The facts and the date
Robert F. Kennedy was shot shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968 in a kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after he had spoken to supporters celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary. He died in hospital on 6 June, about a day later. The shooting took place in 1968, not 1967. The connection with 1967 is that it was in that year that Kennedy, then a US senator from New York, became one of the most prominent critics of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy, and that political course led into his presidential campaign.
Kennedy in 1967
By the start of 1967 Kennedy was a national figure, as the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, a former attorney general and a senator since 1965. He had at first supported US involvement in Vietnam, but his doubts grew as the war grew larger. In March 1967 he gave a major Senate speech urging a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and a move toward negotiations. His criticism put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, with whom he already had a strained relationship, and it fed speculation about whether he would challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Throughout 1967 he said he would not, in part because he feared splitting the party and being accused of personal ambition.
The wider context was a country growing divided over the war. Casualties and troop numbers were rising, protests were widening, and the Dump Johnson movement was looking for a challenger. Kennedy also paid attention to poverty and racial inequality, visiting poor communities such as the Mississippi Delta, and spoke about urban unrest after the riots of the summer of 1967.
The 1968 campaign
Events in early 1968 changed his calculation. The Tet Offensive in January and February undermined official claims that the war was being won. Then, on 12 March, Senator Eugene McCarthy ran far better than expected in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later, on 16 March, Kennedy announced his own candidacy. On 31 March, Johnson stunned the country by saying he would not seek re-election, a decision usually described as the Johnson withdrawal.
Kennedy’s campaign sought a coalition that included Black voters, Hispanic voters, working-class white voters and young people. On 4 April, the night Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, he spoke extemporaneously to a largely Black crowd in Indianapolis and urged them to respond with compassion rather than violence. The speech is often remembered as one of the most notable of his career. He then went through the primaries, winning in places such as Indiana and Nebraska, losing in Oregon, and then campaigning hard in California, where the vote was held on 4 June. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was seeking the nomination through delegates rather than primaries, remained a major rival.
The shooting
After declaring victory in California, Kennedy was leaving the ballroom through a service pantry when a man fired a .22 calibre revolver at close range. Kennedy was hit, and five other people nearby were wounded. Bystanders, including a group of Kennedy’s aides and supporters, helped to subdue the gunman. Kennedy was taken to a hospital, where he died on 6 June at the age of 42. His body was taken by train from New York to Washington, where he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near his brother.
Sirhan Sirhan and the trial
The man arrested at the scene was Sirhan Sirhan, then 24, a Palestinian who had been born in Jerusalem and had emigrated to the United States as a boy. The prosecution argued that he had planned the killing, pointing to notebooks in which he had written about killing Kennedy, and to Kennedy’s support for Israel. The shooting took place on the first anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War, a fact often cited in discussions of motive.
The Sirhan Sirhan trial began in early 1969. The defence argued diminished capacity, saying Sirhan was mentally disturbed and not fully responsible. In April 1969 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and recommended the death penalty. His sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty in 1972. He has been denied parole repeatedly. A parole panel recommended release in 2021, but California’s governor rejected the recommendation in early 2022.
Some questions about the evidence have been raised over the years, including about the number of shots and the position of the gun, and some people, including surviving witnesses and Kennedy family members, have said they doubt the single-gunman account. These claims remain disputed, and the official finding is that Sirhan fired the shots that killed Kennedy.
Consequences
Kennedy’s death removed the most popular antiwar Democrat from the nomination race, and Humphrey went on to be nominated at the Chicago convention in August amid street clashes. Richard Nixon won the presidency in November. Historians disagree about what would have happened had Kennedy lived, and any answer is speculation.
Protection for candidates changed as well. Soon after the shooting, President Johnson ordered Secret Service protection for the major candidates, and Congress later formalised the arrangement. The Gun Control Act of 1968, signed in October, restricted some interstate firearm sales.
Among the decade’s political killings
Kennedy’s death was one of several political killings that marked the 1960s. Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader in Mississippi, was shot in June 1963. President Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November 1963, and his accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot two days later. Malcolm X was killed in New York in February 1965. In August 1967 the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was shot dead in Arlington, Virginia. The King assassination in April 1968 came just two months before Robert Kennedy’s death.
Taken together, these events shaped a sense of vulnerability and loss. Public figures were more heavily guarded, and many Americans came to associate the late 1960s with violence as well as reform. Historians caution against treating the killings as a single story, since the motives, killers and circumstances were quite different. The shooting in Los Angeles can be understood on its own terms, as the end of a campaign and a life, and also as part of that larger pattern.