NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, June 4, 2015, 12:00
PM
(Originally published by the Daily News on
June 5, 1968. This story was written by Jerry Greene and Paul Healy.)
LOS ANGELES, June 5 - Sen.
Robert Kennedy was shot and critically wounded early today as he left a victory
celebration at the Ambassador Hotel here. He had just acknowledged to an
enthusiastic crowd his victory over Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the vital
California Democratic Presidential primary election.
About his condition, the
Senator’s press aide Frank Mankiewicz said of Kennedy: “He’s alive.”
The hotel ballroom was turned
into pandemonium.
Kennedy was reported shot twice
in the head. The younger brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy had
just finished a victory statement and stepped from the podium with his wife,
Ethel, when a gunman apparently leaped up and fired at least five shots from a
small-caliber pistol from short distance.
Kennedy and three others were
wounded.
Paul Schrade, a United Auto
Workers Union worker, suffered a superficial head injury. Ira Weisel, a
television newsman, and Ira Goldstein an ABC cameraman, were wounded, but
reported in good condition.
Witness said Roosevelt Grier, a
professional football player traveling with Kennedy, grabbed the assailant.
They reportedly struggled and the revolver dropped to the floor near where
Kennedy lay in a puddle of blood.
Dr. Marcus McBroom of Los
Angeles, a witness, said the suspect about 25 years old, wearing a work shirt,
his hair tousled, fired one shot, then four or five more in quick succession.
He said the man was yelling “something about saving the country.” “What he said
was something like ‘I did it for my country’,” McBroom said.
June 5, 1968 RFK shot. New York
Daily News
Police took the man into
custody and rushed him through the hotel to a car as an angry crowd surged
around.
Kennedy was helped to an
anteroom, holding a handkerchief to his face with both hands. He was heard to
ask:
“Is everybody okay?”
A call went out for doctors.
The senator was then taken by
ambulance to Central Receiving Hospital nearby, where he was given the last
rites of the Catholic Church about 1 a.m. (4 a.m. New York time) by the Rev.
Thomas Peacha.
Then Kennedy was transferred to
nearby Good Samaritan Hospital, where a neurosurgeon was waiting. He was
reported shot twice in the head - once in the forehead and once near the right
ear.
Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s
campaign aid, came out of Central Receiving and said there was “no word.” Other
sources reported the senator’s condition “critical.”
Mankiewicz told newsmen that
Kennedy “is breathing well and has a good heart. I do not think he is
conscious.” Asked the senator’s condition, he said it was “stable,” and that
Kennedy was “alive.”
An unidentified person in the
Central Receiving Hospital’s emergency room said Kennedy appeared to be
unconscious. He was carried from the hospital on the stretcher, a bottle of
blood plasma suspended over the stretcher.
Dr. Ross Miller, one of the
doctors who first examined Kennedy, said his vital signs were stable. But he
described his condition as critical.
Kennedy’s wife, expecting their
11th child, rode with him in the ambulance.
Word of the shooting swept like
a shock-wave through the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where McCarthy’s backers were
gathered. Sobs and gasps swept through the crowd and a melancholy silence fell
over the gathering.
McCarthy, who had retired to
his suite at the hotel, was told. He came out to the grand ball room and asked
the crowd here to join him in a moment of silent prayer.
In Sacramento, a spokesman for
Gov. Ronald Reagan said Reagan “deplored” the shooting. He said Reagan will
take any means available to “assist in the apprehension of those responsible.”
There was an early report that
Stephen Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, also had been shot. But this was
erroneous. Smith a short time later grabbed a microphone and begged the milling
crowd to leave the room.
The scene was nationally
televised by cameras covering the victory celebration. The scene of happiness
quickly turned to one of terror as the news of the shooting spread.
Wife Kneels Over Him
“Oh, my God!” “Not again!” “No!
No!” the crowd shouted.
Author George Plimpton, front
left, and J.W. Gallivan, Jr., a Robert Kennedy aide, try to wrestle the pistol
out of the hand of Sirhan Sirhan, who had just fired the fatal shots at presidential
hopeful Sen. Robert Kennedy.
As Kennedy was lifted onto a
stretcher, he said: “Oh no! No! Don’t!” he was semiconscious, and apparently in
pain.
Ethel bent over and cradled her
husband’s head - much as Jacqueline Kennedy had held her assassinated husband
in Dallas, on Nov. 21, 1963.
People wept openly, some
hysterically. Others cried: “Kill him!” as the assailant was rushed out of the
Embassy Room, in which the celebration had been held. The room was sealed off
by police.
Athlete Grabs Gunman
The suspect was grabbed
immediately after the shooting. Rayford Johnson, a former Olympics Decathlon
champion who had been working in Kennedy’s campaign seized him. Grier slugged
the man, and was pulled of by others nearby.
Later, as the priest approached
the hospital to minister to Kennedy, he was shoved aside by a policeman. There
was a brief tussle between the policeman and Mrs. Kennedy, who grabbed at him.
She was jostled.
But the incident was quickly
over and the priest was admitted to the room.
Mrs. Kennedy was reported in
complete control.
A policeman was quoted as
saying that a second man had been taken into custody, but there were no
details.
Ron Bennett, a photographer for
United Press International was standing near Kennedy when the shots rang out.
He said the Senator had finished speaking, had grasped a few hands and then had
walked directly behind the podium, through an access to a kitchen area.
It looked like he might be
headed toward employes’ entrance. A lot of people were behind him. Mrs. Kennedy
was a half step behind her husband.
A Sound Like Firecrackers
“I heard some things that
sounded like firecrackers,” said Bennett. “People started yelling and fell to
the ground. I fell down, too.
“The man next to me was shot… I
think in the head.
“Kennedy was on the floor
bleeding from the top of the head. His wife… told everybody to get back and
give Kennedy air.”
A priest handed Kennedy a
Rosary.
“He clenched it tightly and I
was pushed away,” the unidentified priest related.
Mankiewicz said Kennedy had
received “no threats that I know of” in recent days.
Sirhan Sirhan: The First Lone
Wolf
The man who murdered Robert
Kennedy 47 years ago was the first — but not the last.
By Jeffrey Lord – 6.4.15
He was America’s original lone
wolf.
It is 1989. Twenty-one years
after the assassination of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the night in
1968 that he won the California Democratic primary, sending him into a real
battle for the party’s presidential nomination.
Sitting across from the famous
British television interviewer David Frost, Bobby Kennedy’s assassin —
America’s first “lone wolf” inspired by hatred of Israel — made it plain why he
had done what he had done. Sirhan Sirhan said this to Frost, as reported by the
New York Times:
In the interview, Mr. Sirhan,
who is a Jordanian immigrant, said that when Mr. Kennedy gave a speech in
support of sending United States fighter jets to Israel, ''that seemed as
though it were a betrayal.''
'His Sole Support of Israel’
“My only connection with Robert
Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those
50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.”
Mr. Sirhan, 44 years old, said
that when he killed Mr. Kennedy, who was then the leading candidate for the
Democratic Presidential nomination, “I was not doing it out of personal malice
toward the man, but out of concern for other people.”
Mr. Kennedy “was my hero,” Mr.
Sirhan said. “He was my champion.”
“I can't say anything except
that I am totally sorry and feel nothing but remorse for having caused that
tragic death,” Mr. Sirhan said.
In other words? The first real
Islamic terrorist attack inside America was what we now call a “lone wolf
attack.” It was provoked by the American role in the Middle East and it came
not on 9/11 of 2001, but thirty-three years earlier, just after midnight of
June 5, 1968.
For those not around in the
day, Bobby Kennedy was perhaps the most magnetic of the three Kennedy brothers
who burst on the American scene in 1960. Younger than Jack and older than Ted,
Bob Kennedy was at first an unlikely candidate for anything. He had a shyness
and reserve that alternated with a passion to elect his brother president.
Which he did as JFK’s campaign manager in 1960. Appointed Attorney General, RFK
quickly launched his Justice Department as a determined opponent of organized
crime and a (albeit reluctant) supporter of the burgeoning civil rights
movement.
His brother’s assassination in
Dallas in November of 1963 would eventually launch Kennedy on his own career.
He was a mortal political enemy of the new president Lyndon Johnson, their
contempt for each other legendary. By the summer of 1964 Bobby had resigned his
Cabinet seat, bought a home in New York, and become the Democrats’ nominee for the
U.S. Senate. He won.
For what would be the remaining
three years of his life, Bobby Kennedy heralded something new in American
politics — a combination politician and cultural icon with a rock star
following. On the congressional election trail for Democratic candidates in
1966 crowds would swarm him, tearing at his clothes, tousling his hair, and
treating him as those other mid-sixties icons — the Beatles — were treated.
All of this proceeded as the
Vietnam War picked up speed. With Kennedy — again too slowly for some on the
Left — beginning to separate from LBJ. In his third year in the U.S. Senate
what would become known as the “Six Day War” between Israel and its Arab
enemies was launched. With America’s leaders — prominently including Bobby
Kennedy — standing fast by Israel’s side.
Refusing to run for president
himself and to challenge LBJ in the 1968 Democratic primaries, RFK sat on the
sidelines at first and watched the unlikely candidacy of Minnesota Senator
Eugene McCarthy channel the youthful anti-war opposition to LBJ. By March of
1968, with McCarthy having almost upset LBJ in New Hampshire, Kennedy could
stand the pressure no more. On March 16, 1968 Kennedy jumped into the race —
and the not-so-pent-up Kennedy mania broke loose, surging across the country.
Two weeks later, LBJ, sensing his political doom, unexpectedly withdrew.
Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey jumped in — and the
Kennedy/McCarthy/Humphrey race for the Democratic nomination was on in earnest.
Winning some primaries and losing others, Kennedy on June 4 won the last
primary of the season, California, in a high-stakes, tumultuous campaign.
Stepping to the podium to claim victory in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los
Angeles just before midnight, Kennedy spoke to a thunderous ovation from the
ecstatic crowd. Ending his speech with “it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there”
— a reference to the August convention — he began to leave. In the commotion —
and in the day candidates other than a sitting president had no Secret Service protection
— he was turned around and guided out a back way through the Ambassador’s
kitchen. Standing on a table in the kitchen, Sirhan Sirhan, gun in hand, was
waiting to extract lone wolf-style vengeance for Kennedy’s support of Israel.
He did.
The entire nation and a good
bit of the Western world were thrown into chaos in the days that followed. The
sheer awfulness of Kennedy meeting the same fate as his presidential brother
escaped no one. In a sign of the America that was to come, what Ronald Reagan’s
future UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick would years later call the “blame
America first” crowd surfaced. One television station scrubbed its programming
for a while, substituting a static screen with the word “SHAME” written large.
Even as word leaked out that the assassin was a Jordanian immigrant and had
scribbled his animus towards Kennedy over RFK’s support for Israel in his
diary, the overwhelming reaction in the media of the day was to blame some
combination of America, the NRA, and, yes, inevitably, conservatives for
somehow being responsible for Kennedy’s death.
There was no serious attention
given to the idea that what Sirhan Sirhan had done was in fact the first — and
not the last — appearance of what we now call “Islamic terrorism” on American
shores. Yes, Sirhan was technically a Christian — his family were Palestinian
Christians. Yet the Palestinian cause for which he killed was overwhelmingly
pro-Islamic. The CIA fact book notes that 75 percent of the West Bank and 99
percent of the West Bank and 99 percent of the Gaza Strip are Muslim and in
1968 as now the causes of Palestine, Islam, and the Arab world were immutably
entwined. Yet all of this was ignored when Sirhan pulled the trigger in the
name of the Palestinian cause. Much less
was he seen as the herald of a future world prowled by shadowy ISIS “lone
wolves.”
Over the following years this
type of terrorism became more frequent — but it was abroad. The attack on the
1972 Olympics killed Israeli athletes. The American hostages in Iran were in
Iran. A TWA plane hijacking in the 1980s had the terrorists killing an American
sailor — when the plane was in Lebanon. The hijacking of the cruise ship
Achille Lauro and the killing of an American Jew took place off the coast of
Egypt. And on and on the list went — a Marine barracks in Lebanon, U.S.
embassies in Africa, and the USS Cole in Yemen.
Then, finally, the assault on
the American homeland on September 11, 2001.
The world has changed many
times since that murderous night in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in June
of 1968. What has not changed — what has, in fact, picked up steam — is the
determination of Islamic terrorists to target “the Great Satan” that is the
United States of America. American presidents come and go — eight of them from
the then-incumbent Lyndon Johnson on through to George W. Bush with the ninth,
Barack Obama, already at the center of a campaign to replace him with a tenth.
In March of this year, FBI
Director James Comey warned of a social media campaign by ISIS to recruit “lone
wolves” in America. Yesterday, word came from Boston of a plot by ISIS “lone
wolf” sympathizers to behead a Boston policeman. Boston barely two years
distant from the attack on the Boston Marathon by the Islam-devoted “lone wolf”
Tsarnaev brothers. As with the almost-attack in Garland, Texas, by two more
“lone wolves,” the term “lone wolf” has become the go-to phrase in today’s
America. Lone wolf taking its place alongside the equally new term
“self-radicalized.”
It has been a long forty-seven
years since that June midnight in 1968.
But in retrospect? In
retrospect the first of many “lone wolves” to come was already here in America.
Waiting that midnight in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, long before the
existence of social media, ready to pursue his own deadly version of vengeance
for American policy towards Israel and — by extension, Islam.
In retrospect? Bobby Kennedy
was the first — the very first American victim of an Islamic lone wolf attack.
Even more tragically, he would not be the last.
Why Doctors Couldn't Save RFK
This
1968 article details the extent of the Senator and presidential hopeful's fatal
injuries.
By U.S. News Staff
June 5, 2015 | 12:01 a.m. EDT + More
This article originally
appeared in U.S. News & World Report on June 17, 1968.
LOS ANGELES—Even
before Senator Robert F. Kennedy was brought to Good Samaritan Hospital, the
surgeons who were to operate on his brain knew that his case was desperate.
the General
Receiving Hospital where he was first taken, that the Senator had needed heart
massage, adrenalin and a heart-lung machine as emergency measures to restore
heart and lung action.
These were bad
signs to start with.
As the Good
Samaritan surgeons began to clean and explore the Senator’s head wound, they
found even greater cause for alarm.
Three bullets
had hit the Senator. One grazed his forehead. Another lodged harmlessly in his
neck. The third bullet, entering behind the right ear, smashed its way deep
into Senator Kennedy’s head, damaged three principal parts of his brain:
- The brain stem—a tube
about three inches long and approximately an inch in diameter—had been
torn. This was the most serious damage. The brain stem is the main cable
connecting the brain with the rest of the body. Control of many vital
functions of the body—blood pressure, breathing, heart rate—passes through
the brain stem.
- The cerebellum—an
egg-shaped mass of brain tissue, was torn and bruised by large fragments
of the bullet and slivers of shattered bone.
This portion of the brain controls balance, muscle state and co-ordination. - The right side of the
cerebrum—the top portion of the brain—was penetrated by pieces of bone, or
fragments of the bullet. Blood clots and bleeding also damaged this area.
The cerebrum is
the “thinking" part of the brain, as contrasted with the cerebellum, which
is the “feeling" part.
Damage to any one of these three portions
of the brain is serious. Damage to all three is usually disastrous. To Senator
Kennedy it was fatal.