A COUPLE DEGREES OF SEPARATION

By Meri, MSS Contributor

In the months leading up to June 6th, 1968 I worked for Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. I was referred to as one of the "Boiler Room Girls" because we sat near a bank of phones and made cold calls to people to get them to vote for Bobby. We were usually in windowless rooms in the basement of some hotel or building in downtown Los Angeles. We all believed in him and wanted him to be elected President and if he had lived, he probably would have been. He was ahead in the polls.

On June 6th, In Los Angeles, CA it was primary day and Bobby won. We were all invited to attend his victory party at The Ambassador Hotel in downtown L.A. We were all very exited about seeing him and shaking his hand and we KNEW that he was on his way to becoming the next President.

Robert Kennedy was a very intense man who didn't make a lot of small talk. He would often walk through the room we were in and shake his head acknowledging us but seldom smiled. His mind always seemed to be somewhere else. You could feel the electricity whenever he came into the room. He had a different kind of charisma than his brother John had but it was electrifying nevertheless.

After hearing that he had won the primary election I was planning to get dressed up to go to the hotel to congratulate him and probably to accept his thank you to all of us who had worked for him.

My friend Joel who also worked for Bobby was scheduled to pick me up that night for the ride downtown so I had to hire a babysitter since I was then a single mother of small children. I was 26 years old. I began to feel kind of queasy early in the evening and was worried that I had caught the stomach flu from one of my kids who had been sick earlier that week and I was right. I soon found myself throwing up in the bathroom and knew that I wasn't going anywhere that night.

I called my friend Joel and told him to go ahead without me and I opened up the sofa bed where I slept back in those lean days and prepared to watch the festivities on television.

I had probably dozed off for a few hours because I remember waking up to shouting and seeing a huge commotion on the television screen in front of me. It took me a while to figure out what the hysterical reporters were talking about but I gathered that something had happened to Bobby as he made his way out of the hall where he had spoken and through the kitchen of the hotel.

I finally was able to focus and I saw Bobby lying on the ground with one eye open and the other eye closed. I was a student Nurse back then and I knew immediately that this was a horrid injury and that it had penetrated his brain based on the way his eyes looked. I also saw something else that stunned me. My friend Joel was clutching his shoulder and someone was giving him a towel. I later learned that one of Sirhan Sirhan's bullets had hit Joel in the shoulder.

Joel recovered but Bobby did not. The rest is history.

As I watched the funeral train taking Bobby's body back to Washington for his funeral and burial I kept flashing back to that night and I have wondered ever since where I would have been if I had gone to the hotel.

It is 38 years later and Presidents have come and gone. The Kennedy's have had their share of other tragedies since that night but this one was personal to me in a way that's hard to describe. I still believe to this day that he would have made a good President and I will never forget the way he looked and spoke and how that made me feel.

As an odd footnote to this story and one that defies belief; two years later I had traveled to San Quentin Prison where my ex-husband was serving out a sentence for a crime that he had committed. While I waited for them to bring him down I sat next to a little, dark-skinned lady with grayish hair and a foreign accent.

As I looked through the locked doors I saw my Ex being lead into the visitors room. He was shackled to another man who was taken to a different section. The little lady that I had been talking to got up and went through a different doorway and I never saw her again.

When my Ex came out to see me I asked who the short guy was who he had been shackled to. He told me that it was Sirhan Sirhan and I realized that I had been talking to his Mother for over an hour.

I can't even describe the feeling that I had and what went through my mind...it was one of the strangest experiences of my life.