One day in early-summer 1968, my big brother, Paul Jacobs, was leaving work as a part-time statistician for the County’s Department of Probation in downtown Los Angeles when he stumbled across a political legend — and possibly America’s next president — in the backseat of somebody’s car. Robert F. Kennedy was not just a face one forgot.

The U.S. Senator from New York, now a front-running candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was just outside the hoary Biltmore Hotel on hilly Grand Ave. What he was doing there, fist-pumping a few well-wishers as news photographers and others looked on, was not clear. No one knows for sure if he was heading to an official campaign event or was passing through on an impromptu visit.

Paul, then a 21-year-old business major at USC and RFK-supporter himself, was stumped by the presence of the famous man in the dark suit, but he capitalized on his brush with history with dexterous fingers. He removed the lens cap of the 35-mm camera he carried with him all the time, approached the car in which RFK and his aides sat, and hit the shutter button a couple of times roughly 15 feet from his subject. There was no security shooing outsiders away.

Who would have known then the small dustup, or more accurately, the mystery that publication of these heretofore-unseen photographs would cause forty-three years later? The question about them revolves around time, specifically the gap between Paul’s shutter movement and an assassin’s gunshots that’d later ring out across the world, because if the photos were indeed captured on RFK’s last day, doesn’t that suggest there’s other missing pieces about it worth exploring? Whose sedan was Kennedy in? Who were the aides with that crisply parted hair? And why does something about candidate’s brow not look quite right?

Paul believes he snapped the photographs in the pre-dusk, 5 P.M.-range on June 4, 1968, the day of California’s primary election and approximately seven hours before a deranged, Palestinian-born stable boy murdered Kennedy in the kitchen of the old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard following an RFK speech. (RFK had just won California and other Western states, making him the presumptive favorite to secure his party’s nomination for the White House.) If not on June 4, Paul is certain he took the pictures no later than June 3, or about thirty-one hours prior to the assassination. He remembered waking to news that Kennedy was dead and felt a chill race up his spine knowing he’d just seen him. Whatever the timing, Paul’s photography constitute two privately-taken, relatively close-up pictures of the man who might’ve been our commander-and-chief, and maybe the leader who would’ve ended Vietnam before its bloody final coda and kept us from the little scandal known as Watergate.

My brother alerted me to these pictures years back, and being the writer and history buff in the family, I asked him if I could post them on my blog. Then I forgot all about them. Totally. It wasn’t until I saw something on the web about the assassination that I remembered what I had stashed on my hard-drive and uploaded them. Because they’d never been seen outside my family before, I emailed Kevin Roderick at LA Observed, who graciously mentioned them on his high-traffic political/media blog. Within a few days, visits on my own blogs jumped through the roof. The L.A. Times picked up on the pictures and went so far as to try to compare them with other known photographs of RFK, right down to the stripes on his pictured tie.

Then, another Paul threw his two cents in, and the bittersweet excitement turned to questions and consternation. Paul Schrade, a former United Auto Workers chief and RFK campaign aide, contacted Kevin and me, vehement that my brother could not possibly have taken his pictures on June 4, 1968, when I was six-and-a-half more interested in my dog-chewed, plastic army men than the Kennedy phenomenon. At first he dubbed it an “innocent mistake” but as time went on he grew more upset with me, despite my efforts to try and get to the bottom of the timing of the photos. As I discovered, Schrade did have a reason for intense feelings on the subject. He was shot in the head by Sirhan that awful evening, making him part of sad and lucky group who survived gunshot wounds in the same incident in which we lost Bobby Kennedy.

Schrade said it would’ve been impossible for RFK to have been anywhere near downtown on June 4, California’s election day, because he and his family spent the day at the Malibu home of a Hollywood producer John Frankenheimer – one of the men, if you can believe it, behind the Cold War conspirarcy flick, “The Manchurian Candidate.” Burned out from a grueling campaign, Kennedy didn’t set out for the Ambassador Hotel until evening, according to several accounts. But none of that explains the pictures that my brother is pretty darn sure were taken on June 4, and anyone who knows the city understands the distance between downtown and Mid-Wilshire, site of the Ambassador, is only a few miles and can be quickly travered, especially with police escorts. For all that, Schrade’s rendition must be considered. Here’s how one book described RFK’s last full day on earth:

“Kennedy spent the day swimming, sitting in the sun, talking to friends, playing with his children, and sleeping. He became so relaxed that he considered not attending his own election night party, suggesting that he and his family and friends watch the primary results on television. He wanted to invite the media to join them at (director John) Frankenheimer’s home. Because the television networks refused to haul their equipment out to Malibu, Kennedy reluctantly decided to go into Los Angeles to await the election returns. At 7:15 PM, Senator Kennedy, accompanied by Frankenheimer and other members of the campaign staff, left Malibu and sped downtown in Frankenheimer’s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III to the Ambassador Hotel for the election night party. At the hotel, Kennedy and several key staffers had reserved suites on the fifth floor. With the election still in doubt and Kennedy running behind, he went to his suite and remained there, hoping for the tide to turn.”

Schrade also forwarded to me a Youtube clip that buttresses this chronology. He and others wondered whether my brother, through nostalgia or the vicous haze of time, conflated June 1968 with April 1968, when RFK gave a well-known speech (Q&A after it) at the opulent Bitlmore. Again, Schrade was adamant that RFK was not near there the day of his victory speech at the Ambassador and his subsequent murder. “This has been confirmed by the Frankenheimers and campaign manager Fred Dutton,” Schrade emailed. “There was no election rally at the Biltmore or any other location. The car in the photo is not Frankenheimer’s car.”

So, what’s the truth here? Schrade did not volunteer when and where he thought the candid shots were taken, and others have come up blank as well about the details. Nobody knows whose car RFK was in or the identities of those with them. Speculation it might’ve been a young John Kerry or future Colorado Gov. Timothy Wirth, who both evidently worked on the Kennedy campaign, have been generally debunked by surviving confidantes and former journalists.

In an odd, highly-asterixed way, I felt a little lightheaded by Schrade’s denunciation and others fascination with the photos’ timing, as though I were sucked into the asteroid belt circling the “Kennedy mystique” as an outsider with the unbridled gall — and nobody’s permission — to add something private to the public trove about one of America’s political dynasties. The Kennedy narrative is hallowed stuff, and anyone who dares to challenge the writers of it may just have scornful fingers waved in their face and their motivations deduced. History is a prism.

But this story was not about piety, not about moral authority. It was about last glimpses of an immensely transcendent political figure — a man running for the highest office in the land after serving as U.S. Attorney General in the administration of his big brother, John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in his Dallas motorcade in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald. And, to the idiotic head-slaps of more than a few trying to pinpoint those photographs’ birth-date, the germane information was easily accessible on the web but only snatched by a man on the other side of America outside the debate. In two words, think forehead.

On what would prove to be the last full day of his life, Kennedy nearly lost a son. That would be the proof. Out swimming in the waters off Malibu with some of his children, Robert saw his son, David, drowning in the surf. It was June 4, 1968, and the windswept Pacific Ocean was chilly, the summer sky gray. By night-fall (or early the following morning in the pre-Internet age), America would probably know whether RFK or Hubert Humprhey would be the Democratic nominee in the upcoming presidential election. Richard Nixon would be the Republican challenger in a few months. None of that mattered in the hours before, though. According to numerous accounts, a crashing breaker knocked 12-year-old David off his feet, and a severe undertow yanked him down, trapping him beneath the water-line. Kennedy dove under the waves to save his child. Both were scuffed up during the rescue, RFK bearing a scar and bruise close to where he parted his hair afterwards. Supposedly, David promised his father he’d return the favor when he had his chance. Frankenheimer, meanwhile, applied theatrical makeup to his guest’s forehead, because Kennedy would be speaking that night in the crowded ballroom of Mid-Wilshire’s Ambassador Hotel. He couldn’t go on stage looking as though he’d already taken a hard object off the noggin.

This account is told here, here and here, among other places.

Now, examine the photographs carefully. Zoom in on them, especially this closer shot . Get a magnifying glass out. When you do, you’ll see the narrow, misshapen, maybe inch-long mark that RFK had evidently just sustained from rescuing his son against the ocean’s hard bottom. I have searched through pre-June pictures of him and never saw the blemish before. If that scar was fresh, that means my brother’s photographs really were taken when he believed they were: in the late afternoon, hours before Sirhan Sirhan assassinated the man who might’ve ended Vietnam, healed the nation’s cultural wounds and avoided Watergate.

The credit for connecting RFK’s forehead scar with the date of the mystery photos goes not to me, or Kennedy historians or anyone in his inner circle or public eye. The observation and conclusion goes to a music publisher named Dave Loughlin from North Carolina. A longtime Kennedy enthusiast and political-watcher, he found the shots on the web and did some sleuthing. To him I say “bravo.” If there are others with thoughts and comments, please contact me. I’m so gratified that the man from North Carolina took the time to put two and two together and contacted me.

Life, not unexpectedly, sunk for David after that day at the beach.

” … At just after Midnight on June 5, David watched on TV as his father claimed victory in the California presidential primary election, then the 12-year-old listened in horror as the same broadcast reported the Senator’s assassination moments later. The event left an emotional scar on David. He began recreational drug use shortly thereafter. David tried to combat his addictions many times. He completed a month-long stint at St. Mary’s Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis just before Easter 1984. He flew down to Palm Beach, Florida on April 19, 1984 for Easter, where several members of the Kennedy family had gathered. David checked into room 107 of the Brazilian Court hotel and spent the next few days partying. At the insistence of concerned family members, staff went to check on his welfare and found David dead on the floor of his suite from an overdose of cocaine, Demerol and Mellaril on April 25, 1984. David Kennedy was interred in the family plot at Holyhood Cemetery, in Brookline, Massachusetts.”

History, nonetheless, changed dramatically after the events at the Ambassador in ways far beyond the political ramifications. In the shooting’s aftermath, the Secret Service began providing protection to presidential candidates. Mind-boggling, preposterous and dangerous as it was not to have furnished them security before, no one questioned it later. I still can’t get over this. The United States loses both Kennedy brothers to assassins’ bullets and then we make changes? To read up about this after-the-fact policy, click for this NPR story. Here’s an excerpt:

“… Kennedy had several bodyguards with him, including football star Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, as he addressed a crowd gathered to support his bid for the White House. But there were no Secret Service agents present because before 1968, their services weren’t afforded to presidential candidates … ‘We only had 547 agents at that time,” (Special Agent Edwin) Donovan says. “We already had the president and the vice president and their families to protect, so that made it even a smaller number of agents to draw from.’”

Small comfort, considering the gravity of the loss. One question still eats at me. What if Robert Kennedy had knocked himself out or otherwise injured himself enough during his heroic rescue of his son so that he would’ve had to greet the masses celebrating his primary victory by telephone from Malibu, out of the range of Sirhan Sirhan’s treachery? The timing of Paul’s photographs would be an entertaining subject for nostalgic grinning, and that’s it.

Note: the photographs above are the private property of Paul G. Jacobs, and any use of them without prior written permission is strictly forbidden.