| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James W. Hilty. Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 642. $34.95.

The imperatives of historical distance have never been more evident than in studies of the Kennedy family. The glamorous lives and brutal deaths of John and Robert Kennedy evoked first reverence, as in Arthur M. Schlesinger's A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965) and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), and then revisionism, as in Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz's The Kennedys: An American Drama (1984). It took almost two decades, with the publication of Herbert S. Parmet's Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (1980) and JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (1983), to produce a truly balanced biography of the former president. It has taken another decade to do the same for Robert Kennedy. James W. Hilty's superb book is such a biography. 1

Hilty explores "Act One" of Robert Kennedy's life, from his birth in 1925 to John's death in 1963. As the seventh of nine children and the third son of an overbearing father and a pliant mother, Bobby reconciled himself early to living in the shadows of his older brothers. "A personal understanding of Robert Kennedy," Hilty argues, "begins with the realization that most of his life was dictated by his place within the Kennedy family, his obeisance to its rules and rituals, and his resolute loyalty to John Kennedy" (p. ix). . . .

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