June 6, 2018

Fifty years ago today, on June 6, 1968, United States Senator Robert Francis Kennedy (who was often called Bobby Kennedy) died at age 42, one day after being shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy (widely remembered by his initials, RFK) was running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States at the time, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, John, who was elected president in 1960. Unfortunately, Bobby’s path followed John’s in a different way: he was shot and killed less than five years after John died by an assassin’s bullet in November 1963.

Robert F. Kennedy speaks to a crowd in Washington, D.C., in June 1963. Credit: Library of Congress

Bobby Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Nov. 20, 1925. He was the seventh of nine children. He graduated from Harvard University and the University of Virginia Law School. Kennedy entered the government in 1951 as an attorney in the Department of Justice. He gained public attention in the late 1950′s as chief counsel for the Senate committee that investigated improper labor and management activities.

President John F. Kennedy, at left, talks with his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, during the 1960 presidential campaign. Credit: AP/Wide World

Kennedy managed his brother John’s campaigns for the U.S. Senate in 1952 and for the presidency in 1960. He was appointed attorney general of the United States in 1961, and he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1964. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination was part of a difficult year in the United States that included the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., heightened racial tensions and riots in American cities, and an escalation of the Vietnam War (1957-1975).

In 1969, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant born in Jerusalem, was convicted of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and sentenced to death. The sentence was changed to life imprisonment in 1972 after the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan confessed to shooting Kennedy, but he claimed not to recall the crime, and his reasons for the assassination were never made clear. Some people suspected that Sirhan took the fall as part of a larger conspiracy, and that someone else had helped Sirhan or had actually killed Kennedy. Others saw Sirhan’s actions as revenge on the United States for its support of Israel, the creation of which in 1948 displaced many Palestinians. Still others thought Sirhan suffered from diminished capacity, an unbalanced mental state that can make a person less responsible their actions. Regardless, Sirhan’s case is closed and he remains in a correctional facility near San Diego, California.