Television

Neil Genzlinger

You'll be hearing a lot about "the Kennedy legacy" this year, the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. Those references, of course, will be to President John F. Kennedy, but there are other Kennedys with other legacies, and on Friday at 8 p.m. on Investigation Discovery, the documentary "CHILDREN OF PROMISE: THE LEGACY OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY" explores one of them.

The film looks at a Massachusetts program, the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps, that was founded by some of Kennedy's supporters after his assassination to further his efforts to find better ways to help "children of crime, violence and neglect," as the documentary puts it. Some of Kennedy's children speak movingly about his interest in bettering the lives of troubled young people, among them his daughter Kerry Kennedy, who recalls his return from a transformative trip to the Mississippi Delta. "He stood there, and he said, 'I've just been to a part of our country where three families fit into a room the size of this dining room,' " Ms. Kennedy says. " 'We have to help those children.' "

The film looks at several success stories from the Children's Action Corps, which uses a one-child-at-a-time approach rather than fitting all children into a generic model. "We have a broken child welfare system," explains Edward Kelley, the organization's chief executive. "You can't just keep shifting them around and say to them, 'We're going to get you a home some day.' Well, some day never comes."

The New York Times