Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Historical Myths Kennedys Edition, Part 6: An Alternative Reasoning For Bobby Kennedy's Run in 1968 and Why It Would Never Have Ended with Him in the White House

 

 

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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