"Kennedy, Kennedy", the crowd at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was still chanting when Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward and fired. Just moments after Robert F. Kennedy claimed victory in the California Democratic presidential primary on June 5, 1968, the 24-year-old gunman shot the senator at close range in a crowded kitchen corridor. Kennedy fell to the floor with three bullets in him; campaign volunteer Juan Romero cradled his head. Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital fought through the night, but Kennedy died 26 hours later, on June 6. He was 42. The killing followed the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. By just 63 days and hit a nation already fracturing over Vietnam and civil rights. Hubert Humphrey captured the Democratic nomination that August, lost to Richard Nixon in November, and a generation of liberal reformers never fully recovered the momentum RFK had generated. The assassination accelerated sweeping changes to Secret Service protection of presidential candidates and cemented a corrosive national debate about political violence that the United States still has not resolved.