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When these photographs were taken two years ago,  Rick Bell and I felt we
were in the midst of a crucial event in American political history.   There we were, official representatives of the college press, hot on the heels of the most glamorous political figure in the country,  snapping pictures of and talking to poor people in a series of magnificent settings,  spending hours surrounded by eager, willing, photogenic, cute kids who didn't understand anything that was going on.
What I expected to see when I looked at these pictures again was a record of that journey, which would reflect the feelings of excitement,  fervor, commitment and grandeur which I remembered from that trip and which, subsequently, I had come to attach to Robert Kennedy. What I felt, however, was something quite different.
For I see now not the face of a grand dream dissipated, but rather the false structures of a dream that never existed. The excitement which sustained us on that trip was manufactured, and if we believed it it was because we wanted desparately to have it be true.
And now,  somehow it is senseless to believe we could have attached so much meaning to that trip, to the caravan of cars speeding down dirt roads in search of flaws in the American Dream.   We were led on that search by the American Dream itself, and if I cannot now find meaning in that quest, it is not merely a reflection on those flaws for which we searched in Barwick, Hazard and Neon,
There are those, of course, who will look at these photographs and see a sad commentary on the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy era and politics. And while I see a sad commentary also, it is not one of unfulfilled promise. For those who would look on the light shining on Robert Kennedy's head as a symbol of the sadly wasted greatness of the Sixties,
I can only say that it may also be viewed, by one who was there, as an explication of the spiritual and political crisis which binds us now in a common lot of despara-tion while at the same time holds apart one from the other, no matter how hard we try to touch.
David Holwerk
February, 1970