Question: At what year did Kennedy take office as New York Senator?
About the article "Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy", section "Background".

Candidate passages:
D.C. Stadium in Washington, D.C. was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.
In 1978, the United States Congress posthumously awarded Kennedy its Gold Medal of Honor.
In 1998, the United States Mint released a special dollar coin that featured Kennedy on the obverse and the emblems of the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate on the reverse.
In Washington, D.C. on November 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft dedicated the Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, honoring Robert F. Kennedy on what would have been his 76th birthday.
They both spoke during the ceremony, as did Kennedy's eldest son, Joseph II.
Numerous roads, public schools and other facilities across the United States were named in memory of Robert F. Kennedy in the months and years after his death.
The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial organization was founded in 1968, with an international award program to recognize human rights activists.
It is now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
In a further effort to not just remember the late Senator, but continue his work helping disadvantaged, a small group of private citizens launched the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps in 1969, which today helps more than 800 abused and neglected children each year.
A bust of Kennedy resides in the library of the University of Virginia School of Law, from where he obtained his law degree.
On June 4, 2008, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy, the New York State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough Bridge in New York City the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge in honor of the former New York Senator.
New York State Governor David Paterson signed the legislation into law on Friday, August 8, 2008.
Personal items and documents from Kennedy's office in the Justice Department Building are displayed in a permanent exhibit, dedicated to him in the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
The handcuffs used to arrest Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan are now among the collection of the National Law Enforcement Museum. 
Kennedy first considered running for political office in 2000 when he considered running for United States Senator in New York.
After deciding not to run in that election, he again considered running in 2005 for Attorney General.
With the possibility of a matchup against his then brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo generating media interest, Kennedy again decided not to run, despite being considered the frontrunner if he ran.
In a January 2007 interview in "", Kennedy said he would consider running for the potentially open seat of then-United States Senator Hillary Clinton of New York if she were to win the 2008 Presidential election.
RFK Jr.'s father was elected to that seat in 1964 and held it for more than three years.
Clinton did not win the election and Kennedy announced on December 2, 2008 that he would not run, feeling it would take too much time away from his family 
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Was president in "Fatherland", a novel by Robert Harris later made into a HBO movie.
In the novel, Nazi Germany won World War II resulting in a far different world by April 1964.
With tensions easing between the world's two major superpowers, a 75-year-old Adolf Hitler welcomes President Kennedy (who was elected in 1960) to a Berlin summit in the interest of fostering détente.
Kennedy was believed by one of the main characters to be a shoo-in for re-election until the truth of the death camps is uncovered on the day of the summit.
President Kennedy was played by Jan Kohout in the movie.
In the novel "K is for Killing" by Daniel Easterman, he becomes the 34th President in 1940 following the assassination of President D. C. Stephenson.
Stephenson was elected Vice President under Charles Lindbergh in 1932, and became President upon arranging for Lindbergh's assassination to prevent him from discovering a secret nuclear weapon collaboration plan with Nazi Germany.
In the novel, Kennedy is Speaker of the House and becomes President when Stephenson is killed by his own wife, but blames it on German agents and uses it as a pretext to sever all ties with Germany.
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.
In "Franz Ferdinand Lives!
A World Without World War I" (2014) by Richard Ned Lebow in which neither World War I nor World War II took place, Kennedy was elected President in 1960 and served two terms.
His First Lady was the former model, Broadway actress and "Winner Take All" hostess Athalia Fetter.
She became a prominent civil rights activist, which resulted in a rapid decline in her husband's popularity.
Although they were portrayed as a fairy tale couple, they often had extremely heated arguments in the White House.
JPK's Attorney General was his younger brother John F. Kennedy.
During an argument with the First Lady, JPK once remarked that he wished that he had married Jack's wife Jacqueline Kennedy as he was certain that she would have been a vacuous First Lady who would remain out of politics.
John F. Kennedy  Still alive in the 1990s in Brad Ferguson's "The World Next Door" and still legally the President, since the US and the whole world were completely devastated in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into all-out nuclear war and no further elections were ever held.
Kennedy is hated and detested by the remnants of the American population, starting to revive by their own efforts in small pockets here and there.
Generally considered "The man who destroyed the country", Kennedy's exact whereabouts are unknown, and he is rumored to be "hiding out in a bunker somewhere".
In James P. Hogan's "The Proteus Operation", Kennedy is elected President in 1972, in an alternate history where Nazi Germany won World War II and the German-Japanese Axis rules all the world except for North America and Australia.
President Kennedy vows "not to give up a single inch of free soil" and engages in an increasingly tense Cold War with the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, facing the bleak possibility of either defeat in the coming hot war or the destruction of the world in a nuclear holocaust.
In 1974, Kennedy sponsors a secret time travel project to send a special commando unit back to 1939, whose intervention eventually creates our own history.
Herbert B. Douglas' story "The Mother of all Murder Trials" is an alternate history in which Jacqueline Bouvier married John G. W. Husted, Jr. rather than John Kennedy.
Kennedy then married Marilyn Monroe and was elected President in 1960 with her at his side.
In their first year, Monroe was a highly successful and glamorous First Lady, but afterwards their marriage went under increasing strain, bitter quarrels and mutual (justified) accusations of infidelity.
Late on the night of September 30, 1962, President Kennedy discovered his wife in bed with his brother Robert F. Kennedy, pulled a gun and killed both of them – being found by White House aides bitterly crying with the smoking gun still in his hand.
A week later Congress unanimously voted to impeach Kennedy and remove him from office, whereupon he was charged with murder.
After dismissing a lawyer who tried to plead "temporary insanity", Kennedy pleaded guilty and specifically asked the court to sentence him to death as "the least which I deserve", refused to appeal the sentence and went to the electric chair after the Pope came to America to personally give him absolution.
His last words were "God bless America – I am ready to do my last duty for my country".
While initially considered a monster, Kennedy's sincere and obvious penitence won him considerable public sympathy and he was widely regarded as "a tragic hero".
The enormous attention to this sensational murder case relegated to the back pages the news of Soviet missiles being placed in Cuba.
President Johnson, who took office on October 1962, contented himself with warning the Soviets that any use of these missiles would be "answered ten-fold" by American missiles placed in Turkey.
In 1965 Johnson – concluding that there was no chance left to topple the Cuba regime – reached a secret deal with Fidel Castro, for removal of US sanctions in return for a Cuban promise not to "export the revolution".
This caused an open breach between Castro and Che Guevara, who was arrested in Havana and executed on treason charges.
In one of the alternate realities featured in "The Coming of the Quantum Cats" by Frederik Pohl, Kennedy was a Senator from Massachusetts in 1986 who was married to a woman named Marilyn.
At the time, Nancy Reagan was President of the United States.
She was considered a strong and assertive President, who successfully guided her version of the United States through the major crisis of an invasion from a different reality.
Her husband Ronald, known as the First Gentleman, was mostly disregarded.
In Stephen Baxter's "Voyage", the assassin's bullets went differently on 22 November 1963, and it was Jacqueline Kennedy who was killed, while her husband John Kennedy survived - though crippled and incapacitated, which forced him to resign and made Lyndon B. Johnson the new President.
As in our history, Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 and on 20 July 1969 conducted a widely broadcast phone call with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Joe Muldoon who were walking on the moon.
However, in this timeline the call was joined by former President Kennedy, who there and then committed the United States to send a manned mission to Mars - which Nixon eventually took up and started implementing in practice.
The Mars flight did eventually take off in 1980, from what was called on this timeline the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.
In the alternate history "Dark Future" novel series by Kim Newman, Kennedy was defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1960 election after it was discovered that he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe.
In the short story "The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson" by David Gerrold included in the anthology "Alternate Presidents", the title character defeated Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 after Eisenhower made the mistake of choosing Joseph McCarthy as his running mate instead of Richard Nixon.
However, Stevenson proved to be an extremely unpopular president, leading to his impeachment and subsequent resignation in August 1958.
Stevenson was succeeded by Kennedy, his untested 41-year-old vice-president who becomes the 35th President.
Although the story ends immediately after Stevenson has decided to resign, it is heavily implied that Nixon, already the front runner for the next Republican nomination, will defeat Kennedy in the 1960 election.
This is due to the public's antipathy towards the Democrats and the fact that Kennedy is a much derided figure due to his recent marriage to the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe, referred to derisively as "the new Monroe Doctrine."
In the short story "The Kennedy Enterprise" by David Gerrold contained in the anthology "Alternate Kennedys", Kennedy was raised in Hollywood and eventually decided to become an actor.
Although he was cast in numerous films in the 1940s and the 1950s, roles began to dry up by the time that he had reached his mid 40s.
However, in 1966, he was cast in what would become his best known role, namely Captain Jack Logan of the U.S.S.
"Enterprise" (NCC-1701) in the hugely popular science fiction television series "".
In the alternate history novel "The Two Georges" by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss, Kennedy was a publisher in Boston, Massachusetts in 1995.
Although born and raised in the North American Union, Kennedy had a strong sense of his Irish heritage and hated the British Empire for its past and continued transgressions against Ireland from the Great Famine (1845–1852) to the abject poverty and brutal exploitation of Irish miners in the present.
He adopted a separatist stance, which he expressed through the magazine "Common Sense", frequently skirting the edge of legality.
He was suspected of being a member of the terrorist organisation, the Sons of Liberty.
When the Thomas Gainsborough painting "The Two Georges" was stolen from the Governor-General's mansion in New Liverpool in June 1995, Royal American Mounted Police officers Thomas Bushell and Samuel Stanley and the painting's custodian Dr. Kathleen Flannery followed suspected Sons member Joseph Killbride to Boston, they met with Kennedy, who proved combatative in dealing with Bushell and made very subtle and inappropriate advances towards Flannery.
His brother was a Catholic archbishop.
In the first parallel universe featured in "Sliders", the United States was a severely impoverished nation whereas Mexico was an industrial giant and a world power.
Americans emigrated across the Mexican border in droves.
Furthermore, the world was undergoing global cooling.
In this universe, the Twenty-second Amendment, which states that no person may be elected to the presidency more than twice, had seemingly never been ratified.
Consequently, Kennedy was elected to the nation's highest office in every election from 1960 to 1992.
At the time of Quinn Mallory's visit to this universe in September 1994, Kennedy was serving his ninth term as President.
He did not plan to run for re-election in 1996.
He was married to the former Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe.
In a parallel universe featured in the "Sliders" Season Two episode "Time Again and World", Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
After the Rosenbergs were executed, the director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover became the 36th President.
As a result of Hoover's rise to power, much of the United States Constitution was abridged and martial law was declared.
In the Second Gettysburg Address, President Hoover spoke out against the ills of civilisation, claiming that democracy was leading to godless amorality and the breakdown of the family unit.
Hoover remained president for 22 years until his death in 1985.
Martial law had effectively rendered the United States a police state by 1996.
In a parallel universe featured in the "Sliders" Season Two episode "Obsession", a young psychic from San Francisco predicted the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 and thereby prevented his death.
Lincoln was so grateful and impressed that he created a cabinet post known as the Prime Oracle, whose job was to predict natural and man made disasters.
He and his successors were so successful that millions of American citizens came to trust and believe in psychic abilities.
Kennedy's own assassination was likewise prevented and he survived until May 1995, when he died at the age of 78 due to complications from Addison's disease.
Attendees at his funeral included his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. By 1996, the President of the United States was little more than a figurehead for the country as not even the President could question the Prime Oracle's infinite wisdom.
In the "Elseworlds" comic book miniseries "", Kennedy lost the 1960 election to Richard Nixon, who was later assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
However, he was President by 1978.
During his presidency, he had divorced his first wife Jacqueline Kennedy and married Norma Jeane Baker, becoming the first U.S. President to divorce and remarry while in office.
In the film "", a 2004 mockumentary directed by Kevin Willmott which depicts a timeline in which the Confederacy won the American Civil War, completely annexed and absorbed the United States, and perpetuated slavery.
By 1960, when only 29 percent of voters approve of slavery, Roman Catholic Republican John F. Kennedy is elected CSA president over Democrat Richard Nixon.
However, foreign policy such as the Newfoundland Missile Crisis distracts him, and he is unable to implement his domestic agenda before being assassinated.
In the alternate history novel "The Sky People", Kennedy served two full terms as the 35th President from 1961 to 1969.
Although he was initially considered weak on anti-Communist matters, he was elected to a second term in 1964.
His successful handling of the Vietnam War, the Thailand Border Crisis of 1966-1967 and the Six-Day War silenced the majority of his critics.
The key US base on Mars was named after Kennedy.
In the alternate history novel "The Gladiator" by Harry Turtledove, Kennedy's decision to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was a signal to the world that the United States was not as serious about fighting the Cold War as it held itself out as being.
After the US withdraw its troops from the Vietnam War in 1968, communists and socialists formed popular fronts in the face of the United States' perceived weakness.
With the Soviet Union's support, these popular fronts were able to successfully topple Western Europe's capitalist and democratic governments and established People's Republics.
The United States was the last nation to fall.
By the end of the 20th Century, the entire world had turned to communism.
By the late 21st century, the United States was seen as harmless and was completely obedient to the Soviet Union.
In the parallel universe featured in "Fringe", the nonagenarian Kennedy was serving as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in May 2009 but planned to resign his position in order to lead a new US government agency aimed at slowing ecological breakdown.
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy  Patrick Kennedy was elected in 2000 in the story "Prince Pat" by George Alec Effinger in the anthology "Alternate Kennedys", defeating the incumbent Republican, former Secretary of State James A. Baker.
In real life, Patrick Kennedy, son of President John F. Kennedy, was born August 7, 1963, and died two days later of infant respiratory distress syndrome.
This would have made him, at 37, the youngest President in history.
In style and plot, the story parallels the Shakespeare play "Henry V".
Robert F. Kennedy  The novel "A Disturbance of Fate" by Mitchell J. Freedman is premised on Robert Kennedy surviving Sirhan Sirhan's assassination attempt and going on to serve two successful terms as president with Ralph Yarborough as his vice president and eventual successor.
In one of the episodes of "What If?"
on the Discovery Channel, he won the Democratic nomination in 1968 with Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. as his running mate.
Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon and George Wallace in the general election to become the 37th President but was shot to death in September 1969.
In the story "President-Elect" by Mark Aronson in the anthology "Alternate Kennedys", RFK survives his encounter with Sirhan Sirhan and adds a strong law and order theme to his campaign.
Pressured by incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson to more closely toe the party line (or more precisely, the LBJ line) or else risk having his election sabotaged, Kennedy bolts and becomes the Republican nominee with Richard Nixon as his running mate.
The Democrats nominate his brother Ted Kennedy to run with the incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Kennedy/Nixon barely edges Kennedy/Humphrey, but before he can be inaugurated, Robert is killed when he accidentally drives off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, leaving Nixon to become the 37th President.
In the 1969 alternate history "If Israel Lost the War" by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein and Robert Littell, Israel was defeated in the Six Day War, Sirhan Sirhan went home to share in his people's victory celebrations, and Robert Kennedy passed unscathed through the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel and went on to be elected as the 37th President.
On entering office, Kennedy feels that the fall of Pro-Western Israel at the hands of the pro-Soviet Nasser's Egypt has dangerously tipped the global balance of forces, and he orders an escalation of the Vietnam War through a land invasion of North Vietnam.
However, American forces get bogged down far short of Hanoi, due to intensive Vietnamese guerrilla activity plus the direct mass intervention of Chinese "volunteers", similar to those who fought in the Korean War.
As a result, the President's popularity sharply plunges by 1969, when the book ends.
In the short story "Fellow Americans" by Eileen Gunn contained in the anthology "Alternate Presidents", Barry Goldwater defeated the early favourite and incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and went on to be re-elected in 1968.
During his term in office, President Goldwater ordered that nuclear weapons be deployed against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
In 1990, Kennedy, who had never seriously sought the Democratic presidential nomination, was serving as the Governor of New York and proceedings had been instituted against him for an alleged impropriety which he had committed while in his office.
While attending the opening ceremony of the 1990 New York World's Fair in the Tower of Diminished Expectations, Governor Kennedy was the subject of an attempted assassination but survived as he had been wearing a bullet proof vest.
During his convalescence, he informed his wife Ethel Kennedy that he intended to seek the Democratic nomination for the 1992 presidential election and run against the incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush, who was increasingly unpopular due to his perceived poor handling of the economic recession.
However, as the would-be assassin had not been caught, Ethel was afraid that he would strike again and attempted to persuade her husband to abandon his plans to run for the presidency.
Her efforts proved unsuccessful.
Kennedy remained bitter that Johnson had chosen Hubert Humphrey as his running mate in the 1964 election as he was convinced that, with him on the ticket, Johnson would have defeated Goldwater and that he (Kennedy) would have gone on to be elected President himself in 1968.
Ted Kennedy  Mentioned in "The Simpsons" episode "Bart to the Future" and was president sometime before Lisa Simpson.
A list of US Presidents since the 1950s in Robert A. Heinlein's book "" (1984) concludes with "Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy", presumably referring to both Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.
This joke was used earlier in "A Boy and His Dog" (1976) when the main character lists the presidents in order: "Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy...".
This list was also mentioned as the USA presidents in The Number of the Beast for "Timeline 2" (the Future History timeline) as "Woodrow Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, ..., Neemiah Scudder Interregnum".
Elected President in 1980 in the first edition of Jeffrey Archer's novel "Shall We Tell the President?".
He had narrowly managed to defeat Jimmy Carter on the fifth ballot at the Democratic National Convention.
He picked Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers as his running mate and they defeated Illinois Governor James R. Thompson by a 147,000 votes in the popular vote and became the 40th President.
(In the revised edition, Florentyna Kane, from Archer's "Kane and Abel" and "The Prodigal Daughter" was the president.)
Rev.
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
In an episode of "What If?"
on the Discovery Channel, King was Vice President under Robert Kennedy and succeeded him as the 38th President in September 1969.
Major of his initiatives are détente and continue program of Great Society (but under a new name).
He was assassinated in 1971.
He was succeeded by Vice President George McGovern.
Wynton Kelly  In the German Tageschau for the Wende Gruppe Wiedervereinigungsfest, Kelly was President of the United States in the 1970s, during a crisis between the US and the USSR around the "Herald des Freien Westens", a communication satellite.
The secret services of both sides of the Iron Curtain claimed that the other side had stolen crucial parts of the satellite for military purposes.
Kelly gave a broadcast speech in which he warned the Soviet leaders to immediately deliver to stolen parts back to the US under threat of a nuclear attack.
In return General Bravonov, the Soviet leader, warned the US to return their parts of the satellite.
The broadcast speech can be viewed on YouTube under the tag "Wiedervereinigungsfest".  
Morse was a late entry in the race for the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.
It began unofficially at a 1959 press conference held at the state capitol in Salem by local resident Gary Neal and other Morse supporters.
They declared they would put Senator Morse on the ballot by petition.
As early as April 1959, Morse told a meeting of the state's Young Democrats that he had no intention of running.
The group still voted to advance Senator Morse, after Congresswoman Edith Green introduced him as a favorite son.
Gary Neal was persistent and by winter of 1959 was nearing completion of his signature petition to place Morse on the May ballot.
Morse soon found himself at a meeting with Neal where they discussed his efforts.
Neal said to Morse, “if we don’t put your name on the ballot, your enemies will."
It was clear the elephant in the room with Gary Neal and Wayne Morse was the Oregon Republican Party.
Morse shot back about the Oregon Republicans, “I say to the Republican Party, trot out your governor.
I’m ready to take him on.”On December 22, 1959, Wayne Morse announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States of America.
He said at his announcement, “Although I would have preferred not to have entered the Oregon race, I shall not run away from a good political fight if it is inevitable.” The Morse for President Oregon Headquarters was located at 353 S.W.
Morrison St. Portland, Oregon 97204.
The Morse entry into the presidential race did not sit well with many who had anticipated significant campaigning in Oregon from a large field of candidates.
Morse was accused of flip-flopping on whether or not he would run.
Morse filed to run in May primaries in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Oregon, in that order.
He had solid connections in all three areas.
Oregon was his home and where his wife and family lived.
He owned a small farm in Poolesville, Maryland, and had spent fifteen years fighting for D.C. home rule, sponsoring legislation for that cause.
Kennedy did not enter the D.C. primary.
Senator Hubert Humphrey was Morse's main opponent in the D.C. contest, which Humphrey won 7,831 to 5,866.
Morse had known when he entered the Maryland contest that he was climbing an extremely steep hill, and had hoped to offset a potential loss there with a win in the District.
John F. Kennedy was a Catholic and Maryland was the birthplace of the American Catholic church.
Morse attempted to generate as much media coverage as possible.
The New York Times caught wind of the Morse campaign and did their best to follow Morse around.
Morse made his liberalism a key issue at every campaign stop.
His remarks in Cumberland, Maryland suggest that Kennedy was anything but a liberal:"When the Eisenhower Administration took office one of its first objectives was to riddle the tax code with favors for big business and it did so with the help of the Senator from Massachusetts.
We need a candidate who will reverse the big money and big business domination of government.
We need a courageous candidate who will stand up and fight the necessary political battle for the welfare of the average American.
Kennedy has never been willing to do that.
"As Morse had predicted, he lost to Kennedy in Maryland.
Morse continued to pursue his liberalism strategy as the campaign moved to his home turf.
Oregon Democrats prepared for a showdown between Morse and Kennedy, although five candidates would appear on the Oregon ballot.
Humphrey, to this point Kennedy's main challenger in the primaries, had lost badly to Kennedy in West Virginia and had dropped out of the race.
The Kennedy campaign began to focus on Oregon.
Its workers repeatedly denied that Morse was a serious candidate, but to make sure of a win, the campaign sent Rose Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy to speak in Oregon and outspent Morse $54,000 to $9,000.
Morse often found himself responding to Kennedy’s claim that he was not a “serious candidate”, by proclaiming: “I’m a dead serious candidate.” Quietly, Oregon Democrats began to worry about what a loss for Morse would mean in 1962 against possible Republican challenger Governor Mark Hatfield.
Morse would use this to his advantage to help sway undecided Democrats, claiming that if he lost in the primary, it would certainly help Republicans defeat him in 1962.
Kennedy brushed off this argument by claiming that regardless of the outcome of the presidential primary, the people of Oregon had a tremendous respect for Wayne Morse and would send him back to the Senate, and that he would even come back to Oregon in 1962 to campaign for him.
On Election Day, Morse came up roughly 50,000 votes short of defeating Kennedy.
Morse abandoned his presidential race that same week.
Morse largely sat out the rest of the 1960 campaign.
He even opted out of going to the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
Instead he sat at home and watched it on television from Eugene. 
Although Kennedy has never run for public office, he has shown a consistent interest in public affairs, and has been involved in many campaigns, usually as a field organizer.
Kennedy began working as a field organizer for the first congressional campaign of Joseph Kennedy in 1986, where he organized wards in Allston and Brighton.
Later, he managed the re-election campaign for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 2000.
Max Kennedy has volunteered on a number of other campaigns, including the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy in 1980; Michael Dukakis in 1988; Al Gore in 2000; John Kerry in 2004, and as a surrogate for Barack Obama in 2008.
In 2001 the Boston and New York media touted Kennedy as a possible candidate for Massachusetts's 9th congressional district, a seat vacated by Democrat Joe Moakley.
Kennedy never declared his candidacy, citing his desire to spend time with his family, including his three children under the age of 10.
Maxwell Kennedy endorsed then-Senator Barack Obama early in the primary season, and campaigned for Senator Obama throughout 2008 at approximately 200 events in crucial swing states, including Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, he visited diners and doughnut shops at six a.m. and led senior citizens in singing old Irish ballads at lunch centers; Kennedy campaigned in Indiana on Martin Luther King day and again during the Jefferson-Jackson dinner; he campaigned also across Texas from Austin to Dallas and Fort Worth through San Antonio;.
He phone-banked for Senator Obama and spoke at several Rock the Vote Bus Tour events.
He also introduced Senator Obama at a dinner in Hickory Hill.
In October 2009, Kennedy announced that he would be endorsing Alan Khazei in the special election to fill the US Senate seat of his late uncle, Ted Kennedy