Dear Bobby:

As a boy living in refugee camps in Germany, I dreamed of a far-off utopia—a land called the United States of America—where justice ruled and all people loved one another. Sadly, having arrived on these shores in 1949 at the age of 13, I discovered that Americans were just as capable of bigotry and hatred as Europeans. I was devastated to read about anti-Semitism, particularly during the pre-war period, when prominent people such as Henry Ford preached that Jews were “the world’s foremost problem.”

In disbelief, I stared at photographs of Japanese-Americans being taken from their homes and placed in prison camps after Pearl Harbor. I read about crimes against American Indians. Most of all, I was appalled by my adopted country’s mistreatment of its Black citizens. I had read about lynchings and other cruelties as a boy in Europe, but somehow I had assumed that these had taken place hundreds of years ago. Now I discovered that Blacks did not have equal access to education and jobs; in many places, they were confined to using separate, inferior, schools and facilities from those reserved for whites.

But then, you rode in on that proverbial white horse. Finally, I had a hero who would change all that. You reached out to the poor and disenfranchised, to working-class whites, to inner-city Blacks. You understood that America’s greatness came from empowering all its citizens through equal opportunity to have a better life. You represented hope for a better future.

We were in the middle of a presidential campaign, and I hung my hopes on your returning sanity to our nation and the world. You would end the senseless Vietnam war and change the lives of all Americans. Not since your brother Jack challenged us to ask what we could do for our country had I been so inspired and hopeful.

My wife, Sue, and I watched television late into the night of June 4, 1968, as the returns from the critical California Democratic primary were being counted. We cheered and drank a toast to you when you were declared a winner, and thus would most certainly be our party’s candidate in the general election. Exhilarated, we marched off to bed.

The following morning, the radio woke me with the same kind of sad music I had heard after the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King. I was startled. “It can’t be! Not again!” But soon we found out that, indeed, it had happened again. You had been passing through a hotel kitchen when a Palestinian refugee named Sirhan Sirhan shot you three times. Now you, my last remaining hero, were lying in a hospital with a team of doctors trying to save your life.

We kept vigil all day and evening, while you were still hanging on. The next day, you were dead. I felt as though my world had come to an end. How much more could I take? What kind of a lawless country was this? My idealized vision of America, one I had carried with me on our journey from enslaved Czechoslovakia across the pond, was long gone. I wondered if it would ever return. I still wonder today and contemplate what a different world it would be, had you survived. Had you become president, perhaps the Trump nightmare would not have happened. If only…