The gun this time was an Iver-Johnson .22 caliber Cadet. The Cadet was an ugly little thing with a worn wood grip and a dull scratched gunmetal frame. It had been bought secondhand. It held eight bullets in its cylinder and proved once and for all what every hitman knew: you didn’t need the stopping power that gun magazines illustrate with gelatin tests showing penetration and expansion; you didn’t need anything except to get close enough to put one in right behind the ear. From there fragments of the skull and the bullet do what is needed. In this case that was to the cortex, cerebellum and brainstem.
That is what a man named Sirhan Sirhan, 24, did. He did it on June 5, 1968, after stepping from behind an ice machine in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight on June 5. And that was the beginning of the end of another dream. This time it had been embodied in this boyish, toothy man with 10 children born since his marriage to Ethel Skakel in 1950 and one last one, Rory, on the way. He now lay dying on the floor. His hand had just reached out to shake the hand of Juan Romero. The busboy Romero now crouched down over Robert Francis Kennedy, the Senator who had just won the California Democratic primary and seemed destined for the White House. There was no need for reconstruction when it happened. Breslin was in Los Angeles and a witness this time:
He was shaking hands with the kitchen workers who leaned across trays and cups and saucers and bins of ice cubes. Shaking hands with them and looking at them with those deep-set blue eyes . . . and I guess he never saw the guy with the gun.
The gun did not make a very loud noise. Four or five quick, flat sounds and Kennedy disappears . . . and here is the guy with the gun.
People run from him through the kitchen . . . and Bill Barry grabs the guy and Roosevelt Grier pounds on him . . .
Robert Kennedy is on his back. His lips are open in pain. He has a sad look on his face.
The dying became death about 26 hours later at 1:44 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, according to news accounts. He was age 42, even younger than his brother, who at 46 had been president of the United States when he was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, with a 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano bullet from the Western Cartridge Company, according to an account from the Warren Commission which investigated the president’s assassination.
The Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King:
Each of these deaths has introduced myths and theories and by now there are many narratives, often revised, often conflicted, often captured in movies and books.
But that is not really what matters, is it.
What matters is what changes.
In this case, by the time 12 hours later when the body was placed aboard an Air Force jet provided by the White House for a flight from Los Angeles to New York where it would lie in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the nation was racked with grief, filled with anger, and as it had been already riven and now had lost its hope: its national dream now had become a national nightmare.
The Kennedy family’s political leadership during this tumult would now fall to the fourth son of patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, the Senator for Massachusetts. Just a little over a year later he would bring new tragedy into the life of the family, and that of a young woman, drowned when she could not extricate herself from the car he borrowed from his mother and drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. And what had felt like a rising tide of liberal, equitable politics soon ended with Lyndon Johnson at the high water mark.
The plane itself was piloted by the same Air Force major, Warren Smith, who had commanded the flight that carried home the body of Bobby’s brother what seemed like such a short time ago.
Aboard, according to Carl Pelleck, a correspondent for the New York Post, were three widowed women:
“On the plane were three women widowed by assassins’ bullets: Mrs. Ethel Kennedy, the Senator’s widow, expecting their 11th child; Mrs. John F. Kennedy, widow of the Senator’s brother, cut down in his third presidential year, and Mrs. Martin Luther King, whose husband, the civil rights leader and Nobel Prize winner, was killed two months ago.”
When it landed at LaGuardia it was 8 P.M. in New York. Terence Cardinal Cooke, another patriarch, one who commanded millions of Roman Catholics, many of them Irish, would bless it, and hold a private service for the family.
Every detail of what came next was meticulously planned: from the 5:30 A.M. opening onto Fifth Avenue and to the public of the cathedral’s grand bronze doors to their closing well after 10 P.M. Friday night when the last public mourner had mourned. A funeral mass, ticketed by the Kennedys, would come the next morning at ten, and then the funeral train to Washington. Something not seen before. It was all, as everything public except sometimes death, for the Kennedys, carefully organized and scripted. They were a family all right, but they were a political machine. Bobby and Jackie, in grief, with love, and with ruthless efficiency had spent the past four and a half years taking the reality of JFK’s presidency and Joe Kennedy’s dynastic ambitions and using it as a foundation for the Kennedy mythology.
“I was in charge of St. Patrick’s that night when they brought the body and we set up all these different vigils,” said Ronnie Eldridge. Ronnie had first met Jimmy Breslin through Bobby. “People coming in and standing there after the family left. It was an incredible night. Unbelievable. And the next day putting the funeral list together and all that, they made so many lists. They blew out all the copy machines of the Pan Am building.”
Breslin himself had been on the campaign trail with Bobby Kennedy for months. Others were writing those gray columns that are inevitable with political coverage of this kind. They call it a horse race. But it’s a very long track, often muddy, sometimes dusty, and the race itself between political parties or party factions in the case of a primary is more exciting to insiders than the rest of us who simply want to know what Eugene McCarthy, the poet, and Bobby Kennedy, the benighted, stand for. What colors the winning jockey will wear.
Of course Breslin brought something that could be called a winning ticket. He knew who he was writing for. You. He brought his touch. And with that he brought hope. It is what he had been doing since the Trib. And the horse race writers, as they would be known only in political circles, are not actually good horse race writers because those actually write more like Breslin. They did not put you there, at the rail, where you can smell the horse, and feel the jockey’s silks. They did what they had been doing since before Breslin got to the Trib. Dulling it up. Middlebrowing it.
On March 25, Breslin writes from Stockton, California:
At Stockton, rusted pickup trucks sat in the dust in front of the shacks that lined the road from the airport. . . . Only the tinted glass front window of the new building in town, the Bank of America, broke the monotony of one-story poverty. . . .
Kennedy gave the speech he was to give throughout the weekend. He said the nation is troubled and divided. He said the deaths and maiming of brave young men in Vietnam are indecent.
It is a beautiful column, and it goes on to capture the heckling and the jeers and lack of police protection when he stepped off a plane in Los Angeles where the mayor did not like Bobby Kennedy. But already it has captured in a way the others could not the entire Kennedy platform of racial equality, social equality, economic equality and an end to foreign aggression.
This was an important day in a young campaign. Kennedy had announced just a few days earlier, on March 16. He had come that Saturday to the Senate Caucus room where his older brother had announced his own candidacy from Delano, California, where on March 10 he had met with Cesar Chavez of the Farm Workers at the end of his 25-day hunger strike.
A few days later, in a column that appeared on March 27, Breslin captured something else. Youth. Imagination. The things that Bobby Kennedy could touch in a way that even his brother Jack could not.
For a politician she looked very good. She did have braces on her teeth and her high school uniform, a navy blue blazer, was a little rumpled. Otherwise she was fine.
She said her name was Chris Harrington and that she was 15 years old and that she had been in politics for a week now and she liked it very much.
She sat at a desk in the doorway to Robert Kennedy’s campaign headquarters on Wilshire Blvd. and she took phone calls from people who want to do volunteer work on the campaign. When the phone on her desk rang, she squirmed in the chair, reached out an grabbed the phone in the middle of the first ring.
This was the seventh, and last hopeful column of at least eight that he wrote in the thirteen days since his first appeared on Friday, March 15.
Breslin’s coverage had begun in the back seat of a car in New York City, Ronnie Eldridge recalled.
“One day I’m in the car with [Bobby Kennedy] and we’re driving someplace and he says I forgot I have to go back to the Carlisle. There’s a reporter who’s going to Vietnam tomorrow and he wants to talk to me and so they send me into the lobby to find Jimmy Breslin.
“And there’s Jimmy Breslin standing in the lobby waiting for the senator. So he came back into the car and the two of us were in the backseat and they had a whole discussion on Vietnam because they had an argument because Kennedy hadn’t yet come to oppose it. So that’s how I met Jimmy,” said Ronnie, then a Kennedy protégé. Later, looking back on 35 years married to Breslin she summed it up, “We had good times.”
Now here he is on the funeral train, warning people crowding around it to get back, and Eldridge recalls they all held their hands over their hearts and “there wasn’t a space between here and Washington that there weren’t people standing there with their hands over their hearts.” It falls to Breslin to explain why:
The railroad train carrying the body of Robert Francis Kennedy left Pennsylvania Station in New York City after a long, hot, ornate and lovely mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The coffin was put in the last car of the 21-car train. Then 1,500 people shuffled through the passageways and got on the train.
The train swayed and slid down the platform and went into a tunnel under the Hudson River. It came up in the weeds and marshes of New Jersey, and it was here that it started. It was here, on the roads running through the weeds, and in junk yards and factories alongside the tracks, that the funeral of Robert Francis Kennedy took place.
The rest of it was a ritual which could be afforded and put together only by very rich people who also are important. But the people on the sides of the railroad tracks, so many of them Negros, so many of them openly weeping, were different. The ceremony at St. Patrick’s and the ceremony at Arlington, were very small and insignificant next to the shimmering dignity of human beings crying for another.
At Newark, the platforms were packed with the people Robert Kennedy had fallen in love with. I don’t know what it was like at the start with him. But I know what it was like at the end, when he talked for two days about finishing his last campaign in Watts. He couldn’t wait to get to Watts, where he felt he belonged. And he came to Watts in a convertible; he had to ride in convertibles because his brother was killed in a convertible. And he came with his eyes flashing and his hands reaching . . . Robert Kennedy was committed to these people in a way that probably no other white man has ever been, and now they stood on the platforms and wept while the train carrying the body of an Irishman they trusted went past them.
Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian, a Jordanian citizen, born in Jerusalem but by age 12 an adolescent living in America, as he would for the rest of his life, most of which was spent in prison, thought he was killing a man who was helping to send bomber planes to Israel to inflict harm on the Palestinians.
But as the funeral train progressed, Breslin notes, one mourner on one of many crowded platforms was seen to land on the tracks in front of a speeding diesel headed in another direction, now a blur of yellow spit off the bow of the train. This important detail is counterpoised against his vivid portrayal of what the assassin had failed to kill: the Kennedy spirit. That attention to a simple detail is what makes Breslin special. He uses it both as a bridge and to add richness to what comes next.
And now, right next to you, very young, very composed, very handsome, very open, here he is.
“Hello, I’m Joe Kennedy. Thanks for coming.”
He shakes hands with a firm grip.
Joe Kennedy is 15. He is a student at Milton. He is one of the 10 children whose father has just been murdered and is in a coffin in the back of the train.
His mother is a widow at 40 and she is pregnant.
And Joe Kennedy is going through every car of this 21-car railroad train, the funeral train, so he can shake hands and thank all the people for coming to help bury his father. . . .
“Hello, I’m Joe Kennedy.” Murder my uncle. Murder my father. But I am a Kennedy and I come with my head up and my eyes looking right at you and I do this because a Kennedy must go on.
The train had just hit the people. It had hit them like a warning from the gods . . . Stay away, your family lives with death.
And the answer to it was: “Hello, I’m Joe Kennedy, thanks for coming.”