Part V: Snakes – (Chapter 85)
Original Photo of RFK is Public Domain
(AI overlay added by author)
June 5, 1968. Ten days after graduation.
Nana awakens me at 6:00
a.m. so I can make my 9:30 a.m. flight. I go over the itinerary in my head:
Sioux City to Denver on Ozark, Denver to L.A. on TWA, L.A. to Mother and
stepfather Johnny Lawrence, then ‒ who knows?
L.A., here I come!
Nana yanks the covers
back.
My head, still a bit
foggy, when Nana says, “My God, they’ve got Bobby, too!”
Bobby who? I don’t
know any Bobby....
“What’s this damn world
coming to, anyway?” she says, wiping the tears from her eyes.
Then it hits me, last
night’s California primary, Bobby Kennedy’s expected big win ‒ JFK’s younger
brother, our hope for the future, now gone?
I sit up in bed. “What
happened?”
“He was shot by a goon.”
She stands up and runs her fingers through her hair. “A Goddamn goon.”
It’s not like Nana to
take the Lord’s name in vain; coming from her lips, the profanity sounds
shocking.
“A Goddamn goon,” she
whispers, as if she has read my mind and wants me to know she hurts enough to
risk her immortal soul and eternal Hellfire should she drop dead right now.
“A Goddamn goon...”
I kick the sheet off, sit
at the edge of the bed, and put my arms around her. “Is he dead?”
She shakes her head. “But
it don’t look good. Not good at all.” Then she covers her face with her hands.
“God, don’t they ever learn? Don’t they know Bobby was just asking for it?
You’d think of all people he’d know better than to expose himself like that....”
She sobs all over again,
shaking her head.
I jump out of bed and hug
Nana, and we both cry together, remembering another time almost five years ago
when we stood in another room ‒ another house ‒ and mourned the loss of another
Kennedy.
Years later, I’ll look
back on the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations and realize how much
they have changed my generation, but, more than that, how they have changed me
‒ something to do with loss of trust.
But, on this day, as I
embark on my new life, all I feel is sad and complete helplessness.
After I have finished
dressing and packing, Nana, Pappa, and I gather around the TV and watch the Today
show, trying to sort out what has happened.
For the first time, we
hear words like “The Ambassador Hotel,” “lone gunman Sirhan Sirhan,” “How could
this happen again?” We see the raw scenes that will become a part of the
historical landscape: the victory speech; the camera being jostled; Bobby laying
in his own blood on the floor and someone yelling, “The gun, get the gun”; a
man in a white jacket, or maybe it was a woman, supporting Bobby’s head as he
lay dying; and Bobby’s last public words, “Is everybody okay?”
June 5, 1968, Ambassador Hotel
AP Photo: Dick Strobel
[Restricted YouTube video of that terrible night on June 5, 1968 (ABC News)]
We understand that while
Bobby clings to life, he’s not expected to live. And if he does live, he’ll be
a vegetable, not the brilliant man who campaigned so vigorously for the
presidency.
Goodbye to the Camelot
years.
Yes, I’m unhappy that
Bobby’s been shot, but after the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King, I almost
expected that another Kennedy would die violently.
As Barbara Walters and
Hugh Downs sort through what has just happened, I remember another time when a
line was drawn down the middle of November 22, 1963, my 14th year ‒
Marking “Then” and “Now” in clearly defined terms.
Abstract and geometric version of Then and Now