From The Rocky Mountain News

The park is nearly empty. Two women are pushing strollers near the King-Kennedy monument. A man nearby is talking on his cell phone. Across the street, there's a school playground. The swing sets are full. Two kids, waiting in line, are doing cartwheels.

You'd never know anything significant had happened here, not unless you go to the monument that's set in a field of dandelions. It's a sculpture, named Landmark for Peace, of Bobby Kennedy facing Martin Luther King, both with outstretched hands - hands that do not quite touch.

Or unless you walk to the nearby marker where Kennedy stood the night King died, the night Kennedy addressed a mostly African-American crowd in an electric speech that he delivered with only a few notes scribbled on the back of an envelope.

It's a warm spring afternoon, 40 years after the fact, and there's another presidential campaign under way - the first that has mattered in Indiana since Bobby Kennedy launched his campaign in a year the nation nearly ripped itself apart.

The Indiana primary, which always comes late, rarely comes into play. But this year is different. The 2008 primary season has been weird and sometimes wonderful, but inarguably long. They're voting here and in North Carolina today. Most of the experts predict a split - Indiana for Clinton, North Carolina for Obama - and that's as far as the predictions go, except that the race will go on. And on.

It's a primary race that - depending on your world view - is either destroying the Democrats' chances or energizing Democrats across the country. But, in either case, 2008 is nothing like 1968.

In 1968, the Tet offensive was launched in Vietnam and a country began to turn against the war. In 1968, a sitting president was forced to drop out of the race. In 1968, King and Kennedy were assassinated. In 1968, 50 cities burned after King's death. In 1968, the Democratic convention in Chicago gave way to chaos and turned into a police riot. In 1968, Richard Nixon, whose career had seemed to end six years before, was elected president and would later, of course, resign in disgrace.

It is all for the good if 2008 is nothing like 1968.

In 2008, Mike Riley is a small-town trial lawyer in Rensselaer, in northern Indiana. In 1968, he was a 30-year-old lawyer in Indianapolis, president of the state's Young Democrats, when he got a call from Ted Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy had just announced he would run, and Riley, a Kennedy fan, assumed the call was a joke, a friend imitating the Kennedy accent. But it was Ted Kennedy, and he wanted Riley to head his brother's Indiana campaign.

At that point, Lyndon Johnson hadn't yet dropped out of the race, but he would soon. Minnesota Sen. Gene McCarthy had challenged Johnson in New Hampshire after Kennedy had declined. College students were Clean for Gene, the politician/poet. When McCarthy nearly beat Johnson, Kennedy decided to enter the race, fracturing the anti-war left of the Democratic party.

Indiana, a conservative state then and now, was where Kennedy chose to make his start - and his stand.

He regarded it as similar to what West Virginia was for John Kennedy, Riley tells me. "He thought if he could win in a conservative state like Indiana, it would show he could win anywhere."

Kennedy spent around 30 days in the state, running against not only McCarthy, but favorite son Gov. Roger Branigan, who was a stand-in first for Johnson and then basically for Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy rode the Wabash Cannonball, whistle-stopping his way around the state.

"Robert Kennedy was what today would be called a rock star," Riley says. "It was not that long after the assassination of his brother, and the Kennedys were look on, by the people of Indiana, in a kind of awe. Every place he went he was mobbed. People wanted just to touch him, just be around him."

"It was," Riley says, "a very intense time."

On April 4, 1968, Kennedy was in Muncie, Ind., when he heard Martin Luther King had been shot. When Kennedy arrived in Indianapolis, he learned King had died.

Despite concern of riots and warnings from the mayor and police, Kennedy went to this African-American community to speak. Riley remembers that most of the crowd hadn't yet heard about King.

"It was a big crowd," says Riley, who organized the event. "It was a noisy crowd. And then when he told them the news, it went quiet, and then you heard cries and shrieking."

There's a new book out by Ray Boomhower called Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. It tells of Kennedy's brief but memorable speech that night. It was, Boomhower writes, the first time Bobby Kennedy had talked publicly about John Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy quoted from the Greek writer, Aeschylus, whose words from Agememnon had consoled him when his brother was killed.

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

He told those in the crowd who might want to hate white people that his brother, too, "had been killed by a white man."

"What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our county, whether they be white or whether they be black."

The crowd would go home. Indianapolis, unlike many cities, did not riot. Many credit Kennedy's speech.

A month later, on May 7, Kennedy won the Indiana primary. A month after that, early on June 5 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after Kennedy had just won the California primary, there was more tragedy. Riley had fallen asleep watching the California results. He got the call around 4 a.m. - Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

Riley would go the funeral in New York. Kennedy was 42. King was 39. A nation would wonder about its soul. And thousands would line the tracks as the train carried Kennedy's body to Washington.

On April 4, 2008, the 40th anniversary of King's death, Riley introduced Barack Obama to a crowd in Fort Wayne, Ind. Riley says he sees a lot of Bobby Kennedy in Barack Obama.

"I've seen a lot of politicians, and I haven't seen anyone who has turnd on young people as much as he has since Robert Kennedy," Riley says. "You can see the enthusiasm in the crowds. I don't know how Obama will do here. I think he was going along pretty well until Rev. Wright. That will hurt him in Indiana.

"Coming from a small town, I never knew an African-American until I was a senior in high school . . . I'm hopeful he'll be fine, but I don't know that race won't play a role here."

It's 40 years later. The Democrats will nominate either the first African-American or first woman.

Race will almost certainly matter. Gender will matter, too. What no one expected is that all these years later, they would matter here - back in Indiana.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

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