At Eighteen, Donna Chaffee Went to Work for Robert F. Kennedy

In 1965, most eighteen-year-olds were figuring out college, first jobs, or where to spend the summer. Donna Chaffee was walking into the Washington office of Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy had just been sworn in as the junior senator from New York. Barely a year had passed since the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and the country still looked at Bobby as the keeper of a legacy and, for many, the promise of what might come next. Chaffee joined his Senate staff at the very beginning of that chapter. For the next three years she worked close to one of the most famous men in America, and she watched history happen from a desk just outside the spotlight.

First Great Sorrow: My Years with Robert F. Kennedy is her account of that time. It is not a biography written from archives and interviews. It's a memoir, told by someone who knew him personally, and that's exactly what makes it valuable.

Robert Kennedy's Senate years, from 1965 to 1968, are some of the most turbulent in modern American history. The civil rights movement was reshaping the country. The war in Vietnam was escalating and dividing families, campuses, and Congress. Kennedy himself was changing too, moving from the hard-edged political operator of his brother's administration toward the more searching, openly emotional public figure many people remember today. Historians have written about that transformation for decades. Chaffee saw pieces of it up close, in the ordinary rhythm of office life and in moments no newsreel captured.

Some of the most striking scenes in the book are the quiet ones: private conversations, evening rides home from the Capitol, and glimpses of life inside the wider Kennedy world, from summers at Hyannis Port to the controlled chaos of the campaign trail. These are the details that turn a legend back into a person. The man millions admired but few truly knew appears here as a boss, a presence in the room, and someone whose moods and kindnesses mattered to the young people who worked for him.

At the same time, First Great Sorrow is Chaffee's own coming-of-age story. She arrived in Washington young, ambitious, and admiring, and she grew up inside an extraordinary and often frightening decade. The memoir follows her as she learns how political life actually works, finds her own sense of purpose, and faces the emotional weight of a nation repeatedly shattered by violence. In 1968 Kennedy entered the race for president, and Chaffee volunteered for his campaign. That June, on the night he won the California primary, he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and died the following day. He was forty-two.

Readers who know that history will feel the ending approaching from the first page, and that is part of the book's power. Chaffee writes with the knowledge of what came next, looking back at a young woman who did not yet know how the story would end. The title says it plainly. This was her first great sorrow, and in many ways it was a sorrow the whole country shared.

What makes the memoir special is its point of view. The Kennedy story has been told countless times by journalists, historians, and family members. Far less often do we hear from the staff members, the young people who answered the phones, handled the mail, and kept the office running while history unfolded around them. Their perspective is closer to the ground and often more honest, because they saw the person on ordinary days as well as historic ones. Chaffee's never-before-shared stories fill in that missing view, and they bring vivid, human detail to a period most people know only through famous photographs and speeches.

After her years in Washington, Chaffee went on to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in political science. Decades later, she has returned to those formative years with the clarity of hindsight and the tenderness of someone who was there.

For readers fascinated by the Kennedys, by the 1960s, or by the people who stood just outside history's spotlight, First Great Sorrow offers something rare: a firsthand portrait of a legendary figure, and a moving story about power, loss, and growing up in a country that was coming apart.

First Great Sorrow: My Years with Robert F. Kennedy by Donna Chaffee is available now in paperback and hardcover.