Bobby Kennedy Assassinated (June 6, 1968)

 

 

I'm sure many of us remember times in our lives when we awoke in the morning to learn of some major news event that had happened overnight.  For instance, that's when I first heard of Indira Gandhi's assassination; the death of Roberto Clemente in a plane crash; and about the truck bomb that killed 230 US Marines in Lebanon. 

 

 

 

The first time I recall this happening was the morning of June 5, 1968 when my dad woke me up for school (5th grade) and told me that Senator Bobby Kennedy had been shot.  The shooting occurred minutes after his victory speech at a Los Angeles hotel after he won California's Democratic primary.  The first thing that went through my mind was that this was the second Kennedy in just five years to be shot and it been only two months since the assassination of Martin Luther King. 

 

 

Kennedy lingered for a day before dying in the early morning hours of Thursday, June 6 - which happened to be the day of my sister Linda's high school graduation.  Later that day when I arrived home from school I watched some of the news coverage as Kennedy's casket was taken from the plane after it landed in New York.  Since I was 11 at the time the fact that RFK was a youthful 42 years old didn't register with me - after all, he was the age of my parents so it didn't seem young.  Of course, his death cast a pall on the evening's commencement exercises and references to it were inserted into a number of remarks made on the dais. 

 

 

 

In 2006 the movie Bobby a fictionalized account of the  hours leading up to RFK's assassination was released.  It had more than a dozen recognizable stars in its cast, including Ashton Kuthcer, Laurence Fishburne, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore and William H. Macy.