The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America | Thurston Clarke

The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America | Thurston Clarke | What politics should be about

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The Last Campaign:...

	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 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Makes RFK's Loss Sting Even More

Unlike most Kennedy books which show the faults of the brothers and the family at large, this excellent book shows a man who campaigned for president in manner unheard of before and unlikely to be done again. Although Bobby Kennedy is known for hanging out with the glamour crowd, he spent he took his quest to the inner-city ghetto, the Indian reservations and the mining towns. He confronted the well-off and challenged colllege students. He formed an unlikely colition of angry white workers and black millitants. He went into the ghettos of Indianapolis on the night of the King assasination and may have prevented a dangerous riot. If he would have gotten the Democratic nod for president, he quite possibly (unless the Nixon camp could launch a successful smear campaign against him) could have become our greatest president. Hats off to Thurston Clarke!

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What politics should be about

One of the best campaign books I have ever read. As he did in "Ask Not," Thurston Clark brings out the back-story of a great moment in history. In this case, RFK's decision to run for president, despite his many misgivings about doing so. It chronicles his determination to run the way he wanted to - not the ways the polls and pols told him to run. Ultimately, though, "The Last Campaign" shows us what a real leader looks like and ought to behave. With his characteristic bluntness, RFK didn't shirk from reminding people that in a democracy, everyone is responsible for the country's actions. One cannot blame Washington for their problems without holding themselves just as accountable. Sadly, as Clark cites in the book, no politician from any party could get away with such an attitude today.

A great book about a great man.

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Important for America's youth

"The Last Campaign" by Thurston Clarke is the excellenly-written story of Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. While many older Americans--including Tom Brokaw, who's praise can be found on the book's back cover--have called Clarke's study of Kennedy's campaign the first book to truly 'bring them back' to 1968, I think that Clarke's book is more important for younger readers. As a college student myself, I knew nothing of the chaos of the 1960s except what I had learned in a classroom and seen in movies and on poorly-produced television shows. In my previous encounters with media dealing with the 1960s, no document ever made me feel anything about the subject except fascination, until I read Clarke's book. Clarke's writing about RFK's '68 campaign evokes in its readers all of the emotions--excitement, fear, joy, anger, sadness--that the 1960s produced in those Americans who lived through them. In the end, Clarke's story is a description of an ideal political candidate, one who said what needed to be said even when it wasn't prescient, and who treated every American as his brother. That is ultimately something that America's youth need to experience, not so that they know the way things were in the 1960s, but so that they can understand what is possible today.

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The Last Campaign

Enjoyed this a lot, gave me a great insight to a side of RFK I'd never known about. So much so that I had some problems that he really behaved as portrayed during this campaign. Very hard to imagine him crying openly at the sight of poor children and spontaneously going over and hugging some of them. But on the other hand, having 9 or 10 of his own,guess that side of him could come to the surface. Guess the residue of all the tough portrayals of him as Attorney General linger on. If all of this is true and accurate, makes me enormously sad that he didn't live to become President as it certainly seemed that's where he was definitely headed.

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

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