Back to ’68 and the way we were

“This is going to be painful,” Tom Hayden said with a slight sigh as he settled into his seat in a darkened theater. Moments later, larger-than-life images of Robert Kennedy on the 1968 campaign trail in California filled the screen, and there was no way to avoid the feeling that the next two hours, however entertaining they might be, were going to lead to some psychic discomfort.

Sure enough, at the end of the film, Hayden excused himself, eyes reddened, to duck into the men’s room. A bit later, sniffling, he said, “Look at me, I’m mess.”

He wasn’t a mess, really, but he was emotional, as anyone who was invested in certain promising aspects of the time -- the peace movement, the war on poverty, the flowering of the civil rights era -- might be after witnessing, or perhaps in Hayden’s case, reliving, the assassination at the heart of “Bobby,” which expands to a national run in theaters today.

The movie from actor-director Emilio Estevez takes place entirely at the Ambassador Hotel, on June 4, 1968, the day of Kennedy’s victory in the California presidential primary, hours before he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who appears briefly at the end of the film. It weaves the stories of 22 fictional characters -- some based on real people, such as the Latino busboy who cradled the mortally wounded Kennedy on the floor of the Ambassador kitchen -- and culminates with their presence at the Kennedy victory party. The characters, each in his or her way, represent telling slices of the zeitgeist.

The ensemble cast of name actors, who worked for scale, includes Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte as retired doormen musing on the greatness of the Ambassador; William H. Macy as a philandering hotel manager; Sharon Stone as his wife and the hotel’s hairdresser, Demi Moore as a booze-soaked singer slated to introduce Kennedy in the ballroom that night. Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan are a young couple ready to marry to prevent his deployment to Vietnam; Ashton Kutcher is a drug dealer who turns a couple of straight-laced, get-out-the-vote kids onto drugs; and Laurence Fishburne is a chef whose kitchen becomes a testing ground for black-Latino relations.

Though the movie is less about Kennedy specifically and more about Kennedy’s time and place, the foregone conclusion is poignant and shocking. For political activists like Hayden, who knew Kennedy personally and came to see him as a potential hero of the impoverished and oppressed, not to mention a presidential candidate who would commit himself to ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the movie is sure to revive feelings that are not always so far below the surface.

“I feel anger, which I am not over, and loss, which I am not over,” said Hayden.

The day of the California primary, Hayden, then 28 and already famous as a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and author of its clarion call, The Port Huron Statement, was in New York and watched Kennedy’s victory speech on television.

In his 1988 memoir “Rebel, a Personal History of the 1960s,” Hayden writes that over his television, he heard the shots in the Ambassador kitchen and sensed a cataclysmic event: “Suddenly, there came crackling, almost popping noises over the television, a cry in the confused crowd, a call for a doctor, and I knew it was over.”

Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital, and when his body was taken to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Hayden was among those who watched over it throughout the night. “My friend Jack Newfield” -- the Village Voice reporter who died last year -- “had this phrase about it. We all became might-have-beens.”

For Hayden, “Bobby” was a painful, and salutary, reminder of the high price of violence, of what was lost. The tide of mayhem that culminated in Kennedy’s death -- starting with the murders of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22, 1963, of civil rights activist Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, and of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 -- struck a blow to the progressive movement whose reverberations are still felt today, Hayden said in the restaurant of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just down the block from the screening, which he attended at The Times’ invitation.

Relaxed and looking fit in a white long-sleeved shirt untucked over black jeans, Hayden at 66 has a head of thick silver hair and a goatee. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does, he rocks back with force and his face lights up. He is friendly with Bobby Kennedy’s adult children and recently had lunch in Washington with Rory, who was born six months after her father was killed. (In the ‘90s, Rory founded a nonprofit film production company with Hayden’s stepdaughter, Vanessa Vadim. The pair were classmates at Brown.)

Today, having spent 18 years in the California Legislature and running unsuccessfully for governor, mayor and City Council, he’s done with public office. He writes, teaches at the Claremont Colleges, helps craft anti-sweatshop legislation and agitates in various ways for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. But the idea of what might have been still haunts, and watching “Bobby” can’t help but reopen old wounds.

“We would have won in ’64. We would have won in ‘68,” said Hayden, referring to John Kennedy’s presumed reelection and to Bobby Kennedy’s presumed election after that. “I think you would have had a succession of Kennedy presidencies, which would have raised expectations and activated social movements.”

Whether a movie like “Bobby” can do more than revive long-buried feelings of tragedy and rekindle the kind of activism that marked an especially idealistic moment in American history remains to be seen.

“I don’t know how it would affect my students,” said Hayden, who described them as “politically subdued.” They are interested in the world but are also preoccupied with more immediate concerns -- getting good grades to get good jobs. “It’s hard to find discretionary time to join an anti-sweatshop group. They have so many classes. It’s a grinding pressure.”

However, he doesn’t hesitate to speculate about what might happen if, as in the Vietnam era, they had to worry about being drafted to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore.

“If Bush dared to reinstate the draft, I feel absolutely certain it would be like the ‘60s again,” he said. “Campuses would go out of control immediately.”

robin.abcarian@latimes.com.