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There\u2019s a well-known passage in the title essay of Joan Didion\u2019s 1979 collection \u201cThe White Album\u201d\u00a0<\/em>that begins with a litany of 1960s tragedies, including the massacre at My Lai, a harrowing story of child abandonment and a very brief and cryptic mention of Robert Kennedy\u2019s assassination<\/a>: \u201cI watched Robert Kennedy\u2019s funeral on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.\u201d The section concludes with a personal revelation: In June of 1968, Ms. Didion experienced \u201can attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,\u201d for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant. \u201cBy way of comment,\u201d she wrote, \u201cI offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over 40 years later, \u201cThe White Album\u201d is regarded as a masterpiece of nonfiction and a pre-eminent account of the \u201960s as a cultural era. The essay opens with what is perhaps Ms. Didion\u2019s most famous line \u2014 \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live\u201d \u2014 then explores what happens when those shared narratives start to unravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But many of the specific stories she alludes to in the essay have remained maddeningly opaque. Precisely what prompted her physical breakdown, as well as her terse reference to Kennedy\u2019s funeral, has long been the subject of speculation for Didionologists. \u201cWhat was she doing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during Robert Kennedy\u2019s funeral?\u201d Tracy Daugherty wrote in \u201cThe Last Love Song,\u201d <\/em>his 2015 biography of Ms. Didion. \u201cWas she alone? Did a crowd gather before a television set to watch the ceremony in sorrow? Was the TV propped on a wrought-iron table in the sun? What is the point of teasing us with the hotel if not to deliberately disorient the reader?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now we finally know the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recording dated to 1971, Ms. Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, sat down for an interview with the writer\u00a0Jean Stein<\/a>, who was working on a new edition of an oral history about Robert Kennedy. The interview didn\u2019t appear in the final manuscript, and only in the past year has the audio been made available through the\u00a0archives department<\/a>\u00a0at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which houses\u00a0Ms. Stein\u2019s research<\/a>\u00a0from the project. (A transcript, processed in 2019, can also be found in the New York City Public Library\u2019s\u00a0collection<\/a>\u00a0of Ms. Stein\u2019s papers.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The unearthed conversation<\/a> reveals the details of Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion\u2019s trip to Hawaii and illuminates what prompted her breakdown. It also reveals a startling insight she had about the precariousness of the country, as she described to Ms. Stein the exact moment when she could feel the \u201960s \u201csnapping.\u201d And her observations help unlock why her meditation on America\u2019s unraveling still feels so resonant today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On June 5, 1968, Ms. Didion, who was 33, and Mr. Dunne, 36, were driving from Sacramento to San Francisco, where they planned to catch the morning flight to Honolulu, when a news alert came across the radio. Robert Kennedy was in critical condition. He\u2019d been shot in the head at close range. He was undergoing emergency surgery. But before they could learn anything else they departed for Hawaii.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The couple was staying in Waikiki at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, one of the oldest on the island. It was a favorite spot of theirs, as was Honolulu itself, a metropolis in the middle of the ocean where the national newspapers arrived a day late. When they checked in, the West Coast papers on the newsstand displayed the previous day\u2019s headlines. Their room didn\u2019t have a television in it; according to Ms. Didion, none did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After listening to the six o\u2019clock news, they decided to head out into the streets of the city, where the restaurants and bars were crowded with vacationers. They spent the first part of that night trying unsuccessfully to find updates on Kennedy\u2019s condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That evening, they ducked into Duke Kahanamoku\u2019s, the famous Waikiki venue, where\u00a0Don Ho<\/a>\u00a0was headlining. The place was packed \u2014 there was a dry-cleaning convention in town \u2014 and salesmen and their wives crowded around the tables. Still, the couple managed to find a spot right up front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ho came out to do his set. The singer, who was born in Honolulu, was best known for his 1966 hit \u201cTiny Bubbles.\u201d Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion saw him perform before and noticed that on this night, he seemed notably muted. It wasn\u2019t until the end of his set that they learned why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor those of you who don\u2019t know,\u201d Mr. Ho told his audience, \u201cBob Kennedy passed on this evening at 10:40 local time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ho had known Kennedy well, campaigning with him<\/a> in California. He asked one of his musicians to honor the moment by singing the Lord\u2019s Prayer. \u201cOur Father,\u201d the man intoned, \u201cwho art in heaven \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the conventioneers jumped to his feet. \u201cWhat are they singing a church song for?\u201d he shouted. At his table and those surrounding, the other dry-cleaning salesmen and their wives chimed in: \u201cWhat\u2019s this church song for? Why a church song?\u201d Clearly, they were drunk. For Ms. Didion the scene was surreal: the women with their big bouffant hairdos and flower leis, the men growing increasingly belligerent. Then she noticed a young sailor nearby. He was sobbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two months earlier, Kennedy gave<\/a> an impromptu speech to supporters after learning of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s murder. \u201cWhat we need in the United States is not division,\u201d he said, \u201cbut love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.\u201d Now he had been murdered, too. But the convention crowd at Duke Kahanamoku\u2019s refused to acknowledge the tragedy that had just been relayed. \u201cThe whole thing,\u201d Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein, \u201cwas very charged. It was a great conflict of everything and everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for Kennedy, there were no more updates to receive. Everything that could happen, it seemed, had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t until June 8, that Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne were able to watch a\u00a0special broadcast<\/a>\u00a0on ABC\u2019s Honolulu affiliate, which they described as a three-hour tape that combined footage from throughout the week with scenes from Kennedy\u2019s funeral in New York and burial in Washington. A television had been set up on the Royal Hawaiian\u2019s lanai, a large veranda. When the couple arrived, it was already crowded with viewers, and \u201cThe Lawrence Welk Show<\/a>,\u201d a musical variety program, was playing, its images spilling out as if from a time capsule. \u201cHollywood Palace\u201d was scheduled to air next, but the evening\u2019s programming was pre-empted by the special news program on Kennedy\u2019s assassination. The lanai crowd wasn\u2019t happy. Some stood up to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ABC news special, Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne told Ms. Stein, opened with a rendition, by the actor Hume Cronyn, of William Butler Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming,\u201d<\/a> the same poem from which Ms. Didion had drawn the title of her first book of essays, \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem<\/a>,\u201d <\/em>which was published that May: \u201cAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the three-hour special wore on, Ms. Didion looked around the veranda and noticed that everyone who was sitting there earlier in the evening had left. A few guests stopped to ask about the program she was watching, but at the reply \u2014 Bobby Kennedy \u2014 they continued on their way. When a woman lingered to take in a scene from the funeral Mass at St. Patrick\u2019s, the man she was with exclaimed, \u201cWe\u2019ll get enough church in the morning!\u201d and hurried her along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was as if they were shutting their minds to it, shutting their eyes,\u201d Mr. Dunne explained to Ms. Stein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither Ms. Didion nor Mr. Dunne considered themselves Kennedy supporters. She voted<\/a> for Barry Goldwater in the last presidential election, and he was suspicious of the whole Kennedy family. In \u201cDelano,\u201d <\/em>his 1967 book on Cesar Chavez and the Central Valley grape strike, he characterized Robert Kennedy as \u201cruthless, arrogant, a predator in the corridors of power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But like Ms. Didion, Kennedy started from a more conservative position \u2014 on civil rights, on Vietnam \u2014 and his personal evolution on the public stage of the 1960s embodied the turmoil that characterized the era. In his brief campaign, he responded to the climate of discord by advocating a national reconciliation through a shared sense of civic responsibility. \u201cWhen one part of the United States does badly,\u201d he said<\/a> just before his death, \u201cit also has an effect on the rest of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion had spent the previous year publishing \u201cPoints West,\u201d a joint column in The Saturday Evening Post that paid them handsomely to report from the front lines of political and cultural tumult. As the Tet offensive raged in Vietnam in the spring of 1968 and President Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn\u2019t run for another term, Ms. Didion profiled Jim Morrison and Nancy Reagan. After King\u2019s murder and the civil unrest that followed, she wrote about visiting the incarcerated leader of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, at the Alameda County jail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their conversation with Ms. Stein, the couple explained that they found themselves profoundly affected by Robert Kennedy\u2019s murder, to a much greater degree than they\u2019d been by his brother\u2019s. With Jack Kennedy, \u201cthere was a kind of haphazard sense,\u201d Mr. Dunne told Ms. Stein. \u201cIt was just one of those things that could happen to anyone. The thing about Bobby\u2019s death,\u201d he said, \u201cwas there was a pattern. There was something wrong.\u201d He added, \u201cIt was the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past, moments of national trauma provided an opportunity for unity and cohesion. But Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that\u2019s not too different from the one we\u2019ve come to recognize today. Millions of people are dead from the Covid pandemic. Thousands take to the streets in protest while thousands more gather in the national capital to storm the seat of government. We are at a continual deficit of unity or cohesion. And in the wake of each new cataclysm, we\u2019ve found ourselves farther apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo matter what your political feelings are, if you\u2019re attached to the idea of the nation as a community \u2014 if you feel yourself to be part of that community \u2014 then obviously something has happened to that community,\u201d Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein. \u201cIt seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America.\u201d They could heckle a praying singer. They could watch \u201cThe Lawrence Welk Show\u201d but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation \u2014 the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it \u2014 was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn\u2019t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted \u2014 for their self-interest \u2014 a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The implications weighed heavily on Ms. Didion: How could this country continue to exist if the people who\u2019d gained the most from it refused to contribute? How long until the dark pattern she and Mr. Dunne saw in Kennedy\u2019s murder reached its natural conclusion? It\u2019s a sense of catastrophe \u2014 of that rough beast in the distance slouching closer \u2014 that, to many current Americans, feels strikingly familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching all of this made her feel the same way she felt during a Hawaii visit a year earlier, when she was rereading George Orwell on the beach: sick. \u201cI\u2019d order a sandwich from room service and couldn\u2019t eat it,\u201d she told Ms. Stein, \u201cand I\u2019d sit there, and I\u2019d have to go in the bathroom and throw up. And this was very much like that in some way.\u201d On June 8, 1968, sitting with her husband on the abandoned veranda, she was likely experiencing the \u201cattack of vertigo and nausea\u201d she referred to in \u201cThe White Album.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe startling fact was this,\u201d she wrote at the essay\u2019s conclusion. \u201cMy body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was, in some ways, a very radicalizing experience for me,\u201d Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein. These tourists from the mainland, she realized, enjoying their Hawaiian vacation as if nothing had happened, were not going to have any part of a national tragedy \u2014 even as, on the hotel\u2019s television, Robert Kennedy\u2019s casket was transported by rail to Washington and along the tracks nearly two million people<\/a> lined up to pay their respects. To Ms. Didion, the contrast between these scenes and the Royal Hawaiian\u2019s conspicuously deserted veranda felt appalling. With Kennedy\u2019s assassination, she said, \u201cit was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn\u2019t having it.\u201d As she and Mr. Dunne watched the news coverage, she told Ms. Stein, \u201cit was like something snapping.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n