On June 5th, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. won the Democratic Primary in California and it was “on to Chicago” and the Democratic convention.  On June 6th, he was dead. After delivering his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the New York Senator and presidential candidate walked through the kitchen to greet the hotel’s busboys and dishwashers. He was just shaking hands with Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy, when a Palestinian gunman named Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Kennedy for his support of Israel. In her book, The Copycat Effect, Loren Coleman suggests that Sirhan sought to kill the presidential candidate on the one-year anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

In the fifty years since Bobby Kennedy’s murder, many have speculated over what would have happened if Sirhan hadn’t fired those shots. Politico believes that he has come to symbolize the Democrat’s lost dream. “He alone, it seemed, could draw working-class white, black and Latino voters into an umbrella coalition.” At his campaign rallies, Kennedy preached messages of reconciliation and and attacked those who symbolized wealth, power and privilege. As such, “to the black and brown voters who composed the base of his support, he seemed a savior.”

Chris Matthews writes in The Washington Post that Bobby Kennedy was special because he “was not a snob,” unlike many of today’s politicians. On the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Kennedy took it upon himself to personally break the news to the African-American community in Indianapolis. He did it so well, that Indianapolis saw no race riots in the coming days, as opposed to other cities like Washington and Detroit.

Some believe that Kennedy’s assassination, coupled with the killing of King, immediately altered the political mindset in America. The New York Times suggests that both crimes gave rise to the violent attitudes that sometimes surface in American politics. “Why, many people asked, should they continue to pursue change peacefully, through the ballot box and nonviolent protest, when two of the biggest evangelists of that approach had been gunned down?”

This mindset was particularly dominant amongst African-American voters; they felt that their two most important fighters have been taken from them. Indeed, many Americans have come to lose faith in national reconciliation and progress being achieved through the political process. Dr. Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, argues that Kennedy’s death “really did persuade many people to seek private solutions, to retreat, to achieve a kind of personal redemption, and that had a very, very long-lasting effect on American life.”