Forty-five years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, shortly after winning the California Democratic primary. Coming on the heels of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., just two months earlier, the assassination of the forty-two-year-old candidate left the nation reeling with grief; Kennedy’s death, as the poet Robert Lowell later remarked, also “left a generation bereft of its maturity.” In the June 22, 1968, issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell described the weeks following the tragedy, when Americans were sustained by habit, by “the old elegance of mourning and the release of grief”: Each morning since the death of Robert Kennedy, we have awakened to the familiar knowledge that some terrible piece of news, some new jolt of the intolerable, awaits us just beyond the borders of sleep. We open our eyes to a corner of the bureau, a soft glint of mirror, morning sounds, and then it comes back… Like an invalid, we are each day less shocked to find that we are ill, each day more absorbed with our symptoms. In America, “the irreversible is no longer strange,” he wrote; it had become commonplace. - posted in The New Yorker by Erin Overby newyorker/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/06/robert-f-kennedy-anniversary-photographs.html#slide_ss_0=10
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:13:33 +0000
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