Edward Schmitt offers a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) as America's would-be poverty warrior-in-chief, focusing on the experiences that brought RFK to the forefront of the nation's struggles for social and economic justice in the years leading up to his assassination during the presidential campaign of 1968. His book is also a portrait of a time in the not-so-distant past when the fight against poverty was elevated to the highest echelons of national politics as a statement of liberalism's electoral and moral aspirations. Schmitt argues that the politics of poverty were far more central to the decade than the existing historiography suggests, figuring prominently in Democratic Party efforts to expand its constituency base and in major domestic policy initiatives from civil rights to urban renewal, as well as in Lyndon B. Johnson's official declaration of War on Poverty in 1964. RFK may have had a singular ‘obsession’ with the issue of poverty, as one contemporary journalist put it (p. 1), but in Schmitt's view his gambit to make it the basis of an electoral coalition makes his candidacy a sign of where politics was heading –and where it might have gone had he lived.

Just how, and why, RFK came to this position has been the subject of disagreement among biographers, with some emphasizing his sincerity and others his opportunism. Schmitt takes the middle ground on the question of RFK's motivation, but his larger aim is to offer an alternative account, of steady engagement rather than sudden transformation, and of a gradually deepening commitment to dealing with poverty and racial inequality after years of first-hand exposure to the needs and political struggles of the disenfranchised. The result is a narrative of moral and political education, closely tracking RFK's encounters with poverty from his brother's storied 1960 presidential primary campaign in impoverished West Virginia through his decision to enter the 1968 presidential race as the poor people's candidate. Schmitt is balanced and admirably unsentimental in his treatment, carefully weighing the combination of political calculation and genuine concern behind RFK's alternately cautious and far-sighted positions on civil rights, hunger, the rights of migrant farm workers and the looming ‘urban crisis’. He also acknowledges the limitations of what he argues was a distinctively ‘communitarian’ approach, most fully embodied in RFK's efforts to launch the Bedford Stuyvesant Community Development Corporation as a model for neighbourhood transformation.

Schmitt is less persuasive in his attempt to locate RFK ideologically, using the terms ‘communitarian’ and ‘community’ loosely and interchangeably without adequately establishing how Kennedy himself defined community, whether his vision stemmed from a considered critique of contemporary expressions of liberalism, or indeed whether it was especially distinctive at the time. Nor is it entirely clear from this discussion whether RFK's growing compassion for the ‘other’ Americans ever translated into a more systematic analysis of poverty as a problem rooted in social and economic injustice, let alone a coherent programme for reform. Whether RFK might have led the Democrats – and the country – in a different, more compassionate and just, political direction remains for many a matter of speculation, as it does in Schmitt's book. Although some of its themes remain underdeveloped, it offers a well-documented, historically grounded account of a career that gave millions of people reason to harbour those expectations – of Robert F. Kennedy, and of American politics.