On the morning of June 7, 1968, I heard the shocking news. For the third time in the same decade, a national leader had been shot and killed. Only two months previously, Martin Luther King had been assassinated; that killing had come but five years after the shooting of the president, John F. Kennedy.

To me it came as a blow to discover that Bobby Kennedy was the victim this time, felled in the basement of a Los Angeles hotel by a gunman who had an odd, repetitious name. The murder of this 42-year-old leader struck me, and everyone else I knew, as a blow not only against us but against the nation itself.

I remember feeling a vivid sense of dislocation, a deep uneasiness about the future of our country. American society seemed to be coming apart, rent by violence and unsure of its destiny. Never before had I experienced such widely shared feelings of disorientation.

To me, by the late 1960s, Robert Kennedy carried the hope of bringing the Vietnam War to an end and, at home, furthering the struggle for justice and peace, on behalf of minority citizens. His evident zeal for such values made me root for the success of his presidential campaign that had just scored an impressive victory in the California Democratic primary.

All of this public and private history came rushing back recently when I heard a talk by Evan Thomas, the author of a new book rather prosaically entitled “Robert Kennedy: His Life.” Thomas, an editor at Newsweek,  began by saying that anyone who writes about RFK must deal with two myths: the “good Bobby” and the “bad Bobby.” About these myths Thomas said, “Both are true, often at the same time.”

Bobby was a very different type from his brother Jack, the author emphasized. He had a strong streak of Puritanism in him and he was “a striver, a fighter, a digger.” In the Kennedy family, Bobby ranked far below the golden trio of Joe, Kathleen, and Jack. Even by the time  Jack became president, the two brothers were not close friends: only once during this period did Jack come to visit at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s home. Only after the Cuban Missile Crisis did a strong bond develop between them.

RFK felt crushed by Jack’s death, especially because he suspected that he had caused it by antagonizing the Mob and Castro. Never did he believe the findings of the Warren Commission that a single gunman acting on his own had done the horrible deed.

He also experienced a crisis in his faith: how could God allow this to happen? The search for answers drove him to read the classical Greek philosophers and dramatists and he became fascinated with the notion of  “hubris,” the pride that drives human beings to often fatal achievement.

An important point in RFK’s career came when he visited South Africa in 1966. At that time, it was dangerous for a foreign politician to go there but Bobby ignored the danger and gave hope to the oppressed black people of that country. They surged around him as he stood on top of cars to speak. Thomas quotes Margaret Marshall, then a white lawyer in South Africa,  now Chief Justice of  Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court: “He reminded me that we were not alone; he put us back into the great sweep of history.”

Evan Thomas admits to admiring Bobby. In reviewing his life, the author was most surprised by RFK’s courage. He was driven, his hands shook, he was often afraid but nonetheless he dared face the worst. Many advisors told him not to run for president, partly because of the danger of getting shot, but he was a fatalist about that peril.

Though I never met the man, I do remember seeing him play football for Harvard. Noting how small he was, I saw his courage then, in putting on a uniform and competing against players much bigger and stronger.

Other reasons for the author’s admiration are RFK’s achievements. During the thirteen fateful days of  the Cuban missile crisis, Bobby had a major influence on his brother’s decisions. “His initial impulses were terrible, he wanted to stage a provocation,” Thomas said, “but then he best captured a balanced response.” That meant keeping the pressure on the Soviets but giving them the chance to back out.

The other area of RFK’s accomplishment was the civil rights struggle. According to the author, for RFK to oppose segregation “took political guts” because the south was the backbone of the Democratic party.

Such achievements serve to keep alive the might-have-beens that many Americans of my age still fantasize about. If he had been spared deadly violence himself, could RFK have led the nation toward a resolution of the ugly mess in Vietnam a lot sooner than his successor leaders did? Could he have brought his idealism and spiritual vision to bear on our society to the benefit of all?

Richard Griffin