Thirty-Nine Years Ago

Thirty-nine years ago today, Bobby Kennedy, frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President (capitalized this time), was murdered. He'd just made a statement proclaiming victory in the California primary and was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles via the kitchen. There, a man named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan shot Bob in the head. The second Kennedy who was a public servant and victim of an assassin in less than five years died twenty hours later.

I was in L.A. when that happened. The news, including a video of the event, was on the eleven o'clock news. I remember the shot, the screams, the struggle, the confusion as bodyguards, including Rosie Grier, the football star, wrestled Sirhan to the floor and disarmed him. ("Get that gun away from him! Break his thumb if you have to!" someone yelled at Rosie. Rosie got 'er away and didn't break Sirhan's thumb.)) As has always been the routine, they showed the tape over and over and over.

A few days later I was at a job interview next to the LAX airport and from (ironically) a knoll above the road on which a two-vehicle procession arrived, I watched. In the distance on the tarmac was Air Force One -- a Boeing 707 then -- I'd ridden in one of those airworthy ships to Nigeria as a Peace Corps Volunteer a few years before that -- waiting for the remains of RFK, in a huge black hearse, followed by Ted Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy in a huge black limousine.

I saw the two famous Kennedys remarkably clearly in that car that day. It occurred to me long afterward that still a third gunman would have had an easy shot at the third brother then and there. No one was there to protect their slow approach, at least no one I was aware of. My recall is that I stood there alone. For all I know I was in the crosshairs of a government sniper's rifle right then, lest I should turn out to be another of those weirdos who was looking for his fifteen minutes of fame instead of the harmless loser drowning in alcohol that I was, honest-to-god ignorant of the procession I happened on.

In retrospect I envision a mural: brightly colored, a landscape on, say, an adobe wall in downtown Los Angeles. On the left, the two official cars, Teddy with his huge shaggy-haired head downcast, Ethel with her sorrowful face turned up to the strong daylight of the desert next to the ocean that is the L.A. basin. On the right, the behemoth silver-and-blue airship somehow nearly dwarfing the vast tarmac. Brightly colored but surreal, except for the two mourners (and the lone unobserved observer above and at a distance from them) absolutely devoid of humanity, absolutely desolate. Desolation in a desolate nation.

That was 1968, desolation in a desolate year.

I feel as though we are in such a year now.