Chapter 1

FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE NEW FRONTIER:
POSTWAR PROSPERITY, POVERTY, AND THE KENNEDYS

Poverty was a central issue in American politics throughout much of Robert Kennedy’s youth. His childhood was, however, famously insulated from the suffering that millions of Americans endured in the Great Depression. His wealthy and politically powerful family was on display for ordinary Americans when Franklin Roosevelt appointed his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the first Irish American U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in 1937. Readers of popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal learned of the “Nine Kennedys and How They Grew” and the “Nine Young U.S. Ambassadors.” The story of the family patriarch, the second-generation Boston Irish immigrant who became a millionaire and raised his children to move in the elite strata of American life, soon became part of the nation’s folklore.

Chapter 2

AT THE FULCRUM OF THE MOVEMENT:
DECIDING TIME

America at the dawn of the rumbling upheaval of the 1960s, many observers have noted, looked no different from the seemingly conformist, carefree country of the 1950s. Cultural styles, social mores, even the parameters of the mainstream political spectrum—what has been called the postwar liberal consensus—remained static upon John Kennedy’s ascent to the White House.1 Increasingly, however, a central element of the divide that would rend the fabric of the nation was becoming manifest. The United States was on the verge of something approaching a second civil war, and strange, sporadic new kinds of skirmishes were multiplying, erupting on such mundane battlefields as cafeterias, public beaches, and Greyhound buses.2 Nonviolent offensives were led by young African Americans, and their efforts met with stiff resistance and sometimes bloody reprisals. The civil rights movement entered a new phase in the first years of the decade, as these protesters wrested command on the front lines of the struggle away from established organizations. In the eyes of these emerging grassroots leaders, it was deciding time. At mass meetings the Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) resuscitated the labor anthem of Kentuckian Florence Reece, soulfully importuning, “Which Side Are You on Boy, Which Side Are You On?”

Chapter 3

POVERTY AND JUSTICE:
DEFINING A FEDERAL ROLE

Developments in the multifaceted struggle for civil rights would play an important role in deepening Robert Kennedy’s awareness of poverty in America. The attorney general would encounter the problem in a number of significant ways, however, some of which were more clearly linked to the traditional jurisdiction of the Justice Department than others. Because of his relationship to the president, unique not only among attorneys general but also among modern presidential advisers generally—with perhaps only Harry Hopkins and Karl Rove holding similar levels of influence—Robert Kennedy ranged far afield from the conventional domain of Justice Department chief, playing a key role in foreign policy debates and serving as both the president’s top political strategist and administration ombudsman.1 It was not an issue with which the president’s brother was widely identified at this stage in his career, but poverty assumed a steadily increasing importance in many of his activities. Kennedy’s experiences as attorney general would be pivotal to both his preliminary diagnosis of the problem and his nascent commitment to the issue. His interest and his initiatives at the Justice Department elevated the prominence of poverty in the administration’s policy debates, with consequences that would extend beyond his brother’s presidency.

Chapter 4

TROUBLES AND TRIALS:
FROM DALLAS TO WATTS

For his remaining nine months at the Justice Department and through most of his first year in the Senate, Robert Kennedy was in search of direction. He had built his life around his brother’s presidency, and his death left him rudderless and downcast. Through a period beginning and ending with two of the most stunning bursts of violence in the second half of the twentieth century— the assassination in Dallas and the Watts uprising of August 1965—Robert Kennedy was mired in a dark night of both his personal and his political soul. He considered a number of options, including leaving public life. Once he decided to stay in politics, Kennedy floated trial balloons about serving in any of several prominent posts, including the vice presidency and the ambassadorship to South Vietnam. One constant through this period of uncertainty was his involvement with the issue of poverty. Its growing prominence would ultimately lead him to a new role in American political life.

Chapter 5

THE EDUCATION OF A SENATOR:
SEEKING A "GREATER SOCIETY"

The uprising in Watts shocked the nation, and leaders from across the social and political spectrum registered their opinions on the conflagration. Martin Luther King Jr. attributed the explosion to the kindling of “hunger and degradation . . . two diseases not uncommon to Negroes in other parts of America.” An angry Dwight Eisenhower was roused from retirement to proclaim that he “didn’t care what the condition of these people was. Those who started this . . . made the conditions far worse.” The Reverend Billy Graham was confident that events were “definitely influenced by the communists” and worried that next time it would take “every military man in the country to,” in Graham’s words, “ease the tension.” Adam Clayton Powell declared that the country had already seen the “Negro revolt” and was now witnessing “the revolt of the poor.”

Chapter 6

"BORN IN A STORM":
THE BEDFORD-STUYVESANT EXPERIMENT

By late 1966 community leaders in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn were even more anxious than might have been expected after a year of escalating urban violence nationwide. The cause of their unease was the announced intention of their junior U.S. senator to implement a plan for the revitalization of their community. “They were still gun-shy,” Civil Court judge Thomas R. Jones later reflected, “not sure either of how long our allies would stay with us, or where this [plan] was going,. . . or who the money would come from, or a number of things. . . . I knew little, they knew less.” In short, the Bedford-Stuyvesant project was “born in a storm.”

Soon after he delivered his January 1966 urban development speeches, Robert Kennedy directed assistants Adam Walinsky and Thomas Johnston to shape an initiative based on them. When Kennedy visited Bedford- Stuyvesant two weeks later, Walinsky contended, the New York senator was there with a purpose, and his staff expected rough treatment from community leaders at a meeting held at the local YMCA. “He was looking around,” Walinsky recalled, for a place to enact his community development plan. “And that’s why we took him out there,” the acerbic aide said. “So of course the liturgy in Bed-Stuy is that, you know, . . . ‘We’re tired, we want action, blah, blah, blah,’ that was all planned. [At least] in our minds.’”

Chapter 7

"IT BECAME HIS ISSUE":
FIGHTING FOR THE WAR ON POVERTY

Nineteen sixty-six was a Republican year, as the GOP gained forty-seven House seats, three Senate seats, and eight statehouses. With the nation’s social divide widening and the center of the political spectrum moving to the right, two developments provide interesting illustrations of the changing political landscape. In New York City, a civilian police review board recently launched by liberal mayor John Lindsay was eliminated by an overwhelming referendum vote. Despite support from every major state official except Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, the board, designed to provide a check on multiplying concerns about police brutality against African Americans and Latinos, was routed in the all-white districts of the city, and the far higher turnout in those areas than in minority precincts sealed its fate. In October, James Meredith, one of the most powerful national symbols of integration, now pronounced it “another way of effecting white superiority.” Meredith, recently wounded in a sniper attack, called instead for the freedom of blacks to remain apart from white America, and even appreciatively noted George Wallace’s salesmanship on behalf of racial separatism. Meredith declared the Alabama governor “second only to Robert F. Kennedy in being the most astute politician in the country.”

Chapter 8

"YOU CAN’T DENY THESE PEOPLE THE PRESIDENCY":
THE 1968 CAMPAIGN

While it seemed highly unlikely to most observers in the fall of 1967 that any Democrat would be able to wrest the nomination away from the incumbent president, liberal activist Allard Lowenstein had been at work organizing a “Dump Johnson” movement and targeted Kennedy as the candidate to lead the charge. Kennedy was sympathetic but thought the proposition unrealistic. In late September, Lowenstein, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others met at Kennedy’s suburban Virginia home to discuss the election. Kennedy contended that if he were the first announced candidate, the campaign would be deemed personal. “No one would believe I was doing it because of how I felt about Vietnam and poor people,” Kennedy said.