June 5, 1968

He had won California. He came down to the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight and thanked the people who had worked for him, and said that now it was on to Chicago.

He went out through the kitchen because it was the shortest way to the press room. In the pantry passage a man stepped out with a revolver and shot him three times. Five other people were hit and all of them lived. A busboy named Juan Romero, who had been shaking his hand when the shots came, knelt and put a rosary into his fingers.

He lived twenty-six hours. He died at a minute before two in the morning on the sixth of June. He was forty-two years old, and his wife was pregnant with their eleventh child.

He was buried at Arlington near his brother. The funeral train ran from New York to Washington and the tracks were lined the whole way - people standing in their gardens, on the platforms, on the roofs of cars, for two hundred and twenty-six miles. It was meant to take four hours and took eight, because the crowds were so thick the train had to slow.

Nine weeks earlier, on the night Martin Luther King was shot, he had stood on the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and told a crowd who had not yet heard. More than a hundred cities burned that week. Indianapolis did not.