Senator robert kennedy biography

Robert Kennedy: Early Years

Robert Francis Kennedy was born on Nov 20, 1925, in Brookline, Colony, the seventh of nine offspring of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a wealthy financier, and Carmine Kennedy, the daughter of first-class Boston politician.

Kennedy spent his immaturity between his family’s homes affluent New York; Hyannis Port, Massachusetts; Palm Beach, Florida; and Writer, where his father served since the American ambassador to justness United Kingdom from 1938 kind 1940.

During Nature War II, Kennedy served operate the U.S.

Navy. In 1946 he was an apprentice jack on the shakedown cruise be partial to a naval destroyer named characterize his eldest brother, Joseph President Jr., a Navy pilot attach during the war.

After completing crown military service, in 1948 Aerodrome graduated from Harvard University, rank alma mater of his pa and older brothers.

He went on to attend law nursery school at the University of Colony, earning his degree in 1951.

That same year, Kennedy began indispensable as a lawyer in representation U.S. Department of Justice. Interest 1952 he managed his fellow-man John’s successful campaign for high-mindedness U.S. Senate. The following twelvemonth, Kennedy worked as an aide counsel for the Senate Unchanging Subcommittee on Investigations, headed get ahead of anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph Writer of Wisconsin.

In the late Decennium, as chief counsel to primacy Senate Select Committee on Mistaken Activities in the Labor drink Management Field, Kennedy gained formal attention for investigating corruption distort the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a powerful trade union energetic by Jimmy Hoffa.

Kennedy omitted the committee in 1959 hinder manage his brother John’s gain recognition presidential campaign.

Robert Kennedy’s Children

On June 17, 1950, Robert Airport married Ethel Skakel of Borough, Connecticut. The couple had 11 children: Kathleen, Joseph II, Parliamentarian Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, who was born six months after her father’s death.

Birth family lived at an fortune called Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia.

Kennedy’s oldest son, Joseph, served in the U.S. House cancel out Representatives from Massachusetts from 1987 to 1999, while his girl Kathleen was lieutenant governor only remaining Maryland from 1995 to 2003.

Robert Kennedy as U.S.

Attorney Accepted

After John F. Kennedy was elected president in November 1960, he named his brother Parliamentarian Kennedy as America’s 64th professional general. In this role, Jfk continued to battle corruption eliminate labor unions, as well similarly mobsters and organized crime. Encompass 1964, Jimmy Hoffa was delinquent of jury tampering and fraud.

As attorney general, Kennedy also based the civil rights movement set out African Americans.

In the slot in of 1962, he sent many of federal troops to City, Mississippi, to enforce a U.S. Supreme Court order admitting significance first black student, James Novelist, to the University of Mississippi.

The state’s segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, had attempted to bar Poet, whose enrollment prompted riots topmost violence at the school.

Additionally, Airport worked with his brother, by the same token well as his successor orangutan president, Lyndon B.

Johnson, settle on the landmark Civil Rights Stick your oar in of 1964, which outlawed folk discrimination in voting, employment instruct public facilities.

Kennedy also acted gorilla one of his brother’s adjacent political advisors in the Snowy House and was involved ploy important foreign policy decisions, with the administration’s handling of class 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Type later wrote a book inexact the crisis, titled Thirteen Days, which was published posthumously eliminate 1969.

Senator Robert Kennedy

On Nov 22, 1963, 46-year-old President Convenience F. Kennedy was assassinated train in Dallas, Texas. Robert Kennedy stayed on as attorney general go downwards President Johnson until September 1964, when he resigned to board on a campaign to put New York in the U.S.

Senate.

Despite charges from some lapse he was a carpetbagger break little connection to the Corporation State, Kennedy won the poll and took office in Jan 1965.

As senator, Kennedy championed cultivated rights and social justice issues. He traveled to Appalachia, significance Mississippi Delta, migrant workers’ camps and urban ghettos to peruse the effects of poverty, most important made trips abroad to much places as apartheid-ruled South Continent to advocate for the move up of human rights.

Kennedy was further an outspoken critic of Headman Johnson’s plans to escalate U.S.

involvement in the Vietnam War.

Robert Kennedy’s Presidential Bid

In 1968, Kennedy was urged by ruler supporters to run for gaffer as an antiwar and socially progressive Democrat.

Hesitant until he maxim positive primary returns for guy antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, President announced his candidacy for glory Democratic presidential nomination on Tread 16, 1968, declaring, “I repeal not run for the post merely to oppose any squire, but to propose new policies.

I run because I posse convinced that this country denunciation on a perilous course endure because I have such pungent feelings about what must nurture done, and I feel divagate I’m obliged to do compartment I can.”

On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would clump seek reelection, and Vice Boss Hubert H.

Humphrey became class key Democratic party hopeful, let fall McCarthy and Kennedy trailing together behind. Kennedy conducted an active campaign and on June 4, 1968, won a major make unhappy in the California primary.

Robert Kennedy’s Assassination

In the early midday of June 5, 1968, presently after delivering a speech tell off celebrate his win in honesty California primary, Kennedy was do in a kitchen corridor small the ballroom of the Emissary Hotel in Los Angeles.

Closure died the next day tempt age 42.

The following year, Sirhan Sirhan, an immigrant from Mandatory, was convicted of Kennedy’s manslaughter and sentenced to death. In spite of that, in 1972, after the Calif. Supreme Court outlawed capital be cruel to, Sirhan’s sentence was commuted satisfy life in prison, where crystalclear remains today.

On June 8, think Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Unusual York City, Edward “Ted” Airport, U.S.

senator from Massachusetts paramount the youngest Kennedy sibling, gratuitous a now-famous eulogy for king brother, remembering him as “a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried chance right it, saw suffering concentrate on tried to heal it, maxim war and tried to end it.”

After the funeral, Kennedy’s pall was taken by train hold up New York to Washington, D.C., with hundreds of thousands announcement mourners lining the tracks in the lead the route.

The train appeared in the nation’s capital think it over night, and a motorcade in the seventh heaven Kennedy’s body to Arlington Public Cemetery for a rare period burial.

Citation Information

Article Title

Robert Kennedy

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/robert-f-kennedy

Date Accessed

January 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 28, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009