NONFICTION - June 6, 1993

Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign, photographs by Bill Eppridge, text by Hays Gorey, with a foreword by President Bill Clinton. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $35; 131 pp.). Some of us have never recovered from Robert Kennedy’s last campaign 25 years ago. The sense of loss grows deeper as time passes, as the distance increases between where we might have gone and where we are today. This is an extraordinary record of his run for the presidency in the spring of 1968, with Eppridge’s pictures and Gorey’s narrative portraying vividly the excitement, the hope, the humor, and the anguish of that time. Most striking are the photos, many so familiar and unforgettable, like those of Kennedy campaigning with the Sons of Watts or staring vacantly as busboy Juan Romero kneels next to him, pleading for help. Many more, lost for decades in the archives of Time/Life and only now published, capture the adulation of the crowds, the tension of an election whose outcome was anything but certain, and the chaos in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in the terrifying seconds after the assassination. For those who lived through these events, and for those reading about them for the first time, this is an inspirational history of the final months in the life of the man called by President Clinton in his Foreword “the distinctive public servant of his day,” a man who “had an uncommon feel for what people experienced in their lives.”