Bobby, I Hardly Knew Ye

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John. -- Dick Holler, 1968

I was only 8 years old, but I remember Senator Robert FrancisKennedy’s assassination as if it was, perhaps, a week ago.

It was only two months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, so King’s assassination and funeral were still fresh in my mind. Sen. Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination for presidentafter President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that he “would not seekanother term as your President.” Kennedy had just won the California Primary and was celebrating at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

I began my interest in politics at the age of 8 after I had a talk with Mom and Dad about the 1968 presidential election. I learned the difference between Democrats and Republicans, at least from their pointof view. Republicans didn’t like taxes, big government, or black folk.Democrats believed that government should help people, believed taxes were the way to do it, and at least tolerated black people.

“So, which are we,” I asked Mom. “Democrats or Republicans?”

“We’re Democrats,” Mom replied.

School had just let out for the summer when I was watching the electionreturns for the California Primary. (Oh, I long for the days when ourstate had just one primary – in June!) So, I was allowed to stay uplate to watch TV. I liked the Kennedy family. I remember when Mom told me she cried when President John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963 in a motorcade in Dallas. I thought the Kennedy era of support for civil rights and hope for a brighter future was over.
But when JFK’s younger brother, former Attorney General and then-New York Senator Bobby Kennedy was running for President, I thought that maybe the Kennedy era could come back to life. And with the California win, Bobby was on his way.

But shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, that victory was cutviolently short. Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian who objectedto RFK’s support of Israel, shot the senator in the head at close range. I was so naïve. I thought maybe doctors could take the bullet out of Kennedy’s head, and he would just be paralyzed. “You’ve got to save him,” I kept saying to the TV set as Iwatched the news.

But it was not to be. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy died of his wound on June 6, 1968. He was 42. When I heard of his death, I moaned, “Oh, no, not again!” I cried while Mom tried comforting me.

So, the nation endured another funeral of someone in which we hadplaced our hopes. I didn’t let RFK’s death deter me from following political issues. But I’ve often wondered what our nation would have been like had he lived.

Although the quote was attributed to George Bernard Shaw, I will close with RFK’s version: “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Writing Diva