Now, I just happen to look up right then and I seen an arm and a gun stick out in front of us, out of the crowd, y’know? Five shots get fired off, I seen the red flash from the muzzle, and I duck because I was as close as Kennedy was. So close I got powder in my eyes from the flash! I grab for Bobby, throw myself accidentally off-balance and fall back against the ice-making machines. Then the Senator falls right down in front of me and I turn around and I seen blood coming down the right side of his face and I scramble up to my feet, draw my gun and go to the Senator. I look up and Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson and a bunch of people — you was one of them, wasn’t you, Nate? — are beating the shit out of this Sirhan guy. I was scared. I admit it. I was shaking, you know, physically shaking, the way you feel after a car accident. Another security guard stops me and says, ‘Let’s get out in front of this and stop the pandemonium.’ We get out of there.
No, I did not see Sirhan’s face. He was so short, he was standing behind other people and all I could see was his hand and the gun poking out.
Didn’t get a good look at the gun, no. I knew it wasn’t a .38 when it went off, because I’ve shot a .38 and a .22 and you can hear the difference.
Oh, I’d say I was four feet from the gun when it went off and Senator Kennedy was two or three feet.
“Did anyone,” I asked, “come up and squeeze between you and the Senator during all the bedlam?”
“No. People was getting shot and falling, though. It was crazy. Just fucking crazy.”
(Among the pilfered LAPD materials was the transcript of a radio interview with Thane Eugene Cesar fourteen minutes after the shooting, which concluded thusly: “What kind of wounds did the Senator suffer?”
“Well, from where I could see, it looked like he was shot in the head and the chest and the shoulder.”
This made Cesar the only witness to describe accurately the location of RFK’s three wounds.)
I asked, “Were you carrying your own weapon that night, Gene?”
He shook his head. “I had a .38 that Ace issued me. They like the larger caliber. Better stopping power.”
“Did the LAPD confiscate that weapon?”
Another head shake. “No. Or the sidearms of the other two security guards in the room, neither. Those guards was plain-clothes, by the way. I was the sole man in uniform.”
“According to police reports, you owned a .22 like Sirhan’s, but sold it months before? Is that right?”
“It is. A Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver. Sold it for fifteen bucks to Jim Yoder, a Lockheed pal who was getting ready to retire and move to Arkansas, which he did... You sure you don’t want a beer?”
A baby was crying somewhere.
“No thanks.” I shifted in my metal chair and it squeaked. “Gene, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I was Robert Kennedy’s security chief that night.”
His eyes popped like a squeeze doll’s. “Jeez. Shit. I didn’t know.”
I smirked in self-reproach. “Kind of makes us both bodyguards who dropped the ball.”
His soft face turned hard. “I don’t accept that! And you shouldn’t either, Nate. I know all about Bobby refusing to have any armed security seen with him. Gardner, the Ambassador security chief, made that clear. The Senator did not want to be photographed that way!”
“Oh, I know.”
His turn to smirk. “Bobby probably woulda had a shit fit if he seen an armed guard like me sidling up behind him, huh-hah-hah. I was told in no uncertain terms I was strictly there for crowd control. But that Pantry was so packed and risky, he was probably glad for any help. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. I don’t.”
“No sleepless nights?”
He slapped at the air. “Hell no. Well... I had my share of nightmares, dreamin’ I was back in that sardine can with bullets flying every fucking which way. But Senator Kennedy got himself killed with his dumb-ass ideas about keeping the cops out and security to a minimum. Hope I don’t offend you saying so.”
“Not a RFK fan?”
That overbite smile looked at once childish and sinister. “I definitely wouldn’t have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas his brother John did, and JFK sold this country down the river. I think all of them Kennedys are the biggest crooks who ever walked the earth. They literally gave the country away to the Commies, the minorities, the Blacks.”
I twitched a smile. “A Nixon man, then.”
He slapped the air again. “Oh, fuck him, too. I voted for Wallace!”
George Wallace, the notorious segregationist ex-governor of Alabama, had won five states in 1968 with his third-party campaign.
My host gulped some beer, sat forward. “Shit, man, I worked my ass off for ol’ George — passed out handbills, made donations, you name it. Bobby Kennedy getting shot isn’t the tragedy — George Wallace losing the election is the tragedy!”
I squinted at him. “Yet you were right there, protecting Bobby Kennedy that night. Risking your life to do so.”
He leaned back, slapped his pudgy chest. “Because it was my job! Just because I don’t like Democrats don’t mean I go around shooting them every day, huh-hah-hah.”
How often did he shoot them, I wondered?
“Sorry,” he said, and that soft face that had turned hard softened back down. “If you was his security chief, you must’ve been a Kennedy man. I don’t mean no offense.”
“None taken. Like you, I was just doing my job. Filling in for a guy.” I smiled and lied through my teeth: “Can you imagine how much better off we’d be in this country with George Wallace as president?”
He toasted me with his 102. “Fuckin’ A. That Wallace didn’t take shit off nobody! I’m fed fucking up, and a lot of people I work with feel the same. Shove us too far and, one of these days, we’re gonna fight back. If we can’t do it at the ballot box by getting the right man in to straighten this shit out, then we’ve got to take it in our own hands. I can’t see any other way to go!”
“I hear you.”
He squinted at me, the upper lip with the skinny mustache curling. “The black man, these past four to eight years, has been shoving this integration shit down our damn throats... so we’ve learned to hate him, the black man. And one of these days, at the rate they’re goin’, there’s going to be a civil war in this country. It’s going to be white against Black... and let me tell ya, huh-hah-hah — the blacks ain’t never gonna win!”
SUS chief Robert Houghton, in a news release announcing the shutting down of the official investigation, had said, “No one with far right-wing connections was inside that kitchen pantry.”
Good to know.
“Why the hell,” Nita asked, “would Cesar be so candid?”
We were tucked away in a corner of the multi-tiered Miceli’s, perhaps Hollywood’s most popular Italian restaurant. The walls were brick, the woodwork carved, the windows stained glass, the ceiling a nest of hanging Chianti bottles, the tablecloths red-and-white checkered, and the red leather of the booths of a vintage going back to the defunct Pig ’n’ Whistle from which they had been salvaged when my old Chicago crony Carmen Miceli opened the place in 1949.
“Maybe I’m a brilliant interviewer,” I said.
We were sharing an antipasto salad and a bottle of Campione Merlot.