R.F.K. Remembered : Nearly 20 Years Later, the Events at the Ambassador Hotel Still Evoke Pain and Sorrow

It is a week of eerie coincidence regarding Robert F. Kennedy, dead now almost 20 years.

The long-suppressed files of the Los Angeles Police Department investigation into Kennedy’s 1968 assassination were finally released from state archives in Sacramento on Tuesday. The opening of the voluminous papers to the public prompted a fresh round of speculation about whether the June 5, 1968 shooting of the Democratic presidential candidate was the result of a conspiracy or--as most believe and as the courts have concluded--the work of a lone assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan, now serving a life term in prison.

And Saturday, about 500 friends, supporters, former campaign workers--as well as students too young to remember the 42-year-old Kennedy’s bid for the White House--will gather at Loyola Marymount University for a retrospective conference, “R.F.K. Remembered.” For some it will be the first time they have met since Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel moments after happily claiming victory in the California primary.

In interviews with The Times this week, some who were there that night--or had close ties to Kennedy--recalled those final moments.

The Campaign Volunteer

Irwin Stroll was a 17-year-old campaign volunteer invited to the Kennedy victory party that night. He was one of five people, besides Kennedy, wounded in the spray of gunfire triggered by Sirhan. Now a successful Los Angeles interior designer, Stroll said he has never talked publicly about his experience.

“I think I was standing on the podium waiting for Sen. Kennedy to make his victory speech and we were all going to the party afterward. So I proceeded with the family, as I was told to keep walking (to the hotel kitchen). After we walked through the kitchen doors, the shooting began. I was standing about four feet away from Ethel (the senator’s wife) and I’m not really clear in my memory. I guess your mind makes changes on you and blocks out certain situations.”

Stroll did not immediately realize he had been hurt. “I didn’t even know that I was shot. I thought I was kicked in the leg until I looked down and saw that the color of my pants had changed from blue to dark blue. Right after that we heard the senator was shot.”

As he talked about the confusion of that night two decades ago, Stroll’s recall became more specific.

“After I was shot, I went out into the area where the podium was and I was the first person to be noticed that they were shot, which was an indication that there was a shooting back there. And my parents had viewed that (on television) and were quite shocked by the fact that their son was shot. Then my friends, about six of us, got into a taxi cab and I went to Central Receiving (Hospital) with my leg propped up. I was not operated on at Central Receiving. I was just given emergency care and then Bobby was brought in and the priorities were toward him, which was fine . . . It was all hectic and pandemonium.”

The Labor Director

In 1968, Paul Schrade was 43 and a regional director for the United Auto Workers who campaigned extensively for Kennedy. He was shot in the head that night. Today he still lives in Los Angeles and remains active in public affairs.

“I was on the platform (in the hotel ballroom) with Bob, one of those who was thanked by him for helping him in his California campaign. We were really joyful at that point because it was a very difficult election and we won and we were pleased so much about that.

“And I got off the platform early and went into the pantry area to wait. It was so crowded in the Embassy Room and Bob came by me and said, ‘Paul, I want you and Jess (Unruh, at the time speaker of the California Assembly) with me,’ which meant to me that he wanted us with him at the press conference in the Colonial Room. We were heading in that direction.

“At that point Bob turned to his left and started shaking hands with a couple of people who were workers in the kitchen. I can remember one young guy whose name I found out later is Juan Romero shaking hands with him. I just said, ‘We have a President. This is what this is all about. It’s just a wonderful feeling.’ And I turned to follow Bob and just at that point I went out, blacked out.

“All I remember was feeling a very heavy trembling and I thought I was being electrocuted and I had that sensation. I don’t know how long I was out but I was on the floor a lot of time.”

Regaining consciousness, Schrade found that “people had been trampling on me. My feet were pointed toward Bob’s head in the pictures that I’ve seen. And a doctor was there and I was bleeding heavily and he said, ‘You’re going to be OK. We’re going to get you all off to the hospital.’ So I knew something had happened but didn’t have any idea of the devastation, how seriously Bob was wounded or that four other people were shot.”

The Biographer

Jack Newfield, now a 50-year-old writer for New York’s Village Voice, was at work on a biography of Robert Kennedy when the senator was shot. The book, “R.F.K., a Memoir,” has just been reissued by New American Library.

“I was in the suite with him in the Ambassador Hotel, in Room 519 and we were kidding around a lot. It was me and (newspaper columnist) Jimmy Breslin and (novelist) Budd Schulberg and (writer) Pete Hamill and we were just laughing and telling stories. When he went down to make his victory statement, I went down with him and I was halfway between the podium and the pantry when I heard the gunshots.”

At the time, Newfield said he was 12 to 15 feet from Kennedy. “When I heard the shots, I assumed he was shot. Having just lived through the Martin Luther King assassination, I guess my mind was on it. A couple of days before, Saturday in San Francisco, I was in the car riding behind him when a bunch of firecrackers went off and I saw him grab his head. It was certainly on everybody’s mind.”

After the shooting, Newfield said he “went back up to the suite we were in and started to watch television. And then about 3 a.m. me and John Lewis (former Civil Rights worker and now a congressman from Atlanta) went to the hospital and somebody told us he was brain dead. Then I started to cry.”

The Reporter

Pete Hamill, who covered the campaign for Newsday and the New York Post and was a close friend of Kennedy’s, remembers that he was in front of the senator.

“I was kind of walking backwards, taking notes as he (Kennedy) walked through so that I was facing Kennedy and Sirhan was on my right, as it turned out, at the end of those steam tables. I guess Kennedy was about maybe six feet from where I was, six or eight feet. I was sort of in front of the press people who were all just watching him and moving through that corridor, some walking forward and some walking backwards. And then he turned to shake hands with one of the guys in the kitchen and I think the chef too. The guys running the kitchen, he was talking to them. As he turned, the shots started banging off.”

Hamill was briefly uncertain what was happening.

“There was a moment of nonrecognition because it was a small-caliber pistol that sounded like a firecracker--pops, you know, like pop, pop, pop. And then there was an instant recognition. I turned to my right and there was Sirhan with his arm straight out and a gun. And then (football player Roosevelt) Grier and (Olympic athlete) Rafer Johnson or somebody slammed into him. He (Sirhan) kept getting shots off, which is why I think some of those people were hit in the legs. And then he was lifted and slammed onto these steam tables and dragged the length of the room, down to the other end of the room. Bobby was already on the floor of the place. So I went back and forth between looking at Sirhan and back to looking at Kennedy. It was sort of pandemonium.”

In the confusion it was not immediately clear that Kennedy had a mortal head wound, Hamill said.

“A lot of us thought he had been shot in the chest because his hands apparently had flicked against his head and got blood on his fingertips and there was blood on his chest that came off his hands. Originally that’s what it looked like. There was this odd little smile on his face, almost an accepting smile that was obviously just a physical smile.”

The Aide

Dick Tuck, now 65 and best known as a political prankster, was a campaign aide who traveled with Kennedy on his final campaign. He made the arrangements to take Kennedy through the hotel kitchen to another room where reporters were waiting. It was a route that normally would have made Kennedy unhappy.

“I remember one (threat) in Montana where I took Bobby out a back door and he was furious. He said he didn’t go out back doors. He loved to walk through the crowd. But in this case we just couldn’t do it in time and so we agreed we would take him back through the kitchen and down the hall. In hotels these kitchens all hook up into small rooms and big rooms and ballrooms. And we were headed for a room where all these guys were waiting, the pencil press guys. We were pushing through the crowd when the shots were fired.”

At first, Tuck thought Kennedy was not the most gravely hurt.

“I remember looking down and seeing Paul Schrade and if I ever saw a dead man it was him. He had a bullet right between his eyes almost in his forehead. I guess that’s a thick part of the skull for that man because he was totally unconscious and didn’t move.

“When the bullets first started going, people were standing on these folding tables they use for banquets and when I heard the first crack, I thought that one of those tables had given way. It sounded like wood breaking and cracking. And there were a number of other cracks and so on and so forth and then there was a struggle.

“I don’t remember whether I went out a window or what but anyway I brought the stretcher up and was lifting Bobby onto it and that’s the only time he spoke. He kind of pleaded, ‘Please don’t,’ and that was the only word he ever mentioned from the time the shot was fired until then on.”

The Observer

Thousands of miles away, Margaret (Midge) Costanza was watching the events at the Ambassador Hotel on television at her home in Rochester, N.Y. Costanza, who went on to become a controversial White House aide under President Jimmy Carter, directed Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign in eight upstate New York counties. She now lives in Los Angeles.

“I wasn’t quite sure that what I had seen had actually occurred. I wanted an instant replay because I needed to send a message to my emotions. It was like I was sitting there in limbo. I wasn’t sure what to feel and then suddenly in another few seconds, I realized that what I thought I’d seen actually did happen.

“I started sobbing hysterically. Then anger got me. I wanted to smash my television set. I didn’t even know he had been fatally wounded at that time. (Kennedy lived for slightly more than a day after he was shot.) I just knew he had been wounded. It was like my anger came so deep from within me that I wanted to smash things, particularly the set. It was as though if I could smash the set, it would not give me these horrible messages that I had to deal with. But I also knew that if I did that, I wouldn’t know what was going on. So I just threw some things around the house.”

The Legacy

Yes, they agree, it was a long time ago--more than 7,000 days, two decades, a generation, almost forever by some standards.

But Robert F. Kennedy is still a constant presence for many of those who worked with him, supported him and invested their hopes in his last campaign.

At this weekend’s meeting, the emphasis will be on Kennedy’s legacy, rather than mourning his death, Paul Schrade said. It is unfortunate, Schrade added, that the Police Department investigation was released this week. He tried unsuccessfully to reach California Secretary of State March Fong Eu to have the release delayed, Schrade said. “Sensitivity required them holding off because there were family members coming in and this is not time to push their faces in it,” he said of the controversial investigation. The conference, he added, was deliberately timed to coincide with the presidential campaign season, particularly the California June primary.

Clearly, many old Kennedy hands still measure today’s politicians against him.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of books on both Robert and John F. Kennedy and a Kennedy family intimate and a professor at City University of New York, believes that this weekend’s gathering is a harbinger of change in the country’s social and political climate.

Schlesinger cited a Rolling Stone poll this month that found Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were the two public figures “most revered” by younger Americans. And he added that his own theory of 30-year-long American historical cycles forecasts a return to Kennedy-style liberalism.

“By my cyclical hypothesis, the ‘90s should be like the ‘60s and the ‘30s, as the ‘80s are like the ‘50s and the ‘20s,” he said, predicting that the next decade will be “a period of the renewal of idealism and of concern for something besides making a fast buck.”

Kennedy’s press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, now a public relations executive in Washington, also cited the poll, saying, “They (young Americans) have two heroes and they’re both dead. I think that’s an astonishing legacy.”

Specifically, most Kennedy stalwarts believe that Kennedy’s commitment to peace, civil rights and economic opportunity are prime bequests.

Edwin O. Guthman, an aide to Kennedy when Kennedy was attorney general, a former Los Angeles Times national editor and now Gannett Foundation professor of journalism at USC, recalled that Kennedy was fearless in his principles.

“The night Martin Luther King was killed he got the news flying into Indianapolis, where he was campaigning,” Guthman said. “He was scheduled to go down and speak in a black neighborhood and when he arrived they all told him, ‘Don’t go, you can’t go down there now, there’s all hell breaking loose.’ And he went and he spoke and it was a very moving speech. He was the only white politician who could have gone into a black neighborhood that night and not only spoke but commanded their attention.”

Hamill was one of several who listed Kennedy’s curiosity and openmindedness as traits they would like to see more of in today’s politicians.

After he was elected to the Senate, Hamill remembered, Kennedy would sometimes call him in the middle of the night and they’d drive around the depressed areas of New York.

“I think that was a form of night school,” Hamill said. “You know, he was just trying to learn about it. He had gotten the gig already, so he wasn’t running for anything.”

Newfield agreed. “I’ve covered a lot of presidential-level politicians since Robert’s assassination and I see more clearly now his capacity for growth and re-evaluation and change. . . . He was a nice guy who happened to have, I think, capacities of public leadership you find once in a generation.”

Newfield began work on his book immediately, and from the perspective of the years he sees the book as an emotional outlet.

“The next day I flew back to New York--even before he had died--and on the plane I started to write out in longhand what became the first chapter of the book, out of grief therapy, I guess it was.”

Today, Newfield said, he hasn’t completely shaken the regrets and remorse stemming from Kennedy’s death.

“It’s the assassination that hurts more as time goes by,” he said.

Looking back, Tuck said the killing “certainly took the joy out of politics. I was in the Marines in the Pacific in World War II. Death is probably the most frustrating act, especially the death of someone you’re close to, or someone you love.”

Irwin Stroll said the death of Kennedy exacted a toll on his political activism. “I have voted in every election since the senator passed away but it hasn’t been the same,” he explained. “Right after Bobby was shot they asked me to work on the (Vice President Hubert H.) Humphrey campaign and I thought it was too new a wound in my heart to really feel emotionally involved, to really get involved in another campaign.”

He explained that he hasn’t talked about the killing--except with his family--”because it’s something that I’m not really proud of, to be involved in an assassination. I’m sorry that I was involved and I’m sorry that we lost Bobby. I don’t go out and announce myself as Irwin Stroll who was shot during the Kennedy assassination. That’s not something I like to go out and publicize too much. It wasn’t a great moment for me and it wasn’t a great moment for this country when we lost him.”