Robert F. Kennedy

Shot on 5 June 1968 in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan; the Democratic front-runner died twenty-five hours later, eight years after his brother.

Overview

Kennedy, the attorney general of his brother administration and senator from New York, had entered the 1968 race after Eugene McCarthy near-upset of Johnson, campaigning against the war and for the poor, and had just won the California primary when he was shot walking through the hotel kitchen. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab immigrant angry at Kennedy support for Israel in the June war, fired a .22 revolver at close range; Kennedy and five others were wounded. Sirhan was sentenced to death, commuted to life when California briefly ended capital punishment; his many parole bids failed, a 2021 recommendation reversed by the governor. Autopsy evidence that shots were fired closer than Sirhan could have stood feeds a continuing controversy. The murder continued the violent wreckage of American liberalism in 1968, from which the era politics never fully recovered.