Robert F. Kennedy Biography

Robert F. Kennedy was a candidate for U.S. president when he was assassinated in 1968. His death was doubly shocking because his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, had also been assassinated five years earlier.

Robert Kennedy was the seventh of nine children of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. He left Harvard to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war he completed his degree at Harvard in 1948, then earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951. Later in the 1950s he was counsel to a U.S. Senate committee investigating labor unions, leading to his well-known feud with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.

But Kennedy’s political career is more closely associated with his brother, John; he managed JFK’s successful campaigns for the U.S. Senate (1952) and the presidency (1960), and then served as Attorney General in the JFK administration.

After his brother’s 1963 assassination, Robert Kennedy served briefly with the Lyndon Johnson administration, then successfully ran for senator from New York. (This win was often recalled in 2000 when another New York “outsider,” Hillary Clinton, similarly won a senate race there.)

In early 1968, Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. He was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after delivering a speech to supporters upon winning the California primary. He died early the next morning. Kennedy’s book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis was published posthumously in 1969.