Mark Ecke

Just after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy finished his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom with the words "and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there." He had four minutes left as a conscious man, and the way those minutes unfolded still haunts American history. To save time, his bodyguard led him through the hotel kitchen. RFK did what he always did: he stopped to shake hands with the workers. He was reaching for the hand of Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy, when Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward and fired. The photo everyone knows is Romero kneeling on the concrete floor, cradling the senator's head. The boy pressed a rosary into his hand. Witnesses heard Kennedy ask, "Is everybody OK?" Romero told him yes. Kennedy answered, "Everything's going to be OK." He died the next day. He was 42. Consider what that one moment took. Two months earlier, on the night Martin Luther King was murdered, it was Kennedy who stood on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and broke the news to a Black crowd, speaking off the cuff about his own brother's killing for the first time in public, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Indianapolis stayed calm that night while a hundred cities burned. Now, in the space of nine weeks, the country lost them both. His funeral train ran from New York to Washington, and something happened that nobody planned: more than a million Americans appeared along the tracks. Factory workers holding hard hats over hearts. Little League teams at attention. People standing in rivers to see it pass. The train ran hours late because the crowds never stopped. Juan Romero carried that night for the rest of his life. For decades he believed that if Kennedy hadn't stopped to shake his hand, he might have lived. He finally visited the grave in 2010 and said he felt the senator would have told him to be proud, not sorry. Whatever 1968 was supposed to become ended on that kitchen floor, 58 years ago today.