Today’s the 40th anniversary of the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy. It happened late at night in Los Angeles, so most of the country learned of it the next morning, this date in 1968. I remember coming out from my bedroom, one of the first days after school got out, and hearing about it. I would have just finished second grade, but I was developing a precocious interest in current events already. While I didn’t exactly know who Kennedy was, I could tell his shooting was big news. Kennedy would die the next day, June 6, 1968. Over at Popdose today, you’ll find a piece I wrote about the historical what-ifs involving the assassination of RFK. Here, I’d like to add some additional color from that day.
At YouTube, there’s a three-part video titled “RFK Assassination as it Happened,” which features RFK’s California primary victory speech and raw footage of the shooting aftermath and news coverage that I’ve never seen before. It’s taken from one of those conspiracy DVDs that claims to find the real truth behind the Kennedy assassinations in connections between the CIA, the mob, and (for all I know) UFOs. Fortunately, there’s little of that flavor in the YouTube excerpts. You can find part one of the video and navigate to the additional parts here.
When the Top 40 stations finished reporting the day’s sorry news and went back to music, it must have been difficult to reconcile the hits of the day with the real world. The Rascals’ “A Beautiful Morning” may have been meteorologically appropriate in many places, like my town, but not spiritually. Love songs like “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Cowboys to Girls,” and “Like to Get to Know You” would have seemed trivial. The frivolity of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Yummy Yummy Yummy” must have been hard to stomach. “Mony Mony,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”, “Indian Lake,” “Jumping Jack Flash”—diversions all, but probably not diverting enough.
(In London, the Rolling Stones had started recording “Sympathy for the Devil.” On the fly, Mick Jagger revised the song’s lyric, singing “I shouted out ‘who killed the Kennedys’”, instead of the original reference only to “John Kennedy.” If the standard chronology of the song’s recording is correct, the lyric would have been changed before RFK died.)
Could a Top 40 listener find comfort anywhere? “Reach Out in the Darkness” by Friend and Lover, for example, must have seemed like a dream crushed at birth. When Jim and Cathy Post sang about “people finally gettin’ together,” they did not imagine it would be around another Kennedy’s bier.
What about the cathartic emotion found in the best soul music? Maybe “I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You),” the last hit by the David Ruffin edition of the Temptations, might have worked.
But what’s likeliest of all is that there was no quick fix, from the radio or from any other source. RFK himself, speaking on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated, reminded his audience that grief takes time: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Forty years later, we hope to have acquired the wisdom, although a trace of the grief lingers.
Filed under: Record Charts, YouTube
Nicely written.
Many years ago, I was out with friends, all of whom were older than I was. The topic of conversation turned to where everyone had been when they had learned that JFK had been killed. All I had to offer, sadly enough, was to reference the fact that my parents tell me as a baby, I had been kissed by RFK while he was campaigning.
Well-said. And yes, I think the grief will always linger.
I was 9 years old at the time of RFK’s death. It seemed to me that “current events” at that time was constant turmoil in the U.S. There were the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, and continuous rioting…the Democratic National Convention, Watts, and ultimately the shootings at Kent State. There was also Charles Mansion, and Woodstock. It seemed as if 1967-1970 was utter chaos. Yet, somehow, the U.S. elected a President, put a man on the moon, put the first Boeing 747 to use, and complete construction of the World Trade Center…plus the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, and CCR put out GREAT music. What a crazy time it was being a kid!
Shark is so right. While I have no idea what I was doing when RFK was shot, I am constantly amazed at what I was a witness to growing up in the 60’s. I was smack dab in the middle of amazing social change, unparalleled music creativity and historic events that seemed to happen on a weekly basis. Color me blessed.