The House of Kennedy(49)
Two days before the primary, on June 3, Bobby travels more than twelve hundred California miles. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, a loud popping sends Ethel crouching into the wheel wells of the convertible. Earlier in the campaign, Bobby had vowed to Charles Quinn of NBC News, “If I’m ever elected president, I’m never going to ride in one of those God-damned [bulletproof, bubble-top] cars.” When the pops in San Francisco prove to be Chinese firecrackers, Bobby continues to greet the crowds there and in Los Angeles and San Diego, where he nearly collapses from fatigue.
On June 4, Bobby, Ethel, and six of their children stay in Malibu as guests of the film director John Frankenheimer. While voters take to the polls, the family enjoys the beach—until David, a week and a half shy of his thirteenth birthday, is caught in a dangerous undertow. Though Bobby rescues his son, David, a sensitive, good-looking boy (“If we ever go broke,” Ethel once told journalist Dolly Connelly, “we’ll make a movie star of David and live off his earnings”) is traumatized by the event, and both Kennedys sustain minor bruises and scrapes.
It’s a physically and emotionally exhausting experience, and later that day when adviser Richard Goodwin encounters Bobby “stretched out across two chairs in the sunlight…his head hanging limply over the chair frame; his unshaven face deeply lined and his lips slightly parted,” he can’t help fearing the worst. Even after realizing Bobby is only sleeping, Goodwin thinks to himself, “I suppose none of us will ever get over John Kennedy.”
The polls close at 8:00 p.m. It’s after six when Frankenheimer speeds along the Santa Monica Freeway toward the Ambassador Hotel, where the campaign team will watch the election returns. “Take it easy, John,” Bobby Kennedy tells him. “Life is too short.”
Chapter 32
The party in the fifth-floor campaign suite at the Ambassador is in full swing, but Bobby cautiously asks aides, “Do we know enough about it [projected returns] yet?”
He slips away to phone Kenny O’Donnell in Washington, telling him, “You know, Kenny, I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I’ve made it on my own.”
When, just before midnight, the numbers point to a narrow margin of victory—Kennedy, 46 percent; McCarthy, 42 percent—Bobby and Ethel descend to the ballroom. They pass through the hotel kitchen to cheers from the workers—“Viva Kennedy! Viva Kennedy!”—and emerge into a crowd singing “This Land Is Your Land.” As president, Bobby has promised columnist Jack Newfield, he will make the Woody Guthrie song the new national anthem.
“I was just shocked by the fact that he didn’t have any security. I think he had one person,” recalls Latino activist and Kennedy campaign staffer Dolores Huerta. No police are present. Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty is a Nixon man, and under his orders the LAPD labels Bobby as “nobody special” and not only refuses to attend his motorcades but issues the campaign twenty-three tickets on more than a hundred alleged traffic violations. Bobby’s sole bodyguard, former FBI agent Bill Barry, is unarmed. Per government policy in 1968, as a mere presidential candidate, Bobby doesn’t qualify for Secret Service protection.
“We are a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country,” Bobby says after fifteen minutes of unscripted remarks. His twelve-year-old son David is the only one of Bobby’s ten children (Ethel is pregnant with number eleven) awake and watching the live television broadcast. “So my thanks to all of you and now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
As Bobby is speaking these words, his staff agrees to a press conference. The ballroom is so crowded that Bobby fears for his pregnant wife’s safety. “Look after Ethel,” Bobby says to Barry as they retrace their route through the hotel kitchen at 12:15.
Seventeen-year-old busboy Juan Romero shook Bobby’s hand the day before, and now the candidate offers him a second handshake.
A slight, dark-haired man dressed all in blue slips in among the kitchen staff. Inside a rolled-up Kennedy poster he’s hiding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson pistol loaded with eight bullets. He extends the weapon at Bobby and squeezes the trigger. A bullet pierces Bobby’s head. Two more hits follow, one in his back and the other in the right shoulder. (Many will later note the similar physical positioning of the brothers’ fatal injuries.) Bobby drops immediately to the floor.
News cameras continue to roll.
“Shots! Shots! Look out, look out, there’s a madman in here and he’s killing everybody!” someone screams.
The “madman” is the same person who trash collector Alvin Clark remembers pledging to shoot Bobby on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. His name is Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Christian Palestinian whose family fled Jerusalem for Pasadena in 1956. Sirhan—whose notebook containing repeated declarations that “RFK must die” was entered into evidence at his 1969 murder trial—rejects Bobby’s pro-Israel stance.
Bill Barry wrestles the weapon away from Sirhan, but not before the gunman fires off enough rounds to wound five others. When onlookers turn on Sirhan, Barry orders Kennedy aide Jack Gallivan and football star Rosey Grier, “Take this guy. Get this guy off in a corner where people can’t hit him.” (LA police chief Tom Reddin later uses a camper-shell-topped pickup truck to transport Sirhan from jail to court so that he can’t be killed like Lee Harvey Oswald.)