Busboy at RFK’s side is letting go of the guilt

Juan Romero, the Ambassador Hotel busboy who cradled a dying Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, talks about finally letting go almost 50 years later.

Juan Romero pauses at the RFK Memorial in St. James Park in San Jose. “He made me feel like a regular citizen,” Romero says of the night he delivered room service to Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. “He made me feel like a human being.”

Juan Romero would carry the weight of RFK’s assassination through the decades. He still thinks about the slain senator, he said, but he no longer drowns in sorrow or regret. “I don’t carry the cross anymore,” he said.