I was 15 on June 5, 1968, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Only six weeks earlier, I had shaken Kennedy's hand as he blew though my hometown on a whistle-stop campaign for the Indiana Democratic primary. It was a brief meeting, but it had a deep impact on me — so much so that even now, 50 years later, I can't look at photographs of that campaign or even write about it (as I am now) without choking up a little.

For most people who lived through the assassination horrors of that year — first Martin Luther King, Jr., then Bobby Kennedy just two months later — Dion's hit "Abraham, Martin and John" (written by folk-pop maverick Dick Holler) is the song that most directly and immediately evokes that time. An ode to fallen leaders and threatened ideals, it recounts the deaths of Lincoln, MLK, and Bobby's older brother JFK before adding Bobby as an afterthought (or maybe a climax) after what seems like a summing-up bridge.

Dion's version of "Abraham, Martin and John" was released in August 1968, barely a week before the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago. Aided by the singer's plaintive, soulful delivery and an arrangement that bolstered its folk-music base with swelling orchestral touches, the record seemed to strike a chord with radio listeners amidst the chaos and violence of the moment; it went to No. 4 on the charts, and by the end of the year, it was an RIAA-certified gold record.

For my money, though, the song that is most deeply evocative of the 1968 campaign — or at least of Kennedy's tragically aborted part of it — is John Stewart's "Omaha Rainbow," found on Stewart's 1969 solo debut, California Bloodlines. "John who?" you might ask, and I wouldn't blame you. But in 1968, Stewart, at age 29, was an artist with an already impressive résumé. He composed the Monkees' 1967 hit, "Daydream Believer," and he had recently finished up six years as a member of the Kingston Trio, the most commercially successful folk group on the planet. And as a solo artist freed from the strictures of the Trio's matching Oxford shirts and Vegas-friendly showmanship, Stewart had already started to formulate a distinctive Americana-based musical vision that incorporated elements of folk, country and early rock and roll.

Not only that, but Stewart and his romantic and musical partner, Buffy Ford, were regular parts of the Kennedy campaign entourage, stepping up to the microphone at rallies to sing a mixture of old folksong hits (many of which resonated with Kennedy's passionate appeals for an America in which there were no economic or racial outsiders) and Stewart's own original tunes.

"Omaha Rainbow" is an oblique travelogue of the Kennedy campaign, but one that significantly stops short of the tragedy that awaited the candidate — and, I believe, our country — in Los Angeles. The song evokes that moment after Kennedy's primary victories in Indiana and Nebraska, when the prospect of a victory in California would put the nomination — and possibly the Presidency — in his grasp. "Keepin' my eyes on the Omaha rainbow," Stewart sings, "Makin' the rain go out of my way." The storms are clearing, the road is opening; ahead lay the great middle and western stretches of the country, and beyond them the distant goal line of the nominating convention:

And even if I go out to California
I got to warn you what I'm goin' to say
Yeah even if I go out to California
It's a long way to August pickin' up friends along the way

But there's another verse in the song that for me encapsulates the tangled heartstrings of hope and desperation that the Kennedy campaign tugged at in the nation's dispossessed. As the story goes, at some point in the campaign, a boy broke out of the crowd and, running alongside the vehicle in which Kennedy was passing, shouted at the candidate: "Remember my name: Ernesto Juarez!"

Whether or not Kennedy remembered, Stewart (who may have been in the car with Kennedy at that point), certainly did — and made it impossible for anyone who hears "Omaha Rainbow" to forget:

And I remember the name, Ernesto Juarez
Wherever the man says we got to go
There's gonna be a change, Ernesto Juarez
But it's a long way to August, I got a lot of roads to go

In this verse Stewart deftly puts a name, if not a face, to the causes of justice and of social transformation that the Kennedy campaign was all about. It was about the Ernesto Juarezes of the world — about remembering their names and faces, about their desire to be known and recognized and respected by those who pass by them on the other side of the rope lines or behind the tinted windows of limousines.

By the time Stewart finished writing and recording "Omaha Rainbow," the particular dream of a Bobby Kennedy Presidency was long dead. Nixon was in the White House, and under his leadership American politics was already turning — hard — away from the course that Kennedy had been urging in his campaign. And yet Stewart gives Ernesto Juarez — and the rest of us — a chorus that counsels hope and dedication to the horizon of justice, far-off and unattainable as it may seem at times:

So keep your eyes on that far distant star
And the sun's gonna shine where you are

Over the years Stewart would write other songs that reference his time at Bobby Kennedy's side; in 1985 he gathered them into a suite that he released as an album, titled The Last Campaign, on his own label. But for me "Omaha Rainbow" is the song that most deeply triggers the mingled dread and hope, the possibility and tragedy, of that brief window of spring 1968.

Ernesto Juarez, wherever you are, I remember your name. And I hope we are both still able to keep our eyes on that far distant star.

AJ Scheiber is a Twin-Cities-based musician who currently sings and plays in the honky-tonk band Wilkinson James. In his other life, he teaches literature and writing at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

External Links

Robert F. Kennedy - biography at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy - biography at the U.S. Department of Justice

John Stewart - AllMusic

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