Video: 'The President: June 1968. MP897.' (June 4-5, 1968, at 0:23)

(Wednesday, June 5, 1968, 10:02 p.m. EDT) — In an emotional and at times even angry statement on television tonight, President Lyndon Johnson responded to this morning’s shooting of Robert F. Kennedy with plea for Americans to end the violence in their midst once and for all, to tolerate neither hatred nor the preaching of violence and to resolve to live under the law.

“So let us, for God’s sake, resolve to live under the law,” Johnson said from the Fish Room at the White House. “Let us put an end to violence and to the preaching of violence.”

Johnson said he was appointing a commission of distinguished citizens to investigate both the circumstances and the causes of physical violence of all kinds in the United States in the hope that the nation can learn “how we can stop it.”

Video: 'June 5, 1968 - President Lyndon B. Johnson following the Attack on Senator Robert F. Kennedy

Earlier, Johnson had moved swiftly to provide protective Secret Service details to the six announced presidential candidates of major parties, other than Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who already has such protection because of his office.

Kennedy, the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, was shot and critically wounded this morning at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after he made his victory speech California’s Democratic presidential primary.