All This Marvelous Potential

Robert Kennedy's 1968 Tour of Appalachia

By: Matthew Algeo

Narrated by: David Colacci

In the winter of 1967-68, Robert F. Kennedy, then a US senator from New York, ventured deep into the heart of Appalachia. As acting chairman of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, RFK went to eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of the War on Poverty. He was deeply disillusioned by what he found. Kennedy learned that job training programs were useless, welfare programs proved insufficient, and jobs were scarce and getting scarcer. Before he'd even left the state, Kennedy had determined the War on Poverty was a failure - and he blamed Lyndon Johnson.

Robert Kennedy wasn't merely on a fact-finding mission, however; he was considering challenging Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he needed support from white voters to win it. His trip to eastern Kentucky was an opportunity to test his antiwar and antipoverty message with hardscrabble whites. Kennedy encountered deep resentment in the mountains, and a special disdain for establishment politicians. A month after his visit, RFK officially announced he was challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Four months after his visit, he was murdered. He was 42.

All This Marvelous Potential retraces RFK's tour of eastern Kentucky and provides a new portrait of the politician - a politician of uncommon courage who was unafraid to shine a light on our shortcomings.

©2020 Matthew Algeo (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Another great Algeo book.

What Matthew Algeo excels at is telling stories from our history that we should know more about, but don’t. The sport of competitive walking, Grover Cleveland’s cancer surgery at sea, the Truman post-presidential road trip, and now this: RFK’s tour of the Appalachians. If you’re into RFK, or want to know why so many still mourn his death, this gives a few under-cited reasons.

I really wanted to like this one

There's a lot of information on Appalachia, but not so much that involved RFK in particular. I thought it would have more about his experience there, even though it was only two days. I re-read the summary of the book and it really did sound like it would have more of him.

That said, if you're reading this review and want more information on the area, you'll find this book interesting. Read the digital print or paper version though.

The narrator was perfect if you wanted to fall asleep while listening. I found myself zoning out as there was never much variation in his voice. Luckily I borrowed this on Audible Plus and own the Kindle version. I was able to get more out of the latter.