Op-Ed Columns

Film on TV shot from Bobby Kennedy's funeral train 40 years ago loosed a flood of memories. Josephine and I were on that train. As for commentary comparing Barack Obama's campaign with Kennedy's: I don't see that, at least not yet, but reliving those old days renews the stab of loss all of us felt on that final voyage.

I had gotten to know Bobby as a regular reporter at the Justice Department when he was attorney general, and I had followed his campaign closely during our year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

He had impressively matched eloquence with courage — which Obama is yet to demonstrate — when on the night Dr. King was murdered, Bobby left police escorts to enter the bleak heart of Indianapolis's black ghetto.

He told the stunned crowd that Dr. King was dead. Then he spoke to the crowd from the hurt and healing heart of a man whose brother also had been murdered by a white man, who had fought through the pain and saw hope again.

Incongruously, he quoted an ancient Greek poet, whose words struck home to that crowd. "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"

And then we awoke on June 5 to news that Bobby, too, was dead. An urgent call from home informed us that we had been invited to attend the funeral and ride the train bearing the senator to Washington for burial.

It was 1968 and there was no FedEx, no fax machines. We had only a family telegram informing us we'd been invited. We flew to New York anyway Saturday morning, made our way through dense crowds to a side entrance of Saint Patrick's where we were told invited guests would enter.

The service in that majestic place was moving. Sen. Edward Kennedy spoke, his voice catching only once. A family friend, Andy Williams, sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," after which we were instructed to go to a waiting fleet of buses that would take us to Pennsylvania Station.

Marshals on the buses checked invitations, which we didn't have. Luckily a friend, Louis Oberdorfer, saw us and waved us aboard. Lou had been assistant attorney general in charge of the Tax Division, and a Birmingham native.

That journey was long and lugubrious. Ethel Kennedy made a stoic walk the length of the train to thank each one of us, followed by Ted Kennedy and Bobby's son, Joe, who also greeted each of the passengers.

Josephine was in the aisle when Ethel came through our car and sat in the nearest available seat, next to Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King. The two women noted Mrs. Kennedy's bearing in the face of tragedy, a poignant moment for two recent widows.

Somber crowds gathered at every stop, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in full uniforms. One image is locked in my mind. From a distance, I saw a man walking quickly up a hill toward the moving train. He crested the hill as we came alongside. He was a workingman, blue work shirt rolled up over muscular forearms. In his big fist was a bright yellow bouquet of late jonquils with which he saluted the train.

That New Jersey man looked no different than the men pasting George Wallace stickers on bumpers in Anniston two years before. Were they alike in some strange way — an answer to the mystery posed by Bobby Kennedy and Wallace carrying some of the same Indiana counties?

The author of a six-volume series of books on the states, Neal Pierce, and I talked about Wallace's appeal beyond racism, an attraction that many working-class people outside the South felt for him and for his polar opposite, Bobby Kennedy — a connection of comfort and familiarity that Obama is yet to make.

I put it to Neal this way. It's the problem of the 65 percent majority. In Anniston, as in any other city, you have the Chamber of Commerce crowd that represents 1 percent of the population, but about 80 percent of the wealth. They are organized, articulate, well funded, a group with a strong sense of mission and an ability to draw public attention to their agenda.

Then you have the black community, which in the 1960s developed means of drawing attention to their agenda and who represented 34 percent of Anniston's population at the time. That leaves the other 65 percent, who are most resistant to social change.

Some are racists. But cumulatively a host of other problems outweighs racism. The highway department removes a traffic light from a blue-collar community, and there's a series of serious accidents, but it seems impossible to get the bureaucracy to restore the light.

Despite the sanitary hazard of an overflowing drainage ditch in a working-class neighborhood, nobody at city hall seems to listen or do anything about it. The 65 percent begin to feel: "Nobody understands the conditions of my life. Hell, I know I'm the majority in this country. I built it with my own hands. The only person who understands me is George Wallace, who knows what I mean when I say I'm so p----d at those bureaucrats, suits, sneering journalists and blacks I see on TV, I'd like to punch one of 'em in the nose!"

Still, it was hard at the time to think of George Wallace and Bobby Kennedy paired in any
way, just as it stretches credulity now to imagine Obama's appeal to the sons and grandsons of the men pasting those Wallace stickers.

When we returned home then, we found that through time and distance, we had changed, and the South was changing. In less than two years, waves of progressive governors were elected everywhere in the South — except Alabama.

Two generations have been born and matured since then. Race means little to this generation. Yet, there's still the problem of the 65 percent; can they look at Obama and see a man who understands their life and dreams?