AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | OCTOBER 2004

Robert Francis Kennedy would almost certainly have been president if his violent death hadn’t intervened. He was brave, claims one biographer, “precisely because he was fearful and self-doubting.” This probing and perceptive biography reassesses the remarkable and tragic life of the third Kennedy son, the boy Joe Sr. called the “runt.”

Featuring extensive interviews with family members, friends, journalists, Washington insiders, and civil rights activists, the film chronicles the pivotal role RFK played in many of the major events of the 1960s — the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam. The film looks closely at Kennedy’s complicated relationships with some of the leading figures of his day, Martin Luther King and Lyndon B. Johnson, among them. And it reveals much about his personal world, his role as family mediator, and his overwhelming grief and guilt following the assassination of his older brother.

Sarah Colt produced RFK with David Grubin, the award-winning director of FDR and LBJ, for David Grubin Productions, Inc.