RFK eulogized as a 'good and decent man' 50 years ago this hour #OnThisDay #OTD (Jun 8 1968)

Video: 'RFK's Funeral Video - ABC News, June 8, 1968'

(Saturday, June 8, 1968, 10:00 a.m. EDT) — Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, was eulogized today by the last Kennedy son, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, at a funeral Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York as a man who “gave us strength in time of trouble.”

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My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, dressed starkly in black and wearing a black veil over her face, moved her lips silently as though in prayer.

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President Lyndon Johnson and four men who are seeking the presidency — Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, former Vice President Richard Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York — were also in attendance, as was Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated only two months before.

Immediately following the mass, Kennedy’s body was transported by a slow-moving train to Washington, D.C., for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Kennedy, 42, had been shot and critically wounded the June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after he made his victory speech California’s Democratic presidential primary.

Kennedy was exiting the Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Room ballroom through the hotel kitchen when he turned to his left and shook hands with busboy Juan Romero. The gunman stepped down from a low tray-stacker beside an ice machine, rushed past Kennedy’s escort, maître d’hôtel Karl Uecker, and repeatedly fired what was later identified as a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver.

Kennedy, shot three times, fell to the floor. One bullet, fired at a range of about 1 inch, entered behind his right ear, dispersing fragments throughout his brain. The other two entered at the rear of his right armpit; one exited from his chest and the other lodged in the back of his neck.

Despite extensive neurosurgery to remove the bullet and bone fragments from his brain, Kennedy was pronounced dead nearly 26 hours after the shooting.

Following Kennedy’s autopsy on June 6, 1968, his remains were taken to Manhattan, where his closed casket was viewed by thousands at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

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