Douglas had interrupted a globe-trotting trip with Mercedes, his bride of six months, for the detour with Bobby. From there the two headed off by car, then ship, finally arriving in Baku, the biggest city on the Caspian Sea.

Senate investigator ran to catch a plane to Paris, then another to Teheran, where he met Supreme Court Justice William O. Kennedy completed his hearings on Air ForceSecretary Talbott in the summer of 1955, the young U.S. Tye's book – Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon – has been released July 5 by Random House, and is available at Amazon.Com and most bookstores. Larry Tye, a former reporter at The Boston Globe, explores in his new book Bobby's political and personal transformation, looking for the keys to his rise as a liberal icon and the messages his life offers to a country as divided politically as it was in Bobby's era half a century ago. He was precisely the tough liberal - or perhaps tender conservative - that his countrymen seemed to long for when, on the eve of his most decisive victory in his campaign for president in 1968, he was assassinated. By the end, Bobby was his nation's hottest-blooded and most promising reformer. He started his professional life as a cold warrior, driven in part by what he saw in the early trip to Russia described in the excerpts published here. Joseph and Rose's third son, Robert Francis, was and still is the most mysterious and alluring of their nine extraordinary offspring. The Kennedys of Boston were and still are America's First Family.

Bobby kennedy by larry tye