Kerry On

She is a slight and pretty woman with a guileless expression, lustrous brown eyes, and the manner of one eager to help others. But she is deceptively demure; underneath the warmth and charm, one senses alert intelligence, tensile strength, and an indomitable will. Those innocent eyes never miss a trick.

In fact, she is a powerhouse disguised as an ingenue.

She is not her father's daughter for nothing.

Mary Kerry Kennedy, the seventh of 11 children, was eight and a half years old when Robert Kennedy was murdered. She treasures her memories of the joyous days at Hickory Hill, the laughter at the dinner table, the frolicking on the lawn, the swarm of pets of every variety.

One evening, 10 children and their mother were sitting down to a lively supper when the door opened and Daddy appeared, back from a trip to Appalachia for the Senate Subcommittee on Poverty. His expression was somber. The children fell quiet. He had just seen three desperately poor families, who lived huddled together in a shack the size of the Kennedy dining room. He said, "I want you to do something for those children."

Kerry Kennedy Cuomo recalls this moment in the poignant introduction she has written for An Honorable Profession, the 1968 tribute to Robert F. Kennedy that she has persuaded Doubleday to reissue on the 25th anniversary of his death. This moving little book includes recollections, merry and melancholy, by people ranging from Averell Harriman and Harold Macmillan to Andrei Voznesensky and Art Buchwald.

Kerry has never forgotten those words: "I want you to do something for those children." Before she finished Brown University in 1982, she had started work for Amnesty International. She took her law degree at the Boston College Law School five years later and in 1988 founded the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. As its executive director, she has led or participated in human-rights missions to a dozen countries, from Pinochet's Chile and Arap Moi's Kenya to Haiti, Poland, and Northern Ireland.

In 1990 came the great dynastic marriage: the daughter of Robert Kennedy wed to the son of Mario Cuomo, uniting two families dedicated to fervent idealism tempered by political realism—combining, in Kerry's words, "passion and pragmatism." And today, with Andrew Cuomo summoned to Washington as assistant secretary of housing and urban development, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo is back living at Hickory Hill, rejoicing in the new spirit of national revival and laboring as always to fulfill her father's wish.

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.