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Bobby Kennedy: The Sound of Tragedy
From 1968, KNX Newsradio coverage of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles
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Election returns tricked in slowly as L.A. wrestled with its first-ever ballot count by computer, but just after midnight, June 5, 1968, the results were clear: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had won the California Democratic primary.
Kennedy had spent election day lounging in the sun with family members at the Malibu home of friend and filmmaker John Frankenheimer who produced the political thrillers “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May.”
Investigator Dan Moldea reports “[Kennedy] became so relaxed that he considered not attending his own election night party, suggesting that he and his family and friends watch the primary results on television. He wanted to invite the media to join them at Frankenheimer’s home. Because the television networks refused to haul their equipment out to Malibu, Kennedy reluctantly decided to go into Los Angeles to await the election returns.”
Apprentice jockey Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, 24, was drinking coffee and talking horse racing at Bob’s Big Boy in Pasadena at 6pm. He’d spent much of the day firing hundreds of rounds from his .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver at the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club in Duarte and grumbling about Kennedy’s support for Israel and its Six-Day War.
Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian, had immigrated from East Jerusalem in 1957 with his Jordanian mother and two brothers. After drinking and drifting randomly through Los Angeles for the next six hours, Sirhan would encounter Kennedy on L.A.’s Miracle Mile.
The Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Room was packed with a thousand cheering supporters eager to boost Kennedy’s come-from-behind bid to capture the presidency in the November election.
Kennedy vowed to end America’s divisive war in Vietnam but Sen. Eugene McCarthy, also challenging Republican Richard Nixon on a peace ticket, had far more delegates. Vice president Hubert Humphrey had also entered the race with support from the Democratic establishment though Humphrey’s campaign kicked off too late to enter 1968’s primaries. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for a second term had caught Humphrey, and the nation, by surprise.
The showdown would come in Chicago in August at the Democratic National Convention, a fight Kennedy was determined to win. He’d said so from the Embassy Room podium before walking toward the hotel’s kitchen, down a narrow corridor.
KNX reporter Ray McMackin was drawn to the charismatic Kennedy, though his primary assignment that night had been to cover newly-elected Senator Alan Cranston. McMackin followed Kennedy from the podium, tailing the senator from a few feet behind. “This was a big-time guy,” McMackin remembers today. “This could be the next president.”
Suddenly, shots rang out. Sirhan fired his handgun wildly into Kennedy and the crowd. Three bullets struck Kennedy, another tore through his jacket. The fatal shot entered Kennedy’s brain just below his right ear.
“Kennedy was on his back, on the floor, blood gushing out in a pool on the cement floor from the Senator’s head. I was standing next to ABC’s Piers Anderton. We both looked down as Kennedy’s eyes were turning gray and starting to flutter. His face was losing its color.”
Five others were struck by bullets, none of their injuries fatal. Former L.A. Rams’ defensive lineman Roosevelt Grier, working as a Kennedy bodyguard that night, wrestled Sirhan to the ground and seized his weapon.
McMackin raced back through the ballroom to KNX’s broadcast booth. “Ray Williams put me on the air,” he recalls, “but I didn’t know what shock I was in. I sounded like the guy covering the Hindenburg. I was just crying, sobbing. It just blew me away.”
| Playback: Ray McMackin, Assassination Eyewitness |
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“The overall reaction was, ‘My God, another Kennedy. Those people can’t take any more of this. Let’s take Edward Kennedy and hide him.’ So much pity for this Camelot family,” says McMackin from his home in Hemet, California. “Even to this day I can smell the mixture of gun smoke and the disinfectant they used on the cement floor. I can still smell that in my memory.”
McMackin’s work speaks for itself, capturing the shock and horror of the moment and setting KNX — less than two months into its all-news format — on a compass heading it would follow for the next four decades.
“We were bumping around on the air with rip-and-read news stories, grain reports and stuff that didn’t make a difference,” says McMackin. “All of a sudden the whole newsroom woke up to the fact that this was pretty important stuff. This is history.”
It was a night of tragedy for the Kennedy family and the nation, and a defining moment for McMackin and KNX that springs to life in this audio file — 45 minutes of live coverage beginning with the final few moments of Kennedy’s victory speech.
| Playback: KNX Newsradio Kennedy Assassination Aircheck |
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Years of federal, state and local investigations concluded Sirhan acted alone, but McMackin is among those convinced Kennedy was the victim of a hit. Conspiracy theorists say possible perps range from organized crime figures prosecuted by the former attorney general to the USA’s military-industrial complex, fearful of losses should RFK terminate the Vietnam War.
“The bullet that killed Kennedy came from less that two inches from behind his right ear with powder burns and Sirhan was in front of him, no closer that three feet,” says McMackin. “That’s a hell of a bullet.
“Nine bullets were fired that night. Sirhan’s revolver carried eight. There’s also the question of the security guard who pulled Kennedy down from behind. He had a .22 revolver and could have put it behind Kennedy’s ear.”
McMackin also points to Sirhan’s inability to remember the shooting, even under LAPD-administered hypnosis. “He cannot remember. If you or I did something like that, we’d have some recollection.”
Sirhan was sentenced to death, a penalty California’s Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in its 1972 California v. Anderson decision, overturned by voters in a constitutional amendment later that year. The penalty, however, could not be reinstated against Sirhan who remains incarcerated at Corcoran, California, unsuccessful in thirteen parole hearings.
Linkage…The Killing of Robert Kennedy | Dan MoldeaRobert Kennedy Assassination | WikipediaRFK Assassination | BobbyKennedy.comRFK Assassination Archives | FBI