Clarke Thurston - Robert F. Kennedy: ripples of hope: Kerry Kennedy in conversation with heads of state, business leaders, influencers, and activists about her fathers impact on their lives

O ne of the passengers on the train bringing Bobby Kennedys body from his funeral in New York to his burial at Arlington National Cemetery looked out a window at the mourners lining the tracks and asked herself, What did he have that he could do this to people?

Its a question that I tried to answer in my book about his 1968 campaign.

Its also a question we might ask ourselves in 2018, fifty years after his assassination: What did Robert Kennedy have, for example, that has brought us all together tonight, almost fifty years after his death, in this place, at a conference bearing his name?

Its a question whose answer may help you make decisions that take into account justice, human rights, the environment, and poverty.

I came across the question at the archives of the JFK Library in Boston while reading a collection of oral interviews conducted with passengers on that twenty-one-car funeral train bound for Arlington on June 8, 1968.

Passengers on that train looked out and saw what may have been the most dramatic and moving display of public grief ever displayed for an American never elected to the presidency. Trains carrying the remains of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt had traveled at a slow and mournful pace, but Kennedys train had been scheduled to travel nonstop and a normal rate of speed. Crowds were expected, but no one had imagined that on a steamy Saturday afternoon in early June two million people would spontaneously head for the tracks between New York and Washington, wading through marshes, hiking into meadows, filling tenement balconies, climbing onto factory roofs, standing in junkyards and cemeteries, looking down from bridges, and creating a 226-mile-long chain of grief and despair.

Once the train emerged from the Hudson River tunnel into New Jersey, it encountered so many people jamming station platforms and spilling onto the northbound tracks that the engineer had to reduce speed, and reduce it even more after a tragic accident in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when those in the train could look out the windows and see their grief reflected in the faces of mourners lining the tracks.

They saw men in suits, sport shirts, uniforms, and undershirts, crying, saluting, standing at attention, hands over hearts. They saw women in madras shorts and Sunday dresses weeping, kneeling, covering their faces, and holding up their children.

They saw American flags dipped by American Legion honor guards and waved by Cub Scouts, and because anyone with a uniform seemed to have decided to wear it, they saw policemen in gold braid and white gloves, fire companies standing at attention next to their trucks, and veterans in overseas caps snapping salutes.

They saw the kind of white working-class voters who had supported the 1964 candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace for the Democratic nomination, and who might vote again for Wallace or Richard Nixon in November, although until four days earlier many had been planning to vote for Kennedy, even though he was an acknowledged champion of black Americans and had condemned an American war as deeply wrong.

The NBC commentator David Brinkley had called Kennedy the only white politician who could talk to both races, and compared his assassination to Lincolns. So the passengers saw black Americans who had embraced Kennedy more passionately and completely than any white politician since Abraham Lincoln, and who sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the train passed through Philadelphia and Baltimore.

The passengers remembered five nuns standing on tiptoes in a yellow pickup truck, black militants holding up clenched fists, a white policeman cradling a black child in his arms, and a line of Little Leaguers standing at attention along the baselines, heads bowed and caps held over hearts.

A Life magazine reporter, Sylvia Wright, saw a wedding party standing close to the tracks in a Delaware meadow. The bridesmaids were holding up the hems of their pink and green dresses in one hand and their bouquets in the other. As the last car carrying Kennedys coffin approached, they extended their arms and threw their bouquets against its side. After seeing this Wright asked herself the question that has become the descant of much that has been said and written about Bobby Kennedy since, What did he have that he could do this to people?