The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy - David Halberstam

A description of Robert Kennedy's fatal 1968 presidential run.

Anti war lobbiests initial pleading with Kennedy to run in 67, his refusal to run against a sitting Democractic president Johnson (desipite their mutual dislike) and their turning to Eugene, Clean Gene, McCarthy to run as the anti-war democrat.

After Johnson shock narrow victory over McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy enters the race at a significant disadvantage (the powerful anti-war movement having flocked around McCarthy and seeing Kennedy as a political opportunist).

The book follows the campaign, state by state, with a personal insight into the candidate and the day to day successes, failures and trials of running for president. The book ends abruptly after the win in the California primary with barely a reference to Kennedy's assasination.

The last sentence:

"Then he descended to acknowledge his victory, to talk about the violence and the divisiveness, and to let a nation discover in his death what it had never understood or believed about him during his life."

It feels like the book was being writen to describe a sitting president's road to office, was eerily cut short with Kennedy's death and published without modification.

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