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If there seemed an ultimate unseriousness about Paris in May, the events in Mexico City some months later were a trauma and tragedy. Mexico, under President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, was preparing to play host to the Olympics. But the mood of students, intellectuals and much of the middle class had soured on the Diaz government's authoritarianism. On Oct. 2 some 10,000 people gathered at Tlatelolco Square. Late in the afternoon, hundreds of soldiers hidden in , the Aztec ruins opened fire, while secret-police agents in the crowd drew pistols and began making arrests. That night army vehicles carried the bodies away. No one knows how many died. Some estimate 300; others say 500. The government admitted to only 32.
The massacre achieved its immediate objective: the protest movement disintegrated. On Oct. 12 the Olympic flame was lighted, and white doves were released above Aztec Stadium to start the Games.
An End of Heroes
Robert Kennedy had come into the presidential race in a sheepish and vaguely ignominious fashion, piggybacking on Eugene McCarthy's courage. McCarthy, the sardonic Minnesota Senator who wrote poetry and loved to work the contrarian vein, challenged L.B.J. as far back as November 1967. The McCarthy campaign, which seemed a quixotic gesture, swiftly picked up thousands of young volunteers. Long-haired students went to the barber and put on neckties ("Clean for Gene") and fanned out across New Hampshire, the first primary state, canvassing door to door, building a grass-roots movement.
Robert Kennedy had contemplated challenging Johnson, but decided against it. His best year, advisers told him, would be 1972, after Johnson finished a second term. Kennedy promised McCarthy that he would stay out of the race. But then McCarthy astonished everyone, and seemed a winner, by getting 42% of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire (another example of perceptions being more powerful than realities, since the sitting President actually won, with more than 49%). Kennedy saw the world in a new way. Obviously, 1968 was going to be an unusual year. Somewhat maladroitly, on March 16, four days after New Hampshire, he plunged in.
He overtook McCarthy in primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, then lost to him in an upset in Oregon. With that, the party's attention shifted to the June 4 California primary. Kennedy won, with 46% of the vote, against 42% for McCarthy.
That night, around midnight California time, he stood before his happy supporters in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and gave them some serious talk and some wisecracks about his dog Freckles. Among his last words from the rostrum: "I think we can end the divisions within the United States, the violence." Then he walked through a serving pantry that led to the pressroom, his next stop. In the hotel serving pantry, Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian Arab living as a resident alien in the U.S., shot Kennedy in the head with a .22-cal. pistol.