Written By: Ben Cosgrove
How many times must we live through these throat-paralyzing sequences of days of gun play, grief and muffled drums?
That question, posed by LIFE magazine in its June 14, 1968, issue, is freighted with all of the emotions—sorrow, frustration, a bewildered dread—unleashed by the events that unsettled the country in the first half of that schizoid year. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre and the other horrors of the war in Vietnam; and, in early June, the murder of Robert Kennedy by a Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian, Sirhan Sirhan, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Here, remembering RFK’s assassination—a murder that came just as Kennedy was finding his true voice as the leader of a vast, disaffected cross-section of the American public—LIFE.com presents a series of photos by the great Bill Eppridge. Many of these photos never ran in LIFE.
The very first picture in the gallery is not only the most recognized and most frequently reproduced picture from the night of the assassination, but one of the most chilling, signature images of the 1960s. As a historical document, it’s indispensable. As a photograph, it’s astonishing: made in an instant, Eppridge’s picture possesses the immediacy of great photojournalism, while conveying a totemic sense in its interplay of light and dark. It’s reminiscent of a tone sometimes encountered in portraits by the Old Masters.
Wrote LIFE in that issue after RFK’s murder:
The nation in less than six years has watched the violent deaths of two Kennedys and a King. If Robert Kennedy, a complex man, ambitious and fatalistic, did not inspire so universal an admiration as his brother, he had shown himself capable of growing and deepening. He died too young; the Kennedy family has paid dearly for its ardor for public service.
Almost instinctive in the recoil at his murder was the sense that it was a part of a climate of violence. Arthur Schlesinger [JFK’s “court historian”] may have been speaking more in the moment than as a historian when he said last week “we are today the most frightening people on this planet.” Even if he is a Pasadena resident, a Jordanian Arab [RFK’s assassin, Sirhan] who kills out of a hatred for his ancient enemy, the Jews, may be a better example of classic Middle Eastern methods than of the callous kook our mixed-media society is accused of turning on and turning loose.
President Johnson was right when he said, “Two hundred million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy. . . .” But it is surely a good thing to ask ourselves whether the compulsion to violence was born entirely within a killer or whether we and our society are somehow accomplices. . . . The Vietnam war has been our most vivid daily exposure to violence — and the nation’s eagerness to stop it comes less from any political reappraisal of the ends than a moral revulsion at the means: we don’t love violence all that much.
In the decades since LIFE expressed those sentiments, millions of words have been written about the Kennedys and, specifically, about the abiding intensity with which Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy despised one another. The two men had essentially been enemies since Johnson accepted JFK’s invitation to be his running mate, a decision Bobby Kennedy vocally fought until, and beyond, the 1960 Democratic convention. But in early June 1968, it was still possible for most Americans to believe that President Johnson might, in fact, genuinely mourn the loss of the dynamic if chimerical and often arrogant Robert Kennedy.
The photographs that Bill Eppridge made before, during and after RFK’s assassination don’t require that we forget all we’ve learned about the dank underside of American politics in order to appreciate the fear, rage and anguish sparked by Kennedy’s death. On the contrary, the pictures in this gallery suggest that despite how ambitious and even cruel he could sometimes be, Bobby Kennedy obviously inspired, in countless people, the better angels of their nature.
(One person whose better angels were clearly not stirred was Sirhan Sirhan, who said he murdered Bobby Kennedy because Kennedy supported Israel; or maybe because he, Sirhan, was drunk and murderously furious on the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War in the Middle East; or perhaps, as he later claimed, because he was brainwashed . . . take your pick. Sirhan’s stated reasons for pumping three bullets into Bobby Kennedy and injuring several other people that night have varied wildly through the years.)
Would Robert Kennedy have won the Democratic nomination if Sirhan had not gunned him down in that hotel kitchen? Would he have gone on to beat Richard Nixon in the general election if he had won the nomination? The measure of the man must be taken not by what he might have done, but by what he said and did during his lifetime.
“A complex man, ambitious and fatalistic,” LIFE wrote of Kennedy, who had “shown himself capable of growing and deepening.” We’ll never know how much he might have grown, how much further he might have deepened, had Sirhan’s bullets not silenced him.That’s where much of the tragedy of the tale lies: in the ruined promise of the man’s potential.
Rigid, semiconscious, his face an ashen mask, Senator Kennedy lay in a pool of his own blood on the concrete floor, a bullet deep in his brain and another in his neck. Juan Romero, a busboy whose hand Kennedy had shaken before the shots, tried to comfort him.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy, June, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sen. Robert Kennedy campaigned, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Supporters of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy watched him on TV.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sen. Robert Kennedy conferred with an aide during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sen. Robert Kennedy gave a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sen. Robert Kennedy gave a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sen. Robert Kennedy gave a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Headed for his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, Robert Kennedy stopped in the kitchen to shake hands. A few minutes later the gunman was waiting for him in the corridor just outside the kitchen.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy stopped in the kitchen to shake hands.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy greeted supporters not long before his assassination, June 5, 1968, Los Angeles, Calif.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A less-famous image of Sen. Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Hotel employee Juan Romero moments after RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mortally wounded Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In the hot, jammed corridor where her husband lay behind her, Ethel Kennedy implored the crowd of shocked onlookers to move back and give him some air.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A wounded Paul Schrade, a regional director of the United Auto Workers Union, labor chair of Robert Kennedy’s campaign and one of five other people shot by Sirhan Sirhan, lay on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 5, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A mortally wounded Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy assassination, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ethel Kennedy and others surrounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ethel Kennedy and others surrounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ethel Kennedy and others surrounded a mortally wounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ethel Kennedy, who had been walking beside him, crouched over her dying husband, whispering to him as he lay on the floor. Beside Ethel, waiting for the ambulance attendants to arrive, knelt her sister-in-law, Mrs. Stephen Smith and Dr. Ross Miller.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Robert Kennedy supporter registered disbelief after his shooting.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert F. Kennedy assassination, June 5, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A young Robert Kennedy supporter showed disbelief after Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The football great, and RFK bodyguard, Rosey Grier arrived at the hospital. Grier had tackled Sirhan at the scene after Sirhan shot RFK; George Plimpton walked behind Grier.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy, Frank Mankiewicz (center, in suit and tie), prepared to address the media gathered outside the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, Los Angeles, June 5, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Edward Kennedy’s wife Joan Bennett Kennedy (left), Jackie Kennedy (center) and Sargent Shriver (right), husband of Eunice Kennedy and brother-in-law to John, Robert and Edward Kennedy, after the assassination of RFK, Los Angeles, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy’s body was loaded into a transport after his death and autopsy, prior to being shipped from Los Angeles to New York, June 6, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Robert Kennedy’s body was loaded into a transport after his death and autopsy, prior to being shipped from Los Angeles to New York, June 6, 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Following a funeral mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, RFK’s body traveled by train to Washington, DC, where he was buried near his older brother John. In this photo, people paid respects to the slain senator as the train carrying his body passed by, June 1968.
Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
