A Million-Plus Mourners
The trip lasted for eight hours—twice as long as expected—because more than one million people had massed along the tracks and milled in stations to honor their slain hero. Some waited for hours. Others arrived as word spread by radio or television. It was a microcosm of America on a summer Saturday afternoon: working people, businessmen, housewives, Boy Scouts, American Legionnaires. Little Leaguers stopped their games to rush to the tracks, some saluting while others placed their baseball caps over their hearts. Signs floated above the crowd: “God help you,” “RFK, RIP,” “Bless RFK.” The most common one read, “Bye Bobby.”
Dave Powers, who had been part of the Kennedy Irish mafia dating back to JFK’s first campaign for Congress in 1946, did not want the train ride to end. “I wish this thing could go through every state, just keep going,” he said.
I was one of those who managed to catch a glimpse of the RFK funeral train as it sped through my town of Darby, a poor, racially mixed neighborhood a few miles south of the Philadelphia 30th Street Station. The train passed on a track only a few hundred yards from our house. On that sweltering Saturday afternoon, my father, older brother and I stood on a bridge, looking down. I will never forget the scene, a snapshot of unity: old and young people, African American and white, standing shoulder-to-shoulder. A group of Catholic nuns prayed near the tracks, rosary beads in their hands. As the train passed below, I spied Edward Kennedy, the last surviving brother, astride a platform on the last car waving gently to the crowd. Behind him sat the flag-draped coffin.
The interracial, cross-class nature of those who turned out that day has left a tantalizing question: What if RFK had lived? Could he have wrestled the nomination from Vice President Hubert Humphrey and built a powerful coalition that would defeat GOP nominee Richard Nixon in the fall? Tragically, we will never know the answer to those questions. But as the nation grows even more fragmented, it is useful to reflect on a moment in time when, through his passion and commitment, RFK managed to hold together the delicate center of American politics—if only for an eight-hour train ride from New York to Washington D.C.