Living every day is like Russian roulette … Robert F. Kennedy
Morning jolts jarringly with a caaw-caaw-caaw. I can’t decipher the clamor. Not melodic, it’s more of a warning. Sip of coffee—caaw-caaw-caaw. Scratching together my pup’s meal—caaw-caaw-caaw. My towering view, cursed by an orchestration of an active six-lane causeway, maps downtown Miami to South Beach via Biscayne Bay. Today its choked corridor funnels caaw-caaw-caaw along with the rifling pop-pop-pop of tricked-out car exhausts. The sounds puncture colander-holes through my body.
Yesterday a balloon bouquet in festive colors floated in the sky. Tropical teal. Punchbowl pink. Brilliant blue. Caribbean coral. When they reached a certain height, those helium balloons would have exploded. Pop-pop-pop.
In 1968, experts couldn’t agree on the number of shots fired on June 5th. Thirty-eight years later, attempts were made to identify auditory bursts of acoustical evidence. A spectrographic machine indicated that seven sound spikes matched a .22 caliber gun. Milliseconds later, a high-pitched female scream, followed by the woman believed to be Ethel Kennedy wailing, “I think my husband’s been shot,” distorted the sound of what may have been a final gunshot. That last bang, registered at a deeper decibel within the rapid succession of shots fired: a possible popped balloon.
Was there only one assailant? Is there ever?
Who sold the gun? Where were the bullets manufactured? A modified muffler connects to a mechanic. Lone gunman? Handy myth. Conflicting evidence. Eyewitnesses. Inquiries into the inquiry. Theories also include a molecule of disagreement about distance. How close was Sirhan-Sirhan to RFK? Inches apart? Or feet? The fourth and fatal .22-caliber bullet, fired at close range, caught Kennedy behind the right ear and lodged inside his brain. With respect to the witnessing and differing opinions on distance, someone said: “The inability of people to relate what they see is a frailty of human nature.”
Before seeing it, I think “crow”—a rattling American crow cry. Shouldn’t this bird be facing off with a scarecrow in the middle of a wheat field? One time, our glass box balcony hosted a red-tail hawk. Another time, turkey vultures roosted on the ledge. Claws and a bloodied wing were left behind. Remnants of unwitnessed battles. Someone lost. In a fight, someone always does.
When my husband and I first looked at this apartment, I hesitated before stepping onto the balcony. It’s dizzying multi-story elevation, about half the height of the Eiffel Tower and seven times the distance between the granite-chiseled chin and the crown of Mount Rushmore’s George Washington, is a perfect sky-perch for birds with insistent hoarse pitches that surprise.
What does a crow’s outcry predict? The single bird, and its symbolism, arrives as I attempt to integrate over fifty years of collapsed history, while contemplating Robert F. Kennedy’s Russian roulette game of rebuffing fear. My research, welded with digressions and moving at a mournful pace, is reminiscent of how RFK’s twenty-one-car funeral train, its engine draped in black bunting, left Manhattan at a normal rate of speed, but continued to Washington at half speed after two million people headed to the tracks and two were killed by a northbound express.
I was pigtailed and four-years-old on June 6th when Bobby died. So, having no recollection of his life, I had to piece together fragments of information and source from abstractions, clippings, books, and interviews. I learned that 1968 wasn’t even halfway over when Martin Luther King Jr. was dead from a sniper shot. The bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. The day before, he’d spoken to a crowd of striking sanitation workers:
… we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Two months later, Mr. Rogers, an ordained minister and creator of a beloved children’s television series, placed his hand into the fabric of Daniel, a striped tiger puppet. His soothing voice wanted to console the children of our grieving nation.
“What does assassination mean?”
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a make-believe village of empathy, knowledge, and wonder, was where Lady Aberlin and Daniel Tiger played peek-a-boo. The puppet liked it best when he could see her face, revealing that she was still there. Daniel handed Lady Aberlin a balloon and asked her to blow it up. She did. Then he asked her to let the air out.
She said, “Already?”
“Yes. There’s something I want to ask you.”
Hissing air and discordant music took over as they watched the balloon deflate.
Daniel Tiger: Where is all the air that was inside?
Lady Aberlin: It’s–it’s out in this air.
Daniel Tiger: You mean it’s all part of the big air?
Lady Aberlin: That’s it.
Daniel Tiger: Well, what about your air?
Lady Aberlin: My–my air inside me?
Daniel Tiger: What if you blow all your air out? Then you won’t have any left. Just like the balloon.
Lady Aberlin: But people aren’t like balloons, Daniel. When we blow air out, we get some more back in. Watch, I’ll blow air out. (She blew into the balloon, filled it back up, and handed it to Daniel Tiger.)
Daniel Tiger: What does assassination mean?
Every artifact has a story.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Kennedy came to the podium and thanked his staff, Freckles (his black and white English Springer Spaniel), his wife, Rosy Grier, and others. Balloons rained down on the crowd. … on to Chicago and let’s win there. With his index and middle finger, he flashed a V-for-Victory sign to chants of We Want Bobby! We Want Bobby! We Want Bobby!
Bobby’s pale blue eyes shined as he stepped away. With his right hand he swept a curtain of hair from one eye. Was it the one with the droopy lid? People reached out to touch him; he gently gripped their outstretched hands with a child’s clutch. Bobby was tactile. We can’t have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people. A sea of souvenir Styrofoam election hats suspended in midair as he exited through the pantry, the shortest way out. Bill Barry, his bodyguard, who had already cleared a path through the auditorium, rushed back to assist pregnant Ethel off the stage.
We Want Bobby! We Want Bobby! We Want Bobby!
A few hours earlier, at the Malibu beach house of director John Frankenheimer, Kennedy had pulled his son, David, from sinister surf and saved him from drowning. Is that when he decided to skip the election night hoopla? It was the most important evening of his political life, and he ordered television sets to be delivered so his family and staff could watch the poll returns. Networks protested because their crews and correspondents were stationed at the Ambassador Hotel. Pummeled by people for eighty-two days, Kennedy needed to rest. One of his speechwriters saw him lying across two chairs by the pool, his head limply hanging to the side. “For a second, I thought he was dead. God, I suppose none of us will ever get over Kennedy (JFK).”
Capitulated. Did they mean surrendered? Or resigned to fate? Frankenheimer drove Bobby to the Ambassador, traveling so fast that he missed the freeway exit, prompting RFK to say: Take it easy, John. Life is too short.
A story exists in its details. Caaw-caaw-caaw.
Bobby’s grief over his brother was such that he sometimes wore JFK’s clothes, smoked his cigars, and imitated his mannerisms. After he discovered ‘poverty’ boldly scribbled on notepaper by his deceased brother, he framed it and placed it on his office wall. While years of planning went into John’s bid for the presidency, Bobby made his decision to run in only a few days.
Ethel had taken a different flight to Kansas. She traded jokes with the estranged wife of astronaut Scott Carpenter. “Do you think they’ll boo him?” “Will they hate him?” She did not ask, “Will they kill him?”
The Kennedy-Johnson feud was no secret. Johnson had made it clear that the Vietnam War would continue. I had no choice, Bobby said, adding: He hates me so much that if I asked for snow he would make rain, just because it was me (asking).”
Did his gunned-down brother cause Bobby to be fatalistic? Anesthetize him to threats? “We know where your kids go to school, and we know how they get there.” And, “Do you know what hydrochloric acid can do to your eyes?”
Everyone’s got to march to his own music.
Kennedy was willing to bear the full share of responsibility for the country’s wrongs. He once quoted from Antigone of Sophocles:
All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
RFK saw the nation as a wounded soul. He told Kansas State University students that their country was “deep in a malaise of the spirit,” suffering from “a deep crisis of confidence.” He said, “We don’t have to accept the division of races and ages.” He talked to them about how they could heal the country. They understood his diagnosis and concern about the state of affairs and the disgrace of poverty among fellow citizens. He made them aware that the growth of poverty was the wheel spoke connected to other moral issues. Later on, after joining the crowd, he rode in the chilled air of an open-topped convertible and, when he finally returned to the plane, he warmed his body by huddling under his late brother’s topcoat.
Caaw-caaw-caaw. The perched bird on my Miami balcony is atop a plot of land where visionaries and risk takers invested in what was once a deplorable area filled with criminals and castoffs. A single crow is believed to be a sign of bad luck—destruction near. Kennedy curse. Things to avoid doing with a Kennedy: flying, driving, and campaigning.After Ted’s plane crashed in Southampton, Massachusetts, RFK said: Someone up there doesn’t like us!
The pain of loss of two of my brothers, each buried beneath a thick-trunked Chestnut tree, haunts me, like the Kennedy curse. On July 16th, 1999, I bawled hearing that JFK Jr., his wife, and her sister, aboard a single-engine plane, went missing. I became near hysterical reading that they had flown into a hazy, moonless night. My husband laughed until he didn’t. He was taken by surprise. I’d never mentioned my affection for the young and handsome Kennedy Jr., who twice failed the NY bar exam and was known for tooling about Manhattan on a bicycle or inline skates to appointments. Teasingly called John-John, to others and me he was forever the grief-stricken boy, aged three, who saluted his murdered father’s coffin.
After the assassination of his father, JFK Jr.’s impulsive behavior developed into a serious problem. He was disruptive in school, did poorly academically, and was perpetually restless. Can you figure out the rest? Psychiatrist, diagnosis, and prescription to Ritalin. The year my oldest brother killed himself, I was continually fidgeting or soundly sleeping. Schoolwork felt optional. Why bother? I was probably next.
When I was fifteen, questions about my emotional welfare (how are you feeling?) were tagged to the everpresent refrain: he’s in a better place. Those well-meaning questions and cliches didn’t suppress my confusion and pain; they amplified them. Confusion and pain. An English teacher, the one who partied with his students, gave me passing grades, but my algebra teacher wasn’t on board with the bereavement-affirmative-action program. I begged Mom to let me drop the math course focused on isolating variables in exchange for earth science and the examination of soil, before realizing that digging into dirt felt like a burial. However, I’ve drifted too far from RFK. The crow has been gone for hours when a pelican flies by the floor-to-ceiling window. Because of cursed winds, the bird appears stalled in the sky, suspended, hanging there like a thirty-pound paperweight.
Cameramen kept flashing to get their shot of RFK’s dying body. Pop-pop-pop.
In one of his first campaign speeches, he said, “Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom.”
Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!
Months after JFK died, Bobby lived in a shattered twilight state. In Ethel’s words, he was “a man who had lost all his limbs.” Five years later, our tattered and torn country was in an election year. Abroad and at home, our nation was at war. On March 16th, RFK declared his candidacy for the presidency. Not merely to oppose any man—caaw-caaw-caaw—but to implement new policies. Bold and bucktoothed, mop-top Bobby made his announcement in the same spot of the Senate Caucus Room where JFK had declared his run for office.
Are you going to vote for me tomorrow? Are you just going to wave to Mr. Kennedy and then tomorrow, when I’m gone, forget about me?
Was that the day preparations and purchases were made for all things widow-black? Ethel, pregnant, perhaps went shopping for a dress, stockings, shoes, clutch, and a veil. Maybe add a strand of white pearls to complete the outfit? Eighty-two days later, nothing could conceal pain or outrage. Death threats had been routine. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis said, “There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack.”
June 3, 1968. The day before the California primary, RFK was leading Senator McCarthy for the democratic nomination. He flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Thirty-one arrival and departure appointments are listed on his itinerary.
Scratches of a June 3rd summary: 11:40 a.m. Kennedy was met at the airport by staff who had arranged a prank. They were standing next to a rickshaw dressed in rented Chinese coolie costumes. One says, “This is going to be the best thing in the world or it’s going to really bomb because he’s uptight.” Bobby laughed. Next stop, Chinatown.
After driving three blocks, a string of firecrackers exploded near their convertible.
‘Not again’ protests took place alongside the campaign slogan, ‘please, not again.’
Ethel, three months pregnant, clutched her chest and, flinching with each bang, buckled and folded to the floor of the car. She would not like the sounds from my Miami balcony.
Bobby twitched but refused to duck down. There were twenty-six more scheduled stops.
In Long Beach they choral chanted, “Who killed your brother? Who killed your brother?”
Crowds in Watts went wild for Bobby and hurled themselves next to his slow-moving vehicle.
Bill Barry, the Olympic decathlon athlete Rafter Johnson, and former NFL lineman Rosey Grier, held onto him to prevent him from being yanked onto the street.
Bobby (to Grier): You hold me too tight.
Grier: If I don’t hold you—you’re gonna fall.
Bobby: You hold me too too tight.
Grier let him go. RFK fell.
June 4th. The plan was to stay at the beach house of director John Frankenheimer and pass on the election party hoopla. But that didn’t happen. Before giving his victory speech, Bobby called a staffer who was watching the returns come in at the Mayflower Hotel Washington.
Bobby: I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken the shadow of my brother. I feel I made it on my own.
Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!
Balloons popped, people cheered and chanted as Kennedy left the podium and exited the ballroom through an adjoining kitchen. Moving ahead of his security detail, he greeted kitchen staff and spoke to reporters, one with a question that came out garbled: … “how are you going to counter … Humphrey … delegate votes …”
Then came RFK’s pure “Boston Brahmin” cadence that summons up place and birthright.
| potato | petatah |
| manner | mannah |
| years | yeahs |
| there | theeh |
| Korea | career |
Bobby responded to the reporter: It just goes back to the struggle for it …
Shots. Are. Fired. Not firecrackers. Not popped balloons. .22-caliber bullets from the chamber of an Iver Johnson Cadet revolver. A seventeen-year-old busboy, Juan Romero, pressed rosary beads into the senator’s hand. The shooter was in a stranglehold as turkey vulture photographers crowded forward. Their cameras clicked and flashed like ammo and illuminated the pantry.
The busboy, an immigrant who had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico seven years earlier, cradled Bobby’s head. That image, perhaps more than the rosary beads, was the most emblematic tribute.
Is everybody ok? Is everyone ok? Is Paul (Schrade) okay? Is everybody else all right?
A single crow is believed to mean that bad luck and destruction is near.
The hollow behind his ear was the size of a small coin. My head, said Bobby to Ethel. She responded, “I’m with you, my baby.” Someone heard him murmur, Jack … Jack. His son David, thirteen, who had almost drowned, was left alone and in front of the TV for hours. He never got over the media riptide of having to watch his father’s murder replay over and over. In 1984, at the Brazilian Court Palm Beach hotel, David was found dead of a drug overdose. A German model had asked him why he took drugs. I cannot forget my father … I never find peace inside … I’ve been full of pain.
For approximately seventeen minutes, semiconscious, RFK lay on the kitchen floor. His eyes told the story.
Grier: And I go over to the hospital — and I go over to Ethel’s room — and she’s lying on the bed — and so I says, how’s Bobby? And she turns over — aa-nnnd looks — aa-nnnd looks at — aa-nnnd–aa-nnnd —and she looks at me. And I say is it over?
Clumps of memory emerge and scatter as one begins to remember. Whatever surfaces lands anew as freshly-folded discovery. ‘Not again’—‘please, not again.’