On this day, June 5, 54 years ago, in the Presidential Election year of 1968, the nation and the world were transformed in a way that still reverberates.
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the slain President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel shortly after winning the California Democratic Presidential primary.
RFK was at a point where it seemed likely, although not definitively, that he might win the Democratic Presidential nomination to run against Richard Nixon.
The events of the past half century, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush to Donald Trump, have been very divisive and degrading in so many ways, but they might have turned out differently if RFK had lived.
One realizes that no one can be certain about the effects of a potential RFK Presidency, but for millions of Americans then and since, the shocking events of 1968 leave a sense of lost opportunity that has affected the past half century in a negative fashion!
My book, “Assassinations, Threats, and the American Presidency: From Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama”, Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2015, Paperback Edition 2017, covers the tragedy of the RFK Assassination in Chapter 10!