Free Daring by Gail Sheehy Page B

’65,” he replied bluntly. “I accept the responsibility for my part of the blame. But that’s no excuse for perpetuating the error.”
    Wind blew a hard rain that smeared the plane’s windows as we approached Seattle. The senator was in a hurry to make a national press conference. Unbeknownst to us passengers, another plane was coming straight at us. Abruptly, our aircraft plummeted a thousand feet. Men screamed. My eyes shuddered closed. While we were still dropping, I heard Bobby Kennedy quip, “I knew Gene McCarthy was desperate, I didn’t think he was this desperate.”
    THAT NIGHT DICK TUCK ARRANGED for the Kennedys to be back on their big campaign plane, in the air and out of touch, when the results of the Oregon primary came in. At 10 P.M. , Dutton came back to Ethel Kennedy, who was swapping jokes with newsmen over a scotch and water. Dutton moved his lips silently. “We’re beat.”
    The senator came back from his private cabin with a smile, his hands wrapped in towels to sop up the bleeding from all the physical contact.
    â€œHey, how can you look so happy?” Ethel asked.
    â€œBecause I had such a good day.” It was his fatalism again.
    After eighty days of nonstop campaigning, Kennedy slept late on the day of the California primary and took his family to the beach. Polls closed at 8 P.M . CBS projected Bobby the winner, but other networks held back.
    I had to catch the red-eye back to New York. My plane was in the air when his victory became certain. At that moment, Kennedy was hurrying through the hotel kitchen on the way to his press conference.
    It was after 6 A.M. when I staggered out of the taxi from JFK and upstairs to my apartment. I had a sour premonition that something wasn’t right. Maura woke when I snapped the three locks. I picked her up so she wouldn’t wake my sister and carried her into the living room. The phone rang.
    â€œWere you in the kitchen?” It was Clay, in a voice I had not heard before.
    â€œThe kitchen?”
    â€œAt the Ambassador?”
    â€œOh, God, no, what happened?”
    â€œHe was killed, by a Palestinian. He’s not officially dead yet, but it’s all over.”
    I went numb.
    â€œHow soon can you get me the story?”
    I turned on the TV. Watching recaps: Kennedy, responding to a reporter, turned his face, looking for Ethel. I didn’t see the assassin raise his arm over the senator’s aides. I didn’t hear the shots fired from a snub-nosed revolver inches from Kennedy’s head. I didn’t see Kennedy stagger and fall. I didn’t hear the chaos, the yelling, “My God! He’s been shot! Get a doctor! Get the gun! Kill the bastard! No, don’t kill this one! Oh my God, they’ve shot Kennedy!”
    Maura walked into the living room just as another recap showed Ethel Kennedy kneeling on the floor and grabbing her husband’s hand. Blood was pooling behind his ear. Maura’s voice of innocence asked the question that would cause all Americans to search our souls: “Why is the lady in white bending over the man on the floor? Did something bad happen?”
    â€œA bad accident,” I lied. “Would you like French toast this morning, sweetpea?”
    I fed Maura, changed my clothes, woke my sister, and sat in front of my typewriter, lighting one cigarette after another. Clay’s words played over and over in my head. “You’re a journalist . . . a witness to history.” I meditated for a while. A shield of detachment gradually formed around my feelings. I began typing.
    It was his fatalism that carried Bobby Kennedy through, I wrote. For all his fearlessness in pleading for rational gun control, he had to know the chances were good that sooner or later, he, too, would walk into an assassin’s bullets. Among his last words were “Is everybody all right?”
    Even now, in the twenty-first century, America is more