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"Why do people hate me so?" Kennedy asked New York Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff in 1965. Bobby seems to have been honestly bewildered by this question up to the moment of the assassination that he expected ("Sooner or later," he told one friend, "sooner or later"). Schlesinger's Manichaean fable of a lonely R.F.K. crossing swords with the forces of darkness does not fully explain the passions that this remarkable politician stirred.
For one thing, he spent his awkward years in full public view. His father's influence landed him a job in his mid-20s as an assistant counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Then and during a later stint as the relentless harrower of Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby's rough image was frozen forever in many minds: an Irish Torquemada with a face like a fist and a voice out of Warner Bros, cartoons. He ran J.F.K.'s 1960 campaign in a manner that suggested, reasonably enough, that winning mattered most. As an activist Attorney General with a brother in the White House, he inspired more fear.
His inherited wealth and clannish up bringing were mixed blessings. His ad vantages could have cut him off from the world; instead, they helped him to perceive the miseries of those at the oppo site end of the social spectrum. His sympathy for the wretched of the earth was visceral. But he had undisguised patrician contempt for the middle class, those who hankered after comforts he took for granted and who felt threatened by the prospect of militant poor. Significantly, Kennedy's most bitter political enemies were men, like L.B.J., who had scrambled up from poor or straitened childhoods.
Schlesinger does not speculate much on what kind of President R.F.K. would have made. Given what is now known about the nosedive of the U.S. economy, it seems fair to wonder whether Bobby, after 1969, could have possibly satisfied the expectations he had raised. That he was cut down in mid-struggle remains an abiding American tragedy. At its eloquent best, Robert Kennedy and His Times movingly re-creates the way it was, and the way it seemed to be to those who loved him.
—Paul Gray