With victory in the California Primary election, Robert F Kennedy became a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. The crush of people listening to his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June 1968 – many of them young and many of them Black – was testament to the spark of hope he had ignited and the tremors of change rumbling beneath the political status quo. To the delight of supporters and the despair of opponents the prospect of another, very different, Kennedy in the White House was now one step closer.
What skills and experience would he have brought to his presidency? Was he in his brother’s shadow?
Robert Kennedy was President John Kennedy’s most powerful political ‘consigliere’. As attorney general – an office he used to pursue his long-standing campaign against organised crime – his influence stretched across all foreign and domestic policy. He was, effectively, his brother’s deputy and the
