The House of Kennedy(50)
Busboy Romero is still by Bobby’s side, and remembers his lips moving with words of concern. “I heard him say, ‘Is everybody OK?’”
“I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers,” Romero says of holding Bobby’s head off the cold concrete. “I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away.”
At Central Receiving Hospital, 12:30 a.m., Dr. V. F. Bazilauskas tries to get a pulse. “Bob, Bob can you hear us?” the doctor pleads as a priest performs last rites.
The medical team is pumping Bobby with adrenaline and massaging his heart, bringing his vital signs back, but weakly. The doctor gives Ethel his stethoscope. “She listened,” he recalls, “and like a mother hearing a baby’s first heartbeat, she was overjoyed.”
“They put a stethoscope to my ear, and I could hear his heart beating. It was beating…beating…beating…” Ethel later tells her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier. “I thought, Oh my God. He’s going to live. He’s going to live.”
In preparation for surgery, Bobby is transferred to nearby Good Samaritan Hospital, a facility with superior equipment. Through the halls, Hugh McDonald, assistant press secretary, carries Bobby’s size eight-and-a-half dress shoes, repeating, “I’ve got his shoes…I’ve got his shoes.”
In a ninth-floor operating room, a team of neurosurgeons performs a four-hour emergency craniotomy. Twelve hours later, at 1:44 a.m., twenty-six hours after the shooting, Bobby is pronounced dead.
A second Kennedy son felled by a crazed assassin’s bullets.
Chapter 33
The autopsy on Bobby Kennedy is conducted by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, now the Los Angeles County chief medical examiner. As a junior medical examiner, Dr. Noguchi had performed the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe in August 1962. Though he himself has called out errors he made during Monroe’s autopsy, the detailed examination he performs on Bobby is lauded by independent forensic examiners as “the perfect autopsy.” Bobby’s cause of death is a fatal head wound. “Mr. Kennedy,” Dr. Noguchi finds, “was shot from a distance of one to six inches.”
John Tunney, son of the heavyweight boxing legend Gene Tunney and a close friend since law school, advises Ted against seeing his brother in the morgue. “You can’t look,” he tells Ted. “You’ve got to get out of here. Just remember him [Bobby] the way he was. Don’t look at him.”
“They’re killing all the Kennedys,” a distraught Pierre Salinger tells his wife, Nicole. Salinger, a career press man—first for Jack and then Bobby—is on the ground in Los Angeles, coordinating Coretta Scott King’s arrival from Atlanta, and Jackie’s from London.
The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port is plunged into chaos. “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years,” Rose later writes in her memoir. Joe Kennedy Sr.’s nurse, Rita Dallas, observes the matriarch grappling with a deeply personal pain. “With Jack, it was the death of the president,” Dallas reflects. “With Bobby, it was the death of a son.” There are unfounded rumors that the news of Bobby’s death has killed Joe Sr.; it has not. He watches the live television coverage along with the rest of the nation.
When Air Force One arrives in Los Angeles to retrieve Bobby’s body, the NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur observes, “It somehow seems ironic that on afternoons very much like this, Air Force jets bear the bodies of male Kennedys out of the west back to their resting places in the east.” Though the flight manifest was not made public, on the night of June 6, David Brinkley reports on the pathos of the journey taken “in one airplane [by] three widows of three American public figures murdered by assassins”—Jackie, Coretta Scott King, and now Ethel—seen by the Secret Service agent Paul Sweeney “consoling one another.”
Bobby lies in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a site chosen by Stephen Smith to differentiate Bobby’s funeral from Jack’s in Washington, DC, and also as a symbolic homecoming for the New York senator. After a private family service on June 7, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand mourners line twenty-five blocks as they wait to file past Bobby’s casket.
On June 8, hundreds of Washington notables headed by President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, plus Hollywood stars and civil rights dignitaries, join the Kennedys for the funeral. Cardinal Richard Cushing says the televised High Requiem Mass, just as he did for Jack.
Ted steps to the flag-draped coffin and delivers a roll call of Kennedy siblings lost. “Joe and Kathleen, Jack” he intones, his voice breaking with emotion. And now Bobby. All three of his brothers are dead. All killed while serving their country.
To break the hold of unbearable grief, friends try to summon up some of Bobby’s mischievous spirit. Of the solemn but lengthy service, one of them says to Richard Harwood of the Washington Post, “If it had gone on much longer, Bobby would have started kicking the box.”
But the day of mourning has barely begun. In a nod to Abraham Lincoln’s historic funeral train, the Kennedys and seven hundred guests fill twenty-one train cars and embark from New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The 226-mile route runs through New Jersey, Baltimore, and into Washington’s Union Station.