A 40-Year Memory - Bobby Kennedy Shot

June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan.

It was 12:15 am PDT on a early Wednesday morning when Bobby Kennedy, Senator from New York, claimed victory in the tough California primary. He stood in the Ambassador Hotel and told the cheering crowd:

My thanks to all of you and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.

A quick Kennedy wave and it was off through a back hallway.

I lived in Pennsylvania. I was home for a few weeks from college and had sat with a couple close friends watching the returns. It was almost 1:00 am when we gave up. They left and I went to bed. Just before they left I remember commenting, out of nowhere and not with any conscious or unconscious) awareness of anything prophetic:

I'm afraid he'll never live to be President.

It was probably the atmosphere of those days. The underlying violence that we saw in JFK's assassination and the response in so many cities when Martin Luther King was killed just two months earlier. Bobby would be a target.

I wanted him to be President more than just about anything else at that point. He was the last best hope in a time of turmoil and war and anti-war and black-vs-white and grape workers strike in California and oh so many things. Bobby kept Indianapolis from exploding in April after King's death. His work as New York senator had made strides in improving the ghettos of the city. He walked with Cesar Chavez in California and the migrant workers. More than any politician in a very long time he was truly a uniter.

But...

Well, it was not to be. Hope was lost for many of us that night. Many turned their back on the political system or stepped back only to be pushed further away by events in Chicago later that summer, or the ongoing war and a White House that watched football games on TV while thousands marched outside the front lawn. It was not a pretty time.

So I slept that morning of June 5, 1968. And was awakened, as I remember it, by my brother or aunt with the news. Bobby was shot. Bobby was shot.

It became a death watch that day. As the doctors spoke on TV, as the pictures were explained over and over, we all knew it was a hopeless wait. But we waited afraid, angry, struck by the unfairness of life and the complete uncertainty of everything.

I surfed over to You Tube and, needless to say, there is a three part video of the events of that night. Bobby's final speech, the joy, and then the panic and grief. I watched the first part and that same deep spot of emotion was touched. It is 40 years and it still hasn't gone away. It isn't about letting it go. It is about the feeling of what we lost and have not been able to find for 40 years. True uniters are hard to find. And those who think they are, probably aren't.

Anyway, more tomorrow. Here's the link to the first video.