Chris Matthews has returned to the Kennedy well once more, this time with a sleek, urgent volume arguing that Robert F. Kennedy still offers something vital to a country struggling with division and distrust. His new book, Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters, arrives as a centennial tribute and reads less like a traditional biography than a call to conscience.
Matthews has written about RFK before, but this book is tighter, more distilled, and unabashedly prescriptive. Rather than retell the sweep of Kennedy’s life, he pares it down to ten core lessons drawn from pivotal moments: RFK’s civil-rights confrontations as attorney general, his break with the Vietnam War, his willingness to meet rural poverty face-to-face in Mississippi and Appalachia, and the speeches he delivered when the nation needed steady moral clarity.
Each chapter anchors one quality—moral courage, empathy, the ability to admit mistakes, a refusal to pit Americans against one another—and applies it to a moment in today’s political landscape. Matthews devotes particular attention to RFK’s instinct to go toward trouble rather than retreat from it, pointing to his night in Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when he calmed a devastated crowd with only his voice and his presence.
Why write this book now? Matthews has said that he sees RFK as the rare political figure who genuinely grew over time, shedding old prejudices and sharpening his sense of justice. In explaining his motivation for the book, he’s spoken about Kennedy’s “roadmap for moral leadership,” his capacity to “unite people who were not supposed to be in the same room,” and his belief that the country is “at its best when it tries to be good.” Matthews has also emphasized Kennedy’s willingness to accept defeat with grace—something he believes has become too rare in American political life—and he cites RFK’s concession after the Oregon primary as an example of civic maturity the modern era desperately needs.
For readers less familiar with RFK beyond the iconic photographs, the book doubles as a brisk portrait of who he was. Born in 1925, the seventh of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Robert Kennedy emerged early as a tough, relentless investigator on Capitol Hill before becoming attorney general in his brother John’s administration. In that role, he pushed federal power into the segregated South, backing civil-rights activists when doing so carried political risk.
After JFK’s assassination, RFK was elected senator from New York and became a voice for the forgotten and the angry. He toured the Mississippi Delta, confronted hunger in Appalachia, challenged Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, and earned devotion from both minority communities and working-class white voters. His 1968 presidential campaign attempted something few have tried since: a coalition of the poor, the young, Black Americans, Latinos, and blue-collar voters who saw something in him that transcended party lines. That arc ended brutally in Los Angeles the night he won the California primary, a moment Matthews revisits with quiet restraint.
In Lessons from Bobby, Matthews argues that Kennedy’s short life carved out a model of politics that blends toughness with compassion, ambition with self-reflection, and patriotism with the courage to correct course when the country goes wrong. The lessons are simple but pointed: listen to the unheard, stand firm against injustice, take risks for peace, and remember that winning is not the only measure of leadership.
Matthews’ message is clear: Robert F. Kennedy’s voice did not fade with the 1960s. It belongs to the present, and perhaps—if we’re willing to hear it—to the future as well.
