RFK Wins California: Then Shot in Kitchen

Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 AM on June 6, 1968, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was forty-two years old, a father of ten children with an eleventh on the way, and the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had survived twenty-five hours and forty-one minutes after being shot three times by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy had just won the California primary, the largest remaining contest in the Democratic race. His victory speech in the hotel ballroom had ended with a characteristic blend of idealism and self-deprecation. He thanked his supporters, acknowledged his opponent Eugene McCarthy’s campaign, and closed with "on to Chicago, and let’s win there." An aide directed him through the kitchen to avoid the crush in the main corridor. The decision to take that route was made in seconds. Sirhan fired eight rounds from a .22 caliber revolver at close range. One bullet entered behind Kennedy’s right ear and fragmented in his brain. Two other bullets struck his right armpit. Former decathlete Rafer Johnson and football player Rosey Grier wrestled Sirhan to a steam table and pinned him down. Kennedy lay on the kitchen floor, his eyes open, and asked "Is everybody okay?" before losing consciousness. Surgeons operated for nearly four hours but could not repair the damage. Kennedy’s death, coming sixty-three days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, shattered whatever remained of the political cohesion that had carried the civil rights movement and the Great Society. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago descended into violence between police and antiwar protesters. Hubert Humphrey won the nomination and lost the general election to Richard Nixon. The liberal coalition that Kennedy had been attempting to build, uniting working-class whites, African Americans, and Latinos, did not coalesce again in his generation.