The Last Campaign
Thirty-six years later, the movie is still playing in his mind.
"Everything I saw and everything I heard, it's still there inside my head, like a slow-motion movie," photojournalist Bill Eppridge has said of that night—June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Senator Robert Kennedy had just won the California primary and was almost certainly going to be his party's nominee for President. He made a short victory speech, walked off the stage in the hotel's Embassy Ballroom and turned right. "We had a procedure where a couple of photographers and the television crew would form a wedge to get him through a crowd," Bill has said. "Behind the point of the wedge was his bodyguard, Bill Barry. The Senator could shake hands...could move around behind us as we walked backwards through the crowd, photographing him. It worked well for everybody."
But everybody had expected him to turn left to go back to his suite. "Bill Barry said, 'Senator, this way,' and tried to lead him to the left. Bobby said, 'No, Bill,' and pointed to the right, to the kitchen." Senator Kennedy had decided to go to the press room. "He'd been criticized a bit for doing television interviews before he spoke to the writing press, and he was going to talk to the writers about this California victory and invite them to a party that was going to take place later. If he'd gone the other way, the way we all thought he was going to go, it would have taken him completely away from the kitchen."
Because of the change in direction, the wedge didn't form. "He left us flat-footed. I was about 12 feet behind him, and Barry, who'd been pulled off a car the day before and had, I think, a bruised Achilles tendon, was working hurt and wasn't able to catch up with the Senator quickly enough."
Bill Eppridge was working for Life magazine at the time. He'd met Robert Kennedy in 1966 when he covered Kennedy's activities during that year's Congressional elections. In 1968, Bill got himself assigned to Kennedy's presidential campaign. "All the way through the campaign we had feelings that something could happen. The press corps talked about it, about how what had happened to his brother could happen again. The feeling in the country was not good.
"The day before he was shot, we were in Chinatown in San Francisco and somebody set off a string of firecrackers. The Senator dove to the bottom of the car, and we were just petrified.
"When the gunshots went off in that kitchen...I realized what it was. I had been in riots and wars and revolutions, and I knew the sound of gunfire, especially the sound of gunfire coming at me. There were eight shots, I counted them.
"I grabbed the CBS cameraman, Jimmy Wilson, who was next to me, and I pushed him forward. I had no flash, and he had a lighting technician with him—I needed that light. People were frozen in place—it was like one of those nightmares where everything is stopped and you're the only person moving. Jimmy was frozen—he heard the gunshots and he didn't move. I grabbed his arm and we went forward. When we came on the Senator I did something you should never do, but I had to because I was low on film. I said to myself, the picture isn't right from here—I was at the Senator's head—and with Jimmy Wilson, I went around to the Senator's feet. There was a pile of people on the ground and somebody was screaming, 'Don't kill him, don't kill him!' and I realized that underneath that pile was whoever had shot the Senator. I saw the Senator to my left and I had to make a decision as to what I would photograph.
"The busboy who had been shaking his hand as he went down was still holding him. Jimmy is filming, his light was on [and] I started to make pictures. I made three frames: the first one was totally out of focus; the second was in focus, it was pretty good, the busboy is looking down at him; and the third one, with the busboy looking up as if he were saying, 'Somebody help,' that's the photo that's become the icon. Then people started coming in, and the place turned to bedlam."
Bill continued to photograph, then gave his two rolls of film to a Time magazine reporter who was going back to the Time-Life office. "I told him to tell the lab to push it one stop.
"Jay Eyerman, who had run the Life lab in New York, was now living in L.A. and working for the magazine as a photographer. He opened up the lab at the Beverly Hills office and decided to process my film right there. He asked the Time reporter if this was Eppridge's film, and the guy from Time said, 'Yeah, Eppridge says push it one stop.' But Eyerman knew me and the way I worked, and he knew that I constantly underexposed my film. So he decided to push two stops. And he saved it. That film would have been gone had he not done that. Still, that negative was so thin you could barely see it.
"It went through my mind not to take the picture, but this was history—that's Life magazine training; it's instinctive. My other thought was, do I help? But there were so many people around, they didn't need my help. I had to do my job."
Bill had come to Life magazine as a result of winning a picture competition at the Missouri School of Journalism; among the first prizes was a week-long internship at the magazine. After graduation he worked for a time for National Geographic, then began working for Life as a freelancer, becoming a contract photographer in 1962. In ten years with the magazine he covered the war in Vietnam and unrest at home. His photo essay on heroin addiction was the inspiration for the 1971 film, The Panic in Needle Park. He photographed the Beatles when they came to the U.S. for the first time.
After Senator Kennedy's assassination, Bill tried to get back to political coverage. "I did a little thing with Hubert Humphrey, but I found myself looking over my shoulder, and I freaked out every time somebody dropped something on the floor. There were guys on Bobby's campaign who were on Jack's, and they were that way, and I thought they were crazy. Then suddenly I got that way. I thought, probably better to have somebody else on the campaign."
He worked on environmental and outdoor stories for Life until the magazine closed in 1972, then he signed a corporate contract with Time Inc. "I tried all the magazines to see if I liked working for Time or Fortune. I was there for the start of People." Eventually he hooked up with Sports Illustrated, where he is today. "I'd done sports in college and a fair amount of it at Life. At SI I don't do the kind of work our action shooters do. I go into stories that are more journalistically oriented—Mt. St. Helens, the Alaskan oil spill, those kinds of things. I cover the Olympic winter games, bobsled races—sports off the beaten track and environmental issues that relate to sports and the outdoors. The stories I like have to do with the outdoors—hunting, fishing, climbing, anything that has to do with an outdoor activity, especially if there's water or boats or fish involved."
June, 1993, on the 25th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's death, Bill's book, Robert Kennedy, the Last Campaign, was published.
The movie still plays in his mind. "I can see it all," Bill says, "and I think about how our history would have been different if Robert Kennedy had come off the stage that night and turned the other way. Every day I think about that."
In the Bag
Bill's been sidelined for close to three years with a back problem, but has used the time to become familiar with digital cameras. "I mainly use the D1X now," he says. "I have a few D100s, and I'm looking forward to getting a D2H, but right now my main camera is the D1X." The lenses he favors are the 12-24mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S DX , 20-35mm f/2.8D AF and 80-200mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S Zoom-Nikkors.
He's feeling better these days and is looking forward to taking the gear out into the field for an upcoming Sports Illustrated assignment. While recuperating, he was able to do some lecturing and instruction at a few workshops, including Rich Clarkson's Photography at the Summit. "I wasn't able to shoot, but I could share some information." Among other things, he was able to tell the students how to sneak up on a giraffe. "The idea," Bill says, "is to go low."
