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

First off this is an excellent profile of the hectic RFK campaign in 1968. It does a wonderful job of expressing the frenetic pace of the campaign and how it inspired hope in so many people. The book does a wonderful job at trying to inspire in the reader the sense of optimism that RFK's campaign inspired in so many groups.

The one great weakness of the book is that it often descends into raising Kennedy to almost a sainthood. It is very obvious that the author admires RFK and thinks he would have made a great president. That maybe but it does cloud the author's work and makes this almost as much of a sports like bio then a work like history.

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.

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.

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.

"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.