from this past June:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/06/rfk_excerpt200806?currentPage=7The Last Good Campaign
excerpt:
Rene Carpenter watched the students in the front rows. Their faces shone, and they opened their mouths in unison, shouting, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students “real and rare” and said that “a good part of it is John F. Kennedy’s, of course, but John Kennedy … himself couldn’t be so passionate, and couldn’t set off such sparks.”
Kevin Rochat was close to weeping because Kennedy was so direct and honest. He kept telling himself, My God! He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking!
Jim Slattery, who would later be elected to Congress from Kansas, reread the K.S.U. speech during the second Iraq war and decided it was so powerful “because Kennedy was talking about what was right!”
Kennedy concluded by saying, “Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies—and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once said was the last, great hope of mankind. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America but for the heart of America. In these next eight months we are going to decide what this country will stand for—and what kind of men we are.”
He raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised “a new America,” and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.
As he started to leave, waves of students rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust. They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his shirtsleeves. Herb Schmertz was left with a lifelong phobia of crowds. University officials opened a path to a rear exit, but Kennedy waved them off and waded into the crowd. Photographer Stanley Tretick, of Look magazine, watched the mêlée and shouted, “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas! He’s going all the fucking way!”
“You Can Hear the Fabric Ripping”
One reporter would call the Landon lecture the first indication that “we were embarking on something unlike anything we had ever experienced.” Cries of “Holy shit!” and “What the hell are we in for?” echoed through the press bus as it pulled away from the campus. But once the excitement had ebbed, John J. Lindsay, of Newsweek, said, “Listen, I’m not sure we’re going to like how this turns out.”
To help promote Kennedy’s second speech of the day, at the University of Kansas, the campaign had planted an editorial in the school’s newspaper criticizing its students for being “conservative and apathetic.” This had the desired effect of swelling the audience at the Allen Fieldhouse to 19,000, one of the largest in university history. Kennedy’s reception was even more raucous than at Kansas State. Witnesses spoke of “roaring students” and “raw emotion let loose.” Reporter Jack Newfield, from The Village Voice, described it as “emotion beyond reason, cheering until saliva ran, clapping until hands hurt,” and New York Post columnist Jimmy Breslin believed it indicated that “the day when a politician can survive with slogans may be gone.”