RFK.

There's a film to get to, but first this: "Forty years ago tomorrow, as he was celebrating his victory in California's Democratic presidential primary, Senator Robert F Kennedy was assassinated. To mark the occasion, the Op-Ed page invited his children to share their memories of him." Turn first to the New York Times.

See, too, James Stevenson's remembrance in the NYT Magazine accompanying Paul Fusco's astonishing photographs taken of mourners lining the tracks as the funeral train slowly rolled to Washington DC.

There are two new books out: The Last Campaign: Robert F Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, by Thurston Clarke (excerpted in Vanity Fair), and A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties, by former Life photographer Bill Eppridge (a guest on today's Leonard Lopate Show), with an introduction by Pete Hammill (a guest on Fresh Air).

Now then, to the movie (and third book) at hand.

Updated through 6/7.

"Exploring several of the inconsistencies in the official account of the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy without stating an alternative outright, Shane O'Sullivan's RFK Must Die is more of a conspiracy-query doc, but will titillate the suspicious nonetheless," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice.

"Mr O'Sullivan, whose door-stopping book, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F Kennedy, also arrives tomorrow, asserts that [Sirhan Bishara] Sirhan was a patsy, just as Lee Harvey Oswald is alleged by some to have been five years earlier," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The filmmaker fingers a trio of CIA agents whose faces appear repeatedly, and mysteriously, all over footage captured before and after the fateful moment at the Ambassador.... Though it's all skillfully framed and outlined by Mr O'Sullivan, producing an aura of inevitability, the film's most appealing aspect may be its real-life X-Files vibe."

At the Pioneer from tomorrow through June 12.

Meantime, in the Los Angeles Times, Joe Mozingo profiles David Steiner, a lawyer who worked for RFK's campaign and was there that night in the Ambassador Hotel: "And then, the cavernous room was nearly empty. The Klieg lights were gone. Steiner was sitting on the stage. Now he knew that Kennedy had been shot in the head and rushed to the hospital. He felt that if he stepped off the stage he would free fall into an abyss."

Online browsing tip. Magnum photos at Slate.

Updates, 6/6: "How fitting - even how poetic - it is that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination during the week in which we mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of Robert F Kennedy," writes Robert S McElvaine, countering an argument Sean Wilentz laid out recently in the Huffington Post. "This harmonic convergence has deep significance."

Also, Tom Hayden: "There are vast differences between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, owing to circumstance, though both have followed hero's journeys of the classic sort. Kennedy was shaped by his brother's murder and the climate of his times, which drove all but the most robotic towards alienation. Barack is a product of globalization, immigration, even slavery, but nonetheless a privileged inheritor of the movements for which Bobby Kennedy stood.... Those who denounce Obama - and the possibilities of all electoral politics - should ponder the effectiveness of sitting judgmentally on the sidelines while an Unexpected Future arrives through the sheer will of a new generation."

Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT on RFK Must Die: "Overstuffed and underdirected, the movie combines snippets from Robert F Kennedy's speeches with an impressive selection of two-centers, including Sirhan's brother and former CIA operatives. Sadly, neither their testimonies nor that of a mysterious audio recording determine whether the assassin was under the influence of Langley or a lethal combination of self-hypnosis and Tom Collinses."

Updates, 6/7: "Remembering RFK" in the American Prospect.

In 2004, Alistair Cooke recalled the night of the assassination.

Joe Leydon recalls the day - it "should have been the happiest day of my life. But, of course, it wasn't."

Posted by dwhudson at June 5, 2008 7:17 AM