Robert F. Kennedy

Attorney General of the United States, then senator for New York, and at the end of his life a candidate for the presidency his brother had held.

He was born at Brookline on the twentieth of November 1925, the seventh of nine children. He served in the Navy at the end of the war aboard the destroyer named for his eldest brother, who had been killed flying. He took a law degree, ran his brother's campaigns, and prosecuted organised crime and the Teamsters before the McClellan Committee with a thoroughness that made him enemies for life.

His brother made him Attorney General at thirty-five. He sent federal marshals into Alabama for the Freedom Riders, put troops behind James Meredith at Ole Miss, and was in the room through the thirteen days of the Cuban missile crisis. He also signed the wiretaps on Martin Luther King.

After Dallas he was, by every account of him, a different man - quieter, and more interested in people at the bottom than he had been. He went to the Mississippi Delta and to the coalfields and to the migrant camps in California, and what he found there changed how he spoke.

On the fourth of April 1968 he was to speak in a black neighbourhood of Indianapolis and was told on the aircraft that King had been shot. The police would not escort him in. He stood on the back of a flatbed truck in the dark and told the crowd, who had not heard, and then said that he had had a member of his family killed too, and quoted Aeschylus from memory - that pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

More than a hundred cities burned that week. Indianapolis did not.

He won the California primary on the fourth of June and spoke just after midnight in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel. He went out through the kitchen because it was the shortest way to the press room, and was shot three times in the pantry passage. He lived twenty-six hours. He was forty-two.

His funeral train ran from New York to Washington, and the tracks were lined the whole way.

His wife Ethel, who was pregnant with their eleventh child, and their children.