Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Kennedy ran his brother's campaigns, served as his attorney general, and was shot in a hotel kitchen five years after him while running for the presidency himself. He was the seventh of nine children, worked as counsel to Senate committees in the 1950s - including, early and briefly, for Joseph McCarthy, which he later regretted - and made his name pursuing organised crime in the Teamsters, questioning Jimmy Hoffa in televised hearings. His appointment as attorney general in 1961 at thirty-five was open nepotism and he was the most consequential holder of the office in the century. He sent federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders, forced the integration of the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and drafted what became the Civil Rights Act, while also authorising the FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King that Hoover wanted. During the Cuban missile crisis he argued against the air strike the joint chiefs demanded and opened the back channel to the Soviet ambassador that produced the settlement. After Dallas he was unreachable with grief for months, then took a Senate seat in New York and moved steadily left: Appalachian poverty, the Mississippi Delta, migrant farm workers, and eventually against the war his brother had escalated. He announced for the presidency in March 1968 and told a crowd in Indianapolis that King had been killed that evening, quoting Aeschylus from memory; the city did not riot when many others did. He won the California primary on 5 June and was shot leaving the ballroom. He was forty-two. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem, gave Kennedy's support for supplying fighter aircraft to Israel as his motive, and the date - a year to the day after the Six-Day War began - as the reason for choosing it. He remains in prison. The funeral train from New York to Washington took eight hours because of the crowds standing along the track.

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