The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America

“Piercing and painstakingly researched, it’s political history written right.”—New York magazine

The Last Campaign is Thurston Clarke’s bestselling, definitive account of Robert Kennedy’s exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for president: it is a revelatory, resonant, vivid, and moving narrative history.

After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy—formerly Jack’s no-holds-barred political warrior—had almost lost hope. He was haunted by his brother’s murder, and by the nation’s seeming inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country’s pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed eighty-two days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy’s promise to lead them toward a better time.

With new research, interviews, and an intimate sense of Kennedy, The Last Campaign goes right to the heart of America’s deepest despairs—and most fiercely held dreams—and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times.