The Americans

Ambassador Hotel

19 Ambassador Hotel June 5, 1968 You have to read the reports and ricochets and blunt trauma in the walls of the greasy kitchen down the hallway’s throat, then return to your own hearing and back up a few frames, rewind. You have to rattle in the drum of the revelry leading to the shots, yes, and scroll to see the faces when he says . . . and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there. You have to hope the man at the podium is building a storm we’ll want to enter, that its gale winds will feed our rescuing power. There are men who set charges that will buckle a structure’s beams and iron struts. Maybe the storm is inevitable, like the drawn-out struggle for the gun. When he was young the candidate hated being touched, 20 but if you hunch over pictures, he’s reaching for the people of Watts. There’s an old Irish proverb that goes, Surround yourself with rising water and the flood will teach you to swim. As the crowd lifts him down the hallway, caught in one long, blurred shot, all we can see from here is his trailing wake. The hotel collapsed, is still collapsing. Is there a doctor in the house? We need someone now to save the body politic, and a rag to mop up the blood. ...