Kennedy, Robert Francis (1925-1968), served as attorney general of the United States from 1961 to 1964 and as U.S. senator from New York from 1965 to 1968. He was shot in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president, and died the next day. In 1969, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Jordanian-born Arab, was convicted of the assassination and sentenced to death. The sentence was changed to life imprisonment in 1972 after the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty unconstitutional.
Robert Kennedy, who was often called Bobby Kennedy, was appointed attorney general of the United States by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in 1961. Robert also acted as his brother’s closest personal adviser. After the president’s assassination in 1963, Kennedy continued as attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy resigned from the Cabinet position in 1964 to run for the Senate.
Kennedy had entered the government in 1951 as an attorney in the Department of Justice. From 1953 to 1955, he was a counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He gained public attention in the late 1950’s as chief counsel for the Senate committee that investigated improper labor and management activities.
Kennedy managed his brother’s campaigns for the U.S. Senate in 1952 and for the presidency in 1960. Kennedy wrote The Enemy Within (1960), Just Friends and Brave Enemies (1962), To Seek a Newer World (1967), and Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969).
Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Nov. 20, 1925. He graduated from Harvard University and the University of Virginia Law School. His son Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 1999. Robert Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. In 2023, his son Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a lawyer and activist, began campaigning, first as a Democrat and then as an independent, to become president of the United States in the 2024 election. A grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy III, represented a Massachusetts district in the U.S. House from 2013 to 2021.
