His friend Bob

This week I interviewed the man who was shot first on the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Paul Schrade, walking with RFK in the photo above, and on the right with glasses in the photo below, was labor chair of his friend's presidential campaign, and was on stage with him on June 5, 1968, when Bobby Kennedy gave his victory speech after winning the California primary. The candidate was supposed to exit stage right, but was somehow diverted off the back of the stage and led into the kitchen panty. He entered the pantry ahead of everyone. Paul, just steps behind him, recalls thinking, Where is his security? Why is he alone? He remembers Bob, as he calls him, shaking the hands of two Latino bus boys, which pleased him, because Latinos and Black people had helped deliver the win that night. Suddenly, Paul says, the lights in the room became blindingly bright, and he collapsed, convulsing violently, unaware he'd been shot in the head. He heard sounds like firecrackers exploding in quick succession, and was in and out of consciousness after that. He didn't know his friend Bob had died until he awoke with his head bandaged the next day. Paul turned his face to the wall and sobbed. 

On our call, Paul suggested that I watch the four-part 2018 documentary Bobby Kennedy for President, which I did yesterday. At the end of it, I sat in my dark living room, so moved by the work of relieving abject poverty that RFK had been trying to do. At one point, he said that he had traveled all over the world, but had never seen the depths of hunger and deprivation that he had witnessed in his own country on a visit to the Mississippi Delta. It shook him. It changed him, and afterward,  he became committed to healing the devastation he had seen. He marched for Civil Rights, championed anti-poverty legislation, and worked with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to improve conditions for farm workers in California. He had famously bonded with Chavez when he broke bread with him at the end of a hunger strike on March 10, 1968, one month before MLK was shot and killed in Memphis, and three months before he would meet his own death in the pantry area of L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel.

Paul Schrade fell into a depression after that night. He emerged with a new purpose to create a living legacy to his friend Bob's work. He was the driving force behind the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools on the site of the old Ambassador Hotel, which serves a surrounding neighborhood of mostly Latino, Korean, and Black students. The photo above is of Paul in the school's Paul Schrade Library. He is standing on the spot where RFK gave his victory speech that night, everyone on that stage brimming with possibility and joy. 

Now 96 years old, with the vibrancy and vigor of a much younger man, Paul says he will not die before the world understands that there were two gunmen that night. He explained that the forensic evidence, some of which was not presented at trial, conclusively proves that Sirhan Sirhan, the young Palestinian immigrant whose bullet entered the crown of Paul's head, could not have killed RFK. The candidate was shot four times from behind at point blank range, as shown by the gun powder residue behind his ear, where one of the bullets entered, and on the back of his suit jacket. Sirhan never got that close to him, Paul says. As video footage shows, he was tackled and restrained after the first two shots, firing the next six shots wildly, and was never within a foot of Bobby. Further, Paul says, all the shots from Sirhan's gun flew in a westerly direction. The four bullets that pierced Bobby came from the east. Also, Sirhan's gun held eight bullets, while at least a dozen bullets were fired that night. Paul has a theory of who actually killed his friend, but he refuses to climb into that speculation trap, and relies instead on cold forensic findings to prove his case. (If you're curious about the theory, the documentary doesn't shy away from speculating.)

Paul Schrade is a lovely man. The light of humanity is alive in him. He seems to have cracked the code for how to carry the burdens of this world gently. He met with Sirhan Sirhan after that fatal night, and realized he felt no rancor toward the man who had almost ended his life. He saw Sirhan as another victim of the forces that had cut down his friend, and felt an urgency to let him know he had forgiven him. Emptied of bitterness, Paul is propelled instead by the desire to get justice for the candidate whose last words on this earth were, "Is everybody okay? Is Paul okay?" Fifty-two years later, Paul Schrade is more than okay. Talking with him this week made me fall back in love with the work I do. An important note: Everything in this post is in the public domain, easily searchable. I have revealed nothing new or confidential here.