Alistair Cooke on the Robert Kennedy assassination
Among the many dispatches Alistair Cooke filed as the Guardian's chief US correspondent from 1947 to 1972, his eyewitness report of the assassination of Robert Kennedy remains one of his most compelling. Following the BBC's release online of Cooke's Letter from America archive, we are publishing for the first time, alongside his coverage of the assassination and its aftermath, letters from the Guardian's own annals between Cooke and Alastair Hetherington, the paper's editor at the time
From the archive, 7 June 1968: Body of Kennedy flown back
Originally published in the Guardian on 7 June 1968: The body of Robert Francis Kennedy was gently lifted aboard the plane sent here this morning by President Johnson, and Los Angeles added its name to the list of cities whose previous history has been defaced, for the time being, by all too memorable acts of violence: Dallas, Detroit, Memphis.
