An American Melodrama

(by Chester, Hodgson & Page)

Definitive account of the 1968 Presidential campaign, written by three accomplished British journalists, manages to avoid the faux pomp of much American political writing; brilliantly covers the most critical election since 1932 with telling vignettes of key players, Democratic, Republican and independent. Pithy chapters on RFK‘s death in Los Angeles and Nixon working southern delegates at the Miami Hilton are classic.

At page 355, this passage appears, describing the aftermath of RFK’s wounding in the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles:

“It was very claustrophobic , like an alleyway deep in a ship, with the same coarse paint, naked metal, cooking smells, and yellow light…It was quite easy to see where Kennedy had been when he was shot. It was exactly on the diagonal between the ice cabinet and a long steel-topped row of heating cupboards. It was opposite the entrance to a second passage, entering at right angles, through which they had carried him away. There was a good deal of blood on the floor, which seemed very dark in the poor light, and there was a KENNEDY-FOR-PRESIDENT hat lying in it. On the wall by the ice cabinet, perhaps five feet from where Kennedy had fallen, five words were scrawled in crayon, which have not yet been satisfactorily explained but which in their absurd appropriateness heightened the irrational sense of ritual symbolism: THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.”