About this item
From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel comes an in-depth, vibrant, and measured biography about the most complex and controversial member of the Kennedy family. History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure. To capture the full arc of his subject's life, Tye draws on unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files, and fifty-eight boxes of papers that had been under lock and key for the past forty years. He conducted hundreds of interviews with RFK intimates - including Bobby's widow, Ethel, his sister Jean, and his aide John Siegenthaler - many of whom have never spoken to another biographer. Tye's determination to sift through the tangle of often contradictory opinions means that Bobby Kennedy will stand as the definitive one-volume biography of a man much beloved, but just as often misunderstood. Bobby Kennedy's transformation from cold warrior to fiery liberal is a profoundly moving personal story that also offers a lens onto two of the most chaotic and confounding decades of twentieth-century American history. The first half of RFK's career underlines what the country was like in the era of Eisenhower, while his last years as a champion of the underclass reflect the seismic shifts wrought by the 1960s. Nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father, Bobby Kennedy began his public life as counsel to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. He ended it with a noble campaign to unite working-class whites with poor blacks and Latinos in an electoral coalition that seemed poised to redraw the face of presidential politics. Along the way, he turned up at the center of every event that mattered, from the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis to race riots and Vietnam. Bare-knuckle operative, cynical White House insider, romantic visionary - Bobby Kennedy was all of these things at one time or another, and each of these aspects of his personality emerges in the pages of this powerful and perceptive new biography.Advance praise for Bobby Kennedy"It is difficult to envision anyone getting Robert F. Kennedy more right than biographer Tye does in this superb book. Tye beautifully captures Kennedy's contradictions, his emergence from under the hard-to-like father to whom he remained forever loyal, and his growth into a public figure killed by an assassin's bullet." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This is not just another Bobby Kennedy book. It is the definitive biography of one of America's most compelling political figures. Tye's book rests on prodigious and original research including rare, on-the-record interviews with Bobby's widow, Ethel, who confesses that seeing Bobby for the first time was like meeting George Clooney." - Roger Mudd, winner of the Peabody Award and former co-anchor of NBC Nightly News"Robert Kennedy led one of the great unfinished lives in American history. With skill and verve, Tye has written a fascinating account of a transformative figure." - Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power "This biography will appeal not only to those wanting a portrait of a dynamic idealist, but also to those seeking to understand the emotions of the times in which he lived." - Henry A. Kissinger
About the Author
Larry Tye was a longtime journalist -- at the Boston Globe, Anniston (AL) Star, and Louisville Courier-Journal -- and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Tye's books have ranged from biographies of PR pioneer Edward L. Bernays, Negro Leagues legend Satchel Paige, and Superman, to explorations of the Jewish diaspora, the Pullman porters, and ECT, the most stigmatized treatment in medicine. Tye runs a Boston-based fellowship program for health reporters.
