Journalist Pete Hamill was friends with Robert F. Kennedy, helped persuade him to run for president, worked briefly for the campaign and then wrote about it. And he was with Kennedy when the candidate was assassinated by a gunman at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel.
Kennedy died 40 years ago today; it was his murder that prompted the Secret Service to offer protection to presidential candidates.
Pete Hamill has written an essay for the book A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties, a collection of photographs by Bill Eppridge, who followed Kennedy's campaign and was also there the night Kennedy was killed.
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