Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Francis Kennedy was born November 20, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children — the one his father, preoccupied with his two eldest sons, treated for years as something close to an afterthought. He moved through boarding schools, plus a stretch in London while his father served as ambassador, and later described himself as "very awkward," always starting over with new friends. At Milton Academy the headmaster judged him "quiet and shy, but not outstanding," which didn't stop him working harder than almost anyone at sports and grades. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943, finished Harvard in 1948, and went to law school at Virginia, graduating 56th of 125 in 1951 — a record that gave no hint of what came next.

Kennedy's public life — the ruthless Attorney General who broke with his own caution to enforce civil rights, the changed man who emerged from his brother's assassination, the 1968 campaign that reached across lines of race and class, the Indianapolis speech the night King was killed, and the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel that ended it — is BriefHistory's story, and it is told there in full. What follows here is the Kennedy before all of that: the overlooked seventh child, the foreign correspondent, and the young lawyer who cut his teeth working for Joseph McCarthy.

Before he was the Attorney General who prosecuted the South's racial violence, and before he was the candidate who could work a Black church as fluently as a white union hall, the twenty-six-year-old Kennedy spent seven months in 1953 as a staff lawyer on Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee, chasing Communists at the height of the Red Scare — a chapter he rarely discussed once his politics moved. A decade later, as Attorney General, he authorized a limited, month-long FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King Jr., meant to check Communist influence in the civil rights movement; Hoover extended it nearly three years and used the material against King. Kennedy came to regret the order, though he never fully explained it. Neither fact disappears in the man who later stood on the flatbed truck in Indianapolis.

Kennedy's funeral train left New York on June 8, 1968, and took eight hours to cover ground planners had expected to take four, slowed by more than a million people along the tracks. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a northbound train on the opposite track struck and killed two onlookers; one had just thrown her three-year-old grandchild to strangers on the platform. Kennedy was buried that night near his brother John at Arlington, the cemetery's first burial ever held after dark. The Kennedy name stayed in politics for decades, through his brother Ted and then his own children — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer turned vaccine skeptic confirmed in 2025 as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Robert F. Kennedy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations staff other
  Assistant counsel under Senator Joseph McCarthy, December 1952 to July 1953 1953
• Get Hoffa campaign other
  Senate Rackets Committee chief counsel pursuing Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa 1957
• The Enemy Within book
  His account of labor racketeering investigations 1960
• 1968 presidential campaign other
  Entered the Democratic race March 16, 1968; won California primary June 4 1968

• November 20, 1925 aged 0 Born in Brookline, Massachusetts
• 1948 aged ~23 Graduates Harvard University
• June 17, 1950 aged 24 Marries Ethel Skakel
• 1953 aged ~28 Serves as assistant counsel on Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee
• January 1961 aged 35 Becomes U.S. Attorney General under his brother John
• October 1963 aged 37 Authorizes limited FBI wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr.
• March 16, 1968 aged 42 Declares his candidacy for president
• June 5, 1968 aged 42 Shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles Died the next morning, June 6.
• June 8, 1968 aged 42 Buried at Arlington National Cemetery The first burial the cemetery had ever held at night.

• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. worked for
• César Chávez 1927–1993
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union. ally of
• Dolores Huerta b. 1930
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. introduced by
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. sister-in-law of
• Robert McNamara 1916–2009
  Secretary of Defense who applied systems analysis to the Pentagon and escalated the Vietnam War. colleague of