The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America

by Thurston Clarke

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones, and the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. Americans saw news footage from South Vietnam, such as the 1965 film of U.S. Marines setting fire to thatched huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters and flamethrowers as women and children ran for safety, and realized they were capable of atrocities once considered the province of their enemies. They saw smoke rising over Washington, D.C., during the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., soldiers with machine guns guarding the Capitol, federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities for the first time since the Civil War, and asked themselves how this could be happening in their City Upon a Hill.

There was Charles Evers, whom Bobby Kennedy had comforted after his brother, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was assassinated in 1963, and who was now thinking about Bobby: "Where, dear God, is the man to take his place?" There was Coretta Scott King, whom Bobby had comforted after her husband was assassinated in April of that year, and Jackie Kennedy, who had told former White House aide Arthur Schlesinger that she feared "the same thing" that had happened to her husband would happen to Bobby because "there is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack."

In 1996, Ted Kennedy admitted to biographer Adam Clymer that he had feared Bobby might be assassinated. "We weren't that far away from '63 [when JFK was killed]," he said, "and that was still very much of a factor."

It was Richard Nixon, however, who went all the way. On September 16, 1970, four months after Ohio National Guard troops killed Kent State students protesting the bombing of Cambodia,

John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot at long distance by high-powered rifles, like prize stags. Bobby's assassination was less surprising than theirs, but more intimate, and gruesome. He was slaughtered at close range, like a farm animal, in a claustrophobic and abattoir-like room filled with metal tables and knives. Almost eighty people stood only a few feet away.