Very good but still lacking period piece

books:

	• The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America Thurston Clarke Henry Holt and Co., 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great book!

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time! It is very personal and inspiring. It is like being on the campaign trial with Robert Kennedy. I would strongly reccomend this book to anyone interested in american politcs.

Valuabe insight on Kennedy's campaign

I'm not American, nor was I alive when RFK was murdured, but this book made me travel along with all the Kennedy entourage during those 82 days of campaign (the part that described the death, and aftermath, of Martin Luther King made me feel all the emotion people must have felt), and more that that, gave me the precise picture of what RFK wanted to America, in one word, his philosophy. Even if you have already read more about RFK will not be disapointed.

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Asking 'why Not

If I were rating Bobby, there aren't enough stars in the heavens to measure how I feel about him. I was 17 when he died, and I don't think I have taken politics seriously since. Even the left of center Democrats I usually agree with on policy seem pale, scheming elitists compared to Bobby. So do the other Kennedys actually.

Someone, I think Jack Newfield, has argued that Bobby Kennedy's murder was the most tragic event of the 1960s. That if you could go back in time and stop only one of the three murders that defined the decade, it would be Bobby, because he is the one who was still growing, whose work was not nearly complete already. He seems to be the one, who, had he lived, would have really been an agent for change.

The book however, is slight, more a compilation of admiring stories than anything else. Granted the book is a look at a very brief part of Bobby's life and not a full scale biography, but the author Thurston Clark does not go into much about Kennedy's past, and what set him on that road to the Ambassador Hotel.

He also assumes thoughout that had Kennedy lived he would have been elected president. I doubt it, the old machine politics still ruled. The question it seems to me, is how much more vigorous the anti-movement would have been with Bobby as part of it, possibly forcing Humphrey or Nixon to end the Vietnam war quicker, to even to act more aggressively against poverty and hunger in America.

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Very good but still lacking period piece

First off this is an excellent profile of the hectic RFK campaign in 1968. It does a wonderful job of expressing the frenetic pace of the campaign and how it inspired hope in so many people. The book does a wonderful job at trying to inspire in the reader the sense of optimism that RFK's campaign inspired in so many groups.

The one great weakness of the book is that it often descends into raising Kennedy to almost a sainthood. It is very obvious that the author admires RFK and thinks he would have made a great president. That maybe but it does cloud the author's work and makes this almost as much of a sports like bio then a work like history.

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Common Presidential Goals!

The author does a good job of sharing the essence of Bobby Kennedy; particularly while he was running for the nomination to be president. I had forgotten his focus on the poor and minority; "The least of these" so to speak.

I felt that the opening chapter or Forward was a good summary of his attitude and focus. I was reminded of Barak Obama when he first began his campaign. Obama needs to get back to that, to inspiring us!

I am a veteran of the Korean Police Action from 1950 to 1954. Two of my sons were in the service during the Vietnam fiasco, so much of this book was very familiar to me as a father. Two other sons were planning to go to Canada when the war was stopped. I compare the Iraq involvement with our involvement in Vietnam. This book is a good review for all of us.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The definitive account of Robert Kennedy?s exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for president?a revelatory history that is especially resonant now

After John F. 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.

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