“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.

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With new research and previously unavailable interviews, The Last Campaign provides an intimate and absorbing historical narrative that 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 dramas of his times. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy looked past his own pain to that of this country, and he sought to offer it hope. And when he announced that he was running for president, the country united in hope behind him. Over the action-packed eighty-two days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise to lead them toward a better time—until an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s.

Clarke's The Last Campaign is the definitive account of Robert Kennedy's exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for president—and a revelatory history that is especially resonant now....

A revelatory, minute-by-minute account of JFK’s final days that asks what might have been Fifty years after his assassination, President John F. Kennedy’s legend endures. Noted author and historian Thurston Clarke reexamines the last months of the president’s life to show a man in the midst of great change, both in his family and in the key issues of his day: the cold war, civil rights, and Vietnam, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise. JFK’s Last Hundred Days presents a gripping account that weaves together Kennedy’s public and private lives, explains why the grief following his assassination has endured so long, and solves the most tantalizing Kennedy mystery of them all—not who killed him but who he was when he was killed and where he would have led us....