
RFK Funeral Train
- Publisher
- Dewi Lewis Publishing / Umbrage Editions
- Year
- 2001
- Specifications
- Hardcover
17.8 x 28 cm
120 pages
53 photographs
Essays by Norman Mailer and Evan Thomas
Tribute by Edward M. Kennedy
Published in association with Magnum Photos and Umbrage Editions
On June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy’s coffin was put on a train 20 cars long in New York and taken slowly to Washington, D.C., for burial in the Arlington Memorial Cemetery. Paul Fusco, then a staff photographer for Look, was on that train, and the pictures he took of people who lined the tracks along the way fill this moving book. These emotional photographs, many never-before-seen, remember the urgency and tragedy of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the moving farewell from hundreds of thousands of people who stood patiently in the searing heat along roadsides down the east coast to watch his funeral train pass slowly by just as Abraham Lincoln’s had 103 years before. Essays by Norman Mailer (reporting in 1968 from the funeral) as well as a retelling of the story of the passage of the funeral train by Newsweek editor and RFK biographer Evan Thomas, join the tribute given by Robert Kennedy’s brother Senator Edward M. Kennedy, to evoke how this man and his vision of America touched people with idealism and humanity.