****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Fasten your seatbelt, this is a huge read - gut wrenching, inspiring and fast paced. "The Last Campaign" is a rollercoaster of book that perfectly matches Bobby Kennedy's short lived, barnstorming, rocket propelled campaign in the 1968 Presidential Election. From the prologue where Thurston Clarke captures so powerfully the shocked citizens who stood to honour RFK as his funeral train pulled through their communities, this book grabs you and won't let you go. This was a run for US President like no other seemingly without playbook, script or strategy, just a candidate who ran as his heart directed, emotional, raw, driven. RFK never tempered his words to his audience, he delivered no polished rhetoric or memorable soundbites. In fact he was often almost incoherent on the stump, but his determination, his courage and his honesty carried his message the more effectively.He stepped up out of duty and love to pick up JFK's mantle and in a few short weeks, surpassed in many ways what his brother had achieved eight years earlier on the campaign trail, drawing huge crowds, mobbed wherever he went. In a country torn apart, he represented something, he was a symbol of hope or lost innocence perhaps, a promise never fulfilled but a memory and a marker in the big book of human history forever.
