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Several times in 1963, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau had conversations with 31-year-old Bob Arum about a new job.

Only seven years out of Harvard Law School, Arum was working as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the southern district of New York office that Morgenthau headed.

The chatter was that if President John F. Kennedy was re-elected in 1964, Robert Kennedy would become Secretary of State and Morgenthau would become the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy and Morgenthau had chatted informally about having Arum move to Washington, D.C., and head up the tax division of the Justice Department.

"Had those moves occurred, I'd probably be a retired federal judge now and someone else would have had to promote all those fights," said Arum, who at 81 is still one of the sport's top promoters.

On Saturday, Arum will promote a pay-per-view show in Macau, China, headlined by a 12-round welterweight match between Manny Pacquiao and Brandon Rios.

A half-century earlier, though, Arum was a member of the Kennedy administration and boxing was the last thing on his mind.

A year earlier, at RFK's direction, he had seized the assets from the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight that had been promoted by Roy Cohn. Kennedy had learned that Cohn planned to put Patterson's purse in a Swiss bank account and pay him in installments over 17 years.

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RFK, Arum said, "hated" Cohn. The move Cohn wanted to do is legal now, but was illegal under 1962 federal law.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Arum was in a meeting in a conference room in the U.S. Attorney's office in New York. The door was closed. It was highly unusual that anyone would ever interrupt a closed door meeting, particularly without knocking.

But unexpectedly, the door swung open and a person told the startled people around the conference table that the President had been shot in Dallas.

"Of course, we were all shocked, but we didn't have any details and all we knew was that he had been shot," Arum said. "We were all praying for him. Everyone was saying they hoped it was something minor, more of a superficial wound, and that this would be something easy for him to recover from. Sadly, as we all learned a little while later, that was not to be.

"Everyone had such great respect for the President. He was very, very inspiring, just a great leader. He was just getting used to being President, with all of the administrative duties he had, when he was assassinated."

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