The Last Campaign

"As Thurston Clarke recounts in The Last Campaign, Robert Kennedy stirred huge crowds, who would often tear his clothes, and moved even the most hard-bitten of journalists and other intimate observers. He challenged his audiences: telling college students he would end the draft deferments that left poor and minority youths to fight in Vietnam and telling whites that they bore responsibility for black frustration and rage. His soft-spoken speech to a largely black audience in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was a stunning and effective call for peace in America that can still give the reader chills. After spending most of the campaign at Kennedy's side, reporter Richard Harwood, a former marine who had initially been suspicious of Kennedy, asked his editors at the Washington Post to replace him, telling them, "I'm falling in love with the guy."" "Four days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, two million grieving Americans-weeping, waving flags, saluting, and kneeling in prayer lined the tracks to watch his funeral train carry his body from New York to Washington. One of the reporters on this train, Sylvia Wright of Life magazine, saw a bridal party standing in the tall grass of a Delaware meadow. As the car carrying Kennedy's casket passed, the party tossed their bouquets against its side, causing Wright to ask herself, "What did he have that he could do this to people?""--BOOK JACKET.Clarke, Thurston is the author of 'The Last Campaign' with ISBN 9780805077926 and ISBN 0805077928.