Opened on New Year’s Day 1921, the glamorous Ambassador Hotel was a Hollywood landmark, regular home of the Academy Awards and the site of the famed Coconut Grove Nightclub. But on the 5th of June 1968, it became famous for a more notorious event, the assassination of Robert Francis Kennedy, as he walked through the kitchen shortly after claiming victory in the Californian democratic prime re-election, a significant step on his way to the presidency.
Bobby Kennedy shot three times, died at the next day at the Good Samaritan Hospital. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant was arrested for the shooting in which five of the people were injured. He remains in prison to this day.
Recent evidences come to light though, that points to a second shooter as at least 10 shots were fired and Sirhan’s gun was an eight shot .22 caliber revolver. Also, powder burns on Kennedy’s ear and residue in his hair, suggested that Sirhan wasn’t close enough to have fired the fatal shot.
Then there was the unexplained presence of several CIA operatives including David Sanchez Morales, known for his anger at the Kennedy’s for what he saw was their betrayal during the bay of Pigs Invasion. Kennedy’s death was a huge shock for a nation that was still grieving from the assassination of his brother, John F. Kennedy just over for four years earlier.
Having resigned as attorney general in 1964, Bobby Kennedy was a senator for New York at the time of his death and in early 1968, he had announced that he was running for president. With the commitment to racial and economic justice, non-aggressive foreign policy and decent realization of power, Robert Kennedy was considered to be even more progressive than JFK. He was close to Martin Luther King and his impromptus speech in Indianapolis following King’s murder is often credited as the reason that that city is escaped the riot to break out in the square.
Despite his renewed commitment to political change after JFK’s death, Kennedy was said to be a changed man, personally devastated by the tragedy.
In 1965, he was in the party that made the first descendant of 4,300 meter Mount Kennedy, a picked name in his brother’s honor in Yukon, Canada.
While this funeral was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, where he was elegized by his brother Senator Ted Kennedy, who adopted the George Bernard Shore quote saying, “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never work and say why not”.
After the funeral mass, Kennedy’s body was taken by a special train to Washington D.C. passing by thousands of mourners lined at the tracks. The only person ever buried there at night, he was entered at Arlington National Cemetery next to JFK. Close as they were in life, it seemed only fitting that they should remain that way in death.
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