Evan Phillip Freed is an attorney and freelance photographer who traveled with and photographed the presidential campaign of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Freed was present when Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy.
Evan Freed
Freed (left), with Roosevelt Grier, 1967
Robert F. Kennedy, Los Angeles 1968
Robert Kennedy, San Francisco 1968
Robert F. Kennedy 1968 presidential campaign
The Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign began on March 16, 1968, when Robert Francis Kennedy, a United States Senator from New York, mounted an unlikely challenge to incumbent Democratic United States President Lyndon B. Johnson. Following an upset in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek re-election. Kennedy still faced two rival candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination: the leading challenger United States Senator Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had entered the race after Johnson's withdrawal, but Kennedy and McCarthy remained the main challengers to the policies of the Johnson administration. During the spring of 1968, Kennedy led a leading campaign in presidential primary elections throughout the United States. Kennedy's campaign was especially active in Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, California, and Washington, D.C. After declaring victory in the California primary on June 4, 1968, Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died on June 6, 1968 at Good Samaritan Hospital. Had Kennedy been elected president, he would have been the first brother of a former U.S. president to win the presidency himself.
Kennedy at a press conference in the Netherlands, c. February 1962
Kennedy speaks from the platform of a railway business car on his whistle-stop tour through Oregon's Willamette Valley
Kennedy with supporters in San Francisco (photo by Evan Freed)
Kennedy addresses a crowd in Los Angeles