When I was 11 the nuns took us to the local airport on a "field trip." We learned that we were to greet a famous person who was coming to town for a vacation with his wife. The fifty or so sixth and seventh graders were his welcoming committee to our fair town. That famous person turned out to be Bobby Kennedy. He and Ethel and a lone friend... (security man?) came around the corner and we all started cheering. He seemed a little embarrsssed by all the attention, but Ethel was beeming. He waved to all of us and started shaking hands as they headed to their car. I was toward the front of the pack so when he got close, I stuck out my hand. He was one of the first grown men I ever shook hands with. They got into their car and waved some more as they drove away. About a year latter I learned that he had been gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. My heart was broken because just like his brother, another good man was gone. If I was Obama, I would get more than just one securtiy guard so as to not tempt some "lone gunman", in a nation that loves it's myths both good and evil.
Here's another post from Welcome to Pottersville...
Thirteen Bullets
“Bobby,” my parents began on the morning of June 6th, 1968, “Senator Kennedy was shot last night and God may have to take his life.”
That was how the news was broken to me exactly 40 years ago tomorrow of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. I was nine years-old and my parents solemnly gave me the news as I woke up for school the following morning because they knew that would impact on even a child my age. My father was 27, almost 28, still years away from the portly Republican who became an avid follower of Alabama and trying to fit in with Marietta, Georgia’s redneck society in a Bushian transmogrification.
In 1968, my Harlem-born Air Force father took every available opportunity to remind me of the greatness of the Kennedy family’s legacy. Though we lived in Tampa, Florida at the time and Bobby Kennedy was of course from Massachusetts, we were all native New Yorkers and we still thought of Bobby as our junior senator. It was my father that gave me my first political sensibilities, one that had, tragically, lain dormant in my soul for close to four decades before I finally woke up and realized that Chicken Little was right this time.
Into the mix many years later came Dan Moldea, the ultimate “investigative journalist” who nonetheless finds himself on the state’s side of a story every time, from Bobby Kennedy’s assassination to Deborah Jeanne Palfrey’s “suicide.” (His book, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, was effortlessly torn to shreds three years ago by John Hunt, as well as others.)
Darryl Gates, former Chief of the LAPD, is, like Moldea, someone who also finds himself in pivotal moments in American criminal history. He was in charge of the LAPD during the Rodney King beatings, the subsequent riots and then during the OJ Simpson crimes and trial. In every case, Gates justifiably took a beating but I mention him in this article because Gates was also the assistant chief of police at this time. He also oversaw the destruction of crucial evidence, such as doors and door jambs that had been shot during the assassination. Not only that, so were the X-rays taken of the bullet holes. When subsequently asked why he destroyed evidence, Gates casually shrugged his shoulders and said there was no point in hanging on to “dead lumber” that was taking up space.
A television forensic analysis of the reports strongly suggests if not outright proves that there were 13 shots fired in the pantry instead of the eight on which Moldea, the LAPD and the FBI insists to this day. If we’re to believe Moldea’s account that involves not one but four magic bullets, we’re still left with the troubling paradox of having at least two gunmen in his lone nut theory. With Moldea, the FBI, CIA and LAPD and their botched investigations, it’s obvious that a lot of powerful people have a lot at stake in forcing people to believe that Sirhan Sirhan and his eight shot revolver was alone responsible for killing Robert F. Kennedy.
And, if you can’t believe that, then just don’t discuss it, as Moldea told John Hunt in 2005.
Now, those of us who care to get to the truth of the matter know that it was a security guard by the name of Thane Eugene Caesar, a right wing zealot who had no love for the Kennedys yet was given the strangely exalted task of guarding the senator and presidential hopeful at exactly the same place where Kennedy would be shot behind the right ear in back of his head.
13 bullets. One for every one of the original colonies, including one for New York and one for Massachusetts.
Because whatever your pet theory, it was, as some have said, the day America died. Others say the same thing about the other Kennedy assassination and the Washington Posts’s E. J. Dionne said that the day Martin Luther King was shot 63 days before Kennedy was the day liberalism died. In the 60’s champions rose up challenging us to follow them to the Promised Land and without exception they were gunned down, men who weren’t merely lionized and martyred in death but men who in their very lifetimes roused people with hope that they could achieve the unthinkable, men who had the mystique being able to effect much-needed change with much of the nation behind them.
Men who had the audacity to hope.
At the risk of sounding like Hillary Clinton, this is a lesson in murderous intolerance that ought to be heeded by the Obama campaign especially on this anniversary.
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Anyway...
RIP Bobby
Skunkboy
If every man helped his neighbor, no man would be without help
-Bruce Lee
by IanEye » Thu Jun 05, 2008 9:50 pm 
