Breaking His Silence : The Busboy Who Went to RFK’s Side 20 Years Ago Finally Begins to Look Back

When Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot in a kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles 20 years ago, a 17-year-old busboy crouched on the floor beside him, held his head in his hands and pressed a crucifix in his palm. The next day, the busboy’s picture was flashed around the world, and Juan Romero became instantly famous.

The attention stunned him. “I felt stupid,” he recalls. Kennedy’s death was “sad,” and the historic moment Romero was caught in was not something he feels “proud of.”

Later, says Romero, a reporter asked for an exclusive interview and offered him a college scholarship in exchange. “I said . . . didn’t feel right to take advantage of a situation. He said, ‘The people want to know.’ ”

The Pain Got Worse

The people may have wanted to know, but Romero didn’t want to talk. “The more I talked about it, the worse I felt,” he recalls. “And it hurt more and more.”

Except testifying at the Sirhan Sirhan trial, Romero essentially didn’t talk about it for 20 years. “I never told my girls. My neighbors don’t know nothing about it. . . . People always ask me, ‘Why didn’t you talk about it?’ I didn’t feel like it. It happened. It is recognized. But it is nothing to take a pat on the back for. . . . I don’t own a picture of it. I don’t want it around the house.”

In fact, he says, the only reason he has started to talk about it now is that last year his mother called to tell him that someone from the television show “20/20” wanted a brief interview as part of a magazine anniversary project. Romero, still not sure what to do, talked first to one of the other guys at work. “He said, ‘You must want to talk about it. You’re telling me.’ I talked about it. It felt good. It was like a release valve opening.”

On this day, as a camera crew for a group of young Latino film makers sets up lights, reflectors and a video camera on his front lawn, Romero stands off to one side, a strong, broad-shouldered guy with arms crossed and a look of mild amusement on his face.

He and his wife, Elda, have three daughters and live in a neatly painted wood-shingled ranch house in a working-class part of town, with a microwave in the kitchen and a 6-foot console TV in the living room. Romero used to live in a Mexican neighborhood in central San Jose, he says, the kind of warm, friendly community where the kids could leave a “bike on the sidewalk and still find it there the next morning.”

The problem, he says, was that most of the people were renters and didn’t take good care of the yards and street. So seven months ago, he bought this house. To pay the mortgage, he works as a raker for a paving company, a job that he loves. Right now, he’s also putting in a new driveway for his car and truck, because he’s letting a young couple newly arrived from Mexico live in the garage.

It’s all a far cry from his birthplace, Nayarit, a town of 200 people in the hills near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where the people raised chickens, cattle and goats, and grew beans and corn. He came to the United States when he was 10 years old. Romero went to school during the day and, to help support five brothers and three sisters, he bused tables at the Ambassador Hotel at night for $1.80 an hour.

Romero got to see all sorts of celebrities at the Cocoanut Grove. The tips were good. And then one June day during the 1968 presidential primary campaign, Robert Kennedy came to town and took over a wing of the hotel.

Romero was impressed. “The Kennedys were good Catholics. They visited Mexico a lot. I had hopes (if he were elected) that people would look at us in a better way instead of us just being taco benders.”

When Kennedy’s suite called down for room service, Romero recalls that he bribed another busboy into letting him go. “When we delivered the food, we got off the elevator, and went straight to the wing,” he says. “Someone opened the door. And there he was talking on the telephone, pointing in different directions and looking around. We made eye contact. It was like seeing a shooting star. You could feel his magnetism, the power he had.”

It wasn’t Kennedy’s politics that moved Romero. “I didn’t know what he was running for or against. It was his charisma. It was the man himself. His character. The positive image he made you feel.”

The next day, Romero told his friends about the experience. “ ‘I’ve seen Roberto. I was in the same room with him.’ To them, it was no big deal. I thought, maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I get excited too easily.”

Still, says Romero, he knew he wanted to see him again. The following night, as Kennedy came through a kitchen passageway at the hotel after his primary victory speech, Romero was waiting in the crowd. He wanted, he says, to feel the way he’d felt when he’d looked in Kennedy’s eyes. He wanted to shake his hand.

By now the camera crew is just about set up and, before they start, Romero offers drinks. “Water, Coke, cerveza?”

“Sure,” jokes Esai Morales, the director of the camera crew, accepting a beer. “Might as well get sloshed.”

Morales is the darkly handsome young actor who was a big hit in “La Bamba” and who has just completed “Bloodhounds of Broadway” with Madonna and Matt Dillon. He is taping this interview in hopes of eventually turning Romero’s life story into a two-hour movie of the week.

The videotape starts, and as the memories of the night come flooding back to him, Romero gets a distant look in his eyes.

Kennedy came out through the kitchen, shaking hands as he went.

“I felt his grip,” says Romero. “He had calluses from shaking hands. It was a man’s hand. A big, strong-willed man.

After Kennedy let go his hand, Romero felt the flash of heat in his face and heard the gun go off. “I thought it was firecrackers--(that) someone was celebrating.”

“I saw him go down. He was just lying there. His left arm and leg were twitching.” Romero didn’t know Kennedy had been shot. “I thought he had busted his head on the concrete. I put my hand under his head and I felt all the blood.”

Romero’s eyes fill with tears. After 20 years, it’s still hard to talk about it.

“I asked him, ‘Can you get up?’ He wouldn’t react. I saw his lips move. I put my ears down. I swear he asked me if everyone was OK, if everyone was all right.”

Suddenly Romero’s shoulders shake. He starts to sob.

“Cut! Battery. Battery,” yells one of the camera crew technicians.

“I’m sorry,” says Romero.

“It’s all right,” says Morales, putting an arm around his shoulders.

After a brief pause, Romero composes himself. The taping and the memories continue.

“His eye was blinking and his arm and leg were shaking. I thought he might have gotten knocked out when he hit the concrete. He didn’t seem to be in pain.”

For years, Romero had been carrying a little rosary with black beads and a silver crucifix. “I figured he needed a little luck. So I put it in his hand.”

When Ethel Kennedy arrived, says Romero, she was “hysterical.” She “started pushing people around and said to give him room. She pushed me away and I didn’t see him anymore.”

In the meantime, says Romero, people were wading in taking punches at Sirhan. “He had blood and bruises all over him. His shirt was up around his ears. I felt like hitting him myself. I felt like spitting on him.”

Later that day after school, Romero went back to work at the Ambassador. It was a nightmare. He didn’t want to believe it had happened. But then he’d look down at his fingernails and see Kennedy’s dried blood.

Romero left the hotel job three months later. “The hotel asked me if I wanted to take a vacation. I wasn’t doing my job the way I was supposed to. People were coming in and pointing me out. Or we’d get a call for room service. I’d go to the room to take water and ice and people would ask, ‘Are you the busboy?’

“Yes.”

“ ‘Why didn’t you push Sirhan aside?’ ”

Romero left Los Angeles that same year, first going to Santa Barbara where he lived with a sister. He spent a year and a half in a small mining town in Wyoming working as a cook’s helper, a life he still looks back at fondly. He later worked for a company that made yarn for carpets and as a security guard for a piping company.

In 1974 he moved to San Jose. He and Elda were married two years later. In the meantime, he got a job shredding cellulose for an insulation company but after losing the tips of two fingers in two separate accidents, he went to work for a company that installed fountains and lagoons in the courtyards of high-tech office buildings. Then in 1985, he got his present job.

His daughters only recently found out about his small role in history when, on a visit to Mexico, their grandmother showed them the photo in a magazine. “They have seen the photos,” says Romero. “We never talked about it. It’s nothing I’m real proud of.”