June 5 Birthday
On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after winning the California Democratic primary. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, fired a .22 caliber revolver. Kennedy was hit three times — once in the head. He died the next day. He was forty-two. His funeral train from New York to Washington drew crowds along the tracks — two million people stood beside the rails. Kennedy's death ended the hopes of the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party. The convention in Chicago that August became a riot. Nixon won the election. What would have happened if Kennedy had lived is one of the great counterfactuals of American history. The Marshall Plan was proposed at Harvard's commencement on June 5, 1947. Secretary of State George Marshall spoke for twelve minutes and said nothing new — the plan had been developed in the State Department for months. But the speech gave the plan a public face. Marshall offered $13 billion in aid to any European nation that wanted it, including the Soviet Union. The Soviets refused. Sixteen Western European nations accepted. The aid rebuilt factories, roads, and ports. The Marshall Plan is the most successful foreign aid program in history — it rebuilt a devastated continent and bound it to the United States for a generation. John Maynard Keynes, born this day in 1883, transformed economics. He argued that governments should spend during recessions and save during expansions — the opposite of what had been done. His General Theory (1936) was written for fellow economists, and it is dense. He attended the Versailles Peace Conference and resigned in protest, predicting that the reparations would destroy Germany. He was right. He died in 1946, weeks after negotiating the American loan to Britain. People born on June 5 fall under the zodiac sign of Gemini. The birthstone is Pearl and the birth flower is Rose. Historical events on June 5 include 1947: Secretary of State Marshall proposes European recovery program at Harvard, 1968: Robert Kennedy shot at Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, 1981: CDC publishes first report on AIDS (five cases of rare pneumonia in LA). Famous people born on June 5 include John Maynard Keynes (1883), Ken Follett (1949), Mark Wahlberg (1971).