BILL WEISEL: Former ABC news director, now of Healdsburg, was shot when Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert F. Kennedy 36 years ago in Los Angeles

Bill Weisel had a front seat to history as an ABC-TV news director covering the White House and six presidents.

But he was a little too close to the action 36 years ago today when one of the bullets that assassin Sirhan Sirhan fired at presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy ripped into his stomach.

Weisel, now a Healdsburg resident, vividly recalls being shot June 5, 1968, as he followed Kennedy through a food service pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It's a memory he has every year around this time, or when someone recognizes him from the History Channel replay of a documentary on the shooting.

Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary and was going downstairs to meet supporters and star-struck fans, what Weisel and reporters referred to on campaign stops as "the rabble."

"I was with my producer when the shots started. I was right in back of Bobby," Weisel said. "My producer grabbed me around the neck and said 'Get down! Shots!' "

Weisel thought his colleague, Dave Jain, was wrong, that the gunfire was from the sound of campaign balloons popping against hot water pipes.

Little did he know that he, Kennedy and four other bystanders had been hit by the .22-caliber bullets fired by Sirhan.

At first, Weisel believed he had dropped his stopwatch, one of the most important items a TV news producer carries. When he reached for the watch, he felt dampness, then saw blood all over his white shirt.

"I said, 'Dave, I've been hit.' He said, 'I told you.' "

The screaming erupted around him and Weisel remembers lying on the floor but feeling no pain. That is, until "someone stood on me, walked on my leg," he said. That prompted a quote that made Time magazine: "If you don't mind, I've been shot," Weisel told the person walking over him.

The mortally wounded Kennedy was on the floor, about 5 feet away, although what Weisel recalls is the women in the campaign straw hats who kept appearing at the doorway.

"They would scream blood-curdling screams and then disappear, one right after another," he said.

A doctor who attended to Weisel mistakenly thought he was bleeding internally and was not going to make it.

Weisel remembers anchorman Roger Mudd holding his hand and comforting him. "He was never a particularly warm and ingratiating person. He was then."

"From that point on, it was lunacy. I don't know how they got Bobby out," Weisel said.

Weisel and the other wounded were strapped to makeshift litters made from tables and carried four stories down an outside fire escape.

Kennedy, the man who many believed stood to win the presidency, died the next day.

Weisel survived with few side effects, although he later was told by doctors the bullet came within one-30th of an inch of his spine.

The bullet, plucked out at the hospital, ended up with LAPD investigators. The FBI concluded Sirhan acted alone.

Sirhan was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life in prison in 1972 when the state Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan is eligible for parole but has been denied a dozen times.

Weisel believes Kennedy could have made a good president, even though he didn't really like his personality.

"He was not the most benevolent person. He was kind of rough," said Weisel, who sees Kennedy though the prism of the Army McCarthy hearings of the 1950s when Kennedy was an argumentative lawyer.

Weisel prefers Bobby's older brother, John F. Kennedy, whom he met when he was covering the White House.

He remembers JFK's camaraderie with the press corps and how he would good-naturedly toy with rookie reporters. "He would come in and talk to the boys because he was bored in his office."

Weisel remembers the day JFK snuck out of the White House to see the new James Bond movie showing a few blocks away.

When the Secret Service couldn't find him, a Cabinet meeting was called. But JFK was located relatively quickly in the theater. After a brief pause, the Bond film was resumed with Secret Service agents in place around Kennedy.

"He apologized the next day," Weisel said.

Weisel has dozens of anecdotes about presidents, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower, whom he met when he began working at the White House in the late 1950s as a management trainee for the local ABC affiliate. The last president he covered was Jimmy Carter, whose term ended just after Weisel retired in mid-1979.

Weisel, 66, owns the Geyserville Smokehouse Restaurant. It's an area of Sonoma County he was first drawn to in the mid-1970s, when he accompanied President Gerald Ford on a tour of The Geysers.

During his two decades in TV, Weisel had a "Forrest Gump" view of national events: He was there when they unfolded.

Whether on an aircraft carrier that greeted Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts returning from the moon, going with Richard Nixon to Russia twice, covering the Watergate hearings or being at the White House when JFK was shot, Weisel saw a lot.

As news director, he was basically in control of what was broadcast during an event, choosing camera shots, cueing reporters and anchors.

He covered Martin Luther King Jr. on his freedom marches, even walked with Coretta Scott King to the pharmacy to get medication for her migraine headaches.

Weisel said he quickly got over the awe of being with a president. "When you're in the White House, presidents are very familiar," he said.

Perhaps too familiar in the case of Lyndon B. Johnson, one of Weisel's favorites. LBJ had a penchant for reading newspapers in the presidential privie while talking to reporters through the open door.

Weisel said LBJ had been a leader of the Senate and knew how to get things done. Sometimes they were highly unorthodox. He recalls the time an angry Johnson threw a Washington Post editor against the wall for putting on the front page an embarrassing story about a presidential aide.

Weisel also liked Nixon, a Washington insider "who knew all the secrets" and wanted to be nice. "He just didn't know how."

With Watergate, Nixon made "an error in judgment over a very small thing - a lousy break-in," Weisel said. "He handled it poorly."

Watergate marked a turning point in the way the press covered the White House. Presidential peccadillos no longer were discretely overlooked.

"When the press found out they were lied to, the line was crossed," Weisel observed. "Leaders have to realize you can't lie to them (reporters). Especially in a free society."

After more than two decades, Weisel said he grew cynical and tired of the power plays both in Washington and at ABC News. He called it quits after a Christmas morning when he was unexpectedly called in to cover a "non story" of a man who crashed his car into a White House gate.

Weisel doesn't miss the travel and stress of covering the news. But he likes to reminisce about those days.

"It was an interesting time. When you're in the middle of something, you don't realize it, until you look back and say, 'Wow, I was there.' "