| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. By Joseph A. Palermo. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. xviii, 349 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-231-12068-0.)

Robert F. Kennedy was only forty-two years old when he was assassinated in 1968. Despite the brevity of his life and career, he remains a subject of considerable scrutiny, inspiring no fewer than eight major books in just the past four years. The latest contribution is Joseph A. Palermo's thoroughly researched, well-crafted study of RFK's three-year career in the United States Senate. 1

Palermo's central thesis is that RFK underwent a profound transformation during his Senate career, evolving from a well-meaning but conventional liberal to a political populist deeply committed to social change. From 1965 through 1968, the Vietnam War and civil rights violence shattered the assumptions of the liberal consensus and posed new challenges to Democrats trying to revive liberalism. By the time of the Tet Offensive early in 1968, the debate over Vietnam had fully ruptured the Democratic party. As a junior senator from New York, Kennedy reevaluated his own set of assumptions and, as a former adviser in his brother's administration, confessed duplicity in formulating policies that contributed to the war. Receiving a steady flood of advice from peace advocates, Kennedy evolved from a cautious, thoughtful critic of President Lyndon B. Johnson's foreign policies to a pragmatic idealist and the war's strongest liberal opponent. On the domestic front, he completed a similar conversion in the areas of poverty and civil rights, eventually becoming the inheritor of Martin Luther King's legacy. . . .

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