In Kennedy's Justice Department, there was an air of idealism, and the attorney general surrounded himself with vigorous, talented lawyers eager to follow his lead taking on public corruption and white-collar crime, said Steven H. Sachs, a former U.S. attorney from Maryland. Kennedy's role as an aggressive enforcer of the law influenced Sachs' own legal career.
"We were all very much caught up in the idea that something new and exciting and change-making was happening in government and in this country," said Sachs.
As attorney general, Kennedy had a reputation of dropping by the office unannounced, peppering his legion of attorneys with questions.
"People saw that as a positive," said Peter Edelman, who worked in Kennedy's Justice Department and later as a campaign aide. "They were tremendously moved that he was personally interested in what they were doing."
Edelman, now a law professor at Georgetown University, accompanied Kennedy on trips nationwide, including to the Mississippi Delta, where Kennedy, then a senator, would see hunger and desperation firsthand.
"We were visiting a home, and I saw him bend over, trying to get a response out of this poor malnourished child," he said.
"That he was spending that much time focused on this was impressive."
It was a moment that Edelman's soon-to-be-wife Marian Wright, a civil rights attorney and later founder of the Children's Defense Fund, would remember as "when she knew he was for real," recounted Edelman.
Fighting poverty and racial injustice became hallmarks of Kennedy's 1968 campaign, said Thurston Clarke, author of The Last Campaign: 82 Days That Inspired America. His murder devastated the activists he inspired, Clarke said.
"He was seen as the last hope of Democrats and liberals of the '60s," he said.
Mfume was 19 at the time, living in Baltimore, enrolled in GED classes and working at a bakery part-time.
"There was no year like 1968 before, and there has been none since," said Mfume. "Many of us were still mourning and trying to make sense out of the assassination of Martin Luther King, and then all of a sudden, Bobby Kennedy is killed by an assassin's bullet."
Mfume remembers his teary-eyed uncle waking him to tell him Kennedy had been shot. Mfume, already coping with rage after King's death, grew angrier.
But when his mentor, Parren J. Mitchell, announced a bid for Congress, Mfume channeled his frustration into action and volunteered. Mitchell lost but encouraged Mfume not to become distraught.
