A Date Correction
Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the early hours of 5 June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and died the following day, 6 June. The event is sometimes placed in 1967, but it belongs to the 1968 presidential campaign. What did happen in 1967 was a shift in his public positions that made the campaign possible, and that is where this article begins.
Kennedy in 1967
Kennedy had been Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and was elected a senator from New York in 1964. After his brother’s assassination he was widely seen as the heir to a political legacy, and his relations with President Lyndon Johnson were strained.
Vietnam was the main issue that separated them. Kennedy had initially accepted the broad outline of American policy, but by 1967 he was increasingly critical. In a Senate speech in early March he called for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as a step toward negotiations, in a speech that drew a sharp response from the administration. He did not yet break openly with Johnson, and his stance was more cautious than that of the war’s fiercest critics. Later, as the number of American troops rose and casualties mounted, his objections grew sharper.
Poverty was the second issue. In April 1967, as part of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, he toured the Mississippi Delta and saw the conditions of rural Black families, including hungry children in unheated houses. The visit became a defining image of his concern. He also supported a project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, launched in December 1966, that brought together community groups, private business and public money. It is often cited as an experiment in an approach different from the federal programmes known as the War on Poverty. His views on civil rights were shaped by his years at the Justice Department and by the summer’s unrest in Newark and Detroit.
The Decision to Run
Through the autumn of 1967 Kennedy was urged by allies and activists to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. He declined, citing the difficulty of defeating a sitting president and the risk of splitting the party. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced his candidacy in November instead, and the New Hampshire primary in March 1968 showed unexpected strength for him.
Four days after that primary, on 16 March 1968, Kennedy announced his own candidacy. Some critics accused him of opportunism; supporters said the primary result showed a chance to act. On 31 March Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, which changed the contest again.
The 1968 Campaign
Kennedy’s campaign drew unusually mixed crowds: Black voters, working-class white voters, Latino farmworkers and students. He campaigned on ending the war, helping the poor and reducing racial division. On the night of 4 April 1968, in Indianapolis, he told a largely Black crowd that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed, in an impromptu speech that is often remembered for its calm tone. Indianapolis stayed relatively quiet that night, while riots broke out in many other cities.
He won the Indiana and Nebraska primaries in May, lost Oregon in late May, and then went to California. On 4 June he won the California primary, narrowly defeating McCarthy.
The Shooting
After giving a victory speech to supporters at the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight, Kennedy left through the hotel kitchen. There a gunman fired at close range. Kennedy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he died about 26 hours later, on 6 June. Five other people were wounded. He was 42.
A Palestinian-born man, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested at the scene. He was convicted of murder in 1969 and sentenced to death, a sentence converted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling on capital punishment. His motives were widely linked to anger over American support for Israel, following the Six-Day War of 1967, though the details have been debated and some questions about the evidence have continued to be raised by Sirhan’s supporters and a few of Kennedy’s family members. The official conclusion remains that Sirhan fired the shots.
A Nation in Mourning
A funeral Mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on 8 June, followed by a long train journey to Washington, with crowds lining the tracks. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near his brother. The killing came only two months after King’s death and left many Americans feeling that the political system had become dangerously violent.
Congress, which had been debating gun regulation for years, passed the Gun Control Act in October 1968. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, went into its Chicago convention in August without a leader who could unite its factions, and Hubert Humphrey won the nomination. What would have happened had Kennedy lived is an unanswerable question; historians generally say only that he would have been a strong contender and that the outcome was uncertain.