The Funeral Train Of Bobby Kennedy

These Magnum photographs by Paul Fusco document the funeral procession for Bobby Kennedy as it travelled from New York City to Washington, D.C. in June 1968. In tribute to RFK's raw empathy, his determination to make our lives better, and his insistence that the government is answerable to all - black and white, rich and poor - hundreds of thousands of people stood patiently in the searing heat to pay their respects.

Kennedy's assassination was a blow to the optimism for a brighter future that his campaign brought for many Americans who lived through the turbulent 1960s.

Juan Romero, the busboy who shook hands with Kennedy right before he was shot, later said, "It made me realise that no matter how much hope you have it can be taken away in a second."

Jack Newfield, a reporter that had been travelling with the campaign, expressed his feelings on the effect of the assassination, closing his memoir on Kennedy with:

"Now I realised what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968. We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.

The stone was at the bottom of the hill and we were all alone."