This is an L.A. Times Studios podcast.

The assassin was a small, wiry, pockmarked young man with curly hair and a hard-to-place accent.

He had concealed himself behind an ice machine in the crowded kitchen pantry

of the Ambassador Hotel of Los Angeles. He carried an eight-shot revolver he got for $25. He had

loitered in the area for hours asking kitchen workers if his target would be coming that way.

Nearby in the embassy ballroom,

Robert F. Kennedy had just declared victory in the June 4, 1968, California Democratic primary.

The ecstatic crowd chanted, we want Bobby, we want Bobby.

If you look at photos of the crowd, you will see expressions of unembarrassed love

that kind few candidates inspire. Kennedy was 42. He was a New York senator. His admirers

revered him as a secular saint, a figure of hope in a brutal tumultuous decade. But he was despised on the right and divisive on the left.

In East Los Angeles, Mexican-American crowds had greeted him rapturously.

In Van Nuys, his campaign cars were pelted with stones.

Assassinations had already left an indelible blight on the decade. The senator's older brother,

President John F. Kennedy, was killed in 1963. In 1965, it was Malcolm X. In April

1968, it was Martin Luther King Jr. On the day of King's assassination, it was Robert F. Kennedy,

who broke the news to a largely black crowd

at a political rally in Indianapolis.

He spoke of the, quote,

stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land

and of the possibility of compassion.

He spoke of his brother's murder.

...