Robert F. Kennedy greets supporters on the campaign trail in 1968. Photograph by Bettmann / Getty

Other journalists had searched for her already, but I’d looked harder. I’d called people in her home town and at the local high schools, public and private. I’d consulted the yearbooks of the colleges she’d supposedly attended, and their alumni offices. I’d canvassed aging former volunteers for the Presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, for whom she was volunteering that night, fifty-one years ago, when she challenged Robert F. Kennedy in a sleepy airport diner in Indianapolis.

From their two-hour conversation, an eighteen-year-old undergraduate named Pat Sylvester came to embody, for Bobby Kennedy, a whole generation of idealistic young Americans, the ones who, he hoped, would help make him President. And, ever since, people have tried tracking her down. But, as my own quest to find her fizzled, I came to doubt that she’d ever actually existed. Then, suddenly, not long ago, she materialized.

It began in the wee hours of May 8, 1968. Kennedy, then a junior senator from New York, had just survived a crucial challenge to his fledgling, fragile candidacy, beating back a determined McCarthy, along with Indiana’s governor, who was a stand-in for Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, in the Indiana Presidential primary. Now he could go on to fight in Oregon and California.

But, amid all the excitement that evening, Kennedy had forgotten to eat, and finding food at that hour wasn’t easy. “The only place in Indianapolis where you can get even a glass of water after 1 a.m. is the airport,” the New York Post writer Jimmy Breslin, who was there covering the campaign, groused. So out to the airport they all went: the candidate, a few aides, and some intrepid reporters who’d learned in Dallas never to leave a Kennedy unattended.

That’s where they found Sylvester, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Breslin later wrote. With her was a second McCarthy volunteer, whom she’d met just minutes earlier, a twenty-one-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina named Taylor Branch. Years later, he’d win a Pulitzer Prize for the first of three books he wrote on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sylvester was wearing a straw hat with a McCarthy ribbon wrapped around it, and Branch sported two McCarthy pins on his tan jacket. They’d missed their respective flights out that night, to Providence by way of Pittsburgh for her, to Atlanta for him. Both sat, exhausted and dejected, by their suitcases.

Kennedy had won the primary that night, but something still gnawed at him: he considered McCarthy’s volunteers superior to his own. Just the night before, at a local restaurant called Sam’s Attic, when someone had told Kennedy that McCarthy’s kids were “brighter, more radical, more committed” than his, Kennedy had shaken “his drooping head affirmatively,” according to Jack Newfield, of the Village Voice. “I wish I had some of them,” Kennedy lamented.

Mary McGrory, of the Washington Star, who had studied the Kennedys for twenty years, spotted that same envy. “He does not need them, but he wants them,” she wrote. “They would bring luster and spontaneity to what is a dazzling but mechanical effort.” But those very kids hated him, Kennedy knew. They considered him a coward for equivocating on Vietnam and an opportunist both for bigfooting their candidate and for jumping into the race belatedly.

Patsy Sylvester and a fellow-classmate at the Westtown School, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Photograph Courtesy Westtown School

Now, making his way through the empty terminal, Kennedy spotted Sylvester and Branch, walked over to them, smiling, and invited them to join him for a bite to eat. “All right,” Sylvester replied, before trying to place her McCarthy hat on Kennedy’s head. They seated themselves in a booth across from Kennedy, while a knot of reporters hovered nearby. Kennedy was smaller than Branch had imagined, but something else about him made a bigger impression: his intense blue eyes.

Then, for the next couple of hours, Kennedy probed and proselytized, trying to understand why the two preferred McCarthy to him and seeing if he could change their minds. Breslin got at least some of it down and, alone among the reporters, wrote it up. The others were, as reporters like to say, just “gathering string.”

Though Bobby Kennedy was one of the most famous men in the world, Sylvester wasn’t cowed. Instead, she let him have it, criticizing his inconsistent stance on Vietnam, lambasting his ineffectual campaign workers, and complaining about the unfair advantage Kennedy enjoyed simply by dint of his famous name. When Kennedy asked the two what they now planned to do following their candidate’s setback in this most recent primary, she didn’t mince words. “We’re going to stay,” she answered. “Most of them will. The ones who like McCarthy don’t want you.”

The more Kennedy pressed, depicting McCarthy as a racially insensitive dilettante who didn’t really want to be President, a man who was taking advantage of his volunteers, the more Sylvester and Branch dug in. And the deeper they dug in, the more Kennedy admired, and coveted, them. “I remember him complaining that McCarthy got the A students and he got the gentlemen’s-C frat boys,” Branch told me. Meanwhile, according to Breslin, two female Kennedy campaign workers sitting at the table squirmed. “What I wouldn’t give for that girl,” one told the other.

“He had won in Indiana, but he couldn’t win over those kids, and they really got to him,” a key Kennedy aide, Fred Dutton, later recalled. “For days afterward, he talked about that boy and girl in the airport coffee shop—how great they were, in their idealism and determination.” Kennedy never forgot the pair; it’s pretty fair to say, though, that that understates the impact they’d had on him, for he was to live only four more weeks.

For Branch, too, Sylvester was a revelation. The undergraduate school in Chapel Hill was still nearly all male; there, and in his native Atlanta, he’d met few young women like her, so audacious and politically engaged. “We communed,” he recalled. He told her so, and it stuck with her. “He said that he was surprised to be able to communicate so well with a girl,” Sylvester wrote to a friend, shortly afterward.

Breslin’s account ends on a happy note, with Branch and Sylvester leaving the airport with Kennedy after he offered to get hotel rooms for them. To Breslin’s eye, Kennedy’s wooing was working; it marked his second triumph of the evening. “It was, last night in Indianapolis, a very good night for Robert Kennedy,” he wrote.

In fact, the two had spurned Kennedy’s offer—“we said we’d be fine,” she later wrote—and opted to spend what was left of the night in the deserted terminal. But, rather than trying to catch some sleep, they decided to write Kennedy a letter. Taking turns on a yellow legal pad, they worked on it until dawn, composing what Branch called “a frenzied, sleepy-eyed rehashing” of their discussion, letting him know that, while he hadn’t won them over, he’d impressed them anyway.

As day broke, they walked to a nearby motel where they thought Kennedy was staying and slipped their manifesto—“a treatise, really,” Branch said—under what they believed to be his door. “For all I know, they gave us the wrong room number, or they threw it in the trash,” Branch recalled. Then the two separated, without exchanging phone numbers. After all, Branch had other things on his mind; his draft physical was coming up, he was graduating soon, and getting married after that.