He stopped in front of me. With a sweep of one hand, he brushed the hair away from his face long enough to lean down and look straight into my eyes. I uttered some innocuous comment before Bobby asked me my name. “Danny, sir.�
opened in the sea of bodies that gave me a glimpse of Rosey Grier as he struggled to pry the gun away from the shooter. The gunman continued to pull the trigger after he had fired all six rounds from his .22 caliber handgun. The rest of the evening was a blur of sirens and news cameras. We made the 20-minute drive home in silence. My mind was filled with the horrific images I had witnessed, but I went to bed that night without admitting to my parents where I had been. I avoided any conversation with classmates until the next afternoon when our teachers informed us that Kennedy had died from his wounds.
I cried more that night than when my mother died eight years later. The man who had the ability to lead the nation out of the desperate times that began five years earlier when President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas was gone. The future looked bleak without a man to lead us out of the darkness. Bobby was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who believed killing the next president would prevent the sale of American jets to Israel. The site of the violence has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. The Ambassador Hotel fell into disrepair and has been replaced by a community of public schools named to honor the fallen senator dedicated to the ideals he championed.
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The nation has not. The ideals of social justice Kennedy symbolized a half-century ago continue to be out of reach for a nation in search of its soul. That night changed my life forever. Being a witness to history inspired me to become a journalist who could provide objective information on the people responsible for the changes in our society. Bobby has been a part of my life every day for the past 50 years. I continue to be inspired by the ideals he advocated and mourn for the loss of where we could be as a nation if he had lived to fulfill his vision of equality.