Robert Kennedy's grave

" Final Resting Place of Robert Kennedy"

Robert Francis Kennedy
20th November 1925 - 6th June 1968
US Attorney General who targeted the mob in his brother Johns administration. He had just won the Californian nomination in Los Angeles whilst running for the Presidency himself. After giving his victory speech in "The Ambassador Hotel" he left via the kitchen where he was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan an Arab Palestinian and died some 24 hrs later.
Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also called "RFK", was one of two younger brothers of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and was appointed by his brother as Attorney General for his administration. As one of President Kennedy's most trusted advisors, RFK worked closely with the President during the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1964, after his brother's death, Kennedy was elected to the US Senate from the state of New York. He was assassinated shortly after delivering a speech celebrating his victory in the 1968 presidential primary of California at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Career until 1960
Born on November 20, 1925 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Robert Kennedy was the seventh child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy. While growing up, he was raised amidst the competitive yet loyal Kennedy family culture. Robert was combative, aggressive and emotional, as well as very loyal to his father and elder brothers.
After a brief service in the Navy and officer training (V-12) at Bates College, Kennedy went on to attend Harvard. He became a three-year letterman for the Harvard College football team and graduated in 1948. He then enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law, and earned his degree in 1951. Following law school, Kennedy managed his brother John's successful 1952 Senate campaign.
Kennedy started his career working for Senator Joseph McCarthy, with whom he shared hardline anti-Communist views. Kennedy served as Counsel with Roy Cohn to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during the McCarthy Hearings of 1953-54.
Kennedy soon made a name for himself as the chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee hearings, which began in 1956. In a dramatic scene, Kennedy squared off against Jimmy Hoffa during the antagonistic argument that marked Hoffa's testimony. Kennedy left the Rackets Committee in 1959 in order to run his brother John's successful Presidential campaign.

Attorney general
After the 1960 election, he was appointed Attorney General by President Kennedy. As Attorney General, he continued his crusade against organized crime, often at the resistance of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. Convictions against organized crime figures rose by 800% during his term.
Kennedy also began seriously to enforce civil rights and equal opportunity for African-Americans. He expressed the Administration's commitment to civil rights during a 1961 speech at the University of Georgia Law School: "We will not stand by or be aloof. We will move. I happen to believe that the 1954 [Supreme Court school desegregation] decision was right. But my belief does not matter. It is the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law."
In September 1962, he sent U.S. Marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi to enforce a Federal court order admitting the first African American student - James Meredith - to the University of Mississippi. The Office of Civil Rights also hired its first African American lawyer, Thelton Henderson and began to work cautiously with leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Robert Kennedy saw voting as the key to racial justice and collaborated with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to create the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped bring an end to Jim Crow laws.
As his brother's confidante, he also helped develop the strategy to blockade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis instead of initiating a military air strike that might have led to nuclear war, and later negotiated with the Soviet Union to remove the missiles.

The assassination of JFK
The assassination of President Kennedy, which happened two days after Robert Kennedy's 38th birthday, was a brutal shock to the world, the nation, and of course to Robert and the rest of the Kennedy family. For the rest of his life, he never overcame the shock and personal grief of that day in 1963. Robert mourned his brother's death and the fact that so much of Kennedy's vision and promise was ultimately left unfulfilled.
During the days following the assassination, but just before the funeral, Kennedy wrote to his two eldest children, Kathleen, and Joseph II, telling them about the tragedy and to follow what their uncle had started.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy was due to give a speech prior to the showing of a memorial film dedicated to the late President. As Kennedy was introduced, tens of thousands of delegates, party workers, young members, observing journalists, and others broke into thunderous applause and an out roar of support for the nervous and emotionally fragile Robert, standing at the podium. He broke down and began to cry. Despite repeated appeals by him and the chairman of the convention, the audience did not stop their display of support for Kennedy. The applause continued for about 22 minutes. Robert Kennedy mustered enough strength to deliver the speech, but broke down into tears backstage. He would remain personally devastated for many months. His elder brother's death meant that he was now the eldest living son of Joseph Kennedy, and the head not only of his own large family, but of his sisters, of the children of his brothers and sisters, and even of his younger brother, Ted Kennedy. Robert was now the young leader of the Kennedy family, which had been wracked by tragedies.

Senator from New York
Soon after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy left the Cabinet to run for a seat in the United States Senate representing New York. Even though Kennedy was his nemesis, Johnson helped his campaign, as he was later to recall in his memoir of the White House years. His opponent in the 1964 race was Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating, who attempted to portray Kennedy as an arrogant carpetbagger. However, despite Keating's best efforts, Kennedy emerged victorious in the November election, just one of a long line of outsiders who have been accepted by New Yorkers as their Senator. During his three and a half years as a US Senator, Kennedy visited apartheid-ruled South Africa, helped to start a successful redevelopment project in poverty stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City, visited the Mississippi Delta as a member of the Senate committee reviewing the effectiveness of War on Poverty programs and, reversing his prior stance, called for a halt in further escalation of the Vietnam War.
As Senator, Robert endeared himself to African Americans, and other minorities such as Native Americans and immigrant groups. He spoke forcefully, and aligned himself with leaders of the civil rights struggle, and led the Democratic party to pursue a more aggressive agenda to eliminate discrimination on all levels. Kennedy supported busing, integration of all public facilities, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and anti-poverty social programs to increase education, offer opportunities for employment and provide health care for millions of disenfranchised and despairing African-Americans.
Kennedy also embraced opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968. Making this decision was difficult for him, for he knew that President Kennedy had increased military support for South Vietnam, and had envisioned a major U.S. commitment to defending South East Asia and the Indochina region from Communist aggression. Many critics allege that Kennedy's switch in position was to reap advantage during the hotly contested Democratic primaries.
Kennedy's presidential campaign was powered by an aggressive vision for civil freedom and justice, the expansion of social development programs beyond Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, active minority participation in American politics, and outright opposition to the conservative attitudes of the American South and the aloof attitude of many Americans to serious social problems like poverty and racism.
Here Kennedy was at a remarkable contrast to his brother. JFK had been thwarted in his effort to persuade the politicians of the Southern states to accept civil rights legislation, and had been unwilling to appear arrogant to southern Americans. JFK had introduced a major tax-cut legislation to propel the economy, and had trimmed and transformed the workings of the U.S. government. His agenda was not half as committed to a major expansion of government institutions as was RFK's social program. And JFK backed U.S. involvement in South East Asia and other parts of the world against Soviet-sponsored communist aggression, while Robert ultimately committed himself against the war in Vietnam.
By these comparisons, it is easier to portray Robert Kennedy, instead of President John F. Kennedy, as a real icon of American liberalism and the modern political ideals of the United States Democratic Party. It is worth mentioning, however, that circumstances had changed in the time between the brothers' assassinations; civil rights legislation had passed through Congress, the Vietnam War had escalated with dubious success, and Johnson had implemented the Great Society programs JFK never lived to see.

Presidential candidacy and assassination
Originally Kennedy had denied speculation that he was going to run for the Democratic nomination in 1968 against President Lyndon Johnson (The 22nd Amendment didn't disqualify LBJ from running for a second term because he served less than half of JFK's four-year term). Along with doubts of his ability to win the nomination, Kennedy feared that his candidacy would appear to be a product of a personal feud with Johnson. After Johnson won only a very narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968 against Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an anti-war candidate, Kennedy too declared his candidacy for the Presidency on March 16. McCarthy supporters angrily denounced Kennedy as an "opportunist." On March 31, Johnson appeared on television to state that he was no longer a candidate for re-election.
On April 4, during a campaign stop in Indianapolis, Kennedy learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. During a heartfelt, impromptu speech in Indianapolis' inner city, Kennedy called for a reconciliation between the races. In the aftermath of King's assassination, thousands of people were injured and 43 were killed in riots throughout the United States, but Indianapolis remained quiet. Kennedy's campaign relied largely on his ability to run an emotional and intensely personal campaign. Kennedy challenged students on the "hypocrisy" of draft deferments, visited numerous small towns, and made himself available to the masses, by participating in long motorcades and street-corner stump speeches (often in troubled inner-cities). Kennedy made urban poverty a chief concern of his campaign, which in part led to enormous crowds that would attend his events in poor urban areas or rural parts of Appalachia.

Kennedy won the Indiana and Nebraska Democratic primaries, but lost the Oregon primary.

Assassination
On June 4, 1968 Kennedy scored a major victory in his drive toward the Democratic presidential nomination when he won primaries in South Dakota and in California. After Kennedy addressed his supporters in the early morning hours of June 5 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he left the ballroom through a service area to greet supporters working in the hotel's kitchen. In a crowded kitchen passageway, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Christian Arab living in Pasadena, California fired a .22 caliber revolver directly into the crowd surrounding Kennedy. Six people were wounded, including Kennedy, who was shot in the head at close range. After being wounded, Kennedy remained conscious for about 20 minutes. During that time, he was heard to say "Is everybody all right?" He was taken to Central Receiving Hospital and then Good Samaritan Hospital for emergency brain surgery. He died there at the age of 42 in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968.
A funeral mass was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on June 8. His brother, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), eulogized him with the words, "My brother need not be idolized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it." Senator Kennedy (D-MA) concluded his powerful eulogy, paraphrasing his deceased brother Robert, by quoting George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and say why - I dream things that never were and say why not." Immediately following the mass, Kennedy's body was transported by special train to Washington, D.C.. Thousands of people crowded the Penn Central tracks and stations, a situation which led to two deaths and several injuries at Elizabeth, New Jersey. Kennedy was buried near his brother, John, in Arlington National Cemetery. He had always maintained he wished to be buried in Massachusetts, but his family believed that since the brothers had been so close in life that they should be near each other in death. His wish that his grave be marked with a simple, white wooden cross and his name, date of birth and date of death was met.
In 1969 Sirhan was convicted at a trial in which his guilt was never in question, only his mental state at the time of the shooting. He was originally sentenced to death but in 1972 his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment. As of 2006 Sirhan has been denied parole 13 times and is currently incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison.
Shortly after shooting Kennedy, Sirhan reportedly shouted, "I did it for my country!" After Sirhan's arrest he said he shot Kennedy on the anniversary of the Six-Day War because of RFK's (and, by extension, the U.S. government's) support of Israel. Sirhan's animosity towards Israel is said to stem from his childhood. He was born in Jerusalem in 1944 when it was still under British control. His family had fled their home in Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. However, Sirhan later claimed he had no memory of shooting Kennedy.
It is generally believed that Sirhan fired the shots that hit Kennedy. The FBI photographed additional bullet holes in the pantry, but the eight bullets Sirhan's gun could hold had already been accounted for by an LAPD bullet scenario. The FBI, at the request of the LAPD, later downplayed its original unequivocal identification of the holes as "bullet holes". To some this suggests the official account of RFK's assassination is inconsistent or incomplete.
Kennedy's autopsy report concluded that RFK had been shot four times at close range. The fatal shot hit Kennedy about one inch behind his right ear. Another bullet hit RFK in his right armpit and another hit him further down his back. A fourth bullet went through Kennedy's coat shoulders but did no damage. Some claim that Sirhan was not close enough to him at the time to do that. Other eyewitnesses, such as Kennedy bodyguard Roosevelt Grier said Sirhan was the lone gunman.
The Ambassador Hotel incident had been photographed by James Scott Enyart, who has been in a legal battle with L.A. county/police to recover his film since 1988. During the unusual trial, the court lost a large portion of its own files from the earlier proceedings.

Personal life
In 1950, he married Ethel Skakel, who would eventually give birth to 11 children:

Kathleen Hartington (b.1951)
Joseph Patrick II (b.1952)
Robert Francis, Jr. (b.1954)
David Anthony (1955-1984)
Mary Courtney (b.1956)
Michael LeMoyne (1958-1997)
Mary Kerry (b.1959)
Christopher George (b.1963)
Matthew Maxwell Taylor (b.1965)
Douglas Harriman (b.1967)
Rory Elizabeth Katherine (b.1968)
The last child, Rory, was born several months after her father's assassination.

Kennedy was always a loyal son, brother, and family man. Despite the fact that his father's most ambitious dreams centered around his elder brothers, Robert was fiercely loyal to Joseph, Joe Jr. and John. His competitiveness was admired by his father and elder brothers, while his loyalty bound them affectionately closer to each other than most brothers are. Working on the campaigns of John Kennedy, Robert was more involved, passionate and tenacious than the candidate himself, obsessed with every detail, fighting out every battle and taking workers to task. Central to Kennedy's politics and personal attitude to life and its purpose remained the heritage of Kennedy's Irish-Catholicism. Throughout his life he made constant reference to his faith having informed every area of his life and having given him the strength to re-enter the political landscape following the assassination of his elder brother. Yet his was by no means an unresponsive and staid faith but rather the faith of a Catholic Radical - perhaps the first successful Catholic Radical in American political history.

Following the assassination of JFK in 1963, he took Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr under his wing, treating them as if they were his own.

Kennedy was easily the most religious of his brothers. Whereas John F. Kennedy maintained an aloof sense of his faith Robert Kennedy approached his duties to mankind through the looking glass of his Catholicism. In the last years of his life he found great solace in the metaphysical poets of ancient Greece, most especially in the writings of Aeschylus. At his announcement of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Kennedy quoted these lines from Aeschylus in a speech which was to become one of his most memorable moments:

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our own despair, and against our will, comes Wisdom by the awful Grace of God".

Kennedy owned a home at the well-known Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts on Cape Cod but spent most of his time at his estate in Virginia, known as Hickory Hill, located just outside Washington, DC. His widow, Ethel, and his children continued to live at Hickory Hill after his death in 1968. Ethel Kennedy now lives full time at the family's vacation home in Hyannis Port.

His pallbearers included Robert McNamara, John Glenn, Averell Harriman, C. Douglas Dillon, Kirk Lemoyne Billings (schoolmate of John F. Kennedy), Stephen Smith (husband to Jean Ann Kennedy), David Hackett, Jim Whittaker, John Seigenthaler Sr., and Lord Harlech.

Honors
D.C. Stadium in Washington, D.C. was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.

In 1978, the United States Congress posthumously awarded Kennedy its Gold Medal of Honor. In 1998, the United States Mint released a special dollar coin that featured Kennedy on the obverse and the emblems of the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate on the reverse.

In Washington, DC on November 20, 2001, U.S President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft dedicated the Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, honoring RFK on what would have been his 76th birthday. They both spoke during the ceremony, as did Kennedy's eldest son, Joseph II, who made reference to his uncle John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, when he said to the president as he spoke: "Mr. President, your strength since September 11 has been a profile in leadership."

Numerous roads, public schools and other facilities across the United States were named in memory of Robert F. Kennedy in the months and years after his death. In an effort to not just remember the late Senator, but continue his work helping disadvantaged, a small group of private citizens launched the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps in 1969, which today helps more than 800 abused and neglected children each year.

Writing
Considered an eloquent speaker generally, RFK also wrote extensively on politics and issues confronting his generation:

The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee's Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions (1960)
To Seek a Newer World (1967)
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969)

Quotes
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly"

"The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use, rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use- how to make people of power live for the public, rather than off the public."

"Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital, quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change."

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not." (RFK quoting Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw)

Bio from www.wikipedia.org