Pressing Flesh

In the summer of 1966 I was standing with my father at the Lower Mills station outside of Boston. We were headed to work. Him for New England Tel and Tel. Me at a restaurant dishwashing. A Mattapan-bound trolley stopped to let off a crowd. My father and I were mystified by the hubbub, until the trolley pulled away from the platform and we spotted Robert F. Kennedy.

The forty year-old politician was campaigning for his brother Ted.

My father was a staunch Republican from the State of Maine, but sensed an opportunity to meet the future president of the USA and rushed me across the track to RFK, where the young NY senator was pressing flesh with his admirers. He shook my hand and I wished him good luck. Our trolley was approaching and my father and I ran to the other side. Once seated on the trolley, a passenger asked us, "Who was that.

My father said, "The next president."

We prayed for that future, but two years later after winning the California primary a gunman shot RFK dead in LA.

It's been over fifty-three years since his death and every day of this presidential election it what becomes clear is that America and the world lost a great deal more than a man's life.

I cried that day and I cried recently watching 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

In 1989 I was vacationing in LA. 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 enormous black 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. There was nowhere for the victim to run.

I cried once more for the loss of RFK

We are not the same as we were in 1968, although the trolley into Ashmont from Lower Mills is still free as it was on that day in 1966 and that is a good thing.

We miss you Bobby.

  And Martin and Malcolm Biggie and Tupac and thousands more murdered by the powers that be aand they are still murdering. Resist. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8rxSYMi-c&feature=related

December 16, 1978 – East Village – Journal

A Pleasant Paradise
1963 Snipers murdered JFK
1968 A sniper kills Malcolm Luther King.
Gunmen assassinate Malcolm X and RFK
Our leaders dying before their time
Before their replacements
Richard Nixon betrayed the USA
But kept coming back
The Messiah of the Silent Majority
Why did you live?
When so many others died.
Almost sixty thousand US soldiers in Vietnam
Millions throughout Indochina
And Henry Kissinger
The blood of Cambodia on his hands
Palestine too.
He will live to an old age
Never to go to Hell or Heaven
Only finally to death

Leaving us in a pleasant paradise.

Bad poetry

Who Killed the Kennedys?

The night Barack Obama was elected president, people danced in the streets of New York. Our man had beaten the GOP. I looked into the eyes of a man my age and we started crying, not out of joy, but in relief of having endured the lost years since November 22 1963.

Obama was one of us. He took office two months later. The presidential limousine drove him from the inauguration stage to a series of parties. Thousands of supporters glad-handed their president and at the end of the festivities Barack Obama found himself in the White House.

He had it all.

The Oval Office.

The Red Phone to Moscow.

The Briefcase.

They were his along with two wars in Asia and a shattered economy by billionaire tax breaks.

That evening he must have looked at his wife and said, “What now?”

If I was Michelle, I would have said, “What about the Kennedys?”

"What do you mean?"

"Who killed the Kennedys?"

"That's a dangerous question." And he dropped the subject.

The President had eleven years of access to the deep, dark secrets buried by various agencies; Roswell, Martin Luther King, Pearl Harbor et al. We had too many questions, yet nothing new came to light during his administration and considering the body count for asking the wrong questions, I can appreciate his patience.

It takes time to unbury the truth and even fifty years after the fact and it doesn't look like Obama is going to get it for us either before his access is gone.

So who killed the Kennedys?

Someone knows, but they ain't saying, but according to the Rolling Stoners, "It was you and me."

Cold Irish Revenge

I can remember what I was wearing on November 22, 1963. A white shirt, sky blue tie, and dark navy trousers were the boy's uniform at Our Lady of the Foothills south of the Neponset River.

It was a beautiful autumn day.

Then Mother Mary Superior spoke over the intercom and tearfully announced, "President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas."

These words did not change our lives for more than a few weeks as America accepted the lone gunman theory.

But not for all of us.

Irish Cold Revenge tells a different story than the Warren Commission.

It's a true as anything else.

Peter Nolan Smith filmed by Kai Effron

Sunny Cold And Loud

Last night I went to bed at a decent hour. My eyes closed reading AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy. He really hated the Kennedys and I dreamed about my meeting RFK at the Lower Mills trolley stop in 1966. JFK's younger brother shook my hand with the a reincarnated firmness. I attempted to warn him about the gunman in the LA hotel, but a pounding noise disrupted my Sunday morning slumber. The thumping came from the construction of a condo a good ten blocks from the Fort Greene Observatory. I checked my telephone for the time. 7:01. The contractors had their workers at it early probably to catch up on a yesterday lost to snow and rain. I looked out the window. This morning's sky was blue with wispy clouds. I hadn't turned on the heat. My bedroom was cool, although I couldn't see my breath. The work crews on the condo wouldn't be so lucky and I hoped that they were getting double overtime and buried myself in my pillows, hoping to regain contact with RFK. He was still back there in my dreams.