Reflections on a great name
I was 17 years old with that most wonderful thing, a car and a rare, unsupervised freedom. So on the morning of June the 5th, 1973, I drove from La Jolla California to Los Angeles with twenty bucks in my pocket, an address, a vague idea of my destination and a plan. I was going to visit the exact location where Robert F Kennedy had been slain.
How I found the place I don’t know. In the land before cell phones and GPS it was a combination of the triumph of good luck over bad planning. But after some driving around I found it. There it was, suddenly before me, the sprawling, ramshackle campus of the Ambassador Hotel. I parked up and went in. I followed the signs to the Embassy Ballroom.
The lectern and the podium were still intact. Were they original? Possibly. “On to Chicago and let’s win there.” I traced Kennedy’s path back to the corridor leading into the kitchen. And there it was, the very spot where the Senator from New York fell on that awful night exactly five years before. I stood in the strangely mundane, unadorned place where it happened.
It remained a place of work. A single middle aged Mexican-American employee watched me from across the kitchen. Finally he approached. Was I there to see the place of the assassination? Yes I was. He had been there that night. He saw it all. He remembered seeing the assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, standing on one of the steaming-tables as men wrestled the gun away from him. Standing on the table? I never read any such thing, but he insisted it happened that way.
We talked for a while about that night. After absorbing as much of the atmosphere as I could, I at last went to Al’s family restaurant, a local eatery I’d been to as a very small child in 1961. In my infant innocence I called it “Owls” back then. I sat and contemplated what I had seen. I wasn’t sure what the experience meant. I’m still not. Does history inhabit places where history happens?
Later in the school year I wrote a term paper about my visit to that awful, tragic, historic, banal spot. I asked the immemorial question everyone has asked ever since. What if?
Today RFK’s memory remains significant to me, “vigorous” to employ a Kennedy term. His name is undiminished by the absurd politics of his unworthy son and namesake.
RFK senior represented a final hope for sanity in an insane decade. Paradoxically, RFK junior represents a danger in another insane decade, a danger as potentially lethal as the bullet that brought down his father. Fortunately the assassin that inhabits the politics of RFK’s crazed progeny has rubber bullets, disarmed by the whim of history, rendered impotent by a tawdriness directly proportional to his father’s greatness.
It is symbolic of the current era that a name that once shone above a titanic struggle is today an object of scorn in a time of circus freaks and fools. But despite appearances it is not the same name, and it never will be. Robert F Kennedy was an imperfect man, as are all men, but he was and remains a great one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.