When I first paged through Paul Fusco's RFK Funeral Train—the  trade edition published by Umbrage in 2000—I felt a dreadful sense of deja vu for how wrong things had gone in 1968. The optimism of an age in which so many were committed to making the world a better place had been wiped out by the assassination of yet another charismatic leader.

Paul Fusco's photographs are remarkable on many levels. On first reading, it was the overwhelming sense of loss that came through in the faces and gestures of the thousands of people lining the tracks to pay their respects. A collective sense of grief, experienced by people of all ages, races, and classes in these pictures gives a lie, if only for a brief moment, to the racial divide that Bobby Kennedy had worked so hard to bridge.

Forty years later, Aperture published a new edition, titled Paul Fusco: RFK and released in 1988 at a book signing with Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, at Danziger Projects, in New York City. I asked Lesley A. Martin, Aperture's publisher and editor of both the new edition and the original, how the reissue came about. "In all frankness," she said, "it was James Danziger's idea. He was planning his show to commemorate the anniversary, and the book had fallen out of print. When we started talking about the project, we knew we wanted to add some of the outtakes that had been left out of the original edition.

"Paul knew that there were 'some' additional images at the Library of Congress," she continued. "He hadn't been able to get down there to check it out, so finally I got in touch with the LOC and was very surprised to learn that 'some' meant 'some 2,000' Kodachrome slides!"

At the time of the funeral, Paul Fusco was a staff photographer for Look magazine. He was given a ticket and told to get on the train carrying Kennedy's body from New York to Arlington National Cemetery for burial on July 8, 1968. On the way to Penn Station, he stopped at the funeral in progress at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In an interview for Publishers Weekly, Fusco said, "I spent about 10 minutes taking photos at the funeral, then I had to get to the train. That was my assignment." Once on the train, he said, "All I was thinking about was how to get access when we got to Arlington. Then, when the train emerged from beneath the Hudson, and I saw hundreds of people on the platform watching the train come slowly through—it went very slowly—I just opened the window and began to shoot."

“Most of us hide most of the time,” he continued. “We don’t want people aware of what we are feeling. But that day, very few people were hiding. It was a consistent wave of emotion without interruption.” The magazine used only one of Fusco's photos—“not because they didn't like them," he said, "but because as a biweekly, Look was "a little behind on the story." So thousands of images Fusco shot that day remained unseen, and finally went to the LOC when the magazine folded in 1970.

For the re-issue, said Lesley, "I went down again to the LOC and made the final cut over a two-day period. James Danziger had also visited the archive and had come back with digital snaps of his favorites, which dovetailed nicely with my favorites. There was an unbelievable amount of great stuff—Kodachrome slides, beautifully preserved given the pristine conditions at the LOC."

Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train (Aperture 2008), with essays by Vicki Goldberg, Norman Mailer (1923-2007}, and Evan Thomas, and Tribute by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Photos © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos, courtesy Danziger Gallery.

The Train: RFK’s Last Journey continues at SFMOMA through June 10^th, with approximately twenty of Fusco’s prints will be shown alongside Rein Jelle Terpstra’s The People’s View, 2014–18, an archive of some sixty-five amateur snapshots, slides, and home movies taken by the onlookers themselves, and Philippe Parreno’s haunting 2009 film June 8, 1968, which reenacts the event. Info CV19.EX.PHOTO