The Last Campaign or Obama Nation

The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America

Author: Thurston Clark

After John Kennedy's assassination, Robert—formerly his brother's no-holds-barred political warrior—was left stunned and grieving. He was haunted by his brother's murder and by the nation's failure to address its most pressing challenges—race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. When he announced that he was running for president, much of the country was thrilled to hear his message of healing and hope. Although fearing that there were, as he told one confident, "guns between me and the White House," he risked his life to ask Americans to help him reclaim "the generous impulses that are the soul of this nation."

Kennedy stirred huge crowds, who would often tear his clothes, and moved even the most hard-bitten of journalists and other intimate observers. After spending most of the campaign at Kennedy's side, reporter Richard Harwood, a former marine who had initially been suspicious of Kennedy, asked his editors at the Washington Post to replace him, telling them, "I'm falling in love with the guy."

Four days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, two million grieving Americans lined the tracks to watch his funeral train carry his body from New York to Washington. In The Last Campaign, Thurston Clarke explains how one man could have this effect on so many people.

Publishers Weekly

Forty years before Obamamania, there was another White House run that was so frenzied, reporters feared they'd be crushed to death by the electrified crowds he generated. Clarke's encyclopedic study of that short-lived, 11th-hour bid in the spring of 1968 reminds listeners that Robert F. Kennedy understood that the fanaticism toward his campaign was a transmutation of the grief the nation felt over the assassination of his brother. In less than three months, RFK became presidential in his own right, inspiring Americans with both his message of hope and unparalleled oratory gifts. It's precisely this finesse with speech that proves the greatest challenge for this audio: Pete Larkin's reading of Kennedy's addresses simply can't compete with the late politician's familiar delivery. Larkin has the daunting task of calibrating his tone so as to match the optimism of the campaign's first 81 days, while acknowledging the horror of day 82. Without doing impersonations, Larkin uses slight pitch changes to differentiate between Kennedy and others. A Henry Holt hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 31). (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Tremendously moving chronicle of Bobby Kennedy's 1968 run for president. Addressing the needs of a "wounded nation"-mired in the Vietnam War, complacent about poverty and inequity-Senator Kennedy announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968, offering to lead America back to "those ideals which are the source of national strength and generosity and compassion of deed." Clarke (Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech that Changed America, 2004, etc.) follows on Bobby's heels as he plunged headlong into his campaign, from Kansas and Indiana to Oregon and California, throwing off his brother's mantle and becoming at last his own man. He spoke passionately, almost recklessly, inciting crowds to frenzy with his idealistic speeches about the moral shame of Vietnam, the needs of the poor and minorities and the responsibility of each American. Incorporating accounts by a gamut of reporters, politicians, family and "Honorary Kennedys," as well as extracts from Bobby's own stunning stump speeches, Clarke compellingly recreates this "huge, joyous adventure." Seized by grief and guilt over his brother's assassination and morally opposed to the war and to President Johnson's reelection yet unable to reconcile himself to Eugene McCarthy's candidacy, Kennedy (but not all his advisers) decided it was now or never, and his gradual but determined evolution into a fearless, formidable, winning candidate makes stupendous reading. Johnson's decision not to seek reelection robbed him of an antagonist, but when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Kennedy quelled riots with his heartfelt speeches and become King's "real successor." Many worried that King and JFK would not be the last; Clarke quotesaheartbreaking comment from one reporter, who dubbed Bobby's decision to campaign virtually unprotected by security as "slow-motion suicide." The hope he inspired, though eclipsed by his assassination on June 6, still proves instructive and pertinent, especially in this election year. Generous without being slavish, beautifully capturing Kennedy's passion and dignity. Agent: Kathy Robbins/The Robbins Office

Table of Contents:

Prologue: June 8, 1968     1
Early Days
No Choice: March 16-17, 1968     19
"He's Going All the Way": March 17-18, 1968     39
"Bobby Ain't Jack": March 21-31, 1968     51
"Prophets Get Shot"
The Era of Good Feelings: March 31-April 4, 1968     71
A Prayer for Our Country: April 4-5, 1968     91
"Guns Between Me and the White House": April 5-7, 1968     112
"Prophets Get Shot": April 9, 1968     122
Red State Primaries
Like Frank Sinatra Running for President: April 10-15, 1968     139
Brave Heart and Christopher Pretty Boy: April 16 and May 11, 1968     153
"How Does It Look for Me Here?": April 22-24, 1968     166
"From You!": April 26, 1968     183
Riding with the Next President: April 27, 1968     193
Mother Inn: May 3-14, 1968     206
The West Coast
"This Is Peanuts": May 15-28, 1968     227
Resurrection City: May 29, 1968     239
"The Last of the Great Believables": May 30-June 3, 1968     249
"So This Is It": June 4-5, 1968     265
Postscript     276
Notes     283
Bibliography     307
Acknowledgments     311
Index     313

Obama Nation

Author: Jerome R Corsi

In this thoroughly researched and documented book, the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry explains why the extreme leftism of an Obama presidency would leave the United States weakened, diminished and divided, why Obama must be defeated—and how he can be.

Barack Obama stepped onto the national political stage when the then-Illinois State senator addressed the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Soon after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, author Jerome Corsi began researching Obama's personal and political background.

Scrupulously sourced with more than 600 footnotes, The Obama Nation is the result of that research. By tracing Obama's career and influences from his early years in Hawaii and Indonesia, the beginnings of his political career in Chicago, his voting record in the Illinois legislature, his religious training and his adoption of Christianity through to his recent involvement in Kenyan politics, his political advisors and fundraising associates and his meteoric campaign for president, Jerome Corsi shows that an Obama presidency would, in his words, be "a repeat of the failed extremist politics that have characterized and plagued Democratic Party politics since the late 1960s."

In this stunning and comprehensive new book, the reader will learn about:

• Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, from his father and step-father's Islamic backgrounds, to his Communist and socialist mentors in Hawaii and Chicago, to his long-term and close associations with former Weather Underground heroes William Ayers and BernadetteDohrn—associations much closer than heretofore revealed by the press.
• Barack and Michelle's 20-year-long religious affiliation with the black-liberation theology of former Trinity United Church of Christ Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons have always been steeped in a rage first expressed by Franz Fanon , Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, a rage that Corsi shows has deep meaning for Obama.
• Obama's continuing connections with Kenya, the homeland of his father, through his support for the candidacy of Raila Odinga, the radical socialist presidential contender who came to power amid Islamist violence and church burnings.
• Obama's involvement in the slum-landlord empire of the Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko, who helped to bankroll Obama's initial campaigns and to purchase of Barack and Michelle's dream-home property.
• The background and techniques of the Obama campaign's cult of personality, including the derivation of the words "hope" and change."
• Obama's far-left domestic policy, his controversial votes on abortion, his history of opposition to the Second Amendment, his determination to raise capital-gains taxes, his impractical plan to achieve universal health care, and his radical plan to tax Americans to fund a global-poverty-reduction program.
• Obama's naïve, anti-war, anti-nuclear foreign-policy, predicated on the reduction of the military, the eradication of nuclear weapons and an overconfidence in the power of his personality, as if belief in change alone could somehow transform international politics, achieve nuclear-weapons disarmament and withdrawal from Iraq without adverse consequences, for us, for the Iraqis or for Israel.

Meticulously researched and documented, The Obama Nation is the definitive source for information on why and how Barack Obama must be defeated—not by invective and general attacks, but by detailed arguments that are well-researched and fact-based.