A VITAL part of TIME journalism is the dialogue between writers and editors in New York and reporters in the field. The New York end of the dialogue consists of queries that may be a simple question asking, in effect, "What happened?" Most of the time, however, what happened is already fairly clear in broad terms, and what the editors want is details, consequences, overall meaning.
When it was decided three weeks ago that the political phenomenon of Robert Kennedy was becoming important enough to be dealt with at cover length, Writer Ronald Kriss drafted a musing, searching, 1,000-word query to the...