Anyone care to share their memories of Bobby Kennedy? n/t

that things were going to get awful. we had a chance for a different way of being in the world, and we lost it.

the world stopped in a way --

When we evidently weren't able to deal with the "power" which brought us the coup on JFK, we
were headed in a direction which would only bring us more political violence -- and it has!

And we have not been unable either to uncover the "power" behind all those acts of violence.

And here we are now -- on the verge of true calamity -- Global Warming -- and warmongers,
imperialists in charge of government --

How could we ever atone or make amends for the violence this nation has done even over the last
60 years???

i thought i was still "half-asleep". then the reality set in. i thought "how could this have happened AGAIN"?

what I do remember is waking up to deliver the morning Chicago Tribune route I had and seeing a bulletin on the paper stating he had been shot.

I always carried a radio with me when I delivered papers and that was all that was being talked about.

I remember several older brothers and sister of my good friend being extremely upset.

In hind sight I believe this nation would have been so much different and better had he lived.

To bad.

:cry:

but that I was hesitant to post because it's controversial. I watched Bobby Kennedy speak on local TV live in LA the night he was assassinated. The cameras where still on when he had exited the ballroom and the reporter, who was still wrapping up, suddenly said that there might have been gun fire. Then one of the camera men got close enough into the kitchen to shoot the crowd surrounding Kennedy on the floor. All we could see were the backs of the men squatting and hunched over him. Then they stopped the cameras and went directly to the local news room to continue the story because I guess security stopped the coverage there. What I saw before that was Kennedy swimming through the crushing crowd of supporters and his body guards not able to protect him adequately. I saw the same thing with Obama Tuesday night. He was touching hands through a crushing crowd, surrounded by unsmiling body guards that could not protect him if someone wanted to do harm to him. I had an awful feeling of deja vu. I hope people on his campaign will protect him better than this by not letting people crush in that close to him especially now that he is the presumptive nominee.

and Bobby's death broke my heart - I cried for hours, couldn't stop. Quite a contrast to my reaction to JFK's death, which was to feel a kind of numb, speechless, aching horror. Strange to say, after the passing of several decades, that I've never gotten over it.

Lima, Peru. We had flown all night, taking off probably about the time Kennedy was appearing in the Ambassador ballroom.

When I got through Customs, I walked into the terminal. The first thing that hit me was that it was too quiet. Not many people were moving. Everyone was staring at the TVs that were anchored in the ceiling and some on walls. There weren't that many of them, but clusters of folks were around each set. And something strange was playing on those screens.

I couldn't figure it out.

I walked closer to one TV, and I realized people were holding each other and crying. No one was talking. Bags and pocketbooks were just thrown down. Some people slumped in chairs, not looking up. Then I heard some commentator on TV talking about Kennedy's not having regained consciousness. For a second, I thought it was some bizarre replay of November 22, 1963.

I asked a woman what had happened. "I just got back from Peru," I said. "What happened?"

"They killed him," she said. "They killed Bobby." She was crying.

I stared at the screen. It was late morning, I think. I'm not sure. Still daylight, of that I'm certain. But everything seemed to go dark. I took a seat and watched and watched. My flight north was forgotten. I wasn't sure where my luggage was. I hadn't eaten for hours.

I had been on an extended trip to Cuzco and Machu Picchu when Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated, and the distance and the (then) relatively primitive news sources never really brought home the horror of that event or the rioting that followed. I was isolated by distance.

But this, this was home, and this was my welcome back to my America. I was a college kid, just starting out in life when JFK was killed. We had his brother, though, who was doing something heroic with this run for the White House, having worked LBJ out of the way. I was supposed to go to work for his campaign that summer, as soon as I settled in.

I was in the airport the whole day. I caught a flight home that night. My parents met me at the airport. My father was crying. My mother was dry-eyed, and the first thing she said to me, after not seeing me for a year, was, "It's OK to cry, honey."

So I did.

He was actually quiet and shy in private. My dad and he were friends, worked
together well while he was Senator from NY. I used to run into him now and then
when I worked at the Senate one year (page), and his sons and I were schoolmates
for a while when I went to school in DC. His Senate office was one of the loosest
and coolest of all. The world stopped and veered off course the day he died.

The radio in the car was broken, but when I passed a gas station with the flag at half staff, I knew what had happened. It was devastating.

In an open pavillion, I was sitting up in the rafters: there were hundreds of people around and Kennedy spoke on stage. I remember John Glenn was also with him. Just a couple weeks before he died. On his way out, He spotted a boy in a wheelchair. He took off his tie clasp and gave it to the boy. It was a PT 109 likeness. Strange what a person remembers.

lower than Gore Vidal's opinion of Bobby. My father thoroughly loathed Bobby on purely personal reasons. I recently found out teen age Bobby was exceptionally rude to one of my aunts. repeatedly. Which was why my father loathed him. Their political views were very close but my father "never trusted the SOB".

My mother,brothers and I on the other hand adored Bobby. I took my 11 year old butt out to canvass in our highly republican neighborhood. It was the first time I had to defend a candidate and I did my best. The week before the CA primary Bobby tanked in the Oregon primary. My dad traipsed around the house chanting "down the tube with bob the boob" which earned him a couple of nights on the couch.

The morning after the CA primary I woke up and found both my parents parked in front of the TV watching the assassination coverage. My father managed to say a couple of nice thing about Bobby. We kids were pretty sad. As we walked to school and met other kids we were all quiet. At school the nuns had a special mass and we pretty much spent the rest of the day at an extended recess.

I still have a couple of Kennedy 68 badges.

My Dad followed politics like others follow sports, so I was watching and learning hard by that age. Dad loved Bobby. We lived in the Los Angeles area so we saw a lot of coverage. The details of that whole day and that whole night are etched in my mind. Recently I quoted from my memory Bobby's last words right here on DU. I remembered 'On to Chicago to win' , yesterday on the radio I heard the tape. He said 'on to Chicago, and let's win there.' This was 40 years ago, and I'd never heard the words since. There was the girl who said she saw a woman in a Polka Dot dress and a Latino man coming out laughing and saying they'd shot Bobby. I remember dear Rosie Greir, who was at Bobby's side the whole campaign, doing what the Secret Service did not yet do. Rosevelt Grier, here's to you.

I remember someone saying 'give the Senator room to breath.' I remember my whole family in tears. America in tears.

And the next day. Well, I got jumped and pushed to the ground by kids on the way to school- Republican spawn who were, to my horror, reflecting their parent's joy at Bobby's death. This was Orange County and all. But imagine that, you Democrats, they mocked the death of Bobby. I sat there in the dust knowing at that moment that the voting age was 21, but still, I was a Democrat already. Like my parents and Bobby and Rosie Greir. Because one thing was sure, I was not one of these Republibrats and never would be. I was so glad my parents were not Republicans, it seemed like the only measure of right and wrong to me that day. We were the good guys, and they were they bad guys.

Peace and love to everyone.

When JFK was shot, I was 18, as self absorbed as most kids my age back then.We did stay glued to the tv as so many did, watching the funeral, etc.
There was a huge sense of loss for months.

When Bobby was shot, I was 23, married, "just a housewife"
husband had been to Viet Nam in '64.
( before there was * a war * there, it was "advisors", remember?)

I had been watching RFK speech, just before it ended I turned off the tv, which was on a rolling stand
( remember those, anyone?).
As I put my hand on the tv to move push the stand against the wall,
I had a flash/thought...they've killed him, and turned the tv back on,
it was showing the first part of crowd reaction in the ballroom, before the camera had moved into the kitchen area.

That was the night I woke up. Shock Doctrine indeed.

I could see the pattern. JFK, MLK a month before RFK...something big was going on.
My internal world changed as rapidly as the country did.

2 years later I was a political/social activist, sans husband.


Looks like we need another pendulum swing, eh?

Kennedy did some old-fashioned whistlestop speeches off the back of a train, and one of the stops was on a Saturday morning in teeny, tiny Albany, Oregon. I was riding my bike home from Catechism class, and took a slightly different route, finding to my surprise that Kennedy was giving a short address off the back of a railcar at the railroad station. I stopped and listened for a little while, then rode home. A week later, he was dead.

About the only thing I remember from his speech was a laugh line about Nixon: "His campaign slogan is 'Nixon's the One.' I wonder, 'the One' what?"

You know, this year, this anniversary is so strange for me: sometimes it just passes by, and I hardly even notice it; this year, it feels as if I am living in it, all again. Maybe because of all of the fabulous RFK panels, from the Kennedy Library, that have been on C-SPAN.

I actually saw Robert Kennedy once, as a kid of 9, at a Democratic rally on a big commercial parking lot, to promote some of our Michigan Dems who were running again that year; Kennedy was the headliner, huge crowd. My beloved Mom, who has also since died, took me there. Kennedy as Senator from New York, was very popular--I knew somebody who lived in New York State at the time, who told me how people there called Kennedy "Senator Bobby," and I even remember a novelty hit at the time, based on "Wild Thing," by "Senator Bobby," and featuring a lame recorder solo supposedly by Ted. It was a great song. Kennedy was famous for having long hair, of couse, and at that time, that meant that you were going to get a "Beatle" comment of some kind. At this rally, as Kennedy was speaking and doing the famous push-the-hair-out-of-the-eyes motion, I heard an adult male shout, "Hey, Bobby, where's your guitar?" It was not unfriendly. I can still see this day in my mind, and it was one of my most cherished memories; this is one of the things I consider to be "the real Democratic Party," when we were the prevailing force in society.

I will not get into the insult of comparing the third-rate rhetoric of Barack Obama to the literary genius of Kennedy, except to refer people to things such as Kennedy's speech to the crowd in Indianapolis, to tell them that Dr. King had been murdered; deeply moving, and as all interviewers always said--from Merv Griffin to David Frost again recently, Robert Kennedy never gave "canned" answers, always listened, always spoke honestly--it was almost unique as a trait. Kennedy's thought process took a long journey, from a hard--the word used was always "ruthless"--prosecutor/Attorney General, Cold War internationalist, and strict disciplinarian father, to, after John Kennedy's death, a compassionate, wounded, much kinder and gentler living soul. Robert Kennedy Jr. has talked very beautifully about this change. After the President's murder, Robert Kennedy was well-known among people who worked in Washington, D.C. then, to visit the grave and stay, for hours each night, alone. Later came the famous trips to Appalachia, the poorest blacks and whites, the trips speaking to black people in Northern ghettos, where whites had never cared to go before. Much of the journey was of a very shy, serious person, awaking to the world, and to tragedy.

When I was a kid and loved to go shopping with my Mom, at one period of time, she told me, several times, "We aren't going to buy grapes this week," or "I think we'll wait until next time to buy lettuce." I'm sure, by the timing, that it was when Cesar Chavez of the Farm Workers' Union had declared the fast, and the workers went on their dangerous strike. We respected every single call that the Farm Workers made, to boycott lettuce, grapes, etc.

When Kennedy was shot, I think it was just after midnight California time, and so it was 3AM+ here in Michigan. We didn't know about it. My Mom had the TV on, to Primary coverage, and I was going to watch a little of it before I went off to school. About 5 minutes later, there was the shooting, Kennedy was mortally woulnded, I was in total shock, called my Mom in, who was horrified and sent me to school, as I was now getting to be late. For years, I thought I had witnessed the tragedy live, just as I was going to school, then realized later when I learned the time of the shooting, that it must have been a taped replay, kind of new then. As the funeral procession went back to Washington, D.C., and the huge crowds--JFK and FDR like--one of the last stops it made, showing again the always-present Kennedy class, was to the by-then disbanding Poor People's March encampment, where people wept, sang the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and really knew what they had lost. Kennedy's concern for the poor and for justice was real, not "sudden," not put-on, and would have changed our country immeasurably for the good.

John, then Martin, then Robert.