He drew to his cause a wider range of Americans than nearly anyone ever had or has since. That hidden history, however, is precisely what made an RFK presidency more promising than even his boosters realized at the time of his death. It would ensure him acolytes whose views were so antithetical to his leftist fan base that the two groups could neither talk to nor tolerate one another. His steely conservatism made him an idol to a young Rudolph Giuliani and younger Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove. Even guerrilla warfare was in his toolkit: Bobby masterminded cloak-and-dagger operations against Communist Cuba that included blowing up railroad bridges, sabotaging crops, and plotting the elimination of President Fidel Castro. That younger RFK was a bare-knuckled political operative who masterminded his brother’s whatever-it-takes bids for senator and president.Īs attorney general, Kennedy okayed FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he never trusted or liked. Our favorite liberal was nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father and started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting, table-thumping Senator Joseph McCarthy. While history remembers Bobby Kennedy as he was in that 1968 crusade for president-a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight-there was an earlier Bobby whom few recall.

His capacity to reach across divisions of race and class and span ideologies is no accident.

Bobby kennedy making of a liberal icon