5 Jun 1968 Jahr - Robert F Kennesy assassinated

Beschreibung:

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and with President Johnson out of the presidential race, Robert Kennedy emerged in 1968 as the leading liberal figure in the nation. A critic of the Vietnam War, a strong supporter of civil rights, and committed to fighting poverty, Kennedy (the brother of the late President John Kennedy) ran a progressive campaign for president. In this photograph he is shown shaking hands with supporters in Detroit in May 1968. However, less than three weeks after this picture was taken, Kennedy, too, was dead, the victim of yet another assassination.


With a campaign focused on racial and economic fairness and drawing on the continued popularity of his family, Kennedy had emerged as the frontrunner for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. But his candidacy would be cut short. On June 5, as he was celebrating his victory in the California primary over Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy was shot and killed by a young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan — evidence showed that Sirhan was motivated by Kennedy’s support for the sale of American fighter jets to Israel. Amid the anguish over yet another assassination, one newspaper columnist declared that “the country does not work anymore.” Newsweek asked, “Has violence become a way of life?” Kennedy’s assassination was a political calamity for the Democrats — he was the only candidate able to overcome the party’s fissures over Vietnam. In the space of eight weeks, American liberals had lost two great unifiers — King and RFK. With these leaders gone, the crisis of liberalism became unmanageable.

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