Oliver Stone and the JFK Assassination

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Bobby was an interesting character in a lot of ways.

In the 1950s, Robert Kennedy, like most Americans, despised communism. At the time, the Soviet Union was "Enemy #1." But RFK honed his anti-communism working side-by-side with the nation's leading red-baiter, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

A Kennedy family friend, McCarthy vacationed with the clan on Cape Cod, and even dated two Kennedy sisters, Pat and Jean. When Bobby needed a job in 1952, after working on his brother Jack's successful Senate campaign, his father Joe Kennedy picked up the phone. By January, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had a new lawyer.

He would last barely six months, done in by a rivalry with McCarthy's chief deputy, Roy Cohn, as well as disenchantment with their overzealous style. But the months with McCarthy would follow Kennedy for the rest of his life, helping define the "Bad Bobby" that many liberals could never quite forget.

Though Kennedy had long since moved on, he found McCarthy's death in 1957 "very upsetting." In historian Ronald Steel's words, "for him the errant senator was a kindred spirit -- one engaged, as he was himself, in the struggle against evil."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/sfeature/sf_enemies_01.html