Any references to the assassination of Robert Kennedy are especially chilling for those of us who were, so to speak, "there."
When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, I must have been one of the few people on the East Coast -- or practically anywhere in the U.S. -- still awake to watch it unfold. I was such a diehard Eugene McCarthy supporter (head of my campus Clean for Gene outfit) that I simply had to stay up until the last votes were counted in the tight California primary, even though all of the TV anchors had assured us that Kennedy was headed for a crucial victory.
I was still watching, unhappily, when Kennedy gave his victory speech past 3 a.m. in New York.
Kennedy was my senator but I had backed McCarthy early on and was one of the millions who resented RFK for horning in on the antiwar crusade only after Lyndon Johnson announced he would not stand for re-election. The word "opportunist" to describe Kennedy gained wide currency (even some of his supporters admitted it was deserved). However, many of the McCarthyites also came to admire his appeal to blacks, Chicanos and the poor and recognized that he would be a far stronger candidate in the fall -- if he (in tandem with McCarthy) could deny Hubert Humphrey the nomination, still an uphill battle.
In any event, I was watching the vote count to the bitter end -- and what happened in the wee hours of the morning remains vivid even after 40 years.
You've all seen the footage of RFK beaming and waving to the crowd at the Ambassador ballroom and saying, "On to Chicago," and then disappearing from the stage. Nearly everyone beyond the West Coast (and even most people out there) still watching clicked off their sets then, no doubt. CBS and NBC had already ended coverage, and ABC was about to sign off.
But I stayed tuned, and I'll never forget the first suggestions of something amiss.
As I recall, the evidence wasn't a news flash but simply a visual image of an injured body on a table and people standing around in distress, some sobbing, others with eyes in wide-eyed shock. I recall sitting straight up on the couch and pressing closer to the TV. What the hell was this? Then came word of a shooting, and with a Kennedy nearby, there could be little doubt of the target.
More confusion on TV, with the visuals telling the story and still little word about what had happened. Then we heard: RFK had been shot, so had others in wrestling the gun from the would-be assassin (that would explain the stray shot of a wounded man on a table), and Kennedy had been rushed to the hospital.
You had to "be there" to understand the disgust and shock -- just weeks after the Martin Luther King killing (and the riots that followed) and less than five years after Dallas.
I stayed up for a couple more hours, debating whether to go upstairs and wake my parents. Did not do that. Lights were out all up and down the street. I had the utterly bizarre sensation of feeling that I was alone in the world in knowing this utterly horrific news. This was false, of course, but it was easy to feel that way, at 4 a.m., in a pre-Web world..
After a couple of hours, I finally went to bed. When I got up about noon, Frank Mankiewicz was on TV offering a grim report on the senator's condition. About fifteen hours later, Kennedy was dead.
As much as I loved McCarthy, I knew the best hope for beating Humphrey and stopping the war had ended. More than that, one could (and did) feel at the time that nothing good could come of anything in America, amid a never-ending war and the Kings and Kennedys getting shot down when they reached a dangerous level of influence.
That's why, especially for us geezers, the Hillary Clinton remark, even if not intended the way it came off, was especially evocative, and disturbing.
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Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq. It features a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joe Galloway. Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher.