MSNBC: Key figures associated with RFK's assassination: Juan Romero (busboy who aided RFK)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24895033/

THEN

The picture is one of the most iconic of all time: Dressed in a white waiter’s jacket, a young man — he looks barely 13 — crouches over Robert F. Kennedy as the stricken senator lies on the floor of a pantry at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. The photo, taken by Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge, seemed to capture both the tragedy of the moment and Kennedy’s place in history as an advocate for the poor and disadvantaged.



The young man in the picture, Juan Romero, certainly was the latter. Born in Mexico, he had moved to the United States seven years earlier, when he was ten. When he encountered Kennedy, he had become a busboy at the Ambassador.

“Juan had met Kennedy the night before,” Time magazine recalled 30 years later. “Kennedy was campaigning in California's presidential primary, and Juan told the other busboy he'd pick up dirty trays all night in return for the chance to take a room-service call from the Kennedy suite. …

“Juan knew Bobby Kennedy as a Catholic and a family man, and John Kennedy had spoken of Hispanics as hardworking and family-oriented at a time when Juan was being called things like a taco bender.”

The next evening, Romero decided to seek one more chance to see Kennedy. As the senator arrived to make his victory speech, he told the jury at the trial of Sirhan Sirhan in early 1969, he made sure he would be in the right position to meet him again.

“I wanted to see Rafer Johnson, Rosey Grier, Senator Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy,” he told the court, sounding somewhat star-struck.

“When the senator arrived,” the prosecutor asked, “did you shake hands with him?”

“I shook his hand,” Romero replied.

As Kennedy concluded his speech, Romero was presented with another opportunity to meet the senator again — he had just finished a room service order and was in the area of the pantry where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting with his gun.

“I thought there was a person that couldn’t wait to shake his hand,” he told the court, “and I thought I was going to be interested to watch it, and so I was watching it and I … seen him put his – he put his arm like that and he shot two shots and then I saw a gun and then I turned around and I seen he was right in front of him (the senator) and I leaned down and put my hand to the back of his head and tried to give him some, whatever I could, aid, some aid; that is about all I could do.”

“Did you say something to the senator?” the lawyer asked.

“I just said the first thing that came to my mind, ‘Come on senator, you can make it; Mr. Kennedy, you can make it,’ and he tried to talk back and what I understood he said is, ‘Everything is all right, everything is OK.’ ”

NOW

Everything, of course, was not OK. Within 26 hours, Kennedy had died. Romero, who had worked at the Ambassador for about two years, decided to leave Los Angeles, and by the time the trial began he was working, again as a busboy, in Santa Barbara.

“After that night,” Time magazine reported 30 years later, “staying at the hotel was impossible. Every day they'd hand him a bag of mail. He was something of a celebrity, but it felt all wrong. Reporters hounded him, and one offered college tuition in return for his story, but Juan's stepfather told him no honorable man profits from another man's tragedy. And so he left, wandering from town to town and job to job until 1974, when he and his fiancée Elda eloped to San Jose and started a family.”

The interview with Time — conducted by then-columnist Steve Lopez at a restaurant near Romero’s home south of San Francisco, where he worked for a paving company in the booming Silicon Valley area — was one of the first times that Romero spoke publicly about the assassination. A father of three girls and one boy, he was now a grandfather.

“The very first thing Juan Romero wants you to know is that this isn't about him,” said Lopez. “ ‘It's about Bobby,’ he says with eyes so shy they seldom lock onto you. ‘I'll do anything I have to if it keeps his name alive.’ ”

Five years later, Romero again was visited by Lopez, who was by this time working for the Los Angeles Times. Romero recalled how he placed some rosary beads in Kennedy’s hands.

“I asked Ethel if I could give Bobby the rosary beads, and she didn't stop me. She didn't say anything.

“I pressed them into his hand but they wouldn't stay because he couldn't grip them, so I tried wrapping them around his thumb. When they were wheeling him away, I saw the rosary beads still hanging off his hand.”