by David Rowell
After these grisly incidents, the Kennedy family threatened to stop the train if other trains couldn’t be halted. For the duration, the Penn Central traveled at a significantly reduced speed, and the 226-mile trek ended up taking twice as long as was originally scheduled.
The coffin was placed in the last of the twenty-one cars and propped up on chairs so that it could be seen; at times, it had to be braced from falling.
By day’s end, it was estimated that there were anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people who had turned out by the railroad tracks to catch a glimpse of the train’s historic journey and to pay their respects. Many of those mourners lived in small, rural towns that were bisected by the rail lines. Old and young turned out in the simmering heat, black and white, the poor and middle class, the distraught and merely curious. There were choirs singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Honor Guards and mothers in curlers with babies on their hips and older women who had thought to bring flowers but who realized, as the train roared past, they were unsure what they should do with them. Some mourners, including many African-Americans, having come to expect this tragedy, dropped to their knees in anguish as the train passed—not only for the loss of an essential voice in the fight for civil rights, just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, but for the violent state of lawlessness their country had become.
Hubert Humphrey went on to win the Democratic presidential nomination and lost to Richard Nixon in the national election. America didn’t officially end direct involvement in the Vietnam War, which Robert Kennedy had come to bitterly oppose, until early 1973. The U.S. casualties numbered near sixty thousand.
As it turned out, Look magazine didn’t publish Fusco’s pictures taken from the funeral train, and they remained largely unseen until their first publication thirty years later. An expanded edition of that work, RFK (Aperture, 2008), included an additional seventy pictures never seen before. That book, to my mind, offers some of the most searing portraits of American grief ever captured. It’s a country that has come to know too well the cost of seeking justice for all its people, and while a sense of hope has not been completely extinguished, never has it seemed so far out of reach. For a single day, at least, politics were put aside for something more fundamental, more humane: a man who had dared to challenge, sometimes to condemn, the country he loved was dead, and here was a chance to say thank you for the work he did and had intended to do. The people who gathered along the tracks that day were too late to save Robert Kennedy, but they could honor his vision by going about their lives with renewed moral courage and conviction.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself,” he told a group of young people in South Africa on their Day of Affirmation in 1966, “but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bill Routhier, Beth Castrodale, and Audrey Schulman were extraordinarily generous and insightful writing group companions for many years.
Melissa Bank offered me invaluable comments on this novel—and true and timely encouragement throughout. Wells Tower weighed in at an essential time, and Marianne Gingher provided a spark that I very much needed. Ron Carlson imparted a guiding and instrumental lesson early on.
At The Washington Post, Len Downie and Patricia O’Shea selected me for a fellowship at Duke University, where some of this novel was written. Debra Leithauser offered me the gift of time.
At Putnam, Diana Lulek provided always cheerful and expedient assistance. At the Friedrich Agency, Lucy Carson gave me a steady and reassuring line of counsel on all matters throughout. I thank my agent, Molly Friedrich, for her fierce belief in this novel and my editor, Marysue Rucci, for her remarkable care with it. To them I’m profoundly grateful.
I thank Max Steele (1922–2005) for putting me on the path in the first place.
I’m indebted to Jack and Martha Fleer for their ongoing support; my brother, John, for his enthusiasm; my mother, Ann Rowell, for her unwavering faith; and my sons, Griffin and Anderson, for their patience. And to my wife, Katherine, for all the days and nights.
My father, Glenn Rowell, kept a house full of books but didn’t get to include this one. Still, he loved everything the author ever produced.
