A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties
Photographs and text by Bill Eppridge
Introduction by Pete Hamill
Includes never-before published photographs
From Pete Hamill’s introduction:
Then a cruel messenger arrived. Curly haired. Pockmarked. In a pale-blue sweatshirt. Blue jeans. His right foot was forward. His arm was straight out. He was firing a small gun…And there was Kennedy on the floor, at the foot of the ice machine, his eyes open, a kind of sweet accepting smile on his face, as if he knew it would all end this way. Eppridge captures it perfectly, the stark black and white, the sense of an American Pietà.
It’s impossible to remember the 1960s without thinking of Bill Eppridge’s classic photographs for LIFE magazine—the Beatles arriving in the United States for their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Barbra Streisand in Paris, the Woodstock Festival, the Civil Rights Movement, the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, the war in Vietnam, and—most unforgettably—the 1968 presidential candidacy of Senator Robert Kennedy. Kennedy befriended Eppridge during the campaign and it was Eppridge who made the iconic photographs of busboy Juan Romero cradling the fatally wounded candidate in the seconds after he was shot.
Forty years later, those horrific moments continue to haunt Eppridge. “It went through my mind not to take the pictures, but this was history,” said Eppridge. “I can still see it all. And I think how the world would have been different if Bobby had come off the stage that night and turned the other way. Every day I think of that.”
What was most remarkable about the 1968 campaign was Kennedy’s ability to unite a coalition of Americans that no presidential candidate has been able to do since—blacks, Latinos, liberals, and working-class whites—who all saw in Robert Kennedy a visionary who could change the world for the better.
Released to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties by Bill Eppridge (Abrams hardcover $29.95/June 6 pub), captures the vibrancy and the hope of Kennedy’s 1968 quest in 200 unforgettable photographs, many never-before published. Accompanying the photographs are Eppridge’s vivid recollections—from his intimate moments with Kennedy to the frenzied crowds that wanted to touch him, to shake his hand, to embrace him. In his beautifully concise introductory essay, acclaimed journalist and novelist Pete Hamill pays tribute to Kennedy and his legacy—and provides his own emotional account of what it was like that fateful night at the Ambassador Hotel.
OTHER PUBLISHED WORKS BY BILL EPPRIDGE:
Robert Kennedy:The Last Campaign, 1993
(With a foreword by President Clinton)
Upland Passage: A Field Dog’s Education, 1992
Jake: A Labrador Puppy at Work and Play, 1992
