Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy spent the first half of his public career as his brother's enforcer and the second half becoming something his brother never quite got to be: a politician who had genuinely changed. As Attorney General under John F. Kennedy, he ruthlessly pursued organized crime and, under pressure, began enforcing civil rights law in the South. After Dallas, he emerged from grief a different man — quieter, more drawn to the dispossessed, more willing to say uncomfortable things out loud. By 1968, he was the only major political figure in America who could draw simultaneous cheers in Black urban neighborhoods and white working-class factory towns.

Kennedy declared his presidential candidacy on March 16, 1968, 12 days after Eugene McCarthy's strong showing in New Hampshire had proved Lyndon Johnson was vulnerable. He ran against the Vietnam War and against a political culture he said had grown indifferent to poverty and suffering. He campaigned in Appalachian hollows, on Indian reservations, and in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. On April 4, 1968, standing on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, he told a Black crowd that Martin Luther King had just been killed — and improvised what many consider the finest speech of the 1968 campaign, quoting Aeschylus from memory.

He won the California primary on June 4, 1968. Minutes after delivering his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel kitchen. He died the next morning. Kennedy was 42. His death, coming just two months after King's and five years after his brother's, left a generation with the persistent feeling that the 1960s had ended that night in Los Angeles, long before the decade reached its final year.