‘Bobby’ -- I was there

A CRYSTAL BROKE in the air with a little sound, the devil snapping his fingers, and now on a whim, a push from nowhere, I told the guy driving me that I wanted to go to Fullerton. There was an ad in the paper for a gun shop. I was here for an election, not guns, but instinct brought me there. This was in the middle of the morning on the day of the California presidential primary all the way back in 1968.

It was a sun-warmed day, and in Fullerton I found a man and wife in a garage running a gun shop. It was a second job for him, the man said; he drove an oil truck as a first job. If he was gone, his wife came out of the kitchen to sell you a good oiled gun.

The guy had all these pistols on a counter. Among them was an Iver Johnson .22. I asked him what he thought they were for. I don’t know what he said. I know I said that the only reason you have a handgun is to shoot people in the head.

Later, the night was soft, and the sounds of the people were pleasant as they walked through the beginning of the evening on the lawn of the Ambassador Hotel.

It was the campaign headquarters for Robert F. Kennedy, who was getting close to the Democratic nomination for president.

And that is the last bright thing I can remember from that night.

Then, the other day, they put me in a room in front of a movie called “Bobby.” What did I hear in the film? Robert Kennedy, on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, getting up on a platform in Indianapolis with the great crowd in front of him. Rather than run or stammer, he said:

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man....

“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.”

I don’t know where else you can get this kind of passion, deep total passion that can move multitudes. There has hardly been anybody since Kennedy. Clinton on a good day, and the fellow today, Obama.

And so memory stumbles into screeches and screams and now it is all so dark. Reality slides into this movie in front of you. As the film captures precisely what went on, you can’t differentiate.

Suddenly, there is a guy in the hotel with a pistol and he is holding it straight out and firing at this knot of people who had just walked into the gray, wet kitchen.

It was an Iver Johnson .22, and it had been owned first by an auto dealer in Alhambra who was afraid of blacks. Now it made a sound like a tray falling on a table. Now another sound and another. Three or four altogether.

It put a couple of bullets into the head of Robert F. Kennedy. He went down with a brain full of bullet splinters. He was on the wet floor with an eye rolled up and his legs bent under him.

You couldn’t get the gun out of the hand of the shooter. Hands grabbed and yanked and twisted but could not get it. The gun waved and people jumped away from it and now Roosevelt Grier, the immense professional football lineman, grabbed the shooter and got this huge arm around his neck from behind, and somebody screamed, “Kill him!” and Roosevelt just stared. All he had to do was tighten the arm and the guy is gone. Somebody else screamed, “No, no! Keep him alive!”

Jesse Unruh, a Los Angeles politician, was up on the steam table stamping his foot on the gunman’s hand. “This man must stay alive!” he shouted.

Somebody screamed, “Hold him!” Was this in the movie too? I’d have to say it was. Roosevelt threw him on the steam table. The guy no longer had the gun; Roosevelt had the gun. The shooter was kicking his feet.

The crowd was swaying and threatening to fall as one. I just went with them, my feet barely on the floor.

Somebody screamed that the shooter was kicking himself loose.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Grier said. He was pressing his massive torso on the flattened shooter.

He looked at me when he said this. Somehow I had been shoved by the crowd onto the table and I was sitting on the shooter’s legs.

Somebody asked his wet, curly head, “Why did you do it? Why did you have to do it?”

I know he took a deep breath and his eyes rolled and the legs thrashed. I don’t know what I felt under me. I know Grier didn’t seem to notice. “Going nowhere.”

Now, in this film “Bobby” I was watching, there was shouting about the gun and the hand holding it or just losing it. But it seemed real -- too real for me to hold in my mind again.

The last thing I saw that night was Bill Barry, the only security man Bobby ever had, pushing the gurney out of an ambulance and into the hospital emergency room, the two doors closing on Bobby Kennedy and his life and all that it meant to so many.