They Were There

"It's Breathtaking to Think About" 
Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby Kennedy's press secretary, on the night RFK was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. after winning the California primary, June 5, 1968.

"We didn't go downstairs until after 11 that night. Kennedy wanted to wait until Cronkite called it. He'd lost Oregon the week before, so winning California was a real breakthrough. He was happy, but he wasn't boisterous. He was one of the shyest people I've ever known. He wasn't very Irish in that respect. Off the elevator, we went through the lobby to get to the ballroom. The scene was total jubilation. I had written down some notes and the names of some people to thank on a yellow legal pad he took up to the podium. After the speech he was due to go to another room to talk to the writing press, mostly people who had been traveling with the campaign and to whom he felt closer than the network guys. I assumed we were going to go through the crowd. But the maitre d' said he knew a way through the kitchen to get there. The platform was about three feet above the floor. Ethel was about to step off and signaled for me and Bill Barry to help her down. She was pregnant. While we did, Kennedy moved off with the maitre d'. After we got her down, Ethel said to go catch up and that's when we heard the shots. It was a .22, so it wasn't very loud and I thought at first that maybe it was firecrackers. But then I heard people screaming and thought, 'Oh, God.' Dread is a good word to use. I started running. The corridor to the kitchen was long, maybe 20 yards, and when I got there people were wrestling and I saw that some people were shot and then I saw him on the ground. There was a phone on the wall and I called my uncle, a doctor who lived in L.A. I told him what had happened and said get two or three of the best brain people he knew to the hospital. As we were lifting him into the ambulance, his eyes were open and I heard him say 'No' very faintly. I spent the night busying myself with setting up the press room, getting doctors' reports. I had a job to do, and that's what saved my sanity that night. Somehow focusing on the work made it easier than just standing there and thinking about what had just happened, and what could have been. It's breathtaking to think about."

"I May Not Be Running"
Harry McPherson, special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson, on the secret decision LBJ made to announce, in a televised speech on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek reelection.

"In the middle of March 1968 I was asked to have lunch with the president in the Rose Garden. It was a sunny but chilly day. I started talking about a plan I had for the '68 election, to use the eminence of the '76 Bicentennial as a target for laying out a number of goals for America. As I was talking, we could hear the chants from the other side of Pennsylvania Ave of 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?' After I finished the president said, 'Well, I may not be running.' I said, 'You have to run. You're the only guy who can get any of these things done.' And he said, 'No, you've got it wrong. I'm the only one who can't.' The president was scheduled to make a speech on March 31. In January he'd asked me to get started on a Vietnam speech, an omni speech to justify everything we were doing. He had been meeting with a group called the Wisemen, former government people, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy, who eventually told him we need to get out of Vietnam. So he told me we needed a different speech, a peace speech, so I went back and wrote until about 10 p.m. On Saturday the 30th we had an all-day-and-into-the-evening meeting; that's the one with all the pictures of LBJ sitting at the table looking like death warmed over. At the end he asked me to make some final edits to this new speech, and before leaving he smiled and said, 'I may have something else to say at the end, myself.' As Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and I were walking out of the Oval Office, he turned to me and said, 'Christ, is he going to say sayonara?' And I said, 'I think so.' The next day one of the staff guys who was helping put the speech on the teleprompter called and said, 'God Almighty, he's added these three paragraphs to the end, and do you know what he's saying?' I said I had a clue. A few minutes later Johnson called and told me he'd added a little bit at the end and I said I'd heard. He asked me, 'What do you think?' And I said, 'I'm very sorry about that.' And he said, 'Well, thank you, pardner.' Then I went home and called a friend from across the street and we opened a bottle of bourbon. It was about 9 p.m."

"I Ran Upstairs and There He Was"
Andrew Young, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s principal lieutenants, on April 4, 1968, the day King was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn.

"I'd been in court all day, testifying at the hearings on the injunction over whether or not we could march, and when I got back to the hotel at about 5:30 everybody was in this silly mood. Martin's brother was in town. They hadn't seen each other in a while, and it was this grand reunion of old friends and family. When I walked in Martin looked up at me and said, 'Where have you been?' I said I'd been in court and he said, 'Don't give me that, you've been goofing off somewhere.' He threw a pillow at me and I threw it back at him, and then everyone just started throwing pillows around, and it was this very childish, playful moment. Behind the pulpit Martin always seemed so serious, but in private he was this big kid who loved to play around. We were all going over to Rev. Billy Kyle's house for dinner at 6, so Martin went up to his room to get dressed. James Orange and I were out in the parking lot shadowboxing when Martin came to the balcony. I called up to him to go put a coat on. It was cool out, and he already had a cold, but he said, 'Oh, I don't need one.' When the shot rang out I thought it was a car backfiring. When I looked up and he wasn't there, my first reaction was he was still clowning around and trying to make it look like he was shot. But then I saw his shoes sticking out from under the balcony, and I ran upstairs and there he was lying in a pool of blood. The bullet hit the very tip of his chin and went right through his neck. The wound was clean. It was like he'd been sliced by a knife. It was obvious he was dead. We rushed him to the hospital and when we got there I called Coretta. I told her he'd been shot but that he wasn't dead. It was too hard to say to her. I didn't go into the autopsy room; I didn't want to be there. I stayed outside the whole time, just thinking, 'How can you leave us in all this mess?'"