Robert Kennedy Funeral Train

June 8, 1968 by Evan Thomas On Saturday afternoon, June 8, Kennedy's body, as President Lincoln's 103 years before, was carried by a funeral train from New York to Washington. As they had for Lincoln, many thousands - perhaps, for RFK, a million people - lined the tracks. The coffin, on a bier close to the floor of the observation car, could not be seen by bystanders. So Kennedy's pallbearers lifted it up and placed it, a bit precariously, on chairs. Along the route of the train, Boy Scouts and firemen braced at attention; nuns, some wearing dark glasses, stood witness; housewives wept. Thousands and thousands of black people waited quietly in the heat, perhaps because they lived close to the tracks, but also because they had felt for Kennedy, and knew they would miss him. "Marvelous crowds," said Arthur Schlesinger, staring out the window as the train slowly rocked south. "Yes," said Kenny O'Donnell. "But what are they good for now?" Many of us in America believed that that President John F. Kennedy was nurturing a renewed belief in the concept of government as an enabler for all its citizens instead of an acquiescent handmaiden to the privileged and the powerful. Before he was able to instill that as a working principle in our society he was gunned down by an assassin. Five years later when Bobby rose to try to reestablish a government of hope, the hearts of Americans quickened and excitement flared. Then tragedy struck again. The blow was monumental. Hope-on-the-rise had again been shattered and those in most need of hope crowded the tracks of Bobby's last train, stunned into disbelief, and watched that hope trapped in a coffin pass and disappear from their lives.