At about 1:30 a.m. on a sultry June 5, 1968, Jack T., a campaign photographer, and I stood at a taco stand somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard, 10 or 12 minutes from a murder at the historic Ambassador Hotel, a place neither of us would ever dream of finding ourselves at 1 on any morning.
Jack was driving me home when he spotted the stand and pulled in.
“I have to have something to drink, you want something to drink? ” he asked.
So there we were, at a taco stand, stunned and still shaking after the sudden and violent conclusion of months of working, as volunteers on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
There would be no sleeping this night. We would have to go home and tell our story, one we would be telling for years to come.
We took our bottles of soda and sat at one of the tables. We just sat there staring into the night, sipping orange soda.
An electric blue light bug killer hanging nearby just kept electrocuting moths and mosquitos, with sharp, loud snaps. Each snap made Jack twitch.
It felt as though we were actors in a movie.
He stared at the bug killer and back at me.
“What the hell just happened?”
Only an hour before, “what happened” was now history. The shots fired echoed around the world.
We had made it to the front of the stage where Bobby had just finished his speech that ended with, “Now, onto Chicago.”
The applause went on and on as he and his wife, Ethel, were hustled off the stage and escorted away.
Jack and I still had our volunteer buttons on our jackets. We tried to follow.
We pushed our way forward watching the top of Bobby’s head in the crowd. Suddenly, someone decided to take the group through the hotel kitchen.
Then the parade stopped, Bobby and his aides disappeared into the kitchen, and big Rosie Greer slammed the doors in front of us. For a few moments we waited, hoping they’d open.
Then we heard a series of incredibly loud, sharp pops.
Jack turned. “What the hell was that?”
I could see the crowd behind us popping the colored balloons with the end of their cigarettes.
“A celebration,” I said.
“Let’s go down to the garage. Maybe we’ll catch them,” he replied.
We were stopped halfway through the crowd by a woman’s hysterical scream from the far end of the room.
“BOBBY’S DEAD! THEY SHOT BOBBY AND ETHEL! ROSIE, THEY’RE ALL DEAD!”
I remember a great gasp like a sudden wind.
It was as if we were frozen for the longest time, like figures in one of those Christmas glass balls, as rumors like snowflakes flew around and between us. People fell to the floor around the fountain, like marionettes cut from their strings.
Then someone close to me shouted: “There he is.”
In this June 28, 1968, file photo, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan is escorted by his attorney, Russell E. Parsons, from Los Angeles county jail chapel to enter a plea to a charge of murder in Los Angeles. U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin was granted parole on Aug. 27 after two of RFK’s sons spoke in favor of Sirhan Sirhan’s release and prosecutors declined to argue he should be kept behind bars. Associated Press file
I pushed forward as a path filled with floodlights, and two very tall Los Angeles motorcycle cops with big white helmets came cutting through the bodies toward us with this small, handsome, dark-haired man handcuffed between them, while a couple of guys in blue jackets with hotel emblems cleared the path.
“It’s him!” someone cried.
It was him. It was the man who shot Bobby Kennedy, being taken out the side doors.
That was the first and the last time I ever saw Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.
It lasted only seconds and then he, the cops and the floodlights were gone. The rest, as they say, is history.
Breaking News: The 77-year-old Sirhan who was convicted of fatally shooting RFK on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, faced a two-person panel at a 16th parole hearing Aug. 27, who recommended a parole.
And the beat goes on.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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