June 6, 1968: Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York dies at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, about a full day after he was shot in the head following a speech where he claimed victory in the California Primary.
I had considered doing this for June 5, because it was after midnight, Pacific Time, on June 4 that he was shot, and people went through the entire day knowing that he was going to die, but hadn't yet. But it was after midnight, local time, on the 5th that he died, so I'm using the 6th.
The California Primary was on June 4, and, having already lost the Oregon Primary to Senator Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin, he had to win this one, or he would be damaged goods, and have no chance at the Democratic nomination for President. Even with a win, it would have been an uphill struggle: A majority of the Delegates to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago were unpledged, and, while President Lyndon B. Johnson was out of the race, he still controlled the Democratic Party, and his hatred of RFK had never faded, and he would have done whatever he could to make sure those unpledged Delegates went to his chosen candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who hadn't entered any Primaries.
The vote in California was close: Kennedy won 46 percent, McCarthy 42. At 12:02 AM, Pacific Time, on June 5, he addressed his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. With him was his wife, Ethel, then pregnant with their 11 child, their daughter Rory.
Also with him were writer George Plimpton, New York Daily News columnists and fellow Irish Catholics Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, and 2 legendary athletes: Rafer Johnson, the UCLA graduate who'd won the Olympic decathlon in 1960, 2 months before RFK's brother John F. Kennedy was elected President; and Rosey Grier, the recently retired All-Pro defensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams. Both were friends, and unofficial bodyguards. In his victory speech, Bobby paid tribute to another supporter, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who had just broken the record for most consecutive scoreless innings pitched.
Bobby closed by saying, "My thanks to all of you, and now, it's on to Chicago, and let's win there!" He gave the crowd a thumbs-up gesture, then switched to a V-for-Victory -- or a Peace Sign, depending on your point of view -- and said, "Thank you very much."
He walked off the stage, and through the kitchen, intending to reach a service entrance, where a car was going to take him to an airport. He shook hands with several kitchen workers, most of them immigrants, all of them poor, and certainly in what would now be called Bobby's "target audience." The last one he reached was Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy from Mexico. It was 12:15 AM -- 3:15 Eastern Time.
The official story is that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old native of Jerusalem, shot him 3 times, once in the head and twice in the back, with a 4th bullet passing through his jacket. Five other people at the event were also shot, all of whom recovered: Paul Schrade, an official with the United Automobile Workers union; William Weisel, an ABC-TV unit manager; Ira Goldstein, a reporter with the Continental News Service; Elizabeth Evans, a friend of Kennedy campaign aide Pierre Salinger, who had been JFK's White House Press Secretary; and Irwin Stroll, a teenage Kennedy volunteer.
In 1989, Sirhan told British journalist David Frost, "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel, and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel, to obviously do harm to the Palestinians." The assassination was not in reference to the kind of causes with which most people associated Bobby: Poverty, civil rights, the Cold War, and, earlier in his career, the fight against organized crime.
(That fight was intense, and, from Congressional hearings in 1957, began a feud between Bobby and Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa. They hated each other so much that, in a 1983 TV miniseries titled Blood Feud, Robert Blake, playing Hoffa, is told on November 22, 1963, "Kennedy's been shot!" and responds with, "Which Kennedy?" Cotter Smith played Bobby. By the time Bobby was assassinated, Hoffa was in prison, and had nothing to do with it.)
As with the assassinations of JFK and, 2 months earlier, Martin Luther King, there are conspiracy theories. There are those who believe that Sirhan was not the shooter, or that there was a 2nd shooter. Their most common statement is that Sirhan could not have gotten close enough to cause RFK's wounds.
As Bobby lay wounded, he asked, "Is it bad?" Romero cradled his head and placed a rosary in his hand. "He seemed to need it more than me," Romero told an interviewer years later. Bobby asked him, "Is everybody OK?"; Romero responded, "Yes, everybody's OK." Kennedy then turned away and said, "Everything's going to be OK." When the stretcher arrived, he said, "Please don't. Don't lift me." He lost consciousness before he could be loaded into the ambulance.
He was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, and the bullet fragments were removed in surgery. But the damage was too extensive: He hung on for a full day, dying at 1:44 AM on June 6. He was 42 years old. Campaign spokesman Frank Mankiewicz told the country at 2:00 AM, 5:00 Eastern.
Bobby's funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. In the hours before, several friends took turns at vigil at his coffin, including singers Andy Williams and Bobby Darin. His brother, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, every bit as devastated as Bobby was when Jack was killed, delivered the eulogy, concluding with words of George Bernard Shaw that Bobby often quoted:
My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it...
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched, and who sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are, and say, 'Why?' I dream things that never were, and say, 'Why not?'"
His coffin was taken to Penn Station, and a funeral train carried him down the former Pennsylvania Railroad, through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. He was laid to rest under a small white cross at Arlington National Cemetery, a few yards away from JFK.
The Number 1 song in America was "Mrs. Robinson" by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The 3rd verse became retroactively painful:
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to the candidates' debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
when you've got to choose.
Any way you look at it, you lose.
In 1974, Martin Sheen played RFK in the TV-movie The Missiles of October. In 1983, he played JFK in the TV miniseries Kennedy. As far as I know, he is the only actor to have played both brothers. In 2005, his son, Emilio Estevez -- half-Irish and half-Spanish, as Martin's birth name is Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez -- directed the film Bobby, about the events of the assassination. Martin had a small role. The filming was one of the last events at the Ambassador Hotel, which was demolished in 2008. In 2010, a group of buildings opened, operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, under the umbrella name The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
Juan Romero died in 2018, shortly after the 50th Anniversary of the assassination. As of June 6, 2022, Ethel Kennedy is still alive. So is Sirhan Sirhan, incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a California State Prison outside San Diego.
My father was 17 when he shook hands with a Kennedy: In 1960, in a campaign motorcade up Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey, John F. Kennedy reached out and shook his hand. To the end of his life, he remained a Kennedy Democrat. But he once told me that Bobby might have been a bigger loss.
The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy were mentioned as part of the actions claimed by the Devil, played by Mick Jagger, in The Rolling Stones' 1968 song "Sympathy for the Devil."
UPDATE: Ethel Kennedy died on October 10, 2024. She was 96 years old. After the 2024 election, Donald Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Several surviving members of the Kennedy family, including 5 of his 6 surviving siblings, denounced his policies as dangerous for Americans' health.
*
June 6, 1968 was a Thursday. Since Bobby wasn't the President, unlike his brother John on November 22, 1963, no sporting events were canceled or postponed. Some Major League Baseball games scheduled for June 8 were postponed, since that was the day announced for his funeral.
It was the off-season for the NFL. The NBA and NHL had already finished their seasons and had recently crowned their champions. As was usually the case in those days, it was the Boston Celtics in the former and the Montreal Canadiens in the latter. The rival American Basketball Association had just completed their 1st season, and their Champions were the Pittsburgh Pipers.
Of the 20 teams then in MLB, 18 played their games on that Thursday:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Minnesota Twins, 2-0 at the old Yankee Stadium. Dave Boswell and Al Worthington combined on a 9-hit shutout. Fred Talbot fell to 0-7 on the season for the Yankees, and would finish 1-8. That's one of the reasons they traded him the next year to the expansion Seattle Pilots, leading to his becoming famous by being frequently mentioned Ball Four, written by another castoff Yankee pitcher, Jim Bouton.
* The New York Mets beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-3 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
* The Detroit Tigers, on their way to winning the World Series, beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-3 at Fenway Park in Boston.
* The California Angels beat the Baltimore Orioles, 8-6 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.
* The Washington Senators beat the Oakland Athletics, 4-3 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. A year later, it would be renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.
* The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox, 2-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Vic Davalillo singled home the winning run in the 11th inning, making a winning pitcher out of Billy Rohr, for whom he was pinch-hitting. It was the 3rd and last career win for Rohr, whose 1st was for the Red Sox against the Yankees a year earlier, coming within 1 strike of a no-hitter.
* The defending World Champion St. Louis Cardinals beat the Houston Astros, 4-0 at the Astrodome. Bob Gibson allowed just 3 hits in a shutout, lowering his ERA on the season to 1.52. It would get lower.
* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-2 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Future Hall-of-Famer Don Sutton got the win.
* The San Francisco Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-2 at Candlestick Park. Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal advanced to 10-2 on the season. He would finish 26-5.
* The only teams not playing on the day were the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds. Neither were scheduled, so it wasn't because of Bobby's death.
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