Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

About this book

New York Times bestselling author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend Larry Tye was given unprecedented access by the Kennedy family to write this in-depth, vibrant and editorially independent biography. History remembers Robert F. 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.