"I have been living with this thing 40 years now," Eppridge said. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think, somehow, about him. Or that campaign. Or the consequences of his assassination."
Eppridge, an avid outdoorsman who had slogged his way through a Vietnam stint and other conflicts for Life, immediately recognized the firecracker pops as gunshots. His thought that they came from a .25-caliber gun was off just a little.
Eppridge pushed himself and CBS cameraman Jim Wilson forward through the small, dense crowd stuffed in the narrow kitchen. He stopped briefly to photograph a wounded Paul Schrade, a United Auto Workers official. Then he continued to push and covered the 12 or so feet to the candidate.
Instinct took over. Emotion, for the moment, repressed. Eppridge crouched at Kennedy's feet, the television light for Wilson's camera eerily illuminating the scene. Bracketing the imprecise exposure, the first two grainy frames of Tri-X black and white film show Romero holding Kennedy's head and looking down at him. In a third frame, backlit and underexposed, Romero looks up. The images after that show the bedlam that erupts.
As he recalls that night, Eppridge sits with a slouch. Steel and titanium rods run through him: He wears a back brace to help with the genetic osteoporosis intensified by years of carrying camera gear and bags. His gaze turns down. He reveals what Kennedy told him and others on the trail.
"There were something like 22,000 Americans killed because that [Vietnam] War didn't end when [Kennedy] said he was going to end it. If he told us once he told us 20 times that 'When, not if, but when I am president, that day the war ends. We're out.'"
In April, Abrams published Eppridge's book, A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties. He had published an earlier book, Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign, in 1993 that eventually sold out its 10,000 copies, but the results left him unsatisfied.
"The words really weren't mine," he said of that earlier effort, on the 25th anniversary of Kennedy's death. "I wasn't able to talk too much about what I felt.
"That didn't get the message out as far as I was concerned. It's important that we recognize and realize who this man was, and what he meant, and what might have been. Because, he certainly, historically, will be proved to be a most important figure in the history of this country."
The new volume includes Eppridge's own text - and pictures he didn't know he had.
