RFK Shot at Ambassador Hotel: Second Kennedy Falls

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan waited in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver. At 12:15 AM on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy walked through that pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic primary. Sirhan fired eight shots. One bullet entered behind Kennedy’s right ear and lodged in his brain stem. Kennedy lay on the concrete floor, conscious but unable to move, while busboy Juan Romero knelt beside him and placed a rosary in his hand. He died at Good Samaritan Hospital twenty-six hours later. He was forty-two years old. Kennedy had entered the presidential race just eighty-two days earlier, announcing his candidacy on March 16, four days after Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary demonstrated Lyndon Johnson’s political vulnerability. Kennedy ran on opposition to the Vietnam War, poverty, and racial injustice. His campaign drew enormous, chaotic crowds. He was mobbed in city after city, his cufflinks ripped off, his hands scratched bloody by supporters who grabbed at him with a fervor that unnerved his security detail. The California primary was supposed to be the turning point. Kennedy won with 46 percent of the vote, defeating McCarthy and positioning himself as the leading challenger to Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. His victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom ended with the words "on to Chicago," referring to the convention. He never made it past the hotel kitchen. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian born in Jerusalem, said he killed Kennedy because of Kennedy’s support for Israel. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment when California abolished capital punishment in 1972. Kennedy’s assassination, coming just two months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, plunged the country into a despair that defined 1968 as the year American optimism broke.