PETER GOLDMAN WAS AT HOME IN NEW York, watching the results roll in from the California presidential primary. It was early in the morning of June 5, 1968, and for a fleeting instant, Robert F. Kennedy seemed poised to capture the Democratic nomination and perhaps follow his slain brother’s footsteps into the White House.
NBC went off the air, but Goldman, a 35-year-old national affairs writer for Newsweek, stayed awake, flipping through other news channels. Suddenly, he saw footage of a shaken Steve Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and campaign manager, ascending to the podium at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel “and announcing that something horrible had happened.”
As Goldman would observe in his subsequent Newsweek cover story, there was a sense of “sickening familiarity” in the night’s sequence of events, coming as…