The tenth anniversary of the 1968 shootings

The tenth anniversary of the 1968 shootings enters the diary through a television appearance and a personal recollection. On June 2, 1978, Robert Kennedy Jr. appeared on television for the tenth anniversary of his father’s shooting. Andy Warhol immediately connected the date to his own experience: it had been ten years since he was shot, the day after Robert Kennedy Jr.’s father. The entry makes the anniversary less a public commemoration than a marker in Warhol’s private chronology, where one televised reminder brings two consecutive days in 1968 together.

The Anniversary in the Diary

The entry is brief and matter-of-fact. Alongside the anniversary, Warhol notes that Robert Kennedy Jr. had been staying at Fred Hughes’s house for two weeks with Rebecca, whom the diary identifies as the Fraser girl. The couple were described as deeply in love. These details place the televised remembrance within the immediate social present: the past returns through the screen while people connected to the broadcast’s subject are staying in a friend’s home.

The entry does not recount the circumstances of either shooting or explain how the anniversary was marked beyond the television appearance. Its force comes instead from the simple alignment of dates. Warhol identifies his own shooting as having occurred one day after the event being commemorated, bringing his personal history into the same short notation without turning it into a separate account.

From Factory Log to Personal Record

The diary’s form had changed before this anniversary was recorded. For several years, Pat Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log: she listed business visitors and gathered different people’s accounts of the previous night, chiefly to establish what had happened, who had been present, and how much Warhol had spent. The log was not intended to convey his personal view.

In 1976, after the filming of Bad, Hackett told Warhol she no longer wanted to work at the office, though she would continue writing Popism with him. When he asked her to keep the log and itemize his expenses, she declined to keep calling the office for other people’s accounts. They agreed that Warhol would supply the daily information himself. The record consequently became his own personal narrative, the form in which the June 1978 anniversary appears: not as an independently reported public event, but as one item in his account of the day and its associations.

The Routine Behind the Entry

Beginning in fall 1976, Hackett and Warhol spoke by telephone on weekday mornings so she could record his activities and places visited, along with cash business expenses. The calls began around nine, but the supposed five-minute task could take one or two hours. Hackett took extensive notes, then typed the entry while Warhol’s intonations were still fresh. Every other week or so she brought the pages to the office and attached the cab and restaurant receipts corresponding to the amounts he had reported.

The diary was not ordinarily recorded on weekends. On Monday, Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a single session. When either of them was out of town, they adapted the process through phone calls, handwritten notes, or, occasionally, a tape recording. Hackett’s account is explicit that no day was left un-Diarized. The anniversary entry thus belongs to a system that made daily activity, incidental detail, and expense part of a continuous record.

The Published Anniversary

The published diary is an edited selection from an original 20,000 pages. Hackett cut whole days and sometimes entire weeks, as well as portions of individual days; on days crowded with events, she might retain only one. She also reduced lists of names to preserve narrative flow rather than reproduce the feel of social columns. The anniversary’s compact pairing of the television appearance, Warhol’s personal date, and the people staying at Fred Hughes’s house is therefore what remains in the published account, not a full transcript of everything said that morning.

Hackett also removed the interpersonal dimension of her conversations with Warhol, including references that would have meaning only to her. In the few personal references retained, she translated herself into the third person as PH, aiming to let readers occupy the place of the person listening on the other end of the phone. That editorial approach shapes how the anniversary reaches the reader: as Warhol’s intimate daily account, mediated by Hackett’s selection and transcription, with its public and private histories held together in a few lines.