At 1:44 a.m., on June 6, 1968, a team of medical doctors gave up trying to save the life of a politician who suffered from a gunshot wound to his head. They declared this man dead.
Shortly after that declaration, Frank Mankiewicz stood before reporters and said, “Robert Francis Kennedy died today … he was 42 years of age.”
Mankiewicz served as RFK’s press secretary. He took no questions. He just walked away from the microphones and then let the political world try to make sense of the tragedy that befell arguably the nation’s premier political family.
Kennedy sought the presidency in 1968. He declared his candidacy in the same room his brother, John F. Kennedy, declared his own candidacy in 1960. We know what happened to JFK in November 1963 and many of RFK’s entourage feared the same thing could happen to the brother who guided JFK’s campaign to victory, served honorably as U.S. attorney general and then got elected senator from New York.
RFK was my first political hero. I miss him to this day. He’d be 101 years of age had he not been gunned down.
We cannot assess what kind of president RFK would make. He promised to end the Vietnam War. He vowed to work diligently to stem the deep racial divide in America. He wanted to improve health care. And yes, I believe he is spinning in his Arlington National Cemetery grave at the piece-by-piece dismantling of the nation’s health care system by his own son, RFK Jr. … in service to Donald Trump as secretary of health and human services.
I do believe that RFK’s victory in the 1968 California primary he was celebrating the night he was shot to death would have propelled him to victory at the Chicago Democratic convention and would have enabled him to defeat Richard Nixon in the race for the White House.
But the lunatic gunman who ambushed RFK in the hotel kitchen had other ideas. The pistol he used to kill RFK likely changed te course of U.S. history. He likely will live out his miserable life in the California prison system.
The rest of us who came of age politically in the turbulent 1960s will continue to mourn the passing of a 42-year-old politician who grew into the stature he claimed.