Considering your excellent coverage of the contentious 1970 Commencement (feature, July 7), it was startling to read in an editor’s note that in 1968 “most Reunions events were canceled due to the death of Robert F. Kennedy.”
That’s not the way I remember it. What I remember was big-scale celebratory brouhaha echoing through the campus just as the funeral train of RFK was passing through Princeton Junction on the way to his interment in Arlington National Cemetery.
My former wife and I watched Dean of the Chapel Ernest Gordon on the lawn by Murray-Dodge, observing the festive atmosphere with dismay. At our suggestion and others’, he held a memorial service for Robert F. Kennedy in the Chapel in the midst of the festival. The fairly small congregation present found solace in this apparently irrelevant reverence.