Shortly after midnight on June 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy finished his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California Democratic presidential primary.
He waved and smiled as he was guided through a kitchen corridor toward a press conference. Sirhan Sirhan was waiting in the hotel kitchen. He fired eight shots.
Kennedy fell to the kitchen floor. A 17-year-old restaurant worker named Juan Romero cradled his head. Among Kennedy's last conscious words was a question that revealed what was on his mind: "Is everybody okay?"
He was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital. He would never regain consciousness.
Three thousand miles away in the White House in Washington, the man whose relationship with Robert Kennedy had been bitter and deeply hostile for nearly a decade woke to the news. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, was informed of the shooting at 3:31 a.m. Eastern Time by Special Assistant Walt Rostow, who had received an immediate call from the White House Situation Room with the first reports.
Johnson did not go back to sleep. He stayed up through the night making phone calls. He issued a public statement. He ordered Secret Service protection for every presidential candidate in America. And he wrestled privately with something far more complicated than simple grief.
This is the story of what Lyndon Johnson said and did when he heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed.
To understand what Johnson felt in those hours, you have to understand what each man represented to the other. The feud between Johnson and Kennedy was one of the most documented and bitter personal and political conflicts in modern American history.
It predated their arrival in power. It predated the White House. It even predated John F. Kennedy's own presidency. It was a personal dispute in the most specific and profound sense.
The two men had known each other since the 1950s. They disagreed, traded disrespect, and worked effectively against each other for more than a decade. Robert Kennedy had worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee, a fact that became part of the bitter political history between the two men.
Johnson had maneuvered to win the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination but was outmaneuvered by John F. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy, as his brother's campaign manager, then treated Johnson with barely concealed contempt.
When John F. Kennedy named Johnson as his running mate in 1960, Robert Kennedy reportedly tried to undo the decision. Multiple documented accounts, including those in Jeff Shesol's book "Mutual Contempt," which chronicles the feud definitively, record that Robert Kennedy went to Johnson on the morning of the 1960 convention to try to persuade him to withdraw from the ticket. Johnson refused. He became vice president.
Robert Kennedy never forgave that decision, and Johnson spent three years as vice president being treated with contempt by Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy staff, documented by Robert Caro in exceptional detail in "The Passage of Power."
After John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, the relationship did not improve. It calcified. Johnson had political reasons to maintain a working relationship with the Kennedy circle, especially as he sought to preserve Democratic Party unity, advance his legislative agenda, and win the 1964 election. Robert Kennedy needed Johnson's cooperation to protect what remained of his brother's presidency.
The two maintained a public truce while remaining fiercely hostile in private. The documented record of their exchanges during this period, drawn from Johnson's recordings and multiple biographies, shows two men feigning courtesy while barely restraining animosity.
Years later, Johnson described to Doris Kearns Goodwin what Robert Kennedy's candidacy meant to him. He told Goodwin he felt hunted from all sides by a vast herd rushing at him from every direction. He described Black protesters, student demonstrators, mothers demanding welfare, complaining professors, and hysterical reporters.
Then, as Johnson told Goodwin, came the straw that broke the camel's back. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, charmed by the aura of his name, were dancing in the streets.
That documented statement, preserved in Goodwin's book "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream," reveals with exceptional clarity what Robert Kennedy represented to Johnson. Not merely a political rival, but something more threatening. A living symbol of everything Johnson felt he would never be in the eyes of the American public. Young, glamorous, linked to a martyred president, and carrying the most powerful political name in the Democratic Party.
By early 1968, the situation had reached a breaking point. Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson in the New Hampshire primary as an antiwar candidate on March 12, and came within 7 percentage points of defeating the sitting president. The result shocked the political world.
Robert Kennedy, who had agonized for months over whether to enter the race, announced his candidacy on March 16. Kennedy's entry became another major political problem for a president already under enormous pressure.
Sixteen days later, on March 31, Johnson appeared on national television and announced he would not seek reelection. There were multiple factors behind Johnson's withdrawal. Vietnam, his health, his poll numbers. But Kennedy's entry was among the pressures surrounding the decision.
Kennedy and Johnson met for the last time at the White House on April 3, 1968, just days after Johnson announced his withdrawal. Documented accounts of that meeting described two men performing a cautious diplomatic dance. Kennedy told Johnson, "You are a brave and dedicated man." Johnson remained guarded about his stance toward Kennedy's campaign. Both men knew what they were doing. Neither was entirely fooled by the other.
Then Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Then the Democratic primary campaign continued through April and May. Then came June.
On June 4, Kennedy won California. He delivered his victory speech. He walked through the kitchen corridor. And at 3:31 a.m. Eastern Time on June 5, Walt Rostow woke Lyndon Johnson with the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot.
The documented record of what Johnson did in the hours that followed is available through Johnson's tapes, preserved and archived at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The tapes show a president who did not sleep, who was constantly on the phone, and who moved with immediate practical focus.
Johnson spoke three times with the Attorney General. He spoke twice with Secret Service Director Jim Rowley. He spoke with Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. He spoke with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He spoke with senators from both parties, Monroney, Dirksen, and Mansfield, and with Congressman Tom Steed of Oklahoma.
The most important decision Johnson made in those early morning hours was also among the fastest. He directed that Secret Service protection be provided immediately to every presidential candidate and their family. The documented White House statement noted that no legislation authorized this action, but Johnson ordered it carried out regardless. He also directed the FBI to provide additional manpower if needed to support Secret Service teams.
This was not a ceremonial gesture. This was a sitting president realizing in real time that the country he had tried to lead was consuming itself.
At 6:45 a.m., the White House issued Johnson's first public statement on the shooting. His words were direct and unadorned. No words can match the horror of this tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with Senator Kennedy and his family and the other victims. All of America is praying for his recovery. We also pray that division and violence be driven from the hearts of men everywhere.
Those words, "no words can match the horror," were not ordinary political language. Johnson was known for his own particular skill with words, documented by Goodwin and his White House aides. His public statements could be bland and dry. But this statement was not. It acknowledged the horror of the tragedy with something real, and the prayer that division be driven from hearts spoke to a man who recognized in that moment that the country he had tried to lead was consuming itself.
Later that evening at 10:07 p.m., with Kennedy having undergone surgery but still alive, Johnson addressed the nation in a televised broadcast from the White House Fish Room. He spoke about the violence gripping the nation and again called for protection for all presidential candidates. The documented record of that speech is preserved in "The American Presidency Project."
Lyndon Johnson's recordings also document a call Johnson made with Ted Sorensen, Stephen Smith, and Edward Kennedy on June 5. The recording summary preserved at the Miller Center records Johnson asking Sorensen to convey his sorrow to the Kennedy family over the shooting of Robert Kennedy. He told them he had ordered security protection for all presidential candidates and their families. He expressed his sympathy directly to Stephen Smith and Edward Kennedy.
These calls were made by Johnson within hours of the shooting, directly to members of the Kennedy family and their inner circle.
Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, 1968, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 42 years old.
When the death was confirmed, Johnson issued a second documented public statement, also preserved in "The American Presidency Project." He said: "This is a time of tragedy and loss." Senator Robert Kennedy has died. Robert Kennedy affirmed this country, affirmed the essential decency of its people, their longing for peace, and their desire to improve living conditions for all.
The documented statement went on to describe Kennedy's energy, his ideas, and his concern for the poor and disadvantaged. These words, read in isolation, are moving. Read in the full context of Johnson and Robert Kennedy's relationship, they are far more complicated.
Johnson was eulogizing a man with whom he had maintained one of the bitterest political relationships of his career. He was speaking publicly about the essential decency of someone who, according to multiple documented accounts, had treated him with contempt for a decade. The statement was the kind that only a very specific set of historical circumstances could produce. A public grief shaped by the full weight of what Kennedy meant not only to Johnson personally, but to millions of Americans.
Johnson's recordings document the president's calls in the days immediately following Kennedy's death. On June 6, he called Edward Kennedy to offer his condolences and to offer any services the government could provide. The recording summary records Edward Kennedy thanking him. The Miller Center recording log also shows that on June 9, Ethel Kennedy contacted the White House. The tape summary records Ethel thanking President Johnson for his assistance following Robert Kennedy's death. Johnson offered any additional help he could provide, and Ethel asked Johnson to convey her thanks to Lady Bird Johnson as well.
These documented exchanges between Johnson and the Kennedy family in the days after Robert Kennedy's death have almost no presence in common historical coverage. Everyone remembers the feud. The private communications in the days that followed have been largely forgotten.
Johnson also faced an immediate and highly complex political question. With Kennedy's death, the Democratic primary race shifted. Hubert Humphrey was the most likely candidate to win the nomination. Eugene McCarthy remained in the race. Some of Kennedy's delegates and supporters raised the idea of asking Johnson himself to reconsider his withdrawal from the race. The documented record shows Johnson's aides were contacted about this possibility. Johnson did not reconsider his decision. He had made it in March, and he stuck to it.
By the time of the Chicago convention in August, the Democratic Party was deeply divided. Antiwar protesters filled the streets, while inside the convention hall the party struggled to reconcile the factions left by the torn primary season and Kennedy's assassination. Johnson did not attend the Chicago convention amid fears of protests and the hostile political climate surrounding the gathering. The convention that nominated his vice president took place in a city that looked like a war zone on television.
Johnson, in his private life, as Doris Kearns Goodwin documented in their extended conversations after he left the White House, was a man who by 1968 felt besieged by forces he could neither control nor escape. The stampede he described to Goodwin, "the vast herd coming at me from every direction," was his own metaphor for the year leading up to Robert Kennedy's death. After the assassination, that metaphor did not change. The stampede continued. But one of the men at its center had suddenly gone.
What Johnson said publicly about Robert Kennedy's death was measured, honest in its acknowledgment of the tragedy, and careful in its recognition of what Kennedy meant to millions of Americans. "No words can match the horror of the tragedy. Robert Kennedy gave this country a sense of hope." Those were the documented words of a man who, whatever the truth of his private relationship with Kennedy, recognized the scale of what had happened.
Two major American political figures were assassinated within 10 weeks of each other in the same turbulent year. A third figure, King, was killed in April. The country Johnson devoted his presidency to building, from the Great Society and civil rights legislation to the War on Poverty, was coming apart under pressures no legislation could address.
Johnson left the White House on January 20, 1969. He returned to his ranch in Texas. He died there on January 22, 1973, just two days before the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement. He was 64 years old.
What the documented records reveal about Lyndon Johnson in the hours and days after Robert Kennedy's killing is not simple grief or simple relief. It is a man in the full complexity of a situation that defied easy emotional classification. He ordered protection for candidates within hours. He made calls to offer condolences to the Kennedy family. He issued public statements expressing genuine sorrow. And he understood deep down, as he told Goodwin years later, that 1968 was the year the thing he had feared since the first day of his presidency was settled: Robert Kennedy reclaiming what he believed was his right, not through politics, but through a killer's bullet in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles.
None of that made it simple. Nothing about Lyndon Johnson was ever simple at all.