When hope lived

FORTY years ago this week, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary. One moment he was thanking a standing-room crowd, the next he was sprawled in a hotel pantry, blood leaking from the back of his head where a .22-caliber bullet had penetrated his skull. A few feet away, a group of Kennedy supporters -- George Plimpton, former pro football player Rosey Grier, Olympian Rafer Johnson -- wrestled with the shooter, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. "Hold him! Hold him!" radio journalist Andy West cried into his tape recorder. "We don't want another Oswald."

Since then, Kennedy has become a symbol, invoked by politicians at their convenience, as when President Clinton quoted him at the signing ceremony for "a welfare reform act that, among other things, cut food stamps to poor children," Thurston Clarke writes in "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America." Even his death has taken on a metaphoric value; just look at the recent furor over remarks by another Clinton, who last month declared, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California" as justification for staying in the Democratic race.

Yet what's important is not how Kennedy died or what he symbolized but the more complex story of who he was. "Bobby Kennedy was no saint," Clarke notes. "He had worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1954 and retained an affection for McCarthy longer than was seemly. . . . [But] JFK adviser Ted Sorensen . . . believed that by 1968 he had transformed himself, abandoning his hard line on the Cold War, repudiating the Vietnam War, and becoming deeply troubled by poverty and racial injustice."

"The Last Campaign" traces the outcome of this transformation, to re-create the final, frenzied 2 1/2 months of Kennedy's life. Beginning with his declaration on March 16, 1968, that he was running for president and ending with those gunshots at the Ambassador, it's smart and well-reported, a vivid portrait of a politician coming to a moral reckoning.

Such a process, Clarke suggests, began in the wake of JFK's assassination, an event that would deepen his brother's sense of empathy. In 1966, Kennedy picketed with Cesar Chavez; a year later, on the TV news show "Face the Nation," he made his first public statement against the Vietnam War.