Netflix’s ‘Bobby Kennedy For President’ Documentary Series Is A Portrait Of What Could Have Been [Review]

Netflix has become the new home of the true crime documentary series, the tightly knotted, edge of your seat sort of documentary that has as many cliffhangers as it does chapters (“Making a Murderer” and “Wild Wild Country” most recently). Which is what makes the streaming service’s newest edition, “Bobby Kennedy For President” such an anomaly. Certainly, there is plenty of crime, conspiracy, and murder in the life of the lesser-known Kennedy, but the series, as directed by Dawn Porter (“Trapped,” “Spies of Mississippi”) is more of a PBS docuseries than anything else. At least until the fourth chapter when Porter dives headfirst into the unseemly underbelly of RFK’s assassination and the plots that may have been behind it.

Porter’s series starts off much like Bobby Kennedy’s political career: unmoored and focused on someone else’s fame. The four-part series’ first chapter has the unfortunate responsibility to set the stage and introduce the boyishly good-looking politician in his ascendant years, as he grabbed onto the coattails of his elder brother, Jack, who rose to the highest office in the land. It’s hard to recap just how much is packed into the first chapter, which leaves the hour feeling like little more than exposition to set the stage for the real meat of the story: Bobby’s transformation, after his brother’s death, into the face of the progressive left, a senator from New York, and eventually the Democratic frontrunner in the 1968 presidential primary. What seems most important to Porter to establish early on in the first chapter, is that Bobby wasn’t a saint. He was a ruthless campaign manager for his brother and a hardliner Attorney General who was more interested in getting results than doing things by the books. His shrewdness, according to “Bobby Kennedy For President,” is integral to understand just how large his metamorphosis was into the radical humanitarian he became.

This picture of Bobby, as someone with actual faults, is an important balancing feature as the series kicks off and it gives Porter’s work a sense of objectivity. But as the chapters unfold and Bobby travels to the Mississippi Delta to witness child starvation, as he meets Cesar Chavez and as he begins advocating for the end of the Vietnam War, any criticism of him begins to fade into the noise of crowds chanting his name. And it’s hard not to be lulled into this vision, especially knowing what becomes of him, or, more importantly, not knowing what would have become of him, or this country, had he won the election and become the 37th president of the United States.

The cast of talking heads that Porter assembled further this image of Bobby as a man worth idolizing. Not only do they tout his political acumen and his ability to connect with people across the country, but they claim that he was never an absent father, that he was the quintessential family man, that he was, in a way, faultless. But the fact is, the notoriously press adverse Kennedy family didn’t participate in “Bobby Kennedy For President,” so a gaping hole exists. Maybe he was everything he seemed to be, maybe the image of himself he projected on the campaign trail was real, but if we as a country, and an audience, have learned anything in the last half-century, it’s that that’s not the case.

Still, it’s hard not to be wooed by Bobby, which is one of the best moves that Porter makes — she lets Bobby speak for himself. And thankfully, there’s a wealth of footage to utilize. And not only do we get to see Bobby woo America, but we get to see him transform, from a broken man in the wake of Jack’s death to a tireless advocate for civil rights and a progressive agenda that’s still being fought for today. This transformation makes the second and third chapters of “Bobby Kennedy For President” far and away the best. They seem more concerned with the man than with the myth or the tragedy that has enveloped his life, even if they lack the teeth — or the evidence — to round him into a complete and real human.

What’s most startling about Porter’s series, though, is in the image of the 1960s, the tumultuous and divisive decade. It’s hard not to see a troubling reflection of today and of the hatred and mistrust of one another that has once again arisen. And as such it’s hard not to wonder who the next great progressive leaders will be — who the next RFK or MLK will be — and what will become of them once they’re recognized for what they are. And despite the fact “Bobby Kennedy For President” fails to paint a full portrait of Bobby — or at least fails to convincingly prove that he truly was as perfect as he looked — the series is a moving and frightening look at the cost of division and the price that an entire country pays for it. [B+]