Forty Years Later

Counter added Sunday, March 25, 2007 -11:00 am Pacific Time


	*Photography*


	Thursday, June 5, 2008 – Forty Years Later

There was the event:

Forty years ago, on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was brimming with the confidence of a young, charismatic and liberal political star. He had just won the California Democratic primary, giving him a strong chance to win the party's presidential nomination, rising out of the shadow of his brother John F. Kennedy, the president murdered less than five years before.

And in a split second, it was all over: a deranged Palestinian shot him dead in a Los Angeles hotel as he reveled in his victory. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy plunged the United States into deep trauma.

It came in the wake of the devastating Tet offensive against US and South Vietnamese troops in Vietnam, which showed the US was not winning the war and forced then-president Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat, to concede that he was too weak to seek the White House in that November's election. And it followed by two months the April 4 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, which sparked riots across the country.

Pat Morrison's article Where History Turned appeared Thursday in the Los Angeles Times, about the site:

What about that place, the hotel pantry, where history was unmade and remade in a moment?

The assassination turned out to be the last notable chapter of the storied and usually gloried Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown. George Washington didn't sleep there, but Winston Churchill did, and Albert Einstein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nikita Khrushchev, sulking when he wasn't allowed to go to Disneyland.

But time went by, and the chic hotels went west, and in 1989 the Ambassador closed. Donald Trump wanted to extend his edifice complex to L.A. and bought the place.

That didn't work out. The Los Angeles Unified School District got the site. There's a new school going up where the Ambassador Hotel once stood. It's pretty much all gone now. Morrison wonders

Go here to learn about the hotel – and that site has links to much more. Hillary Clinton recently mentioned the assassination, but history disappears out here.










	The nearby Wilshire Christian Church – 1922-23, Robert H. Orr, architect –





	Someone else had the same idea, photograph the site on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination – David Weldzius, a real photographer, with a real camera.





	Above the site –

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0. The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.


	[Forty Years Later]


	All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik