50 years later: the 17-year-old busboy who gave Robert F. Kennedy his last rosary

There will be a lot of remembrances and commemorations in the days ahead marking the death of Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago. He was killed by an assassin’s bullet in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel on June 5, 1968.

But few accounts will be as stirring or heart-wrenching as this one by Juan Romero, done by NPR. 

Romero was a 17-year-old busboy in the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy walked by and shook his hand seconds before being shot. He will forever be remembered as the young man who cradled Kennedy’s head in a now-iconic photograph.

Romero sets the scene:

“I remember extending my hand as far as I could, and then I remember him shaking my hand,” Romero says. “And as he let go, somebody shot him.”

His next actions are now immortalized in photos taken by journalists there for the victory speech.

“I kneeled down to him and I could see his lips moving, so I put my ear next to his lips and I heard him say, ‘Is everybody OK?’ I said, ‘Yes, everybody’s OK.’ I put my hand between the cold concrete and his head just to make him comfortable.”

“I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers,” Romero says. “I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away.”

Read the whole story and hear the account of the busboy — now a 67-year-old haunted by the memory that day, and all that followed — at this link. 

Two thoughts:

First, it’s possible that Kennedy’s last words were, “Is everybody OK?” He was thinking about the others around him, not himself.

And secondly, I can’t help but notice how much has changed over the last five decades. How many 17-year-olds today carry a rosary with them, or know how to use it for something other than a necklace?

Meantime, another remembrance, in The Boston Globe, notes this about RFK:

Robert Kennedy was perhaps the most religiously driven of the Kennedy men, and certainly the most self-examining, but he had lived to that moment nothing like a sainted life. He was an aide to the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who lent his name to perhaps the worst ism native to American soil. He was regarded as the “ruthless’’ brother, ready and willing to crush rivals, and accomplished in the task. And he was seen as a serial opportunist: an attorney general who hesitated before plunging in on civil rights. A carpetbagger senator in New York. A skimmer — in the argot of old Irish South Boston, where the species is especially reviled — who jumped into a presidential race only after President Lyndon B. Johnson had been softened up by another McCarthy, Gene, of Minnesota.

But by 1968, Kennedy — drowning in despair and inflamed with anger — felt free to speak and act for himself.

“He reached out to people who otherwise had no full membership in our society,’’ said Peter Edelman, who as a Kennedy aide accompanied the senator to his meeting with the labor leader Cesar Chavez. “He went to see people and listened to them. That was the way he learned. He did this particularly for people of color, but really for people of all backgrounds who were in poverty, or near it.’’

Read on.