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.
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