See Bobby Kennedy's Evolution in New Documentary

But Kennedy’s hatred of Johnson and others was offset by a growing, socially conscious kind of love for humanity as he campaigned for president after Johnson declined to run, his own presidency ruined by Vietnam. Kennedy’s visits to the underprivileged in Appalachia, Mississippi and the California grape fields made him a new man, a champion for the downtrodden and a beacon for the idealistic young. In one funny scene, he confronts a California official who arrested farmworkers because they were “ready to violate the law” — but actually had done nothing illegal at all. Incredulous, his eyes twinkling with an amused outrage, Kennedy advises the official to “use the lunch hour to read the Constitution.”

If you don’t remember 1968, Porter’s no-narrator method makes it a bit hard to keep track of that year’s multiple disasters. As Bobby’s friend and great journalist Pete Hamill recalls on camera, “Martin King had been killed, Malcolm X had been killed. It was like some kind of shooting gallery instead of a civilization.” Right after King’s death, the viewer sees Kennedy making America more civilized, calming an Indianapolis crowd quoting the moving words of his favorite poet, Aeschylus, and perhaps preventing a riot the week dozens of other U.S. towns erupted in flames.

The fourth and last episode in the series is a clunker, featuring the theory that Kennedy's convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian outraged by the candidate's support for Israel, didn’t really kill him — or at least didn't act alone. We hear a disturbing audiotape of an allegedly hypnotized Sirhan being coached by his defense team to recall his crime, which he says he doesn't remember, and Schrade says it couldn't have happened the way prosecutors said. Schrade has no memory of what happened after he himself was shot, and the doc doesn't present a coherent alternative-assassin theory, nor refute Sirhan's confession, apprehension with a hot pistol, and possession of a notebook in which he repeatedly wrote, “RFK must die!” But the scene of Schrade meeting Romero is moving, and the first three episodes are a must-see for history buffs, making Kennedy, for the first time, a documentary movie star.