How RFK killing unfolded on TV
Coverage of Kennedy’s death in 1968 presaged today’s 24-hour news cycle.
Like many in the baby boomer generation, Josh Mankiewicz awoke on June 5, 1968, to the news that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot shortly after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.
Mankiewicz was 12 at the time, and the first report created anxious moments in his Washington, D.C, home. His father, Frank Mankiewicz, was Kennedy’s press aide and with the candidate that night at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. After the shooting was reported at 12:15 a.m. Pacific, Josh’s mother was on the phone trying to reach his father.
“In the first early hours ... a lot of people ... thought my dad had been one of the first people who got shot,” said Mankiewicz, now 62 and a correspondent for NBC’s “Dateline.” His family was relieved when Frank Mankiewicz appeared on TV to give his first press briefing, standing on the roof of a police car in front of the Good Samaritan Hospital. Inside, surgeons were attempting to save Kennedy’s life.
Frank Mankiewicz was a somber but steady presence
in the 25-hour span after the shooting, a period filled with terror, disbelief and sorrow — much of it seen live on TV.
Television news in 1968 had already been saturated with violent images — from the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam to riots after the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But Robert Kennedy’s shooting, 4½ years after his brother President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, immersed viewers in the chaos and sadness of the dark, turbulent year as no other event had.
“That was the moment I began to wonder if the country was coming apart,” said Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who as a 20-year-old college student watched his father, CBS News’ Mike Wallace, report the story from network’s New York studio.
For ABC News’ Sam Donaldson, the shooting wasn’t a total shock.
“You just sort of expected it,” Donaldson said. “When they called me early in the morning, Washington time, to say ‘Bobby has been shot, get down to the bureau,’ I was upset. On the other hand, my reaction was not ‘my God, how could this have happened?’ [In] the 1960s, anything could happen and it did.”
The 140 hours of coverage by the three broadcast networks over four days — from the first frantic reports to Kennedy’s funeral — presaged how America would come to absorb traumatic events on 24-hour cable news and then social media.
Kennedy had given his victory speech after midnight, and the networks had switched back to their studios or signed off the air once the senator left the ballroom to exit through the kitchen. Kennedy was greeting hotel workers when Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian from Jordan, fired a .22-caliber handgun. Five others, including William Weisel, associate director for ABC News, were hit.
Los Angeles station KTLA-TV Channel 5 was taping in the ballroom when the shooting occurred; reporter Larry Scheer had the first eyewitness account. ABC, CBS and NBC correspondents and cameramen scrambled back in position amid screams, sobbing and cries of “oh, no!”
In New York, Wallace and CBS anchor Walter Cronkite had gone home; morning anchor Joseph Benti, who had covered the primary returns, was at a bar-and-grill across from the CBS Broadcast Center before his shift.
“I was the only on-air guy left, and I was trying not to get too loaded so that I could be on at 7,” recalled Benti. “The network was off the air and someone came in and said ‘Bobby Kennedy has been shot.’ ”
It was hours before footage from the Ambassador kitchen was processed and aired. With no immediate pictures, TV correspondents in the ballroom tried to sort through information from grieving Kennedy supporters.
When a man told CBS’ Terry Drinkwater that he had given last rites for Kennedy — a common practice among Catholics in lifethreatening situations — many in the crowd believed it meant he’d already died. Some in the room fainted.
Weisel gave his ABC News colleagues Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith a phone interview from Kaiser Sunset Hospital before going into surgery.
“I really thought I was going to die instantly because blood was shooting every place,” he told them.
Correspondents interviewed doctors who attended to Kennedy in the kitchen before he was placed in an ambulance. They said he was alive and his pulse strong. But when Mankiewicz appeared at 2:30 a.m. Pacific, Kennedy’s true condition became known. Saying doctors described him as “very critical,” Mankiewicz explained how one of the two bullets that struck Kennedy entered behind his right ear and lodged in his brain.
Early news reports suggested Kennedy would survive. A surgeon told ABC science editor Jules Bergman that a bullet could enter Kennedy’s brain without causing permanent damage.
But the surgery, which Mankiewicz said should take 45 minutes, lasted several hours. During that time viewers saw footage of Kennedy on the kitchen floor, a pair of hands cradling his head and a pool of blood underneath. His open eyes appeared lifeless.
Faced with the prolonged live coverage of the shooting of a prominent political figure for the second time in two months, TV journalists became emotional as they filled the gaps between new information. Some called for gun control laws and decried the political influence of the National Rifle Assn. — the same arguments viewers hear some 50 years later after every school shooting. They questioned whether candidates should campaign in public and whether the U.S. was headed toward a police state.
Spouting opinions and speculation is common now but was rare during the broadcast network hegemony of the 1960s.
“The anchors and reporters of that time tried to keep our personal views out of the story, but in those kind of instances, it slipped a lot,” Donaldson recalled.
On June 6 at 1:59 a.m., Mankiewicz appeared before TV cameras inside the hospital for his fifth and final briefing to say that Kennedy had died. Josh Mankiewicz said he knew the outcome once when he heard his father say “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy” at the start of his statement.
As often happens now during national tragedies, other TV personalities addressed the news in their own way. Johnny Carson, Kennedy’s neighbor at the United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, turned NBC’s “The Tonight Show” into a wake with the late senator’s New York friends. PBS host Fred Rogers made a special episode of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” in which his puppet characters talked about the assassination as a way to help children cope with the trauma. Network executives instructed producers to curtail violence in their scripted shows as politicians claimed TV was a cause of real-life mayhem.
ABC, CBS and NBC pooled resources to cover the June 8 memorial service at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the 21-car funeral train that took Kennedy’s body south for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. TV cameras were positioned at every stop along the route, where crowds gathered in sweltering heat to watch the train pass. In Baltimore, the throngs that lined the platforms spontaneously broke out into song, alternating “We Shall Overcome” with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Even during the solemn procession, there was no respite from the year’s violence. Anchors broke into the coverage with news that James Earl Ray, a fugitive wanted for the murder of King, had been captured at London’s Heathrow Airport.
In his 2017 book “Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews noted how the journey through bleak railroad yards lacked the majesty of President Kennedy’s farewell.
“For Jack, there was the Yeatsian beauty of the riderless horse with the boots on backwards and the beautiful Kennedy family,” he said. “For Bobby, it was that sad train ride. It was just loss.”
Frank Mankiewicz remained a Washington fixture as manager of George McGovern’s unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign and later, chief executive for National Public Radio. But his televised briefings seen by millions of Americans in June 1968 indelibly linked him to Kennedy’s assassination through his 2014 death.
“My dad would've given anything to not be famous for the thing that made him famous,” said Josh Mankiewicz. “Once, I was traveling with him and we went to buy a newspaper at the airport before we got on a plane,” Mankiewicz recalled. “And the woman who sold him the paper stared at him. All of a sudden she said, ‘I know who you are,’ and she started to cry. My dad tried to console her. I’ve never forgotten that.”