Review: In ‘Bobby Kennedy for President,’ a Don Draper of Politics

“Bobby Kennedy for President,” a four-part documentary coming out shortly before the 50th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, sounds like a departure for Netflix. The streaming service’s lineup of original documentary series has been dominated by variations on true crime, with the occasional side trip into environmental scandal or cooking. A comprehensive survey of a major historical figure would be something new.

So maybe it’s not surprising that the series, directed by Dawn Porter (“Trapped,” “Spies of Mississippi”) and available on Friday, is an odd hybrid — a conventional, public-television-style biographical documentary that veers, in its fourth hour, into the sort of true-crime investigation Netflix is known for. Then at the last minute it swerves again, with a jarringly sentimental reunion and visit to the scene of the killing that’s straight out of the feel-good branch of reality TV.

Throughout, “Bobby Kennedy for President” provides information and sometimes fascinating film clips without ever giving us much of a sense of its subject, who remains a Don Draper-like cipher. Outside of the third hour, which covers the 1968 presidential campaign, he’s a supporting player in the dramas of other people: his brother John, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson. The series often looks like a general social and political history of the 1960s that’s only loosely tied to Kennedy.

He even gets elbowed aside by the former colleagues, friends and aides who make up the show’s relatively small stable of interview subjects. Activists like the congressman John Lewis, Marian Wright Edelman and Dolores Huerta relate their experiences with Kennedy while we see them with him in the archival photos and film, looking like their glamorous younger selves. Paul Schrade, an adviser to Kennedy on labor affairs who was wounded during the assassination, becomes the centerpiece of the fourth episode because of his decadeslong effort to prove that a second shooter, not Sirhan Sirhan, killed Kennedy.

The Kennedy of “Bobby Kennedy for President” is a smart, ambitious politician, perhaps more principled than most — it’s hard to judge the depth of his convictions — who managed to capture the imaginations of young Americans and the loyalty of minority voters. He did it despite the contradictions in his own record, including service with McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and the approval, when he was attorney general, of the wiretapping of King and other civil rights leaders.

Porter fills in this historical record, but the man at the center remains elusive. No family members or, it seems, close personal friends are interviewed. The copious footage — including scenes from pioneering documentaries by Robert Drew like “Crisis” and “Primary” — conveys Kennedy’s seriousness, intelligence and, in the wake of John’s 1963 assassination, overriding sense of melancholy. But the main quality it captures is reserve — the shields are always up, and the filmmakers and broadcasters of the time don’t try very hard to get around them.

There are a lot of images in “Bobby Kennedy for President” that we’ve seen before, of riots, marches, demonstrations, the Cuban missile crisis, the steps of the University of Alabama. Less familiar, and more compelling, are scenes of the fervor surrounding Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. In California an aide holds him around the waist to keep him from falling out of his car as waves of people run up to grab his hand. What the series shows us, finally, is how he mirrored people’s hopes for peaceful change — then, and now.

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‘Bobby Kennedy for President’

Streaming Friday on Netflix