For all the flaws in JFK’s
presidency, at least they can be linked to some tangible accomplishments.
Almost everything involving the myth of Bobby Kennedy is based on the possibility
of what might have happened if he hadn’t been killed.
Contemporaries had a clearer
perspective. Even as he admits the tragedy of Bobby’s death in The Making of
The President: 1968 Theodore White admitted that their were hoops still to
jump through. He doubted RFK’s potential to win the New York Primary, to
triumph at the Democratic Convention or even if he had been nominated, that the
Republicans might have been inclined to turn to a different candidate instead
of Richard Nixon – perhaps Reagan or even Nelson Rockefeller. But with the
passage of time, the realism began to vanish and more people began to seize on
to the myth.
While this is understandable,
given how history ended up playing out in the years to come, the fact is all of
this gives to much denial of what actually happened and who Bobby Kennedy
actually was. So in this article, I’m going to deconstruct the myth around Bobby,
an alternate reason for his running that I think is valid, and why even if
Sirhan Sirhan had not intervened, that a potential Bobby Kennedy nomination was
still unlikely and a presidency even more so.
Let’s start with something I
believe most people who idolize Robert don’t want to admit: a lot of the problems
in politics in the 1960s are a direct result of the feud between him and Lyndon
Johnson. The exact origins for its beginning may never be known for certain,
but it has to have calcified after John got the 1960 nomination from the
Democrats, offered the VP to LBJ and LBJ accepted it.
To this day, it remains clouded
in mystery as to the chronicle of events: whether the offer was genuine or when
it was given under the assumption that Johnson would refuse and they could give
it to Stuart Symington, the candidate they really wanted; whether after Lyndon
accepted it, they tried to retract it, with Bobby being decidedly against it.
Whatever the reason after LBJ took the nomination, the two men bore a grudge
that never dissipated and actually got worse over time.
Johnson believed with every
fiber of his being that Bobby was orchestrating a way to get him off the ticket
in 1964. Bobby almost as much blamed LBJ for his brother dying in Dallas in
1963 – the whole reason for the visit was to shore up support in Texas.
Whatever the reason, after Johnson became President, there were a lot of people
who wanted Bobby to take the nomination in 1964, current occupant be damned.
There was a shadow campaign
in 1964 to have Bobby Kennedy be Johnson’s nominee for Vice President. Douglas
MacArthur, who would died in the next year, told Bobby to grab the ticket: “Johnson
won’t survive his term. Lyndon gambled on him and he won. You gamble on
(Lyndon) and you’ll win!” During the New
Hampshire primary, a write-in campaign was staged for the Democratic Vice
Presidential nomination. RFK won it, despite not claiming he was behind it.
There was no realistic
chance that LBJ would pick Bobby for the nomination, of course, and he did everything
in his power to minimize Bobby’s presence at the Democratic Convention that
August. Even so, Johnson was still incredibly doubtful that the public wanted
him and briefly considered turning down the nomination. But he did accept it.
Meanwhile, Bobby had
resigned as Attorney General and was running for against Kenneth Keating in New
York for a Senate Seat. The Kennedy name did not encourage much love in New
York; claims of ‘carpetbagger’ began the
minute he announced and continued until Election day. Nevertheless, Bobby
managed to Win, even though he underperformed LBJ in New York by over 1 million
votes. Despite that, Bobby never gave credit to LBJ for getting him there.
After a poor performance in
the 1966 midterms and LBJ’s popularity began to dwindle among Americans, Allard
Lowenstein began to look for a Democrat to make a challenge against Johnson in
New Hampshire, almost entirely for a protest vote. One of the first people he
came to was Bobby Kennedy. Bobby turned him down.
The explanation he gave in
the fall of 1967 was that while he believed in Lowenstein’s idea, he did not
wish to make this challenge about his feelings against LBJ. That might very
well have been the truth. But there is another less altruistic explanation.
Bobby Kennedy knew that if
he did nothing, he would be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for
President in 1972. If Lyndon won reelection, then he would have no power over
Bobby or any aspect of the nominating process along the way and he could run,
claiming to be a supporter of the Great Society. If Johnson lost – to Richard
Nixon – then it would be far easier to run against him as the full notion of ‘The
Restoration of Camelot’ which had been beginning to come alive for years.
What is more, for the unpopularity
of the Vietnam War among the youth of America, there was no evidence that it
was a winning issue to stand against it. When The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was
passed in 1964, only two Senators had voted against it – Ernest Gruening of
Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon. Both had lost their reelection fights during
the midterms. To take a position against Vietnam was not politically sound for
any elected official in the Democratic Party going into 1968. And Bobby was a
realistic. He knew that if he made this challenge and lost, LBJ would hold it
over his head and do everything in his power to destroy his political ambitions,
starting with his run for reelection for Senate in 1970.
So Bobby stayed out.
Lowenstein approached many other anti-war Democrats – among them Frank Church,
William Fulbright, and George McGovern. McGovern himself wanted to do it, but
like many of the men he approached, he had barely won his senate seat in 1962
and he knew the odds of reelection were slim to begin with. So eventually,
Lowenstein turned to Eugene McCarthy.
McCarthy had no Presidential
ambitions and was not particularly interested in advancing in politics. (Just
two years later he chose not to seek reelection.) And its unlikely McCarthy’s
challenge would have amounted to anything had it not been for the Tet Offensive
and how badly it looked to Americans at home. Democrats became disillusioned
with the war, and McCarthy’s prospects brightened. He came within a few inches
of defeating LBJ in New Hampshire, receiving 42% of the vote to LBJ’s 49% and
twenty of the 24 delegates.
Even before the Tet Offensive
it is said that Bobby Kennedy was considering getting into the race because he
had grown and changed his position on Vietnam and that is why he chose to get
into the race not long after McCarthy’s victory. There’s another, less generous,
explanation. After New Hampshire, Bobby smelled Lyndon’s blood in the water and
he knew that if he got into the race, it was a way of sticking the knife in
against a man he hated.
There’s an also an argument
that McCarthy’s victory in New Hampshire had shifted everything politically
enough that Bobby’s future might be cloudy. If McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey were
nominated, Bobby’s chance at the White House could possibly be closed off until
1976. Bobby was known for being ruthless after all.
Whatever the reason, Bobby
announced for the Democratic nomination on March 15th. On March 31st,
LBJ made his famous speech to the nation in which he announced: “I shall not
seek, nor will I accept another nomination from my party.” Not long after that
Hubert Humphrey declared his candidacy and began the process of slowly but
surely grabbing the delegates he would need to win the nomination without
competing in a primary. (Hubert Humphrey will eventually get his own series of
articles later on.)
It is worth noting, for all
intents and purposes, McCarthy was far more popular in the primaries than Bobby
was during the 1968 campaign. For the first three months of the campaign,
McCarthy won as many primaries as Kennedy did, taking Wisconsin, Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Oregon and on June 6th New Jersey. Bobby’s campaign is
remembered more fondly more likely because of the reporters fondness for him
than anything else: Jules Witcover’s famous volume 85 Days spends all its
time focusing on his time on the Kennedy campaign and how much fun it was while
regarding McCarthy, who started the real campaign, as a gadfly who wouldn’t get
out of Bobby’s way. His triumphs in Indiana and Nebraska are cheered about, and
when McCarthy manages to beat Kennedy in Oregon, it has to do with how his
campaign mismanaged it rather than ability of McCarthy. Bobby comes across as a
man of the people, while McCarthy is essentially an elitist snob. The fact is,
there were not that many major differences between Kennedy and McCarthy and for
all his people loved by youth, its worth noting in many ways Bobby was more
conservative than McCarthy was. Even the fact that McCarthy still managed to
get more votes in the primary cycle than anyone is glossed over by the fact of
Bobby’s assassination the night of his victory in the California primary. (He
also won South Dakota earlier that night.)
I won’t minimize the tragedy
of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. It was a great loss for our country and the
Democratic Party for decades to come. But just as JFK’s death in Dallas has led
countless millions to believe he would never have gotten us involved in Vietnam,
just as many believe Bobby’s death prevented us from getting out of Vietnam within
the next year.
All of this assumes that
Bobby Kennedy would have been the Democratic nominee. All of this is on false
logic because it ignores three very critical facts.
1. The New York Primary was
still to come.
Every time I raise the possibility of Bobby losing this primary, they wave it
off with the idea that ‘It was his home state.” It wasn’t, for one thing, and
for another Bobby was not very popular in New York even then. Quite a few of
papers and columnists – including the Times – were against him. More importantly,
the coalition that had just managed to get him to a narrow victory in California
– based on the young, African Americans and Latinos – was not present in New
York to the same degree. Even if we allow Bobby’s victory here, that ignores
the next fact:
2. Humphrey had the delegates. On the
night of the June 6th primary, Hubert Humphrey had more or less
gotten a majority of the delegates needed to win the nomination. Even Stephen
Smith, Kennedy’s campaign manager, conceded as much after the fact. In order
for Bobby to be nominated at Chicago, he would have had to form a union with
the McCarthy-ites (many of whom disliked him on principle) or forced McCarthy
to surrender his delegates to him, then convince the delegates who were loyal
to Humphrey to move to him. Witcover writes in 85 Days that the Kennedy
campaign had a plan to just that. I find that even the most ambitious plan
would have been unlikely to succeed because of something they don’t
acknowledge:
3. LBJ. In Ken Burns’ documentary on
The Vietnam War, it was officially revealed what has only been a rumor in
the half century since. Leading up to the convention and even while the chaos
was unfolding, Johnson was reconsidering his decision not to run. A
conversation with fellow Texan John Connolly told him that they could get at least
1000 delegates to vote for him on the first ballot. But a conversation with Richard Daley told
him that if he showed up in Chicago, they could not guarantee his safety. So he
stayed out of it, and Humphrey was nominated.
If
Bobby Kennedy had even been a slight threat to getting the Democratic nomination,
I think Johnson would have risked a firing squad to make sure that he got it
instead of him. (He was actually considering making an effort in August anyway
when the Prague Spring started that and he could not turn his attention away).
He certainly would have done everything in his power to make sure Bobby didn’t
get it, and go out of his way to make sure Humphrey did.
And even if you allow all of these possibilities to
go into effect and Bobby still somehow gets a Democratic nomination, his
victory in November remains remote.
Does Nixon get the nomination in 1968 if Bobby is
nominated? After all, the fact that he lost to Kennedy eight years ago would be
on Republicans minds, and its not like that he was ever the most popular man in
the party to begin with. (There were quite a few people who wanted Ronald
Reagan ahead of him, and Reagan himself had wanted the nomination in 1968, but
there were other factors. Reagan will be getting his own article later.)
How would the presence of George Wallace affected
the Kennedy presidential campaign? Wallace was a major force campaigning
against the violence in the streets that was filling America at the time.
Considering that the Republicans were also campaigning on the ‘law and order’
platform, being the odd man out would not have helped.
And would LBJ have gone out of his way to help Bobby
Kennedy earn the Presidency as he tried to help Humphrey in November of 1968?
Humphrey was close to Johnson’s views on Vietnam. Bobby wasn’t. Could LBJ have
put his thumb on the scale for Nixon or whoever the Republican nominee was
because they were closer to his?
At the end of the day, a potential Bobby Kennedy
presidency is built on the shakiest of foundations that can never be disproven
because of his death and even as history has been far more revealing of everything
that was working against it over the years.
I have read my share of alternate histories over the
years (both science fiction and speculative non-fiction) and entire books have
been composed to this very possibility. And that’s fine, speculation is one thing.
But it is more important to acknowledge the hard truths than history has
revealed.
Bobby Kennedy was never going to be the Democratic nominee
for President in 1968 had he lived. His death, even more than his older brothers,
has ensured him a place in mythology. He is eternally young, the possibility
that we could have had but fate intervened. The fact that it did has glossed
over the inevitable fate that he would have been a defeated Presidential candidate
and the Kennedy aura would have been forever dimmed.
I will end this series with the story of Ted Kennedy’s
Presidential ambitions and how his own political luster may have done far more
to diminish the Democratic prospects for much of the next twenty years even as
it enhanced his own reputation.
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