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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOn this day, June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy's funeral train ran from NYC to DC.
Tue Jun 8, 2021: On this day, June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy's funeral train ran from NYC to DC
Mon Jun 8, 2020: On this day, June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy's funeral train ran from NYC to DC
Along route of Robert Kennedys funeral train, [June 8,] 1968:
Link to tweet
Another scene from Robert Kennedys funeral train, [June 8,] 1968:
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I found this exhibit at
@SFMOMA
very moving - photos taken by Paul Fusco from the train carrying Robert Kennedys body; snapshots & home movies by the spectators; & a 70mm film reenactment of the trains journey by French artist Philippe Parreno.
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Wed Apr 4, 2018: Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral Train, Fifty Years Later
Hat tip, Trainorders: Nostalgia & History > Photo Essay on RFK Funeral Train
By Louis Menand April 3, 2018
The Train: RFKs Last Journey is an ingenious and, in a surprising way, affecting exhibition that opened last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Although the train in question is the one that, almost fifty years ago, carried Robert Kennedys body from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial in Arlington Cemetery, the show is not about Kennedy. The show is about deathor, more exactly, about the relationship between photography and death. .... Robert Kennedy is now dead. He was shot in the head at 12:15 a.m., on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary. He had been campaigning for President for not even three months. He never regained consciousness and died the following day. His body was flown to New York City, where, on June 8th, a funeral was held at St. Patricks Cathedral. Immediately afterward, the casket was put on a train to Washington.
The heart of the sfmoma show is a set of twenty-one photographs taken from aboard that train by a photographer named Paul Fusco. It was a last-minute assignment from Look, where Fusco was a staff photographer, and he assumed that his main task would be in Arlington, where Kennedy was to be buried next to his brother John. But when the train emerged from the Hudson River tunnel, Fusco was amazed to see people lining the tracks. He found a spot at an open window, and, for the eight hours it took the train to get to Washington, he shot picture after picture of the crowds who came out to witness Kennedys body being carried to its grave.
Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968. Photograph by Paul Fusco / Magnum / Courtesy Danziger Gallery
Those pictures eventually became some the most famous works of photojournalism from what was a golden age, the era of the big mass-circulation picture magazines: Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Paris Match, and Stern. Fusco carried three cameras with him on the train: two Leica rangefinder cameras and a Nikon S.L.R. For almost all of the shots, he used Kodachrome film, and he took around a thousand pictures. By the end of the journey, as dusk fell, his exposure times were up to one second.
Trains in the Northeast corridor do not run through upscale neighborhoods. The people who spontaneously turned out to watch the funeral train pass byKennedys biographer Evan Thomas says there were a millionwere, by appearance, mostly working class, and there were whites and African-Americans often standing in clusters together. In 2018, looking back at those images, as the train approaches the terminal and the light begins to fade, you realize that you are watching the final hours of the great Democratic coalition that had dominated American politics since the election of Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932the coalition that would fracture six months later with the election of Richard Nixon, and which is now as dead as Robert Kennedy.
....
Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968.Photograph by Paul Fusco / Magnum / Courtesy Danziger Gallery
The pictures won't link correctly from the article in The New Yorker. I took these images from an article in the New York Times:
By PHYLLIS TUCHMAN OCT. 30, 2017
One more article:
Text JAMES STEVENSON JUNE 1, 2008
PROCESSION: After Kennedys funeral in New York the morning of June 8, 1968, his body was transported to Washington. Mourners, about a million by some estimates, lined the tracks, and the trip, usually about four hours, took twice that long. Credit Paul Fusco
Sat Jun 8, 2019: Beschloss tweet: Bringing RFK home
Fri Jun 7, 2019: Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral Train, June 8, 1968
Response to mahatmakanejeeves (Original post)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
Beatlelvr
(619 posts)I was in high school and I loved Bobby. He was the real deal. Who knows how his nomination could change this country's future. The day of this train ride I had to stay home from school I was crying so much.
kairos12
(12,869 posts)electric_blue68
(14,932 posts)(the day before Ihat a friend and I on June 7 waited on line for 4+ hours to pass by his casket at St Patrick's in NYC)
My mom sent my dad with me (I looked wan, exhausted) to view the Funeral Procession along 34th St as they headed toward Penn Station.
Then we came back home.
My sis and mom watched the train in the living room, while I watched it in the extra room because I had to study for HS end of year tests.
I was so angry that I had to take time away from watching every second I could from watching The Train.
When the people in Philadelphia started singing the Battle
Hymn of The Republic...
I did see this film.
halfulglas
(1,654 posts)I was crying off and on so much. So many hopes were shattered. I didn't have to work because it was a Saturday. But I remember the night of the assassination we went to bed because we had work the next day and the assassination was on the West Coast so when the radio alarm came on the next day with coverage of the assassination I thought I was in a time warp. They were talking about assassination, gunshots, Kennedy, etc. For a while I was so disoriented I couldn't figure out what was going on. We had to go to work, but yeah, sometimes the 60s felt like one assassination after another.
blue neen
(12,327 posts)It was a very sad day for America. Will we ever know the truth? Very doubtful.