Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy was shot after he had delivered his acceptance speech in the wake of his emphatic victory in the Californian Democratic Party presidential primary, in which he vanquished Senator Eugene McCarthy. It was not inevitable, despite Kennedy’s proven electoral appeal, that he could sway the Democratic Party convention in Chicago and become its nominee for the 1968 general election, in which Richard Nixon ultimately defeated Hubert Humphrey.

Despite his own formidable political muscle and extensive networks among organised labour leaders, he had also made formidable enemies within his own party. Many viewed him as an opportunist who had only entered the race after the incumbent, president Lyndon Johnson, had been exposed as vulnerable after an unconvincing victory over McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.

Others hated him for his ruthless exercise of the power he had enjoyed as his late brother’s most influential adviser during the Kennedy administration. Even the patron saint of the Democratic Party, Eleanor Roosevelt, had denounced him as phony liberal because of his work for the infamous senator Joseph McCarthy.

I remain an RFK true believer. Perhaps that is largely nostalgia. The assassination of his brother President John F Kennedy in November 1963 marked my engagement with the adult world. I started reading the newspapers and taking an active interest in politics, unlike my seven-year-old classmates. The image of RFK lying bleeding on the floor of that hotel kitchen, rosary beads entwined in his hands by the young busboy who was cradling his head, remains vivid in my memory five decades on.

Coming weeks after the murder in Memphis of Martin Luther King, when cities in the United States burst into flames amid rioting that required troops and National Guardsmen to quell, it seemed that last great hope of mankind was coming apart at the seams. It was losing a brutal war in Vietnam while its own urban heartland was riven by racial hatred.