The president's brother and attorney general who engineered the secret settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis
He later wrote: 'The strongest argument against an all-out surprise attack was that it would be a Pearl Harbor in reverse and would blacken the name of the United States in the eyes of the world.'
The younger brother and most trusted adviser of President John F. Kennedy, he was appointed attorney general at 35 and led a crusade against organized crime while championing civil rights. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he initially favored invasion but was persuaded by George Ball's Pearl Harbor analogy to support a naval blockade instead; in the crisis's final hours, his secret meeting with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, delivering the promise that U.S. Jupiter missiles would be removed from Turkey, was the key to the settlement. After his brother's assassination, he served as a U.S. Senator, opposing the Vietnam War and fighting poverty, before being assassinated during his own presidential campaign in 1968.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1952Campaign manager, JFK Senate campaign
- 1953–1955Assistant/Counsel, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
- 1957–1959Chief Counsel, McClellan Committee (Senate Labor Rackets)
- 1961–196464th United States Attorney General
- 1965–1968U.S. Senator from New York
Related historical events
- 1955–1975The Second Indochina WarSenator who turned against the warAfter his brother’s assassination he opposed the war in the Senate and was assassinated during the 1968 primaries.
- 1962The Cuban Missile Crisiskey intermediary in secret negotiationsInitially favored invasion on EXCOMM but shifted to the blockade approach; in a secret meeting with Ambassador Dobrynin, he conveyed the promise to withdraw missiles from Turkey, unlocking the resolution.
Attorney General and the Civil Rights Struggle
Appointed attorney general in 1961, Kennedy confronted the question of federal intervention in the southern civil rights struggle. When a mob besieged demonstrators supporting the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, he told Martin Luther King that federal marshals were on their way and proposed a temporary halt to the rides. James Farmer and Diane Nash rejected the proposal, and the marshals protected the demonstrators. King was disappointed when the Alabama National Guard later replaced the marshals. The Kennedy administration gave substantial attention to the southern freedom struggle, but King repeatedly criticized the Justice Department for failing to protect civil rights activists adequately and to enforce a ruling ending racial segregation in interstate travel. The federal response combined support for the struggle with a preference for administrative negotiation and enforcement that King considered insufficient. In 1963, Kennedy authorized the wiretapping of King's home and office because of King's relationship with Stanley Levison. King thanked Kennedy in 1964 for his work guiding the Civil Rights Act through Congress, but that praise should be read alongside King's criticism of the Justice Department's failure to investigate civil rights violations.