1968: Robert Kennedy Sr., America's Lost President?
One of the great “what ifs” of the 1960s was what would have happened if Robert Kennedy were not assassinated on June 5, 1968, as he won the California and South Dakota primaries. Would he have gone on to win the Democratic nomination, beat Richard Nixon in 1968, and become a great president?
The conventional wisdom seems to be YES. More people remember the charismatic personality of RFK SR than they do Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, who won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 and was narrowly defeated by Richard Nixon.
I used to think “yes,” RFK would have won, but now I rather doubt it.
“What if Robert Kennedy lived?” The question is eternally interesting because it asks us to ponder the role of individuals in history, and how much of a difference each person can make. Americans tend to believe in the “Great Man Theory of History,” at least if we like him. This can amount to wishful thinking. Even potentially great men can ultimately lead small, tragic, thwarted and unrealized lives, ruled by forces beyond their control.
Kennedy is fascinating in part because a minuscule decision: turning to his left from the podium of the Ambassador Hotel to enter the hotel kitchen where he was shot, instead of to his right off the podium as originally planned, altered American and perhaps world history. The original plan, according to advisor Jeff Greenfield, was for his brother-in-law Stephen Smith to meet him on the podium and take him in a different direction.
The sentimental response to the question is that
fresh from his California primary victory, he would have won the Democratic Party nomination against Hubert Humphrey. This is far from assured, as these two videos posted by History MythBusters of contemporaneous 1968 TV news coverage demonstrate. Kennedy would have had a very difficult uphill battle to win the nomination. One of the most persuasive alternate histories of how he could have won the nomination was by Jeff Greenfield in The Daily Beast: Sirhan’s assassination attempt fails; Kennedy’s survival changes the political dynamic, just as the attempt on Ronald Reagan changed the dynamic in 1981. Senator Eugene McCarthy leaves the race and Bobby wins his delegates and supporters. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, leader of the big city bosses, endorses him. As the candidate who won the most primaries, he seeks to change party rules so Humphrey and Johnson delegates can be released to support him.
he would have gone on to defeat Richard Nixon in the fall. But after eight years of Democratic control of both the presidency and Congress, the natural swing of the electorate would be exhaustion with liberal activism of the 1960s, leaning to Republicans to return to more sedate times, or for a Democrat winning a narrow one-term victory, not two terms of a activist with a big social agenda and a veto-proof Democratic Congress. My friend Bruce Johnson, with whom I shared an early interest in politics, fleshed out a persuasive scenario of the RFK 1968 general election campaign in an earlier discussion: “Nixon COULDN’T have treated RFK as a lackluster stand-in for a discredited, unpopular president, so he’d have had to wage a more aggressive campaign. The only national campaigns Nixon ever won were those where he played it safe. So the whole dynamic would have been different. As for states – RFK likely would have lost Texas, the only Southern state HHH carried. However, RFK almost certainly would have won a number of Northern industrial states, the heartland of his strength, that HHH narrowly lost – New Jersey for sure, probably Indiana and Ohio. If he’d won California, as seems likely – Humphrey barely lost it – he’d probably have won the election.”
Once elected, wishful thinking is that Kennedy
would have quickly ended American involvement in Vietnam, saving tens of thousands of lives. Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas suggested in Newsweek that RFK could have pulled the plug on the South Vietnamese government and withdrawn half a million troops by 1971. But if South Vietnam fell to the communists before the 1972 election, this would have inevitably created a political backlash in America. It is easy to forget how divided America was over the Vietnam War. Could RFK have saved South Vietnam? Doubtful. Some alternative histories suggest different US policies could have saved it. Perhaps because of his connections with the anti-war left, RFK could have bought more time for a negotiated settlement than Nixon did. By November 1969, less than a year in office, Nixon faced hundreds of thousands of passionate demonstrators against the war on the streets of Washington.
salvaged the War on Poverty with programs both conservatives and liberals could support, involving local control and empowering users of government programs to participate in their design and accountability. He “envisioned businesses and charities working with government to provide jobs and strengthen poor neighborhoods in rural areas,” and had already created a model in New York, wrote Ellen Meacham in the NYT. This was indeed a tragic, missed opportunity.
avoided Nixon’s Watergate corruption, which broke trust with the American people, destroyed idealism and created cynicism about government leaders. But the Kennedys had their own secrets and abuses of power, which if exposed during RFK’s presidency, might have led to the same kind of cynicism.
The question of “what if” Robert Kennedy lived continues to fascinate. Greenfield wrote a 150-page novella on RFK’s election and presidency, as part of his best-selling book, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternative Histories of American Politics. It seems quite plausible.
Mitchell Freedman wrote “A Disturbance of Fate,” an alternative history of the U.S. if RFK became president. It is by no means a utopia, but does portray the US shifting toward democratic socialism like Northern European countries.
Both the PBS Documentary on RFK excerpted above and the Netflix movie, Robert Kennedy for President, recapture Kennedy’s amazing, awe-inspiring life, and elicit inevitable sadness at the end. Emotionally, of course, I resonate to it all. Intellectually, I think these films extend or enhance a myth, which makes powerful television but which was not the complete political reality as America lived it.
There were a lot of good Democrats who HATED Bobby Kennedy — they thought of him as arrogant, too ambitious, someone who obtained his high place in politics on his family’s wealth and his brother’s name. Some of those Democrats who hated RFK were enthusiastic supporters of Humphrey, and many might have voted for Nixon in 68. It’s not clear what they would have done — they didn’t like Nixon either. If they voted for RFK, they would have held their nose to do so.
There’s little doubt that if Robert Kennedy had lived, but lost the nomination, he would have made it easier for the Democratic Party to unify that year. The other defeated candidate for the nomination, Senator Eugene McCarthy, bitterly sat on his hands after losing. But RFK was much more of a team player. Vice President Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon by just 500,000 votes (43.4% to 42.7%). He was gaining on Nixon until the polls closed. Another day or two of a surge, and he probably would have won.
There were certain historical patterns and social, societal trends that were larger than RFK:
1) the disillusionment in political leaders and the fall of the imperial presidency were built into the faux intimacy that television and the growth of an aggressive mass media brought into the process. The mass media pattern was/is to build someone up, then tear them down, to initially magnify a person’s goodness and then magnify their dark side. If Nixon wasn’t around to kick, to become disillusioned in, someone else would have been, perhaps RFK. It is very difficult for a public figure, particularly a politician, to sustain high popularity indefinitely in the hot glare of uncontrolled publicity.
2) the heightened security of campaigns, removing politicians from a closeness to the people, was a product of mass media. If an assassin’s bullet did not kill RFK or another candidate in 1968, it would have eventually happened. RFK was naïve if not reckless in this regard and probably would have been shot eventually unless his security detail was substantially beefed up to that of a president.
3) It’s unlikely Robert Kennedy under any circumstances could have pushed back against long-term demographic trends, the rise of the Sunbelt and population shift of political power away from the old industrial northeast and toward the South. This trend became strongly apparent by 1976, culminating in the elections of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 and former California governor Ronald Reagan in 1980.
4) Election analysts view 1968 as a realigning election: the “Solid South” left the Democratic Party for third-party candidate George Wallace. Many Southern segregationists, raised as Democrats, supported Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 because of his opposition to civil rights. They still considered themselves Democrats or “Dixiecrats” in 1968, supporting the local Democratic Party, but voted for Wallace for President. By 1972, Republicans had made enough inroads to began to win elections in the South. With the demise of old-guard Southern conservative Democrats, the GOP gradually became the majority party in many Southern states.
5) The pendulum swings in politics and history, and it would have been extremely difficult for the Democratic Party to hold onto the presidency and Congress for 16 years, from 1960 to 1976.
At some point, the pendulum would have swung dramatically to the right, and Ronald Reagan would have been waiting in the wings to turn back the clock, or to respond to the excesses of Democrats.
Ah, the ironies of history. There was a good chance that RFK would have lost the nomination in 1968, would have tried again for the presidency in 1972, but by then Nixon was the incumbent who would have used every dirty trick to win. RFK could have lost in 1972, lost the election as big as George McGovern did, and become in history not as a great romantic legend whose shadow loomed over generations, but as the biggest loser in American political history, the man who led the Democratic Party off the cliff and into the wilderness for eight years if not decades.
He might have been forced out of politics before the age of 50 and done something else with the remainder of his life. He didn’t seem to have the patience his brother Ted had to spend 47 years in the US Senate slowly putting together coalitions to pass landmark legislation.
6) Changing standards for politicians. Just as interesting to American political history buffs like me is an interview of Robert Kennedy by the BBC’s David Frost, posted on JackHurston.com under the headline, “Do they make politicians like this anymore?” (This website and audio interview are no longer online.)
After RFK’s death, this interview was often cited, poignantly, as an example of his vulnerability and depth. But listening to it now I am struck by how UNPRACTICED and VULNERABLE RFK seems with a member of the broadcast media, unrehearsed if not inarticulate.
One of his advisors acknowledged that he had difficulty boiling his views down into overly simplistic talking points. A political candidate today who seems so UNREHEARSED, so vulnerable, so untrained by media relations professionals, who doesn’t STICK TO TALKING POINTS and think in advance what the answers to reporters’ questions will be, and think in advance and in the most calculating fashion what the full consequences of his answers to reinforce a positive “image” would be hounded out of the race, indeed out of national politics.
The fast-paced, too media-savvy, brutal political culture today simply does not have the time or the tolerance for a candidate like RFK who would evince such angst and vulnerability in public.
I’m afraid the answer to Hurston’s question is, “No, they don’t make politicians like RFK anymore, but the fault, dear Brutus, may be not so much in the stars as in ourselves.”
Whatever Robert Kennedy’s individual fate, he inspired others and continues to inspire generations afterward with this speech asserting that one young man or one young woman can make a difference in the world.
“Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, & in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation…Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, & crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Entire speech:
RFK in the Land of Apartheid: Film, Transcripts and Study Guides
Newt Gingrich Perspective
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Ph.D. historian, in his “What If” Facebook series, suggests Robert Kennedy would have lost the nomination because he started his campaign too late, but that he would have agreed to serve as Hubert Humphrey’s vice presidential nominee. If the Democrats unified in this way, the Humphrey-Kennedy ticket may very well have beaten Richard Nixon in 1968, meaning no Watergate scandal.
Humphrey-Kennedy would have been under pressure to de-escalate and end America’s involvement in Vietnam in their first term, before 1972. Yet politically, if the North Vietnamese overran the South before the 1972 election, that would have created a political backlash in the US so they would have tried hard to prevent it.
However, if re-elected in 1972, the Humphrey-Kennedy administration would have faced almost certain humiliation before the end of their second term when the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam. And by 1976, just when Robert Kennedy was considering a run for the presidency in his own right, President Kennedy’s affairs, dalliance with Marilyn Monroe and a mafia mol would have become known, along with the drug problems of his own children, dooming RFK’s chances for the presidency. California Governor Ronald Reagan would almost certainly have won the 1976 election against Kennedy or any other Democrat.
RFK would have been wise to decide not to run in 1976. He might have returned in 1980 after the likely perceived failure of Reagan’s one term, 1977-81, serving as president in 1981-89.
James Rogan Perspective
Gingrich promotes former Republican congressman James Rogan’s book, “And Now Its On to Chicago,” an alternate history of Robert Kennedy’s candidacy if he lived. Rogan, who led the prosecution in the House impeachment and Senate trial of President Bill Clinton, wrote on WND.com: “As a San Francisco boy growing up in the 1960s in a blue-collar, part-Irish and all-Roman Catholic family, John and Robert Kennedy were heroes to our generation of immigrant and denominational descendants. We admired them in life and mourned them in death – deeply.”
After RFK’s assassination, his neurosurgeon reported “that if the fatal shot had struck just one centimeter to the right, Bobby would have recovered and resumed his campaign. Because it did not he died at age 42, leaving a pregnant widow, 10 young children and a gaping hole in American history,” Rogan wrote.
Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2018/03/robert-kennedy-the-man-the-myth-the-truth/#cjKGAxlrVpA6svdf.99
Rogan said he held RFK in awe, and while in Congress co-sponsored legislation with RFK’s son Joseph to rename the US Justice Department Building in his honor. “Republicans killed the bill in committee,” he wrote. “Thirty years after RFK’s death, his memory still aroused so much GOP disdain that they would not have named the DOJ outhouse after him. When I tried raising the issue with Speaker Newt Gingrich directly, he cut me off. “That bill is dead – dead,” he snapped irritably. Later, when my friend Lyn Nofziger, Ronald Reagan’s longtime spokesman and adviser, visited my Capitol Hill office, I saw him staring at a large autographed photo of Bobby Kennedy hanging on my wall. Turning to me and looking both confused and disgusted, he asked, “What the hell is that thing doing here?”
“This leads to my next point: Fascination does not cause blindness.”
Related:
Charles Pierce in Esquire: I’d Like to Think Bobby Kennedy Would Have Saved Us From What We’ve Become
Would Anti-War Senator Eugene McCarthy Join Forces With Robert Kennedy?
Not likely. He would've blocked Bobby's presidential nomination.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her 2024 book, “An Unfinished Love Story,” about her 1960s activism and that of her husband, Richard Goodwin, sheds new light on the subject. Dick Goodwin worked for Sen. Eugene McCarthy when he challenged President Johnson. Goodwin was also a good friend of Robert Kennedy, and switched to support RFK after McCarthy did well in the New Hampshire primary against Johnson and RFK entered the race. On the night of the California primary, upon learning the results, RFK told Goodwin that in order to win the nomination, “I’ve got to get free of McCarthy” because their competition was splitting the anti-war coalition. He instructed Goodwin to offer McCarthy whatever cabinet position he desired, including Secretary of State, if he withdrew from the race. Goodwin could lure McCarthy with the idea that he could become the Secretary of State who ended the Vietnam War.
I seriously doubt that McCarthy would have accepted the offer. He deeply resented his fellow Irish Catholic, Robert Kennedy, thinking he was arrogant and over-privileged. He mostly got his high government positions because of his father’s wealth and connection to his brother. He thought Bobby was ruthless. Though perceived as an anti-war leftist zealot in 1968, McCarthy was a mercurial and diffident personality who challenged Johnson partly because he was bored in the Senate, and didn’t plan to run for re-election from Minnesota in 1970…
McCarthy essentially lost faith in the system, and preferred pontificating and writing poetry to making a difference in politics. After leaving the Senate, he ran for president several more times, capturing almost no attention or support. In 1980, as an indication of his disillusionment with Democratic politics, he supported Ronald Reagan for president.
Read my full piece about McCarthy:
