On a cold February evening in 1986 on the streets of Stockholm, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme ’48 and his wife Lisbeth were walking home alone from the movies, having dismissed their security guards earlier in the day. Out of nowhere, a bullet was fired directly at Palme, who died instantly upon being shot. Forty years, a $71 million investigation, 60,000 documents and more than 100 individuals claiming responsibility later, the case remains unsolved.

Palme was born in Stockholm in 1928 to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He enrolled in Stockholm University at 17, but had to pause his studies due to compulsory military conscription, where he eventually served as a cavalry lieutenant, according to an Alumni Bulletin article. After completing his military service, he had a strong desire to study in the United States; his grandfather’s only condition was that he attend a Protestant institution. “I had never heard of the College, but as it turned out I was lucky, extremely lucky to land there,” Palme told the Alumni Bulletin in 1984.

Palme entered Kenyon with extensive credit from his studies in Stockholm, allowing him to graduate in just one year. Despite his short time on the Hill, Palme was deeply involved in campus life and extracurricular activities. He graduated with straight As as a political science and economics major and played varsity soccer for Kenyon’s first soccer team. He wrote his thesis on the United Auto Workers, leading him to gain an interest in socialist causes: “He spent every weekend exploring the union movement [at an industrial plant in Mount Vernon],” according to classmate and friend Henry Abraham ’48. 

After graduation, Palme decided to hitchhike around the United States for four months on a budget of $300, which played a large role in his socialist ideology. “While I was a student at Kenyon College,” Palme explained in a 1975 Collegian article, “I took an extended bus tour of the United States. It was the appalling poverty and injustices that I saw during that trip, especially in the South, that made me a Socialist.” 

Upon returning to Sweden, Palme quickly became involved in the political scene. He enlisted as a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in 1949 while studying law at Stockholm University. In 1957, Palme was elected to the Swedish parliament as a member of the Social Democratic Party, later joining the government’s cabinet in 1963. According to a Collegian article from 1969, Palme was elected as the prime minister of Sweden that year, becoming the youngest head of government in Swedish history at 42 years old. During his time as prime minister, Sweden expanded its pension, universal healthcare, public housing and public education programs, forming the nation into its contemporary welfare state. Palme also staunchly opposed American involvement in Vietnam. 

Despite graduating from Kenyon in 1948, Palme would return to the Hill in 1970 to give a speech and receive an honorary degree. Because of Palme’s strong anti-Vietnam War stance, the event received national coverage. According to the 1975 Collegian article, about two busloads of demonstrators from the International Longshoremen’s Association protested against his presence on campus, disrupting his speech. After the event, one newspaper even wrote, “Make a note of Kenyon College as a place not to send your son, your daughter or your donations. … Kenyon proves to be the kind of College that is proud of a former student now leading one of the world’s most anti-American countries.” 

Palme was reelected as prime minister in 1982. Tragically, his second term would be cut short by his assassination just four years later. At the scene of the crime, the murderer quickly fled after shooting a second bullet that grazed Lisbeth. Many credit the negligence of Stockholm police for the case’s ambiguity, as a police alert about the prime minister’s assassination was not issued until three hours after his death. In fact, when Stockholm’s police chief for serious crime was awakened and told of the news, he went back to sleep, according to Covert Action Magazine. There have been many theories surrounding the assassination over the last 40 years, with the most prominent suspecting a politically-motivated murder by opposing interests. As stated by investigative journalist Gunnar Hall in a 2016 issue of the Collegian Magazine, “This whole thing has all the rings of some kind of intelligence or paramilitary operational,” and was likely carried out by a “small, organized group, with links either to Swedish or South African intelligence.”

The open case remains an open wound in Sweden’s history, yet Palme’s legacy lives on, in Sweden and at Kenyon (Palme House, home to the Department of Anthropology, is named in his honor). In the words of Palme himself, “Democratic freedom requires solidarity among the people. In order to live and survive a society must have a comprehensive solidarity. … There is never ‘we’ and ‘they.’ There is only ‘us.’”