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Paul Fusco - RFK Funeral Train - Rediscovered

In 1968 Paul Fusco, on a Look Magazine assignment, rode RFK’s funeral train from New York to Washington. The result is a tremendous documentation of the spontaneous gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people as they came to pay their respects. An exhibition of Fusco’s body of work is running at Danziger Projects through July 31.

RFK has always loomed large in my understanding of the mythology of America, the America I’ve grown up in. Certainly I’m not alone in this. From a young age, my father always told me that Bobby Kennedy had been his hero. As a girl I didn’t really know what that meant. A child’s understanding of her country’s history is a little choppy, and Bobby was this enigmatic sort of wild card to me.

My father is the kind of guy who wears his heart on his sleeve. He is at once this tough product of his Boston upbringing, and at the same time he is pure emotion. He is a great storyteller, and over the years I’ve learned to ask the questions that have helped me assemble a proper chronology of his younger life. He himself is an enigmatic sort of wild card. As I grew up and began to make sense of RFK and his legacy, it all made sense to me - of course this man was my father’s hero. RFK died the same year that my father was driving a diaper truck in Roxbury, and at twenty one years old a young father and husband. I have spent years putting it all together, making sense of my father’s young adulthood, his Boston, and the America that contextualized both.

These pictures are what I imagine that America must have looked like.