He spoke softly, telling Kennedy how much he loved his country and tried to honor the ideals Kennedy preached.īobby Kennedy was a complicated man who had many critics on both the left and the right. On Saturday, Romero stood silently over the cross, his hands clasped, staring down at the small gravestone. When the young busboy realized the situation was grave, he took his own rosary beads out of his shirt pocket, twisted them around Kennedy’s hand and prayed for him. He tried to help, thinking perhaps that Kennedy had merely been pushed out of harm’s way and hit his head on the concrete. There’s no way to make sense of that, but I urged him to listen to his buddy, Chacon, who reminds him that in a moment of tragedy, Juan did a humane thing. RFK, a man of peace, was killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a man of violence and rage. I told Romero it’s time he let go of the guilt. He would have taken the bullet himself, he said, if Kennedy could have been spared. If he hadn’t been so intent on shaking Kennedy’s hand, he told me, he might have seen and stopped the assassin. Romero holds himself at least partly responsible for Kennedy’s death, and in his private moment with Kennedy now, he wanted to ask forgiveness. Chacon had finally suggested he visit Arlington for the sake of his own healing.
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Chacon, a retired TV newsman, had seen Romero break down many times over the years as he relived the trauma. “This is you,” the woman said to him, and Romero looked away in horror.įorty-two years later, as Romero approached the grave, his friend Chacon stood at a respectful distance, knowing Romero had to do this in his own way. On the day after the shooting, as he was sitting on the bus on the way to Roosevelt High, a woman, reading the Los Angeles Times, looked at a picture in the paper of a young busboy in a crisp white uniform, a mask of disbelief on his face as he tried to help Kennedy up off the floor. He had wept the night before as he anticipated this moment, telling me how he had refused to wash Kennedy’s dried blood off his hand. His chest was tight and his shoulders stiff as he made his way toward the simple, small white cross that marks RFK’s grave. Kennedy, and two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby lay dying from an assassin’s bullet.Īt Arlington on Saturday, Romero, now 60, walked slowly. Four and a half years after the assassination of John F. For years, he had avoided talking about his small part in a national tragedy, but he came to believe it was his duty to speak up about his own take on Kennedy’s legacy, in part because hatred and small-mindedness often pollute the national conversation.Īfter the speech, Romero pressed through the crowd again, his pride swelling. I first wrote about Romero in 1998, on the 30th anniversary of the RFK assassination, and was struck by his decency and spirit of goodwill. “If I can get it out of the way now.” Maybe a good cry would help him keep his composure, he said, when he finally stood at the grave. “Sorry,” he apologized to his daughter, Elda, and friend, Rigo Chacon, who had made the trip with him from California. Under a soft blue sky, with fall colors exploding across the velvety slopes of the cemetery, Romero walked off to be alone and have one last good cry before visiting the grave. Getting up the courage to visit Arlington National Cemetery was not easy for Romero, a construction worker from San Jose who has been haunted for decades by the events of June 5, 1968. Romero was wearing a suit for the first time in his life, saying it was the proper way to show his respect for a man whose memory he has tried to honor by living a life of tolerance and humility. On Saturday morning, more than 42 years later, he knelt again, this time beside RFK’s grave on what would have been Kennedy’s 85th birthday.
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As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.