"Kennedy brought along seasoned American experts on development and refugee relief. One of them was Nevin Scrimshaw, a nutrition professor at MIT who had done cutting-edge work fighting malnutrition in children in Guatemala and India. Scrimshaw had a clinical familiarity with what they saw. “Edema, profound apathy, hair loss, pallor of the hair, and so forth,” he recalls. “To me, what was so devastating was the scale.” It was worse than anything he had seen in his long years in the field, from Panama to Egypt. He was stunned at the size of the first camp they visited, near Calcutta, where some ten thousand refugees were sheltering. “Imagine looking out on a field, hundreds of people squatting, most of them with diarrhea,” he says, still appalled by the memory at the age of ninety-four. “Imagine the people politely inviting you into their tent, and while they’re talking, picking up a rag in a corner, and seeing a child that’s going to be dead in a few hours.”... Hundreds of people massed around the visitors, many carrying desperately malnourished children. “This was something beyond anything Kennedy had seen or imagined,” says Scrimshaw. The senator was visibly overwhelmed... Hiking along a road north of Calcutta, Kennedy heard stories of massacre from dozens of Bengali peasant farmers—a small sample of the seven thousand refugees along the banks of the river crossing to East Pakistan. There were children dying along the road as their parents pleaded for help. Many were obviously in shock, sitting in despair by the side of the road or wandering blindly. Most of them, he realized, were Hindus. Despite the efforts of the Indians, the camps were racked with despair and gloom. “The conditions in the tents, camps, makeshift shelters, were horrible,” says Scrimshaw. The whole state of West Bengal seemed like a huge refugee camp, with its muddy roads jammed with endless lines for inoculations or registration cards. The youngest children and the elderly had been the first to die. Again and again, Kennedy saw little ones, under the age of five, who would obviously be dead within days or hours. He saw dead children. When Kennedy asked the director of one of the refugee camps what he most urgently needed, he replied, “a crematorium.”"