Just after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy walked through a kitchen corridor at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, fired a .22 revolver at close range, striking Kennedy in the head and wounding five bystanders. Kennedy died roughly 26 hours later, plunging a nation already reeling from Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination two months earlier into further turmoil.
Kennedy had just finished his victory speech to supporters in the Embassy Room ballroom, ending with 'On to Chicago, and let's win there,' a reference to the Democratic convention. Aides steered him through a service pantry as a shortcut to a press conference. There, busboy Juan Romero knelt beside the fallen senator, cradling his head—a photograph of that instant became one of the era's most haunting images.
Sirhan Sirhan had stalked Kennedy for weeks, motivated in part by Kennedy's support for Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War. He was captured at the scene after Kennedy's own bodyguard, former Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, and writer George Plimpton wrestled the gun from him.
Kennedy clung to life at Good Samaritan Hospital, undergoing hours of surgery, but was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. on June 6. His funeral train from New York to Washington drew mourners lining the tracks for 225 miles, some struck and killed by a passing train in the crowds. His assassination, following his brother's in 1963 and King's in April 1968, deepened a national sense that American political violence had become endemic.