RFK Murdered on This Date in History

In Davie, Florida, on the morning of June 5, 1968, I found myself in Room 18 of Suite D in the grand, exalted Nova Elementary School "educational experiment" as a Sixth Grader.  I was, for whatever reason...it was not the ordinary routine...sitting in the southwestern part of the room (closest, through the walls, to the basketball court), which was old man Bartfay's home base (you had to have been an original "Nova Titan", based in the elementary school experience, to know what I'm talking about).  It was there and then that I was informed by one of my fellow students (or, more accurately, my fellow inmates), that New York Senator Robert Kennedy had been murdered in California following his victory speech after that state's Democratic Party primary had given him all of its delegates in the fight for the presidential nomination.  The horrible act had occurred several hours earlier, but since in my own highly dysfunctional childhood family back then none of us ever gave a hoot about what was going on in the world during the early morning hours besides our own self-pitying circumstances, we all had woken up in the morning that sad day and each of us had gone off on our merry (check that, miserable) ways, completely oblivious to the terrible tragedy that had already taken place some three thousand miles west.  But there I was...and I can't remember who I was with...with another assassination on my hands to deal with, after Martin Luther King's a couple of months earlier...

When I think of Robert Francis Kennedy, I naturally hearken back to his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose middle name was my mother's maiden.  I also think of the very talented comedian John Byner and how he, on the Steve Allen television show in 1968, would perform his hilarious rendition of Bobby Kennedy by means of his character "Kenny Bobbity", which forever established firmly within me RFK's unmistakable voice (although you can still hear it by listening to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal). I do remember watching Bobby Kennedy debating Gene McCarthy on television just before that fateful California Primary...and noticing that his opponent thoroughly creamed him in it.  But Kennedy narrowly won the primary anyway...although historians seem to forget that Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had forgone campaigning in California, had already collected enough delegates to win him the party's nomination in the first round.  I know this with confidence, because I actually went to the library (at the University of Florida) and examined day-to-day newspaper records of the ongoing events.  It was only years after the fact that some revisionists began to claim that RFK would have gotten the '68 Democratic nomination had he not been assassinated.  That claim is completely false...

My parents were very skeptical about Robert Kennedy, claiming that he was a political chameleon who changed his colors with the times, going from fervent anti-communist witch-hunter in the fifties...to his brother JFK's right-hand man in the early sixties...to Gandhi-like peace advocate later that decade.  I tend to agree with their opinions, but nevertheless the man was done a terrible injustice with his shooting that terrible night 47 years ago...