THE relatively brief career of Robert F. Kennedy commanded a remarkable share of the public's attention. His restless energy seemed a daily part of the news. Like most other journalists TIME'S editors felt a sense of long familiarity with his high visibility. Even so, as they leafed through past issues last week, they were surprised by the reminders of just how often Bobby Kennedy had appeared on TIME'S cover. Before he was killed by an assassin's bullet at the age of 42, he was our cover subject no fewer than five times, and beyond that, he appeared in the background of a cover portrait that included his parents, his brother Jack, and his sister-in-law Jackie (July 11, 1960). There was, in fact, a seventh cover that included Bobby--as one of a crew of presidential hopefuls (April 14, 1967).

In our first cover story on him, when he was the campaign manager for his brother, we assessed him as "a young man of brutal honesty and impeccable integrity." In the cover story a year and a half later, when he was Attorney General, "his youthful energies were explosive; his capacity for listening, looking, learning was enormous; his charm (when he felt like turning it on) was electric."

Later in his service as Attorney General, he was the cover figure for his role in the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and he was praised for "his shrewd, tough abilities for detail-by-detail planning," In 1966, as he passed President Johnson in popularity polls, the cover story reported that "a strong streak of fatalism runs through him," Bobby was quoted as saying: "There's no use figuring out where you're going to be later on; you may not be there at all. So the sensible thing is to do the very best you can all the time," Only a few weeks ago, during his vigorous primary campaign, he was portrayed by Artist Roy Lichtenstein as an American pop hero. TIME saw him as "glad to be in combat again, waging the politics of restoration."

This week's cover was painted by Louis Glanzman, whose last previous portrait for TIME was of Charles de Gaulle (May 31). Glanzman, assigned to do Kennedy's portrait eight hours after the shooting in Los Angeles, found the commission an almost painful personal experience. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the artist worked all night on a portrait-- for himself-- as a kind of catharsis of his grief. This time, faced with a hard deadline, he also worked the night through, "I was glad to have the chance," he said. "I had to get it out of my system."

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