A Shining Moment Cut Short by Assassin

I stood silent and mesmerized just a few feet from him. I had left my seat and wandered into the lobby, and there he was, larger than life and completely alone, slowly pacing back and forth, head bowed to the ground.

Despite a two-hour delay, the crowd’s deafening cheers beckoned him from his reverie toward the great hall where he would speak. As he walked toward the stage, he was nearly smothered by people wanting to touch him.

That night was the rally for Robert F. Kennedy held at the Los Angeles Sports Arena 31 years ago, in the final days of the California presidential primary. I was 15 years old and that event marked my political awakening. Two days later Kennedy was dead.

From that time forward I was driven by what I took to be the Kennedy ethos: public service and love of country, an active life fueled by a competitive spirit, loyalty to family, compassion for the underdog and devotion to high purpose and personal accomplishment.

I took hold of the message as though it were a sacrament. An impressionable teenager, I wanted to be a Kennedy. There is truth to journalist Richard Reeves’ observation that just watching the Kennedys was a form of self-improvement.

Many of the steps I took since then were inspired directly by Kennedyesque ideals: student body president, law school graduate, Democratic staff counsel on Capitol Hill, criminal prosecutor.

What was it about Robert Kennedy that we found so compelling? He was an uncommon synthesis: a Cold Warrior who opposed the Vietnam War; a physically tough and combative man who nonetheless quoted Tennyson and Aeschylus; a man of privilege who had rapport with the dispossessed. He was considered liberal, modern, and broad-minded, but yet was a devout Catholic. He had profound empathy for inner-city black youths but was unforgiving on crime and violence. He was a crusader who preached that to abandon the impoverished was wrong. But he also believed that for the poor to abandon their own initiative was sacrilege.

Robert Kennedy may have been at one time ruthless, opportunistic and arrogant. He got his start on Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting bandwagon. He was the pugnacious lawyer who grilled Teamster bosses for the Senate rackets committee. He played hatchet man in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

His brother’s assassination seemed to humanize him, causing him, as civil rights activist Roger Wilkins put it, to connect with the world’s pain. He was a changed man because he had shifted from his brother’s political operative to a candidate in his own right. Victorious in California, Kennedy was gaining momentum.

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The one voice I have long remembered--and whose column I have kept all these years--is that of Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray. I seldom read the sports pages. But Murray’s column on the morning of June 6, 1968, caught my attention. “I was going to write to you about fun and games today--a golf match on a sylvan lake, a track meet in a municipal amphitheater. But once again America the Beautiful has taken a bullet to the groin. The country is in surgery.” The article ended: “Pray God our healers can repair Bobby Kennedy. Who is going to repair America?”

The nation held its breath after Kennedy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital. Meanwhile, I went to my junior high school and told friends in our Republican town that Bobby would not only survive the bullet in his brain but become our next president. His death hours later seemed incomprehensible.

The litany of exposes that has surfaced over the decades about the Kennedys has seemed to involve Bobby very little. He continues to strike a chord in many of us, and for good reason.

Robert Kennedy touched the country’s conscience. In a 1966 speech about the poor, he said, “Those who live with us are our brothers. They share with us the same short moment of life. . . . They seek, as we do, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. . . . Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

After his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, massive crowds followed the train bearing his coffin from New York City to Washington.

I wonder who these days will light the path of today’s youths, beckoning them to “dream things that never were, and say: ‘Why not?’ ”

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Kathleen Tuttle is a prosecutor and writer in Los Angeles.