RFK’s legacy hasn’t faded on 50th anniversary of assassination

Fifty years after he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Robert F. Kennedy retains his pull on the nation’s political imagination. What if he hadn’t been killed?

One of his sons, Robert Jr., stoked the flames of remembrance recently when he said he doubts Sirhan B. Sirhan was the only gunman in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that June night in 1968. He wants the killing reinvestigated.

More retrospectives are expected Wednesday during a public memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, where Mr. Kennedy is buried. Former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, will be among the speakers.

The 42-year-old senator from New York had entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on March 16, just 80 days earlier, with a call for the nation to “stand for hope instead of despair.” He’d been sprinting around the country, winning primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, and losing in Oregon.

California was crucial to his hopes because its size and diversity made it a microcosm of the whole nation. He told those close to him that if he didn’t win the state’s 174 delegates, he would drop out. His Democratic foes, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were doing everything they could to make that happen.

Mr. Kennedy had already been to San Diego several times that spring, drawing enthusiastic crowds, and now he was back, at the El Cortez Hotel.

It was June 3, a night rally. Mr. Kennedy started giving his usual stump speech, calling for an end to the Vietnam War and an end to racial injustice.

“I think we can do better for this country than that,” he said. Then he stopped. He sagged to the floor and sat near the edge of the stage with his head in his hands.

“He was so fatigued he passed out,” said George Mitrovich, a longtime San Diegan who worked as a press aide on the campaign.

Ushered backstage, into a bathroom, Mr. Kennedy splashed water on his face. Minutes passed. Then he went out and finished his talk. The crowd of about 3,000 people cheered. A day later, Mr. Kennedy won the primary. And lost his life.

Mr. Mitrovich is among those who think Mr. Kennedy would have gone on to capture the Democratic nomination, and then the White House.

“And every terrible awful thing that happened after would have been avoided,” he said. “But that’s not how it’s gone.”

Mr. Kennedy’s death came almost five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, and just two months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis.