Robert Kennedy

June 6, 1968.  I got up in the morning to my mother listening to the radio, as we did every morning.  We listened to KMPC Los Angeles.  I remember Gary Owens was one of the jockey's but they had sketch comedy and popular music in the morning. My mother and I would often giggle over the bad puns. My mother was staring at the little beige radio on the counter.  She was crying. She said that when she turned on the radio that she misunderstood when the announcer said that RFK was "Shot"  she thought he was just tired.  Now she understood that he had BEEN shot and was dead.  My parents were Kennedy Democrats. Losing Bobby, after losing JFK was too much for my mother.  We talked about it, I  am sure.  I was weeks away from turning ten and was something of a political child.  I am sure I wondered who would lead us , now that Bobby was gone.

I read recently that RFK's assassination resulted in giving the US Nixon.  The Democrats were forced to go with Hubert Humphrey, not exactly a dynamic man or a ball of fire and after Bobby, well the party could not get it together enough to beat the Republicans.   Had Bobby lived and been elected, I like to think the world would have been a better place.  There is a lot of talk about his plans for Vietnam, but I am more interested in his initial platform that would have addressed civil rights, hunger, poverty and education in this country.  The thing that makes me sick when I think about it it the prevailing idea that those people who live in poverty or hunger in this country somehow deserve it.  The Republican party has never ( and please don't cite Lincoln,his party was "Republican" in name only their policies do not reflect current values).

I had lunch once at the Ambassador hotel, sometime in the late 80's before they razed most of it and turned it into a High School.  The place was deserted and shabby.  Frankly the ghosts int he room were enough to make me uneasy.  I heard an interview with the busboy where he said Bobby asked him "Is everyone else alright?  I wondered if that were a fiction, designed to rise his star one final time.  A part of me hopes it is true.