He was giving a speech at a shopping center, of all places. There he was, sitting atop a white convertible. We ran down a hill to be the first to greet him.
It was a different time.
I was a teenager, and the walls of my room were plastered with posters and bumper stickers. I still have them, along with the campaign buttons, hats, and newspaper clippings.
I shudder to think of what might have happened had he not given the speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was a very tense time, but his very presence was calming.
"...A historian says a well-organized black community kept its calm. It's hard to overlook the image of one single man, standing on a flatbed truck, who never looked down at the paper in his hand — only at the faces in the crowd.
"My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus," Robert Kennedy said, "and he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89365887On a lighter, much more innocent note...my best friend, Stella, and I were fearless. The world was ours to conquer.
Senator Kennedy was staying at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel on May 5,1968. We caught a bus going downtown to hear him speak after the primary. On the way, I penned a letter to his younger brother Ted. Silly stuff, really. But, I figured Bobby would be to busy to respond.
Once we got into the Sheraton, we decided not to listen to the speech, but instead; find which room he and Ethel were staying in, and try to get a private audience. Can you believe we thought that could really be possible?
Well, we almost made it. We got about six feet off the elevator on the correct floor, before we were nabbed by the Secret Service, and escorted back downstairs.
And that silly letter I wrote on the bus? I had given it to someone in Bobby's entourage, asking them to do their best to see that it got to Ted, and forgot all about it. A few weeks later, I received in the mail a personal response from him. I still have that too. :)
It was, indeed, a very different time.
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