Searching for America's Heart; RFK and the Renewal of Hope

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. viii, [2], 22 pages. Index. Inscribed by the author on the fep. Peter Benjamin Edelman (born January 9, 1938) is an American lawyer, policy maker, and law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law. He worked for Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and for the Clinton administration, where he resigned to protest Bill Clinton's signing the welfare reform legislation. Edelman was one of the founders and president of the board of the New Israel Fund. Edelman worked as a legislative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, from 1964 to 1968, accompanying Kennedy to his meeting with labor leader Cesar Chavez. Edelman also met his wife while touring impoverished areas of Mississippi with Kennedy to prepare for reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Following Kennedy's assassination, Edelman spent brief period working as deputy director for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. Derived from a Kirkus review: Edelman, a former aide to Robert Kennedy, combines memoir and polemic in his repudiation of current tactics in the war on poverty. He begins by recounting Kennedy's views on how the power of the state might best be used to end economic injustice in America-a task, the author writes, that Kennedy believed would best be accomplished by creating and sustaining meaningful, community-based jobs. He examines the Clinton administration's checkered service in this war with some disdain; a onetime presidential adviser on welfare policy, Edelman cannot contain his disgust at Clinton's retreat from principle in the face of the Gingrich-led Republican revolution of 1994. Edelman calls for a rethinking of welfare policy beyond the current one-size-fits-all model. A solid argument to extend the nation's present prosperity to the lowest echelons, as Robert Kennedy urged three decades ago.