Robert F. Kennedy had the reputation of being a tough guy, taking on Jimmy Hoffa and fighting crime as President John F. Kennedy’s right-hand man and attorney general. But I’ll always see him as the quintessential gentleman, campaigning for his brother in the fall of 1960.
My mother, my twin sister Jane and I were Kennedy “groupies” back then. We’d met Sen. John Kennedy during the summer at the Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and followed his campaign appearances in Chicago with the zeal of true stalkers. We had honed our skills to an art form: Never try to compete with the huge crowds welcoming the candidate into the city; stand outside known destinations (his sister’s Chicago apartment, the local hotel or motel); go to the airport when the candidate is departing.
At O’Hare International Airport, we managed to walk alone with Sen. Kennedy to his plane, “Caroline,” after the infamous Chicago debate with Richard Nixon. Imagine, two 14-year-old girls chatting with the senator at midnight as he walks across the tarmac!
Bobby Kennedy was coming to Chicago to give a speech, and staying at a hotel near the airport. Sleuths that we were, we went to the front desk on the night of his arrival hoping to catch a glimpse of him as he left for the drive to the downtown rally. My mother was trying to convince the desk clerk that we had legitimate business with Mr. Kennedy. Alas, the clerk remained skeptical and refused to give out the room number. While she tried to persuade him, I happened to glance down and see the words, “Bob Kennedy, 147” on a piece of paper!
“Mom! Mom!” I hissed, trying to get her attention. The clerk grabbed the piece of paper, and we walked away.
Room 147 was down a long corridor. We waited in the hallway trying to decide our next move when the door opened and out came Bobby Kennedy. A waiter came down the hall and handed him a bowl of soup to eat on the run. We stood back, so as not to interrupt his makeshift dinner, but he said, “Come here, girls,” and was interested in talking to us.
As we chatted, two rather large women came down the hall and knocked Kennedy’s arm and the soup spilled all over the hallway rug. All of us — the waiter, Bobby’s assistants, my mom and sister and me — stood paralyzed. None of us could move, except Bobby Kennedy. He ran back into the hotel room, grabbed a towel and was down on one knee, wiping up the spilt soup and apologizing to the waiter: “I’m sorry to cause you so much trouble.”
Afterward, he resumed his conversation with us, as if nothing had happened. “Do you live near here? Do you go to school near here?”
Jane told him that we saw him on The Jack Paar show, and that we’d seen his brother the senator, in person, almost 30 times. He grinned, “And it gets better each time?”
“Yes, sir!” we replied. Then he shook our hands and took off to give his talk.
“Humility” comes from the Latin root “humilis” (low, lowly) and “humus” (ground, earth). But for me, the most profound definition of humility is visual: Bobby Kennedy, bent over, one knee to the ground, cleaning up a soggy mess that wasn’t his doing.
The recent news of the death of the busboy who cradled Robert Kennedy after he was shot brought this memory back to mind. That night in 1968, I was with friends at a restaurant in San Jose, Calif., celebrating our upcoming college graduation. The radio was on, and we heard it all in real time. It was really a sucker punch, especially after already trying to assimilate the assassinations of President John Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King., Jr.
The busboy, Juan Romero, said Bobby’s last words were asking if everyone was OK. That surely fits the experience I had of him — a loving and caring man.
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