well as a more cautious critic of its Vietnam policy, placing himself at the exact median point of American idealism and American power. It is a fascinating story of realpolitik (the Kennedy staff wanted Mayor Daley's backing in Chicago) played for radical aims, but Halberstam demonstrates his thesis that Kennedy was the rare politician who surpassed his image. The Kennedy backers were a coalition of old eggheads, youngish radicals (Allard Lowenstein was a major booster and a radicalizer of the candidate), veterans like Larry O'Brien, and--possibly--because he was the first, candidate to visit them and make demands for them--the ghetto residents. Kennedy was a crucial bridge to the New Politics which was, like the country, in transition politically. Halberstam mourns him.

    The renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women returns with this first volume in a multigenerational history that will forever change the way America views its most famous family ...

    On the right he has been idolized by Rudy Giuliani and memorialized by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who renamed the Justice Department after him. On the left, his admirers say he represented the last hope of revitalizing the liberal tradition. But who was Robert Kennedy? To acclaimed reporter Jack Newfield, who worked closely with him during his last years, RFK was a human being far different from the myths that surrounded his name. "Part of him was soldier, priest, radical, and football coach. But he was none of these. He was a politician. His enemies said he was consumed with selfish ambition, a ruthless opportunist exploiting his brother's legend. But he was too passionate and too vulnerable ever to be the cool and confident operator his brother was." In this haunting and memorable portrait we see what kind of man died when Robert Kennedy was shot. And what kind of leader America lost.