When hope lived

Forty years ago this week, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary. One moment he was thanking a standing-room crowd, the next he was sprawled in a hotel pantry, blood leaking from the back of his head where a .22-caliber bullet had penetrated his skull. A few feet away, a group of Kennedy supporters -- George Plimpton, former pro football player Rosey Grier, Olympian Rafer Johnson -- wrestled with the shooter, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. "Hold him! Hold him!" radio journalist Andy West cried into his tape recorder. "We don't want another Oswald."

By David L. Ulin

June 1, 2008