REMEMBERING RFK.

Forty years ago tonight, I was one of a number of very young staffers on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign crammed into a Los Angeles hotel room, where we watched on television as Robert Kennedy, a few miles down Wilshire Boulevard at the Ambassador Hotel, claimed victory in the California primary. A few minutes later, the networks reported that Kennedy had been shot. The rest of the evening was a mix of anxiety, nausea, tears, misgivings and despair.The dynamic between the two campaigns was nothing if not complicated. Throughout 1967, anti-Vietnam War activists in the Democratic Party, led by Allard Lowenstein, had implored Kennedy to challenge Lyndon Johnson's reelection bid. Kennedy consistently demurred, and, improbably, McCarthy -- cool, skeptical, nobody's idea of a crusader -- stepped up to carry the antiwar banner. Only after McCarthy shocked the political world by almost beating Johnson in New Hampshire did Kennedy enter the race.

The closer Barack Obama gets to the White House, the more some people worry that some crazy is going to take a shot at him. Two weeks ago, when Hillary Clinton invoked the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as evidence that she was not indecently prolonging the Democratic primary season, the furor that erupted was wildly disproportionate, because whatever Clinton's many sins, she was not in any sense suggesting that she was waiting for Obama to get shot so she could win the nomination.But part of what she tapped into to was the fear, dread really, that the turbulence of 1968 may find an echo the 2008 campaign with equally deadly results; the Obama candidacy seems an odd reflection of the turbulent events of that time. He is both the embodiment of Martin Luther King's Dream and a latter-day incarnation of Bobby Kennedy's inspirational call for hope and change.