--- title: Behind the Picture: RFK's Assassination, Los Angeles, 1968 description: On the 46th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination, LIFE.com presents a series of photos from that night by the great Bill Eppridge. canonical: https://time.com/3879872/robert-kennedy-assassination-photographs-by-bill-eppridge-june-1968/ author: Ben Cosgrove article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-05-15T20:55:01.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:03:42.532Z og:title: Behind the Picture: RFK's Assassination, Los Angeles, 1968 og:description: On the 46th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination, LIFE.com presents a series of photos from that night by the great Bill Eppridge. og:url: https://time.com/3879872/robert-kennedy-assassination-photographs-by-bill-eppridge-june-1968/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2cf8a43e6885d3a/6988473935ba6f8f79c0c4e8/01_141404.jpg?branch=production&width=772&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 772 og:image:height: 434 og:image:alt: Robert Kennedy assassination, June 1968 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Behind the Picture: RFK's Assassination, Los Angeles, 1968 twitter:description: On the 46th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination, LIFE.com presents a series of photos from that night by the great Bill Eppridge. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc2cf8a43e6885d3a/6988473935ba6f8f79c0c4e8/01_141404.jpg?branch=production&width=772&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Behind the Picture: RFK's Assassination, Los Angeles, 1968 > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [Ben Cosgrove](https://time.com/author/ben-cosgrove/) ## Ben Cosgrove May 15, 2014 8:55 PM UTC  Caption from LIFE. "Rigid, semiconscious, his face an ashen mask, Senator Kennedy lies in a pool of his own blood on the concrete floor, a bullet deep in his brain and another in his neck. Juan Romero, a busboy whose hand Kennedy had shaken before the shots, tried to comfort him." Caption from LIFE. "Rigid, semiconscious, his face an ashen mask, Senator Kennedy lies in a pool of his own blood on the concrete floor, a bullet deep in his brain and another in his neck. Juan Romero, a busboy whose hand Kennedy had shaken before the shots, tried to comfort him."Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images by [Ben Cosgrove](https://time.com/author/ben-cosgrove/) ## Ben Cosgrove May 15, 2014 8:55 PM UTC **_How many times must we live through these throat-paralyzing sequences of days of gun play, grief and muffled drums?_** That question, posed by LIFE magazine in its June 14, 1968, issue, is freighted with all of the emotions — sorrow, frustration, a kind of bewildered dread — unleashed by the events that unsettled the country in the first half of that schizoid year. The assassination of Dr. King; the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre and the other horrors of the war in Vietnam; and, on June 5, the murder of [Robert Kennedy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%5FF.%5FKennedy) by a Jerusalem-born Palestinian Christian, Sirhan Sirhan, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Here, remembering RFK’s assassination — a murder made, if possible, all the more heinous by the fact that Kennedy was gunned down just as he was finding his true voice as the leader of a vast, disaffected cross-section of the American public — LIFE.com presents a series of photos by the great [Bill Eppridge](http://www.monroegallery.com/photographers/display/id/72). Many of the photos featured here never ran in LIFE. The very first picture in the gallery is, of course, not only the most recognized and most frequently reproduced picture from that night, but one of the most chilling, signature images of the 1960s. As a historical document, it’s indispensable. As a photograph, it’s astonishing: made in an instant, Eppridge’s picture possesses the immediacy of great photojournalism, while somehow conveying the totemic sense — especially in its interplay of (barely perceptible) light and (profound) dark — one sometimes encounters in portraits by the Old Masters. Rembrandt himself, one imagines, might have felt a kinship with the tone, the lighting, the bleak intensity of the scene. --- > “” --- --- > “” --- --- > “” --- In the decades since LIFE expressed those sentiments, millions of words have been written about the Kennedys and, specifically, about the abiding intensity with which Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy despised one another. The two men had been enemies — not too strong a word — ever since Johnson accepted JFK’s invitation to be his running mate, a decision Bobby Kennedy vocally fought until, and beyond, the 1960 Democratic convention. But in early June 1968, it was still possible for most Americans to believe that President Johnson might, in fact, genuinely mourn the loss of the dynamic — if chimerical and often arrogant — Robert Kennedy. The photographs that Bill Eppridge made before, during and after RFK’s assassination don’t require that we forget all we’ve learned about the dank underside of American politics in order to appreciate the fear, rage and anguish sparked by Kennedy’s death. On the contrary, the pictures in this gallery suggest that _despite_ how ambitious and even cruel he could sometimes be, Bobby Kennedy obviously inspired, in countless people, the better angels of their nature. (One person whose better angels were clearly not stirred was Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Bobby Kennedy because Kennedy supported Israel; or maybe because he, Sirhan, was drunk and murderously furious on the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War in the Middle East; or perhaps, as he later claimed, because he was brainwashed . . . take your pick. Sirhan’s stated reasons for pumping three bullets into Bobby Kennedy — and injuring several other people that night — have varied wildly through the years.) Would Robert Kennedy have won the Democratic nomination if Sirhan had not gunned him down in that hotel kitchen? Would he have gone on to beat Richard Nixon in the general election if he had won the nomination? Playing “What if. . . . ?” is always an intriguing, if ultimately pointless, exercise. The real measure of the man has to be taken not by what he might have done, but by what he actually said and what he did during his lifetime. “A complex man, ambitious and fatalistic,” LIFE wrote of Kennedy, a man who had “shown himself capable of growing and deepening.” We’ll never know how much he might have grown, how much further he might have deepened, had Sirhan’s bullets not silenced him. In the end, that’s where much of the tragedy of the tale lies: in the ruined promise of a dead man’s unmeasured potential. Robert Kennedy was 42 when he was killed. He and his wife, Ethel, had 11 children; the last, Rory, was born six months after the assassination. In the decades since RFK’s death, two of those children, David and Michael, have died. Sirhan Sirhan is now 70 years old, and serving a life sentence in a California prison. He has a parole hearing every five years. _Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com_  Caption from LIFE. "Rigid, semiconscious, his face an ashen mask, Senator Kennedy lies in a pool of his own blood on the concrete floor, a bullet deep in his brain and another in his neck. Juan Romero, a busboy whose hand Kennedy had shaken before the shots, tried to comfort him." Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy campaigns, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy campaigns, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Supporters of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy watch their candidate on TV. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy confers with an aide during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy gives a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy gives a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Sen. Robert Kennedy gives a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles before his assassination, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. "Heading for his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, Robert Kennedy stops in the kitchen to shake hands. A few minutes later the gunman was waiting for him in the corridor just outside the kitchen." Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Heading for his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, Robert Kennedy stops in the kitchen to shake hands. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Robert Kennedy greets supporters not long before his assassination, June 5, 1968, Los Angeles, Calif. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A less-famous image of Sen. Robert Kennedy and Ambassador Hotel employee Juan Romero moments after RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A mortally wounded Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. "In the hot jammed corridor where her husband lay behind her, Mrs. Robert Kennedy implored the crowd of shocked onlookers to move back and give him some air." Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A wounded Paul Schrade, a regional director of the United Auto Workers Union, labor chair of Robert Kennedy's campaign and one of five other people shot by Sirhan Sirhan, on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 5, 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A mortally wounded Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A mortally wounded Robert Kennedy on the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Mrs. Robert Kennedy and others surround a mortally wounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Mrs. Robert Kennedy and others surround a mortally wounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Mrs. Robert Kennedy and others surround a mortally wounded Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. "Mrs. Robert Kennedy, who had been walking with the senator, crouched over her dying husband, whispering to him as he lay on the floor. Beside her, waiting for the ambulance attendants to arrive, knelt her sister-in-law, Mrs. Stephen Smith and Dr. Ross Miller." Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A Robert Kennedy supporter registers disbelief after his shooting by Sirhan Sirhan, Los Angeles, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Los Angeles, June 1968, after Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. A young Robert Kennedy supporter registers disbelief after his shooting by Sirhan Sirhan, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968\. In front with glasses is football great Rosey Grier, who tackled Sirhan Sirhan after Sirhan shot RFK; George Plimpton walks behind Grier. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. The scene at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles after mortally wounded Robert Kennedy arrived there, June 1968\. In front of open door, in suit and tie, is George Plimpton. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy, Frank Mankiewicz (center, in suit and tie), prepares to address the media gathered outside the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, Los Angeles, June 5, 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Mrs. Edward Kennedy (left), Jackie Kennedy (center) and Sargent Shriver (right), husband of Eunice Kennedy and brother-in-law to John, Robert and Edward Kennedy, after the assassination of RFK, Los Angeles, June 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Robert Kennedy's body being loaded into a transport after his death and autopsy, prior to being shipped from Los Angeles to New York, June 6, 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Not published in LIFE. Robert Kennedy's body being loaded into a transport after his death and autopsy, prior to being shipped from Los Angeles to New York, June 6, 1968. Bill Eppridge—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Following a funeral mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, RFK's body traveled by train to Washington, DC, where he was buried near his older brother John. Above: People pay respects to the slain senator as the train carrying his body passes by, June 1968. 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