It’s the early 1960s. You’re dropping by a friend’s place. You knock on the door — but brace yourself. In their house or apartment there just might reside a lithe jungle cat. These creatures usually call Central and South American forests home, but as LIFE explained to its readers in a December 1961 article, margays were adapting to a whole new habitat … a concrete jungle.
Today, they’re classified as Near Threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered species. But back in the ’60s, margays (along with leopards, chimpanzees and kangaroos) were kept by the rich and famous as novelty pets. The photo here is of Montezuma the margay — “the most elegant pet to be found in New York City,” according to LIFE — romping in the Manhattan home of Mr. and Mrs. Si Merrill.
Subsisting largely on a diet of beef or turkey heart, and the occasional side of watercress, the powerful feline was full of energy. “I don’t think I could live without a margay,” Mrs. Merrill told LIFE. But Monte (as he was known) could probably do all right without her. Margays live largely on birds in their native arboreal habitat — and New York, of course, has an abundance of plump pigeons.
The Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, was so vast in scope—and so punishingly effective in establishing an Allied beachhead on European soil—that people sometimes forget just how long the war lasted, and how brutal it remained, in both Europe and the Pacific after D-Day. The successes at Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword beaches remain, rightly, among the most celebrated military operations in history—but for more than a year following those landings, the fighting went on, and on, and on in some of the war’s most appalling battles and campaigns.
Hundreds of thousands of Allied and Axis troops and untold thousands more civilian men, women and children died before Japan surrendered in September 1945, finally ending the war that for six years had reshaped the globe. This gallery features photographs — some of them iconic, many of them little-known — from Saipan, Bastogne, Iwo Jima, Berlin, Nagasaki: places where the war did not stop when Operation Overlord ended.
Rescue workers helped pull victims from ruins of a building hit by a German V-1 “flying bomb,” July 1944.
Mansell The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A grizzled, battle-weary Marine peered over his shoulder during the final days of fighting on Saipan, July 1944.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Marines in action during the fight for control of Saipan, summer 1944.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marines tended to a wounded comrades while the fighting rages on during the battle to take Saipan from the Japanese, 1944.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
St. Lo, France, summer 1944.
Joe Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
St. Lo, France, summer 1944.
Joe Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Free French soldier dashes to aid a French resistance fighter took aim at a German sniper attacking a crowd during a tour by Gen. Charles DeGaulle following the liberation of Paris, August 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sniper attack, Paris, August 1944.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
V-E Day, Paris
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Grim-faced American soldiers fighting on Okinawa listened to a radio broadcast of the surrender of Germany and the end of WWII in Europe, May 1945.
U.S. Army
A cathedral was turned into a makeshift hospital during the Allied campaign to retake the Philippines, December 1944.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A nurse tended to wounded soldiers in a makeshift hospital located in a cathedral during the campaign to retake the Philippines, Dec. 1944.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
This tired American soldier was just back from the front lines near the town of Murrigen during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American General Anthony McAuliffe, commander of the 101st Airborne during the Battle of the Bulge.
U.S. Army
German POWs carried the body of an American soldier killed in the Battle of Bulge, January 1945.
George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A lace curtain shrouded the body of an American soldier awaiting burial in Bastogne cemetery, January 1945.
Russ Engel/U.S. Army
United States Marines (foreground) blew up a cave connected to a Japanese blockhouse on Iwo Jima, March 1945.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U. S. Coast Guardsmen assisted a wounded Marine returning from the fight on Iwo Jima, 1945.
U.S. Coast Guard
Crewmen fought fires on the deck of the USS Saratoga, which was badly damaged and set ablaze after being hit several times by Japanese bomber planes and kamikaze attacks off of Iwo Jima, 1945.
U.S. Navy
U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.
Joe Rosenthal AP Photo
Oberwallstrasse, in central Berlin, saw some of the most vicious fighting between German and Soviet troops in the spring of 1945.
William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collecton/Shutterstock
Russian soldiers and a civilian struggled to move a large bronze Nazi Party eagle that once loomed over a doorway of the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, 1945.
William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collecton/Shutterstock
American infantryman Terry Moore took cover as incoming Japanese artillery fire exploded nearby during the fight to take Okinawa, May 1945.
W. Eugene Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
U.S. Marines waited to pick off enemies who fled a cave after it was attacked with an explosive charge during the vicious fight for control of Okinawa, 1945.
U.S. Marine Corps
A gutted trolley car amid Hiroshima ruins, months after America’s August 1945 atomic bomb attack on the city.
Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Nagasaki, September, 1945.
Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mother and child in Hiroshima, Japan, December 1945.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A photo album, pieces of pottery, a pair of scissors and shards of life strewn on the ground in Nagasaki, 1945.
Bernard Hoffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American officers (including neck-craning skeptic William “Bull” Halsey, third fr. left) lined the deck of the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) while the Japanese delegation signed the official surrender document, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
V-J Day kiss, Times Square, Aug. 14, 1945.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In the early- to mid-1960s, Dean Martin emerged as one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. He starred in major films, knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with what would become his trademark tune, “Everybody Loves Somebody,” defined a new genre of cool with Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, and captained his own long-running TV variety show. He did all of it with the air of a man who had just woken from a nap and was still charmingly groggy.
In 1958 when the pictures in this gallery were made, Dino—while famous as one-half of the Martin & Lewis comedy duo—had not yet crossed over into superstardom. But he was certainly enough of a draw that LIFE magazine devoted a photo-filled seven-page feature to the man they dubbed “Make-a-Million Martin.”
[To] his skillfully used musical and comedy talents, he adds an ebullience that pervades everything he does. . . . Uninhibited, spry of mind and muscle, he maintains a state of relaxation that “makes Perry Como look like a nervous wreck.”
Keeping carefree appears to be the common denominator of the many Martins — showman, businessman, prankster, family man, self-styled hell-raiser and Hollywood social lion. In each role he works hard at making hard work look easy.
Here LIFE pays tribute to one of show business’ enduring, and most laid-back, superstars.
Dean Martin swung a golf club in order to stay loose on the set of the film Some Came Running, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Jr. visited Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra on the set of Some Came Running, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., 1958
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin with Shirley MacLaine, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin listened to music at home, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin in the steam room, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After a steam bath, Dean dined on beef and beer before his Sands act. With him are songsmith Sammy Cahn (seated) and helper Mack Gray.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin, 1958
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin charged onto stage, followed by Frank Sinatra, at a performance by Judy Garland. To make amends for heckling Garland from the audience, they contributed their talents to the show.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin on stage, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin, 1958
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin hosted a dinner at his Hollywood Dino’s Lodge restaurant. The menu before guest Edith Adams had been altered by her husband, TV’s Ernie Kovacs.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin advised Jimmy Van Huesen (foreground), Johnny Grant (left), Leo and Mrs. Durocher that the dinner would be “on separate checks.”
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin took a turn running a Sands roulette wheel. He pushed chips to a winner, telling her, “Either take it or get out of here.”
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin signed autographs, Las Vegas, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin with his wife, Jeanne, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin at home with his wife, Jeanne, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean inspected his daughter Claudia’s hair. ‘Comb it with a broom?” he asked.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Young Dino flexed for his father, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pop’s perplexity was registered as Gina strolled pensively in shoes large enough for two.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin at home, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Poker pals at Martin’s home included (clockwise from Dean at left) agent Jerry Gershwin, Tony Curtis, Milton Berle, Ernie Kovacs with 85-cent cigar, and director Billy Wilder.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin gave his son Dino a kiss and a dish of ice cream. “Eat it, it comes on the dinner,” said Dean.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Milton Berle joke slayed Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, and publicist Warran Cowan. “Show Miltie a curtain, he takes a bow,'” said Dean.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin with his wife, Jeanne, at home, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
On July 5, 1946, less than a week after the United States detonated an atomic bomb above tiny Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, a Frenchman named Louis Réard an automobile engineer moonlighting as a fashion designer introduced to the sunbathing public what was billed as the world’s smallest swimsuit. Réard called his creation the bikini a name inspired, he later said, by the sight of women rolling up their bathing suits in order to acquire a more complete tan.
Two-piece swimsuits had, of course, been around for a long, long time before Réard came along. Greek urns and mosaics created more than 3,000 years ago depict women athletes wearing two-piece outfits. But Réard’s genius was to devise a garment, out of as little fabric as possible, that one could still legally wear in public.
He marketed his new fashion brilliantly, as well—pronouncing, for example, that a bathing suit wasn’t a true bikini unless both pieces could be pulled through a wedding ring.
Here, LIFE.com offers a celebration of a bathing staple that, through the years, has enjoyed and endured a dizzying array of permutations while always remaining, unmistakably, itself.
Some of the early photos in this gallery depict two-piece bathing suits that might, at first glance, look like bona fide bikinis—but, in Réard’s eyes, would not fit the bill. After all, can be wearing a genuine bikini if, say, one’s bellybutton is covered by a swath of nylon, no matter how elegant or tasteful that swath might be.
Bikinis are not for everyone. There are, thankfully, as many styles of bathing suit as there are human body types and temperaments. That said, it remains incontestably true that few sights can evoke thoughts of summer’s delights with quite the same visceral punch as the unmistakable silhouette of Monsieur Réard’s ingeniously simple, timeless design.
Model June Pickney, 1960.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Linda Christian in 1945.
Bob Landry/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing in France, 1945.
Ralph Morse/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Dona Drake playfully took aim with a rifle on the balcony of her Los Angeles home, 1942.
Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Model Lynn Jones, 1955.
Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
French actress Barbara Lange in a makeshift two-piece bathing suit she cut from one yard of cloth, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Santa Monica, Calif., 1940.
Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
This sun bather had creative tattoos, 1941.
Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rita Hayworth at home in Los Angeles, 1945.
Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Florida, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Florida, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Florida, 1945.
Nina Leen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing in France, 1945.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing in France, 1945.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing in France, 1945.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing in France, 1945.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Beauty pageant winner Jackie Lee Barnes posed poolside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1949.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Model in a bikini, 1950.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Model in a bikini, 1950.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
French fashion model Christiane Richard wore a bikini while drinking her morning coffee, 1950.
Nat Farbman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jayne Mansfield posed with hot-water bottle likenesses floating around her, 1957.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jayne Mansfield and unidentified man, 1961.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Skin diving in Israel, 1960.
Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sunbathing, 1961.
Allan Grant/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Actress Philomene Toulouse, cradling a pet fox, vied for attention at the Cannes film festival, 1962.
Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Cannes, France, 1962.
Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1964.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hungarian model, 1965.
Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Model Naty Abascal showed off designs on her chest and stomach, Bahamas, 1968.
You can’t see her face. The angle from which the photograph is taken is unconventional, and almost vertiginous. The hair, when considered dispassionately, looks absolutely weird.
But Bill Ray’s celebrated picture of Marilyn Monroe onstage at the old Madison Square Garden, singing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy during a May 1962 birthday gala in his honor, remains one of the all-time great celebrity portraits. It has drama (a lone figure, spotlit, on a dark stage). It has sex (a skintight, sequined dress that conceals very, very little). And, of course, in retrospect, it also feels absolutely charged with pathos: Marilyn, after all, would be dead within months of the picture being made, while JFK’s assassination in November 1963 was less than a year and half away.
But like all pictures that assume a stature and a celebrity of their own, far beyond what the photographer could possibly have hoped for or even imagined at the time he or she made the shot, Ray’s photograph is more than a mere portrait. In its stark, almost severe black-and-white simplicity a female figure, a few sheets of paper, a rather battered old wooden lectern, all surrounded by an impenetrable black void the image of Marilyn Monroe seems to capture not only a celebration, but the 35-year-old movie star’s loneliness; her desperate need for affection and affirmation; and the isolating, withering effects of fame on those souls unprepared for its unblinking gaze.
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.
![Japing for Judy [Garland], Dean charges onto stage, followed by Sinatra. To make amends for heckling Garland from audience, they contributed their talents to act.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/05/140529-dean-martin-12-1024x702.jpg "Dean Martin charged onto stage, followed by Frank Sinatra, at a performance by Judy Garland. To make amends for heckling Garland from the audience, they contributed their talents to the show.")
