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In the long shadows cast by his glamorous, extraverted older brothers and sisters, Bobby was all but overwhelmed. He was naturally shy, physically slight and never much of a student, but he compensated with grim determination to succeed. Recalls a Milton Academy classmate: "It was much tougher in school for him than the others—socially, in football, with studies." In the closing months of the war, Second Class Seaman Kennedy served aboard the newly commissioned destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (named for his brother, who died in an airplane explosion over the English Channel). But though Joe died for his country in Europe, and Jack's heroism in the Solomons became a great wartime tale of the South Pacific, Bobby's naval service consisted of six dismal months in the Caribbean, spent mostly scraping paint, with no sign of the enemy.
At Harvard after the war, admits Bobby, "I led a rather relaxed life." His driving energies were focused almost entirely on football, and he made the varsity team despite his wiry physique (5 ft. 10 in., 165 Ibs.).
Days of Glory. After college Bobby drifted. As a correspondent for the Boston Post, he covered the Arab-Israeli war and the Berlin airlift. He won his law degree at the University of Virginia, entered Government service as a junior attorney for the Justice Department, where one of his first cases was the Owen Lattimore investigation. In 1950 he married Ethel Skakel, a Greenwich, Conn, girl he had met on a college ski trip (who has turned into a first-rate political campaigner). In 1952 Bobby joined the legal staff of Joe McCarthy's Senate Investigations Subcommittee. A diligent worker, he uncovered a headline-getting scandal involving British merchant ships carrying supplies to Red China during the Korean war. The "slipshod" investigations of the committee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, seemed just as scandalous to Bobby, and he resigned from the committee staff. But he was soon back on the subcommittee as the Democrats' minority counsel. After the Democrats won the Senate in 1954, Bob Kennedy took over as the subcommittee's chief counsel.
Bobby's days of glory began in 1958, when he was appointed counsel for the Senate labor rackets committee. In his investigations of corruption in organized labor, he was indefatigable, drove himself (and his staff) mercilessly through high-pressure, 16-hour days that stretched out over two years. On television screens, his persistent grilling of the labor hoods absorbed the nation, and for a time Bobby overshadowed his big brother as a national figure. "Everyone likes to feel he's done something," says Jack. "Bobby felt submerged, and then he came along with this labor investigation."