America was already in upheaval before Senator Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded early in the morning of June 5, 1968. It was a tumultuous year in a traumatic decade, including the assassination of Kennedy’s brother, John F. Kennedy, in 1963, and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. that April.
After Kennedy’s death, moments after he clinched the California primary in the 1968 presidential election, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a sweeping gun control law. Anti-gun protesters picketed the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association as public sentiment zeroed in on guns as a major problem.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Dennis Brack/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Anti-gun protesters outside the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association.
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Ron Bennett/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Senator Robert F. Kennedy campaigning for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in Los Angeles, California, in May 1968.
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Ron Bennett/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Robert F. Kennedy addressing supporters the night he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.
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Ron Bennett/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Senator Robert F. Kennedy moments after he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. United Press International caption reads: With his shirt open and one eye closed, Senator Robert F. Kennedy lies on the floor of the Hotel Ambassador here early June 5th after being shot by a man identified as Sirhan Sirhan, twenty-four, a Jordanian born in Jerusalem.
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Ron Bennett/UT Austin Briscoe Center for American History
Sirhan Sirhan being taken into custody after the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. United Press International caption reads: The suspect in the shooting of Sen. Robert Kennedy is hustled out of the Ambassador Hotel after he was subdued. Behind him and to the right is Jesse Unruh, Kennedy's California campaign manager. The man has refused to give his name and police are checking fingerprint files for identification.
“The NRA had a prominent building in the center of Washington and not far from the National Mall where protests marches often started,” Dennis Brack, a journalist who photographed protesters outside the NRA headquarters, tells me in an interview. “Its location wasn’t a good spot for the NRA—in the ‘60s we were no strangers to marches: there was a march every day.”
Robert Kennedy had led a stunning campaign, making him one of the most exciting politicians in U.S. history. He appealed especially to poor, African American, Hispanic, Catholic, and young voters with his modern liberalism and ability to transcended the racial divide.
“It was always a long shot for Kennedy,” says Jules Witcover, a journalist who had covered the campaign and who was with Kennedy when he was shot in the kitchen passageway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. “[But] he was a sensation in the campaign . . . generating so much enthusiasm and support.”
Kennedy campaigned tirelessly, all over the country, typically mobbed by huge crowds, ever aware of how his brother had died, and that any of those crowds could harbor a shooter.
The night of June 4 at the Ambassador Hotel had begun in excited anticipation for Kennedy supporters anxious to celebrate his win of the important California primary.
After sharing cigars and drinks with journalists covering his campaign, Kennedy gave a victory speech in the hotel’s ballroom, finishing with the words “Now on to Chicago, and let’s win there too,” referring to the forthcoming Democratic National Convention in August.
Kennedy left the stage shortly after midnight, passing through the hotel’s kitchen passageway toward another room where he would give a press conference.
Four months after Robert Kennedy’s death, President Johnson managed to secure a gun control bill. It marked the beginning of the NRA’s transformation from a gun enthusiast organization to a political lobbying group focused on opposing gun control.
In the crowded passageway, twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Sirhan was waiting. As Kennedy passed, Sirhan raised his hand high above the crowd and fired multiple shots from a snub-nosed revolver. Bullets hit Kennedy in his brain, his neck, and grazed his forehead. Five other people were hit, though none mortally. (As with JFK’s assassination, RFK’s death sparked conspiracy theories suggesting Sirhan didn’t act alone or might not have fired the lethal bullets.)
“His hour of political triumph became another hour of mindless tragedy in a nation that cannot or will not keep weapons of death from the hands of madmen who walk its streets,” Witcover wrote shortly afterwards.
Sirhan, a Jordanian born in Jerusalem who had lived in the Los Angeles area since 1957, reportedly targeted Kennedy for supporting Israel. After Sirhan’s arrest, two notebooks were found at his Pasadena home detailing his intention to assassinate Kennedy before June 5, 1968—the first anniversary of the end of the six-day Arab-Israeli war.
President Johnson was renowned as a wily political operator who could successfully shepherd legislation through an unfriendly Congress; his administration passed groundbreaking laws including the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. But even he was unable to overcome opposition from America’s gun lobby.
“By ‘68, Johnson had lost power in Congress and his prestige had gone down due to the Vietnam War,” says Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office. “It’s too bad he hadn’t pushed earlier—it was a real missed opportunity, as he probably would have succeeded in ’64 after JFK’s assassination.”
Four months after Robert Kennedy’s death, Johnson managed to secure a gun control bill. But due to NRA lobbying and Johnson’s diminished powers, it lacked key provisions he sought, such as national registration of guns and the licensing of owners. The 1968 bill marked the beginning of the NRA’s transformation from a gun enthusiast organization focused on marksmanship and gun safety to a political lobbying group focused on opposing gun control.
Historically, gun ownership and gun regulation had not been partisan issues, nor had they been matters of constitutional debate, historian Jill Lepore and author of These Truths: A History of the United States, tells me in an interview. But this began to change in the 1960s, she argues, not because of the NRA but because black nationalists such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers began citing the right to own a rifle or shotgun to support their agendas.
As the 1970s progressed, the NRA began to take advantage of a growing conservative backlash against civil rights and feminist movements. Gun rights became a conservative political movement for whites.
“If, in the 1960s, the gun debate took place in the shadow of the Black Power movement, in the 1970s it took place in the shadow of a growing White Power movement,” Lepore says.
In the years following Johnson’s 1968 gun control legislation, the NRA has fought steadily to roll it back. Despite these efforts, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed in 1993 after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, followed in 1994 by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. But the assault weapons ban included a sunset provision, meaning it would expire after ten years. Since it sunsetted in 2004, no politician has managed to reinstate it.
“It’s so different today—the NRA is such an organized entity, and it’s not about public opinion but about who comes out in the primaries,” Suri says of the organization’s evolution. “Republicans, who vote most strongly in the primaries, are often members of the NRA—the NRA has hijacked our democracy.”
For much of the last fifty years, a debate has raged in America over what constitutes a right to bear arms, and to whom it is due.
As NRA member and director of the Texas State Rifle Association Mike Cox, puts it, “The Second Amendment has been chipped away at with piecemeal legislation. People underestimate the number of citizens that want the Second restored.”
“If, in the 1960s, the gun debate took place in the shadow of the Black Power movement, in the 1970s it took place in the shadow of a growing White Power movement.”
This is a debate the NRA has largely won, although the ramifications have deeply divided the country. The rift in America during the 1960s lay at the heart of what drove Robert Kennedy to campaign at a time when being a politician—or anyone involved in the fight for civil rights—could have lethal consequences.
Kennedy first heard about Dr. King’s assassination while heading to a rally in one of Indianapolis’s black wards. Some advised Kennedy to cancel, fearful of a potentially dangerous escalation, but Kennedy insisted on attending. Upon arriving, it was clear the crowd of about 1,000 people didn’t know about King’s death.
From the podium Kennedy somberly announced the news and quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus, appealing to everyone not to give in to anger, to remain calm.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man to make gentle the life of this world,” Kennedy said. “Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”
James Jeffrey is a British journalist who divides his time between America, East Africa, and the UK. His writing appears in various international media.