The day after an assassins bullet crashed through Robert Kennedys skull, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote a letter to Congress.
Let us now spell out our grief in constructive action, the president urged in a message on June 6, 1968. Johnson decried the availability of arms to the mentally ill. And he lamented mail-order murder, which had allowed Lee Harvey Oswald five years earlier to purchase a $19.95 rifle from a Chicago store and train its sights on Robert Kennedys brother John as he rode through Dallas in his presidential motorcade:
So today, I call upon the Congress in the name of sanity, in the name of safety - and in the name of an aroused nation - to give America the Gun Control Law it needs, Johnson wrote.
In private, the president spoke with still greater urgency, calling his aides into the White House.
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We have only two weeks, maybe only 10 days, Joseph Califano, his chief assistant for domestic policy, recalled the president telling them. Weve got to beat the NRA into the offices of members of Congress.
Johnson was practiced in the art of carving political advantage out of chaos. Five days after President John F. Kennedys death, he urged the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill and got it seven months later. He used the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination to push through the Fair Housing Act. Now, the death of the upstart young senator who had risen to be Johnsons political rival presented another opportunity to advance his legislative agenda.
But gun control was not a straightforward case of righting old injustices. It tapped into the social turmoil of the 1960s, exposing cultural and
