America /The Fifties

THE UNFINISHED ODYSSEY of ROBERT KENNEDY

DAVID HALBERSTAM, ©1968 ​
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy is an objective and sympathetic study of the growth of Robert Kennedy as a politician and human being, of the huge distance between the young man who admired Joe McCarthy and the presidential candidate who had to contend with the conflicting forces and ambitions of a spectrum ranging from Cesar Chavez and Charles Evers to Mayor Daley--and yet who exemplified the aspirations of this unlikely coalition. 

NOTABLE QUOTES

Robert Kennedy was in many ways the most interesting figure in American politics, not only because he was a Kennedy, not only because so much of his education had taken place in the public eye--it could be traced by putting together film clips of this decade--but primarily because he was a transitional figure in a transitional year.  At a time of great flux in American life and politics, with old laws on the way out and new laws on the way in, Robert Kennedy was at exactly the halfway mark between the old and the new..

-The Unfinished Odyssey, page 40

A terrible beauty was born with the death of Robert Kennedy.  It surrounds and suffuses the hard intelligence of this poignant and powerful memoir

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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REVIEWS

Kirkus Review
January 1968

The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

The Pulitzer prize-winning newsman's analysis of Kennedy's ideological journey toward "increasing radicalism" and a personal account of his subsequent successes (and single major defeat) along the campaign trail. Halberstam shows how Kennedy in his role as "leader of the honorable opposition in the Democratic party" became the caustic critic of the administration's ghetto policies as well as a more cautious critic of its Vietnam policy, placing himself at "the exact median point of American idealism and American power." It is a fascinating story of realpolitik (the Kennedy staff wanted Mayor Daley's backing in Chicago) played for radical aims, but Halberstam demonstrates his thesis that Kennedy was the rare politician who surpassed his image. The Kennedy backers were a coalition of old eggheads, youngish radicals (Allard Lowenstein was a major booster and a radicalizer of the candidate), veterans like Larry O'Brien, and—possibly—because he was the first, candidate to visit them and make demands for them—the ghetto residents. Kennedy was a crucial bridge to the New Politics which was, like the country, "in transition politically." Halberstam mourns him.
The New York Review, John Phillips
August 21, 1969

Bobby

Each of these mournful books is written deep in Bobby’s thrall, and that is as it has to be. Two of them present Eugene McCarthy as pretty much the thoroughgoing baddy Bobby thought he was. All three are sentimental memoirs. David Halberstam often appears to be striving for a stiff-upperlip poignancy that has been suggested in a Yeatsian jacket blurb awarded him by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. [Full Review]

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David Halberstam

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