Results...........................

Few in Congress made better use of their full palette of tactics and strategies - from model programs to the bully pulpit - that the very junior senator from New York.  Even so, liberals said he was providing an illusion of dissent, while conservatives worried he was all heart and too subversive.  Neither could see at first that he was crafting a new creed - grasping at the bits of FDR and his father's New Deal collectivism that still worked, and borrowing from heroes such as Herbert Hoover and Ralph Waldo Emerson who saw the centrality of self-reliance.  He was also hardheaded enough to disdain rebellion without results, which set him apart from most 1960s activists.

-Larry Tye, as excerpted from the chapter Senator Kennedy in Bobby Kennedy:  The Making of a Liberal Icon