20th Century Blog

RFK was a US senator and attorney general for the presidential administration for his brother. Just like his brother he was a popular political figure and had a high education. He graduated from Milton Academy but before he got the chance to complete his Harvard career world war two broke out and his brother Joseph Kennedy was killed in combat. Robert joined the navy and was assigned as a lieutenant to the destroyer which was named after his brother. In 1946 he returned to Harvard and graduated two years later. He went on to study law at the university of Virginia law school and then was admitted to the Massachusetts bar which is an association for lawyers in 1951.

He went on to run his brothers’ presidential campaign his inclusion in his brother’s cabinet gave rise to charge of nepotism but he still succeeded and proved to be a good attorney general especially in prosecuting civil rights cases. He was also his brothers closest advisor after the assassination of his brother john he continued to serve for a time In Lyndon b Johnson’s cabinet. He resigned from Johnson’s cabinet in 1964 then he ran for senator of new York despite the criticism of him being a carpetbagger he continued to succeed in the senate and was a vigorous advocate of social reform and was identified as a spokesman for the rights of minority’s.
Robert became increasingly critical of President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war witch urged him to run for democratic president. Eugene McCarthy’s showing at the democratic primary in New Hampshire convinced Kennedy that a challenge to Johnson could be successful and he announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968. Kennedy conducted an energetic campaign and won a series of primary victories culminating in California on June forth at the end of the day he gave a victory speech in the ambassador hotel in LA while leaving he was shot and he died the next day.

August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a “police riot” took place. The title of “police riot” came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protestors. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, bags of urine, and chunks of concern.
Conventions help to open up the political process to millions of people. The violence between police and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the streets and parks of Chicago gave the city a black-eye from which it has yet to completely recover. Some confrontations were planned. Some were spontaneous. This one was planned, but nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Many months before the Chicago convention, experienced movement activists decided that it would be an ideal place to confront "the system" and demand an end to the Viet Nam war. They invited one hundred thousand people to come and demonstrate. The City of Chicago responded by refusing to grant permits for any marches and for only one rally.
Around 3:30 pm, a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The demonstration was made up of 10,000 protestors. They police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, bags of urine, and chunks of concrete. Police fought with the protestors and vice versa. The chants of the protestors shifted from ‘Hell no, we won’t go” to “Pigs are whores.” The gas is going to be used, let that gas come down all over Chicago. . . . If we are going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated."

The Kent State shootings, also known as the May 4 massacre or Kent State massacre, occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. President Richard Nixon's announcement of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the need to draft more soldiers for an expansion of the Vietnam War effort provoked massive protests on campuses throughout the country. At Kent State University, demonstrators occupied buildings and destroyed the ROTC offices. In response, the governor of Ohio dispatched hundreds of National Guardsmen to the campus. On May 4, the guardsmen open fire on a crowd of protesters, killing four students and wounding nine others. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

Unidentified speaker 1: "Suddenly, they turned around, got underneath, as if they were ordered to, they did it all together, aimed. And personally, I was standing there saying, they're not going to shoot, they can't do that. If they are going to shoot, it's going to be blank."

Unidentified speaker 2: "The shots were definitely coming my way, because when a bullet passes your head, it makes a crack. I hit the ground behind the curve, looking over. I saw a student hit. He stumbled and fell, to where he was running towards the car. Another student tried to pull him behind the car; bullets were coming through the windows of the car.

"As this student fell behind the car, I saw another student go down, next to the curb, on the far side of the automobile, maybe 25 or 30 yards from where I was lying. It was maybe 25, 30, 35 seconds of sporadic firing.

"The firing stopped. I lay there maybe 10 or 15 seconds. I got up, I saw four or five students lying around the lot. By this time, it was like mass hysteria. Students were crying, they were screaming for ambulances. I heard some girl screaming, 'They didn't have blank, they didn't have blank,' no, they didn't."

· Jeffrey Glenn Miller; 20, 265 ft (81 m) shot through the mouth - killed instantly
· Allison B. Krause; 19, 343 ft (105 m) fatal left chest wound - died later that day
· William Knox Schroeder; 19, 382 ft (116 m) fatal chest wound - died almost an hour later in hospital while waiting for surgery
· Sandra Lee Scheuer; 20, 390 ft (120 m) fatal neck wound - died a few minutes later from loss of blood

· Joseph Lewis Jr. 71 ft (22 m); hit twice in the right abdomen and left lower leg
· John R. Cleary 110 ft (34 m); upper left chest wound
· Thomas Mark Grace 225 ft (69 m); struck in left ankle
· Alan Michael Canfora 225 ft (69 m); hit in his right wrist
· Dean R. Kahler 300 ft (91 m); back wound fracturing the vertebrae - permanently paralyzed from the chest down
· Douglas Alan Wrentmore 329 ft (100 m); hit in his right knee
· James Dennis Russell 375 ft (114 m); hit in his right thigh from a bullet and in the right forehead by birdshot - both wounds minor (died 2007)
· Robert Follis Stamps 495 ft (151 m); hit in his right buttock (died June 11, 2008)
· Donald Scott Mackenzie 750 ft (230 m); neck wound