Larry Tye has done his homework...The story he tells in Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon is familiar, but the vast array of materials he has consulted and the interviews he has conducted are enough to give it a new vitality ... We are in Larry Tye’s debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who spoke these words and, for a brief moment, almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans.
...eases out the complex truth behind the simplistic image of a liberal warrior, and offers up a compelling story of how idealism can be cultivated and liberalism learned ... Tye’s work feels most essential when seen as a mirror of our own times, reflecting back the scant progress our country has made on the issues Kennedy fought hardest for near the end of his life and the cynicism that has so deeply permeated our culture ... Tye does an exemplary job.
...an evocative in-depth portrait of the most complicated Kennedy ... Mr. Tye’s account of Kennedy’s early career is insightful, nuanced, fair and balanced ... Deeply sympathetic to Kennedy for making forgotten and neglected Americans his primary constituents, Mr. Tye chooses to end his biography with a moving — and myth-making — tribute to Robert Kennedy, the person.
Larry Tye’s new biography is proof enough that America’s fabled family hasn’t exhausted its narrative momentum ... captures RFK’s rise and fall with straightforward prose bolstered by impressive research. Along with hundreds of interviews with Kennedy intimates, including his widow, Ethel, Tye sifted through unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files, and boxes of Kennedy papers that had been locked away for some 40 years ... Tragic as it is, Tye’s is a tale, inevitably, of white privilege on a rising tide of idealism, and there’s a hagiographic tilt to this latest portrait of Bobby. It hardly discredits the carefully attributed storytelling, but the familiar details — the plutocratic father, the golden older brothers, the sprawling, overachieving Catholic family — have long since congealed into the myth of an American Camelot, a favorite cliché.
Tye’s vivid journalistic style makes [this] biography an arresting read ... the author has uncovered some intriguing stories that have been subsumed by the Kennedy mythology ... Many of the most fascinating stories come through Tye’s dissection of Bobby’s relations with his adversaries. Kennedy’s relentless pursuit of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa is well documented. But their behind-the-scenes rivalry is almost farcical ... the author’s attempt to mark too many 'turning points' can be distracting. He is at his best when he reflects on Kennedy’s transition as coming 'not in a single transformative moment but in subtle incremental stages.'”
...does a compelling job of showing how a tough-guy counsel to the red-baiting, demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s became, in the next decade, 'a liberal icon' ... Mr. Tye has a keen gift for narrative storytelling and an ability to depict his subject with almost novelistic emotional detail ... conscientiously strips away the accretions of myth that have come to surround Robert F. Kennedy, while at the same time creating a sympathetic portrait of this complex, searching man.
The book is often very, very good, and if it falls short of definitive, it at least can't blame unrealistic expectations: Tye walks into the flaws in his biography with his eyes wide open. It captures RFK's cold, ruthless side with appropriate relish, and it provides fast-paced and very detailed accounts of RFK's early working relationship with soon-to-be-disgraced Wisconsin politician Joe McCarthy ... But the book's flaws steadily accumulate as the pages turn. Tye's research is extensive, but he frequently indulges in dramatic elaborations that research can't support ... Tye can often be refreshingly discerning about the mercurial nature of RFK's growth as a person and a candidate, but he's neither a curious nor a rigorous assessor of the facts.
Mr Tye’s account is nuanced and thorough, and he manages the rare feat of interviewing Kennedy’s widow Ethel, now 88. Yet it is still hard for the reader to get truly inside the mind of this complex Kennedy, somehow both a 'Machiavellian contriver and man of conscience.' A few stylistic quirks also distract. Mr Tye repeats that Bobby was 'growing up fast'—a tired way to describe a grown man. He has an odd habit of relegating key points to footnotes.
[A] clear-eyed and absorbing new biography ... Tye cuts through the gauzy nostalgia to create a perceptive account of a life rife with contradictions, unearthed via boxes of previously unseen family papers along with interviews with RFK’s widow, Ethel, his former aides, and many others who knew him ... [Tye] occasionally falls victim to the sentimental depiction of Kennedy that he has set out to dispel...these lapses are minor, though, in a book that demonstrates forcefully and convincingly that Kennedy underwent a genuine change to emerge on the right side of history.
Tye presents a balanced portrait of his subject that gives equal due to Kennedy's achievements and failures in and out of the public eye ... Readers looking for titillation or confirmation of rumors long bandied about will likely be disappointed.
