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— formerly Jack's no-holds-barred political warrior— 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. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds lined up along the country's railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby.
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.
Clarke examines the enormous effect on Americans of RFK's eighty-two-day campaign for the presidency. RFK became a candidate because he hoped to help heal a morally wounded nation. It was 1968. An unpopular president (Johnson) was waging a controversial war (Vietnam). By deciding to run, RFK infuriated Johnson and angered everyone from white Southerners to the business community, from organized crime to machine pols like Chicago's Mayor Daly. The year also saw the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, assassination, and the worst racial disturbances since the Civil War. Pete Larkin narrates in the best storytelling tradition, avoiding any trace of theatricality or "broadcast voice." He makes Clarke's well-researched page out of recent American history hard to put down. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
About the Author
THURSTON CLARKE has written several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Pearl Harbor Ghosts and California Fault, a New York Times notable book. His articles have been published in Vanity Fair, Glamour, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Willsboro, New York, with his wife and three daughters.
