Inside a short-lived campaign

Early in "The Last Campaign," author Thurston Clarke describes Life magazine reporter Sylvia Wright's reaction as she spots a wedding party watching the train carrying former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy's body.

"The bridesmaids held the hems of their pink and green dresses in one hand, their bouquets in the other," Clarke writes. "As the last car carrying Kennedy's coffin passed, they extended their arms and tossed their flowers against its side. After seeing this, and the solemn Boy Scouts, black women prostrate with grief, and brawny white men gripping tiny flags in ham-hock hands as tears rolled down their cheeks, Wright asked herself the question that has become the silent descant of most everything written or said about Bobby Kennedy: 'What did he have that he could do this to people?'"

Clarke sets out to answer that question by taking readers inside Kennedy's frenzied 82-day presidential campaign, which was cut short by an assassin's bullet on June 5, 1968. Unfortunately, he doesn't succeed.

Clarke does an admirable job of capturing the giddy chaos of the campaign — one of the last of the old-style presidential runs, before the age of sound bites and the 24-hour news cycle — but his portrait of Kennedy lacks complexity. He shows us Kennedy greeting adoring crowds, visting poverty-stricken Indian reservations and captivating college students, but he never really explores how this candidate orged such a strong connection with voters.

The RFK who emerges from these pages is certainly passionate and driven, but he's also a little remote -- more like a sketch of a politician than the real thing.

"The Last Campaign" is well-written for the most part (atthough the author occasionally lets his enthusiasm for Kennedy get the better of him), and it's an intriguing look at a presidential campaign unlike any other. But if you're looking for a convincing portrait of Kennedy in all his complexity, better try another book.