This Day in History - June 5, 1968 - Robert F. Kennedy gunned down

[Hugh_Lebowski]

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bobby-kennedy-is-assassinated

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. He was pronounced dead a day later, on June 6, 1968.

Bobby K

Such a tragic loss for this country.

[Paladin]

1. I remember it like it was yesterday.

A school friend woke me up with a phone call at 5:00 AM to let me know it had happened. Dear God, the positive things RFK could have accomplished for this country. What a tragic waste.

[electric_blue68]

7. It really felt like the last devastating blow in a fight

[kairos12]

2. Correction to title. 1968 not 67.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Thanks! nt

[mobeau69]

4. Still hurts.

[Dave in VA]

5. Still a very open wound.

All the dreams of what should have been.

[CTyankee]

6. I went to bed before they had said whether Bobby pulled through...I woke up to

a morning national news network and they were showing Bobby playing touch football on the Kennedy estate and other shots from his life. I knew immediately that he had died. God, that was sad. We had lost Dr. King, JFK and now RFK. The world was coming apart...

[electric_blue68]

8. I was going to put something up if no one had by now...

Thanks



I was asleep in NYC and I woke up a little after 4AM with the strangest stomach ache I'd ever had. I'd long out grown the nervous stomach ache I might get on occasion when waaay younger going to school. I turned on my dad's little transistor radio, and heard the news.

I really didn't go back to sleep, blurrily made my way through my HS day. I overheard one person say they were happy. It took a lot out of me not to slap them. A subdued day at a rather usually boisterous HS as we said in low voices to each other that we hoped he'd make it. 😔

I listened to a particular radio show who's host had had many of JFK, and then Bobby's people on his show that I'd been listening to since some time in '67. Much of the staff, and advisors, etc that you read their names in history books now would talk away. Finally went to sleep.

Woke up again around 4am with that same stomach ache in time to hear Frank Mackowitz read his statement.

A friend and I stood on line for ?5 hours to view the casket at St Patrick's Cathedral. Then the next day my mom made my dad go with me (because she thought I looked terrible) to see the procession going to Penn Station for the train.

I had to study for year end exaims as I watched the train travel to DC. I slid between being so annoyed that I had to study so couldn't always pay full attention, and being in surreal sorrow.

Do you remember the crowd singing Battle Hymn of The Republic? 😔

There have only been a couple of years when June arrives that I didn't remember what was coming up.

My folks in 1964 when we visited our cousins right outside of DC (I was 11) we went to visit JFK's grave with the internal flame, and iconic white picket fence. It only dawned on me last year the sadness they must have felt, that they'd go to honor him.

Decades later on a Perfect DC Summer Day - low's '80s, low humidity, crystal clear deep blue sky I visited both JFK's final grave with a circular area with the quotes, and everything. As I turned I saw the simple white cross on the green for RFK further down the slope. Of course I was going to visit that, too. Facing the cross they had a space, and two quotes from him.

It still hurts all these decades later. The paths our country could have taken then, if....