In Brief: ‘Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir’

Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy 30 years ago this week, which murderous anniversary is the occasion of a number of contentious books and Jack Newfield’s worshipful Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir (Sunday, June 7; 8 to 11 p.m.; Discovery), in which his children, his colleagues, and journalists including Newfield, Hamill, Breslin, Peter Maas, and the late Murray Kempton remember him with bitter passion. Glenn Close narrates the first hour, Mario Cuomo the second, and Ving Rhames the third, a not untypical Bobby combo. I can’t pretend to be objective. He was the last American politician I cared about, or cried for – the only one since Lincoln as novelistically interesting as, say, a Havel or a Mandela. Has there ever been a sadder pair of eyes, or so much brokenness that seemed to have mended badly, and that sense of swimming up from the bends of despair toward an empathic grasp of all those who were disenfranchised and dispossessed, all that’s bereft?

In Brief: ‘Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir’