Must Reads: The busboy who tried to help a wounded Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 dies. His life was haunted by the violence
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy lies on the floor at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after he was shot. Juan Romero kneels next to him.
He left Los Angeles and moved to Wyoming, later came back west and settled in San Jose, raised a family and devoted himself to construction work.
But still he was haunted by what happened just after midnight June 5, 1968, when he was on duty as a busboy at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard near Koreatown. That was the night an assassin took aim at Robert F. Kennedy, a candidate for president of the United States. Romero, just 17 at the time, squatted next to the fallen U.S. senator, cradled Kennedy’s head, and tried to help him up before realizing how gravely wounded Kennedy was.
Juan Romero in June.
(Los Angeles Times)
Advertisement
The photos of that moment, with confusion and despair in Romero’s young, dark eyes, made for searing portraits of 1960s upheaval and followed by two months the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and by five years the assassination of RFK’s brother, President John F. Kennedy.
It was only in recent years that Romero began to let go, and in my visits with him three years ago and again this past June, he seemed to have been revived. Finally, he said, he was able to mark his birthday after years of refusing to celebrate because it was in the same month as RFK’s assassination.
That only made the news of Romero’s death this week in Modesto, at age 68, seem all the more tragic.
“He had a heart attack several days ago and his brain went too long without oxygen,” said his longtime friend, TV newsman Rigo Chacon of San Jose. “He passed away on Monday morning.”
Advertisement
A niece and a brother confirmed Romero’s death, but family members were unavailable for comment.
Romero had not been ill, Chacon said. When I met with Romero in June, on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, he told me he loved the hard, sweaty work of paving driveways and roads, and he had no intention of retiring. His marriage had failed many years earlier, but he said he was in regular contact with his children from that marriage, and he was giddy about a new romance with a Modesto woman.
That day, we met at a downtown San Jose park, near a monument to Kennedy. The candidate had spoken there not long before his death and told throngs of supporters that poverty and illiteracy were indecent, and he warned of “an erosion of a sense of national decency.”
1/31
March 23, 1968, Sacramento The candidate
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy campaigns at a shopping center in Sacramento a week after announcing his candidacy for president.
He was 42 years old and serving his first term in the U.S. Senate. His campaign would last only 82 days and would end in violence in Los Angeles in early June, just moments after his greatest political victory.
Kennedy, at lower right, addresses a crowd estimated at over 8,000 at the Monterey airport. Throughout California that spring, Kennedy drew huge crowds. He often campaigned by standing astride a slow-moving convertible.
Kennedy, did not have Secret Service protection during the campaign, despite the assassination 4½ years earlier of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Such protection is now provided for major candidates starting 120 days before a general election.
Six days before he announced his candidacy, Kennedy flew to California to support Cesar Chavez, the controversial leader of the United Farm Workers of America, who was ending a 25-day fast in support of nonviolence.
According to Thurston Clarke’s newly published campaign history, “The Last Campaign,” one advisor warned Kennedy that appearing with Chavez might hurt him politically. “I know,” Kennedy said. “But I like Cesar.”
Overwhelming support from Latino voters would later help carry Kennedy to a narrow victory in the crucial California primary.
Kennedy campaigns before a large crowd in the San Diego County suburb of Chula Vista.
Describing Kennedy’s barnstorming that day, the Los Angeles Times’ Paul Houston wrote, “The spectacle Monday night included small children racing alongside the senator’s car as if trailing a pied piper. Adults jammed sidewalks, some waving Kennedy signs.”
Kennedy, standing in a convertible, campaigns at the Los Angeles Farmers Market.
In a 2008 remembrance for the Los Angeles Times, John Crandell described a Kennedy appearance that spring in Van Nuys as “the center of an emotional riot. People had swarmed out into the street and all over that convertible! Total bedlam .... I still think of that sole moment of spring as the most electrifying of my life.”
Reeling from a surprising loss in the Oregon primary the day before, Kennedy found his political footing in a now-legendary motorcade from LAX to downtown Los Angeles.
Writing in “The Last Campaign,” Thurston Clarke describes the scene: “People filled the streets in minority neighborhoods, slowing his motorcade to a crawl, thrusting scraps of paper at him for autographs, and screaming his name. At one point, he dashed back to the car carrying the photographers, yelling, ‘From now on Los Angeles is my Resurrection City!’ ”
Kennedy debates his Democratic primary rival, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, on the ABC News program “Issues and Answers.”
Analyzing the stakes in the debate, the Times’ Richard Bergholz wrote, “For McCarthy, it was an unexpected chance at televised statewide exposure. For Kennedy, it was a dangerous gamble to take, when he has said all along that his real rival is Vice President Humphrey and not McCarthy.” Humphrey, the ultimate Democratic nominee in 1968, did not compete in the primary.
Kennedy shakes hands with students at Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove.
In the final days of the campaign -- and, as it turned out, his life -- the 42-year-old Kennedy drove himself to exhaustion, barnstorming up and down California in what journalist Jack Newfield would later call “a state beyond fatigue.”
Before June 5, 1968, presidential candidates did not receive protection from the Secret Service. In hindsight, Robert F. Kennedy looks remarkably vulnerable in campaign photos such as this one.
The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 were fresh in the minds of those who covered Kennedy -- and in the mind of the candidate himself, according to columnist Jimmy Breslin.
“ ‘Russian roulette,’ he always said. ‘Living every day is Russian roulette,’ ” Breslin wrote of Kennedy on June 6, 1968.
Like many Latinos in Los Angeles in 1968, 17-year-old Juan Romero, a busboy at the Ambassador Hotel, admired Robert F. Kennedy. The night before the California primary he had delivered room service to Kennedy’s hotel suite and had shaken the candidate’s hand.
“He shook my hand as hard as anyone had ever shaken it,” Romero told the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez 35 years later. “I walked out of there 20 feet tall, thinking, ‘I’m not just a busboy, I’m a human being.’ He made me feel that way.”
One of the last photos taken of Robert F. Kennedy before he was shot shortly after midnight. He has just won the California primary, and is walking through a crush of supporters at the Ambassador Hotel. His wife Ethel, pregnant at the time with the couple’s 11th child, is at his side. At Kennedy’s right is Jesse Unruh, then the powerful Democratic speaker of the California Assembly. Behind and to the right of Unruh is Rosey Grier, a former Los Angeles Rams football player and supporter of RFK.
In this image from KTLA-TV’s broadcast, Robert Kennedy claims victory in the California primary, just after midnight on the morning of June 5, 1968. Kennedy’s final words in public were, "...now on to Chicago, and let’s win there!”
Television and radio coverage captured much of what happened next. “Those viewers who were still watching the returns at 12:20 Wednesday morning became eyewitnesses to a horrific drama as it unfolded,” wrote Times Entertainment Editor Charles Champlin.
Busboy Juan Romero, 17, comforts Robert F. Kennedy moments after Kennedy had been shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen.
Thirty-five years later, Romero would tell Times columnist Steve Lopez: “He was looking up at the ceiling, and I thought he’d banged his head. I asked, ‘Are you OK? Can you get up?’ ”
Robert F. Kennedy, still conscious after the shooting, but mortally wounded.
Describing the scene in the pantry, journalist Jimmy Breslin wrote for the next day’s editions, “Robert Kennedy is on his back. He has this sad look on his face. His lips are open in pain and disgust. His right eye rolls up in his head and his left eye closes but still there is this sadness in his face. You see, he knows so much about this thing.”
(Boris Yaro / Los Angeles Times)
16/31
June 5, 1968, Los Angeles
Ethel Kennedy, at lower left, attempts to comfort her husband moments after he was shot. The rosary beads under Kennedy’s right hand belonged to busboy Juan Romero.
“I asked Ethel if I could give Bobby the rosary beads, and she didn’t stop me. She didn’t say anything,” Romero later remembered. “I pressed them into his hand but they wouldn’t stay because he couldn’t grip them, so I tried wrapping them around his thumb. When they were wheeling him away, I saw the rosary beads still hanging off his hand.”
(United Press International)
17/31
June 5, 1968, Los Angeles
The front page of the Los Angeles Times’ June 5, 1968 edition. Robert F. Kennedy would survive for another day before being pronounced dead early on the morning of June 6.
The photograph was taken by Times reporter-photographer Boris Yaro, who was in the pantry of the Ambasssador Hotel when Kennedy was shot. “I was getting ready to shoot a picture and I thought the shots were firecrackers going off,” Yaro told his own newspaper, fighting back tears.
May 1969, San Quentin Prison, Calif. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan
Sirhan Sirhan, shown in a prison mug shot, was arrested at the Ambassador Hotel. Even before he was tried and convicted, The Times wrote, “The assassin’s name is Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, and though he has pleaded innocent, that he shot Kennedy is beyond dispute; he was seized before he finished shooting.”
A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant who lived in Pasadena, Sirhan was described by police as a “virulent” anti-Israeli who hated Robert Kennedy because of Kennedy’s support for Israel.
A police officer inspects the area of the kitchen where Robert Kennedy was shot.
Journalist Jimmy Breslin described the shooting: “The gun did not make a very loud noise. Four or five quick, flat sounds in the low-ceilinged room and Kennedy disappears and a guy behind him disappears in the people screaming and running and here is the guy with the gun.”
The .22-caliber revolver with serial number H53725 was identified as the gun used to shoot Robert F. Kennedy. The photo was taken after The Times obtained a court order to view physical evidence in the case.
A page from Sirhan Sirhan’s diary, dated May 18, 1968, reads in part, “R.F.K. must die - RFK must be killed.”
The diary entry was one of thousands of pieces of evidence from the secret Los Angles Police Department files that were released in 1988 at the state archives in Sacramento.
Lee and Keith Dale, 17 and 15 years old, of Hawthorne, maintain a vigil outside Good Samaritan Hospital, where Kennedy lay gravely wounded.
Describing the scene at the hospital, The Times reported, “A vigil began at Kennedy’s bedside -- a vigil which was observed in the hallways, by newsmen outside, and by thousands of circling cars which passed up and down Wilshire Boulevard, many of them bearing newly printed bumper stickers which read: “Pray for Bobby”
A woman holds a sign that reads “God Bless You Bobby Rest In Peace.”
At 2 a.m. that day, in the darkness outside Good Samaritan Hospital, Kennedy’s press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, read a short statement: “Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Sen. Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife, Ethel, his sister, Mrs. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was 42 years old.”
A procession of cars follows the hearse carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy as it leaves downtown Los Angeles.
The Times’ great sports columnist Jim Murray spoke for many when he expressed his despair: “Once again America the Beautiful has taken a bullet to the groin,” Murray wrote. “The Violent States of America. One bullet is mightier than one million votes. It’s not a Democracy, it’s a Lunacy.”
The last surviving Kennedy brother, 36-year-old Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, eulogized his brother in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” the younger brother said, his voice breaking. “He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
Among the 2,300 mourners who filled the cathedral were President Lyndon B. Johnson, an estimated 200 Catholic priests, and Kennedy’s 77-year-old mother, Rose.
June 8, 1968 Aboard Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train
After the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Kennedy’s body was taken by special train from New York to Washington for burial.
Along the route, crowds lined the tracks, and the 21-car train, carrying 1,000 people, fell behind schedule as it slowed to give mourners a chance to pay their respects.
Undated, June 8, 1968 Aboard Robert F. Kennedy‘s funeral train
A family waits along the railroad tracks to pay final respects to the late Robert F. Kennedy, whose body was taken by a special train to Washington after his funeral in New York.
Television networks carried live coverage of portions of the long train ride, including touching images of Americans standing silently along the railroad tracks in tribute.
Late in the evening of Saturday, June 8, in a ceremony delayed by five hours and lit by candlelight, Robert F. Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, 60 feet from his brother John’s gravesite.
The lead pallbearer, at left, was 15-year-old Joseph Kennedy, the eldest of Kennedy’s 10 children.
“The scene,” wrote Robert J. Donovan for The Times, was “poignantly similar to one already burned into the memory of living Americans” — the burial 4½ years earlier of Kennedy’s slain brother, President John F. Kennedy. “It defied understanding that such a scene could be reenacted so soon, with the same haunting presence of the Kennedy women in their black veils and stately bearing,” Donovan wrote.
Sirhan Sirhan, center, surrounded by sheriff’s deputies, on his way to court. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a Los Angeles County jury and sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
The Times reported that Sirhan, ashen-faced at the verdict, tried to comfort his defense attorney by saying: “Don’t be concerned. Even Jesus Christ couldn’t have saved me.”
Sirhan’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 when the California Supreme Court invalidated pending death sentences in the state.
Opened in 1921, the Ambassador, foreground, was one of Los Angeles’ grand hotels for decades. Every president from Herbert Hoover to Richard M. Nixon stayed there, but it is best remembered today as the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination.
The hotel closed in 1989, and was purchased by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2001. The district, considering the location for a new public school, ultimately prevailed in a long-running legal battle with preservationists who wanted to save the old hotel.
Workers demolish a wing of the 85-year-old Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy’s family had supported the razing of the building to make way for a new public school.
“There could be no better memorial to my father than a living memorial that educates the children of this city,” said Max Kennedy, son of RFK, at a groundbreaking ceremony on Nov. 20, 2006.
Romero was in the habit of leaving flowers at that monument each year to mark RFK’s death. In our many conversations over the years, he said he often felt we were moving further politically from what he saw as a Kennedy legacy of tolerance and compassion.
When I met Romero in 1998, just before the 30th anniversary of the assassination, he fell apart in recalling the fateful night and how he happened to be in the hotel pantry area where Kennedy was shot. Romero told me he had met Kennedy the night before when the candidate ordered room service, and he felt honored by the way Kennedy shook his hand firmly and looked him in the eye with respect.
“I remember walking out of that room … feeling 10 feet tall, feeling like an American,” said Romero, who had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico seven years earlier. He became an Ambassador busboy on the advice of his strict stepfather, who worked at the hotel and wanted Romero to be sure to stay out of trouble on the streets of East Los Angeles.
The next night, after Kennedy won California’s Democratic primary and made a victory speech, he retreated through the kitchen pantry area and Romero pushed through the crowd to congratulate him. He said that just as he shook Kennedy’s hand, the shots were fired. Romero thought that the pops were from firecrackers and that Kennedy had fallen in fright, but Romero then saw blood spilling onto his own hand and realized what had happened as Sirhan Sirhan, the man with the gun, was apprehended. Romero said he was carrying rosary beads in his pocket and stuffed them into Kennedy’s hands.
Romero was taken to the Rampart police station for questioning, then took a bus to Roosevelt High the next morning. He still had Kennedy’s blood on his hand and said he chose not to wash it off.
As if the experience wasn’t traumatic enough, Romero said he got letters from people congratulating him for what he did. That made him uncomfortable, and so did letters from people asking him why he didn’t do something to prevent the assassination. He got tired of being asked by Ambassador guests to pose for photographs, found work in Wyoming, then made his home in San Jose.
In 2010, I met up with Romero in Washington and went with him to Arlington National Cemetery, where RFK is buried. He said he wanted to pay his respects, tell Kennedy he had tried to live a life of tolerance and humility, and to apologize. His buddy Chacon and I told him he had nothing to apologize for, but Romero knelt at the grave, spoke softly and wept.
Advertisement
Five years later, Romero emailed me to say he was finally feeling better with the help of a friend he had met on Facebook. She told him that when she looked at the photos from the Ambassador, she saw a brave young man who tried to help someone who’d been hurt, even as others retreated.
I heard from former California First Lady Maria Shriver, a niece of Bobby Kennedy, after I wrote that column. She said she wanted an address to send a thank-you note to Romero.
“I always felt a great deal of empathy for him … because of how difficult it was for him to move past that,” Shriver told me Wednesday evening when I called her with the news of Romero’s death.
Shriver said she never met Romero but hoped he came to realize he did the humane thing in a tragic moment, and she hoped he had found peace in the end.
Advertisement
“God bless him,” Shriver said. “It’s kind of hard to know why someone gets put into a situation that they’re locked in forever. But as I see it, he was locked into an image of helping someone.”
California native Steve Lopez has been a journalist for 45 years. His work has won numerous national awards for newspaper and magazine writing. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling “The Soloist,” a story that began on the pages of the Los Angeles Times, where he has been a columnist since 2001.
