Robert Kennedy spent the first half of his career as his brother’s ruthless enforcer — wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., pursuing Jimmy Hoffa with obsessive intensity, and operating with a cold political calculation that earned him enemies across the political spectrum. Then his brother was assassinated, and something broke open. The Bobby Kennedy of 1968 — speaking about poverty, racial justice, and Vietnam — bore almost no resemblance to the Bobby Kennedy of 1961.

This episode traces RFK from the Kennedy family’s competitive crucible through the attorney general years, JFK’s assassination, the transformation, and the 1968 presidential campaign cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

• The ruthless early career — McCarthy committee counsel, campaign enforcer, and aggressive attorney general
• JFK’s assassination and the grief that transformed Robert Kennedy’s political vision
• The Senate years, the poverty tours, and the increasingly radical critique of American inequality
• The 1968 presidential campaign and the assassination at the Ambassador Hotel