UPDATE: Juan Romero and RFK
On June 5, 1968, Juan Romero was working at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Robert Kennedy had just won California’s Democratic Primary and was staying at that hotel. Juan Romero was seventeen, worked in the kitchen doing room service and had carried a tray to RFK’s room. The presidential candidate shook Juan’s hand.
Juan recalls: “I remember staring at him with my mouth open, and I see him shaking the hand of a waiter and then reaching out to me. I remember him grabbing my hand and he gave me a two-handed shake. He had piercing blue eyes and he looked right at you. You knew he was looking at you and not through you…I didn’t feel like I was a Mexican, and I didn’t feel like I was a busboy…I felt Iike I was right there with him.”
Later that evening, RFK gave a speech to thank everyone who had gathered to congratulate him. When Juan heard that RFK would be walking through the kitchen to avoid crowds, he waited, eager for another handshake.
STEVE LOPEZ KEEPS IN TOUCH
LA TIMES writer Steve Lopez, who wrote the first article which I blogged about previously and which you can read here, has followed up with Juan Romero over the years, flying with him to Washington DC so that Juan could go to RFK’s grave. In his piece today, he has again talked with Juan about that day when RFK was murdered.
Romero waited in the kitchen, then pushed through the crowd to shake RFK’s hand once more. At that exact moment, bullets tore into Kennedy. Romero took out the rosary he always carried and tried to press it into Kennedy’s hands. To this day, Juan Romero has been tortured by the events of that night. He wonders if Kennedy had not paused to shake his hand again if maybe Sirhan Sirhan might have missed. He still struggles with his guilt.
Lopez writes today that Romero is thinking of going back to Arlington Cemetery again. “I want to go there and just say ‘Hi’ and explain that everything is going good and I’m grateful for his involvement in my life and that I will always respect his effort for social justice. And to say that I will never forget the first time we met, and that I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for him.”
MORE OF JUAN’S MEMORIES
In the first article Lopez wrote, Juan Romero said about that horrible moment when he found himself kneeling by the dying senator: “I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete.” Lopez also recounted in that first piece that Romero said he went to school the next day with Kennedy’s blood under his fingernails, refusing to wash it away.
WHAT IF RFK HADN’T BEEN ASSASSINATED?
Today in the LA TIMES there was also an affecting piece by Mark Kurlansky author of the book “1968:The Year that Rocked the World.” An apt title as it was Viet Nam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, RFK and the turbulent Democratic convention in Chicago, riots in the streets, a weaker candidate, Hubert Humphrey, which led to the eventual election of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
I’ll leave you with this from Kurlansky’s piece:
“No politician quite like Bobby Kennedy has come along since. Had he lived, I am almost certain the Vietnam War would have ended years, and many thousand of lives, earlier. Perhaps Jim Crow could have been attacked in such a way that African Americans today would not still be fighting for equal treatment, and even, again, the right to vote. We are still using military might and horrific violence to bend small, poor nations to our will; it has become almost a way of life for us as a nation. Gun violence is an epidemic, and there is not the political will to curb it.”
He ends his piece with this: “On that June night in 1968, I came to understand that in this country where anyone could be shot dead at any moment, our demons were deep within us. There would be no magical leaders to save us from ourselves.”
This iconic photo, taken by Boris Yaro of the Los Angeles Times and Bill Eppridge of Life Magazine, captures the horror of the moment. Kennedy was walking through the kitchen to get to his car, only to be felled by an assassin’s bullet. And there in the photo is Juan Romero, kneeling at RFK’s head.
Also: Zina Saunders for the LA TIMES
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