In 1966 I was standing in the Lower Mills trolley station outside of Boston with my father. He was a staunch Republican from the State of Maine, but when a Mattapan-bound trolley stopped to let off Robert F Kennedy.

Sensing an opportunity to meet the future my father rushed me over to RFK. The young NY senator shook my hand and pressed flesh with the gathering crowd. My father and I ran across the tracks to catch the Ashmont-bound trolley and once seated, a passenger asked, “Who was that.

My father said, “The next president.”

I have no idea what he was doing there.

Maybe campaigning for his brother Teddy.

Two years later he was dead.

It’s almost 40 years since his death and recently Emilio Estervez directed a film about the day of RFK’s assassination BOBBY.

Set in the famed Ambassador Hotel the movie is a tranches de vie or slice of life exposition about the running of a large hotel intercut with actual footage of RFK’s speechs. Adultery, drugs, drunkenness, ageing, racism, labor, and Vietnam are only of a few of the topics covered by the Robert Altmanish screenplay, but what becomes clear is that America and the world lost a great deal more than a man’s life, when Sirhan Sirhan shot the winner of the California primary.

(Some people say it was the Mafia)

I cried that day and I cried at the end of the movie and also during Ted Kennedy’s eulogy in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “Some men see thing as they are and ask why, my brother dreams things that never were and asked why not.”

No one in politics talks like that today and the movie reminded me of where we were then and are now.

In 1989 I was in LA on holiday. My friend Adriana Kaegi of Kid Creole and the Coconuts was working on a video for the LAMBADA at the then-deserted Ambassador Hotel. I was a little hung-over and didn’t think much about the significance of the location until I wandered into the Embassy ballroom and said to myself, “I’ve been here before.”

Not in person, but I climbed onto the stage where RFK announced his victory. I stood at the dusty podium. His hands might have touched the wood and I looked to the left.

The kitchen door was open.

Rosie Grier was RFK’s bodyguard. The ex-LA Rams linebacker was supposed to protect the candidate from the crowds. Later he said that the candidate’s security plans called for an exit through the audience, however someone yelled, “No, Bobbie this way.

And RFK entered the kitchen. 

The film portrays the exuberant chaos and then a man sticks a .22 in the face of RFK and pulls the trigger.

Standing in that empty kitchen I realized this was a killer’s killing zone. Nowhere for the victim to run.

After the funeral CBS showed RFK’s cortege train passage from NYC to DC for this burial. The editor used BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER to heighten the loss and in BOBBY the director has SOUND OF SILENCE play during Bobby’s actual speech from the Embassy Room.

The movie ends with tears as a collage of America’s 1968 plays out on the screen with an audio of RFK’s speech on violence. Nothing has changed and we are not the same, although the trolley into Ashmont from Lower Mills is as it was on that day in 1966 still free.