Kennedy is dead; Johnson declares a national day of mourning
The spring of 1968 had already broken the Democratic Party. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, cities were burning, and Johnson himself had announced he would not seek re-election. Then, in the early hours of June 6, Robert F. Kennedy — who had just won the California primary — died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, nearly 25 hours after Sirhan Sirhan shot him in the kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel. Johnson sent the plane that carried Kennedy's casket to New York, where thousands filed past it at St. Patrick's Cathedral, and declared a national day of mourning for a man he had spent much of his presidency despising.
Kennedy's assassination that June, coming just two months after King's murder, pushed Congress to finally extend Secret Service protection to major presidential candidates — a structural gap in American democracy that had been exposed in the most brutal way possible. The killings of 1968 closed a chapter of postwar American political optimism that has never quite reopened.
QWhy did Robert Kennedy have no Secret Service protection on the night he was shot?
At the time of Kennedy's assassination, federal law did not require the government to provide Secret Service protection to presidential candidates — only to the sitting president and vice president. Kennedy's entire security detail that night consisted of a former FBI agent named William Barry and two unofficial bodyguards: Rafer Johnson, the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medalist, and former NFL player Rosey Grier. The gap had simply never been legislated closed. Congress moved quickly after the shooting, and the resulting law extending Secret Service protection to major candidates was one of the direct institutional consequences of June 5, 1968.
QWhat did Johnson do with the plane that carried Kennedy's casket — and why does it matter?
Johnson sent a jet emblazoned with 'United States of America' — a presidential aircraft — to transport Kennedy's casket from Los Angeles to New York City, where thousands viewed it at St. Patrick's Cathedral before the funeral mass on June 8. The gesture carried real weight given that Johnson and Kennedy had hated each other for years, and historian Jeff Shesol has noted that Johnson's handling of the mourning period was notably warmer toward John Kennedy's memory than toward Robert's. Sending the plane was an act of office rather than affection — a distinction Johnson's contemporaries understood clearly.
QWhat was written in Sirhan Sirhan's diary before the assassination?
During a search of Sirhan's home, investigators found a diary containing an entry dated May 18 that read: 'Robert Kennedy must be assassinated ... My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more and more of an unshakable obsession. RFK must die. RFK must be killed.' When Sirhan was booked by police on the night of the shooting, they found in his pocket a newspaper article discussing Kennedy's support for Israel. At trial in 1969, Sirhan testified that he had killed Kennedy 'with 20 years of malice aforethought.' As of 2023, he had been denied parole 17 times.
