Out on the big back lawn Bobby threw me a very long pass. I was a long way
from my Deerfield Academy football days but I ran like crazy to catch that
pass. Somehow I felt if I did it would help my cause in the argument. And I
think maybe it did. When we got back in the house, Bobby said: “Look, Budd,
I realise this is a screenplay, not a Justice Department brief, so if you
feel so strongly about it, maybe we can leave it in.”
()
On the evening of the election, we went early to Bobby’s suite in the
Ambassador Hotel, and hung out with what had become Bobby’s family, a motley
gathering of pro and amateur politicos, friendly news commentators,
Hollywood liberals and adoring black athletes — all with their eyes glued to
the TV screen as encouraging reports kept coming in on Bobby’s ascendancy
over McCarthy. Bobby was “in”. We rejoiced. I was out on a mini-balcony when
the TV commentator Sander Vanocur found me to say Bobby would like to see
me. When I came into the large bedroom I was surprised to see him sitting in
the far corner on the floor, barefoot, smoking a small cigar. I had never
seen that before. Stalking up and down the room impatiently was Big Daddy
Unruh, the Democratic boss of California.
When I sat down with Bobby, he immediately started talking about our Watts
Workshop. He was fascinated with it. He said it was so cost-effective
because writers needed only paper and typewriters. But what they wrote
expressed the deepest feelings and aspirations of their community. If he
became President, he said, he would like to see the Government fund
workshops like that in every city in the country, sort of a throwback to the
New Deal days of the Federal Writers Project. I was in political heaven. I
actually had visions of heading up a Federal Writers Project for the Vietnam
generation. Meanwhile, Big Daddy was getting mad. “For Christ’s sake, Bobby,
get up. We gotta get downstairs. We’ll miss the prime time.”
In the elevator going down Bobby said the Empire Room he was headed for would
be too crowded, so on leaving he was going to make a short cut through the
pantry. He’d meet me, and a bunch of fellow writers, Pete Hamill, George
Plimpton, Jimmy Breslin, at the far end of the pantry. “And we’ll all go out
to the Factory to celebrate.”
So that’s where I was when the shots rang out. Sirhan Sirhan [the man
convicted of the assassination] ran straight down toward us. For a moment I
held him in my arms. His gun was so tiny it looked like a toy but he kept
firing it and several people screamed. Sirhan was very small but he felt like
a coiled spring and I couldn’t hold him. The other writers tried grabbing
him too, but he spun away. Finally he was held for good by Bobby’s two star
athlete bodyguards, the giant but gentle football player Rosie Grier, and
the decathlon star Rafer Johnson.
Jerry and I gravitated up to Bobby’s suite and found that a dozen other
friends had done so too. Rosey was sobbing that he felt guilty for not doing
a better job of protecting Bobby, and then suddenly passed out and lay back
on Bobby’s bed. All of us stayed there till dawn. What amazed me was that
all through that fraught night, not one police officer, or FBI, not one of
the officials we would have expected to come up to examine Bobby’s room,
appeared. It seemed unreal. Of course we knew Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty
hated Bobby. And so did J. Edgar Hoover. Just the same, after the most
history-bending assassination since Lincoln, we would have thought law
enforcement would have had to make its presence felt, if only for
appearance’s sake. After all, in that bedroom that night were a dozen
eyewitnesses.
In its own oblique way, the Emilio Estevez film Bobby does justice to
this tragedy. It’s an ingenious cross-section of Americans drawn to the
hotel that day for their own personal and sometimes even trivial reasons. A
young girl, played by Lindsay Lohan, is having her nails done by the hair
salon keeper Sharon Stone. Lindsay is marrying her young beau (Elijah Wood)
to keep him out of the Vietnam War. The star singer in the hotel’s Coconut
Grove, played by Demi Moore, is a lush who finally drives her patient
husband (Estevez) away. Helen Hunt contributes as a socialite whose main
problem is that she forgot to pack her black shoes for the formal affair in
the hotel. In his role as her husband, Martin Sheen gives one of the best
performances.
All of these comings and goings are folded into the explosive climax when all
the high hopes of Bobby and his followers come crashing down in that
infamous pantry. Counterpointing the unspeakable violence, Estevez has
superimposed the voice of Bobby, after the death of Martin Luther King. To
meet the high ideals Bobby was calling for, to remind America and world
audiences of the awesome fork in the road we came to in the early hours of
June 5, 1968, to try to encompass Bobby’s mission in this sorry day when we
have been demeaned by Bush rather than uplifted by Bobby’s legacy, is a tall
order for a motion picture.
To my surprise, Estevez has been inspired to rise to the challenge. Something
of the unique quality of Bobby has reached out to him.
In his heart-wrenchingly premature passing, Bobby Kennedy lives. And today, in
these dark days for America, we need his spirit, and his call to greatness,
more than ever.
Life and death of Robert F. Kennedy
1944–46 Serves in US Navy Reserve
1948 Graduates from Harvard
1952 Manages his brother JFK’s successful Senate campaign
1953-60 Counsel to various Senate committees under Senator
Joe McCarthy: shares his hardline anti-Communist views
1960 Manages JFK’s presidency campaign.
1961 Attorney General with reputation for being hard on
organised crime and promoting African-American civil rights
1963 Assassination of JFK: Bobby now eldest Kennedy brother
1964 Tribute speech to JFK at Democratic Convention gains
20-minute ovation
1965 Leaves the Cabinet to become junior senator for New York
March
1968 Announces he will run for the Democratic presidential
nomination
June 1968 Aged 42, shot by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan in a
kitchen passageway of Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Motives remain
unclear but theories include Bobby’s support of Israel in the 1967 Six-Day
War
FRANCESCA STEELE
