Upon the advice of a mod, I thought P&E would be the best place for this discussion. I myself wasn’t around yet when Kennedy was running, so I’ve only learned about his impact as well as the effect of his death is only secondhand.
This BBC article caught my attention and inspired this post. In it, people suggest that if RFK had lived Bill a Clinton would never have become President, for example, due to changes in the national feeling toward government. What do you all think? Would it have been an earth-shaking change? Notable but not hugely significant? Negligible?
The loss of such strong voices advocating traditional liberal policies also meant there was no-one to counter emerging criticism of those polices from the likes of Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan, argues Jeremi Suri, a history professor and author.
I disagree. There were lots of other liberals around.
He seemed to me to be positioned to be the leader of the liberals. but only if he could have politically outlasted or overcome LBJ, which is definitely debatable. LBJ was the classic post-FDR liberal in terms of social spending – he actually seemed to have believed at some point that offering Ho Chi Minh foreign aid money could have settled the Viet Nam conflict. In my personal opinion, LBJ’s tendency toward thinking of government spending as a cure-all led ultimately to the Reagan “revolution.”
Pretty sure RFK announced he was in in middle of March and LBJ pulled out a couple of weeks later, after LBJ barely beat Eugene McCarthy in the NH primary
The Chicago convention may have been even crazier. I expect Humphrey would still have been the nominee, but RFK might have been offered the VP slot. (Primaries didn’t quite carry the weight they do now.)
Humphrey would still have been the nominee, based on tradition, but he still would have lost. I don’t think Bobby would have accepted VP. Bobby might have run in 72 but I think 76 would have been his year. Just my $.02.
Agreed, Humphrey still would have received the nomination, the Democratic Party would still have been split and Nixon still would have won.
Furthermore, IMHO had RFK run and been nominated in 1972, Nixon still would have won, although not by the overwhelming total he racked up against McGovern.
I think Clinton would still have had a decent shot at being President. He just would have triangulated differently, based on Bobby’s influence on the Democratic party.
If Kennedy had lived, I feel he would have won the nomination and the Presidency in 1968. I think he would have pulled most American troops out of Vietnam because he had committed himself pretty strongly to that position. But there would have been a backlash. Republicans would have had a clear issue to run against Kennedy in 1972. They would call him the man who handed Vietnam to the communists (I’m assuming an earlier American withdrawal would have led to an earlier South Vietnamese collapse). Kennedy probably would have ended up a one term President.
I’m not sure who would have been the 1972 Republican nominee. A third try by Nixon? A second try by Goldwater? An earlier try by Reagan? I don’t feel it would have been the right year for somebody like Bush, Lodge, Rockefeller, or Romney. So let’s call it Reagan and he gets elected eight years earlier than he did historically.
I think it very likely that Clinton would not have become president, because the effect of RFK not dying then would (IMHO) have weighed substantially more than a butterfly flapping its wings over the Amazon. Though it would be interesting to ask Voltaire, who opined that whether Caesar spat to his left or his right while marching through Gaul made absolutely no difference in the subsequent unfolding of history.
Very possible that RFK would have secured the Democratic nomination and won the election. Also possible that wouldn’t happen. There’s not much more to say about it. He was gaining in popularity, Humphrey was a weak challenger, however he would have had the backing of many of the party elders initially, but not the Kennedy brigade. It all could have gone either way. There’s no way to know how the general election would have turned out if RFK was the candidate, or possibly even Humphrey’s running mate. However, IMO Nixon had an edge with the voters because he had the support of the Republican base and the growing dissatisfaction with LBJ would have been detrimental to any Democratic candidate.
I agree it’s speculative, but Clinton’s three big assets were:
personal charisma;
driving ambition;
ability to sense where the Democratic party was heading, and combine that with his sense of popular support for issues (triangulation).
The first two were personal and wouldn’t be affected by an RFK win. Clinton wanted to be president and had the personal charisma to achieve that goal.
I just think that if he had come to political maturity in an RFK-influenced Democratic party, his political views would have been shaped by that party and his policies would be reflective of that party. Clinton in RFK-world would have had different political views.
(He probably would have admitted to inhaling, and would have been more vocal about the efforts he took to avoid going to Vietnam, because in RFK-world, those would have been strengths, not weaknesses.)
I fail to see how any prediction of Bill Clinton’s future could be justified in world so changed as a result of RFK staying alive in 1968. Even if he had not become the candidate or president he would have remained a political force changing the course of American politics.
I think that the '68 election might have gone differently. RFK could appeal to disaffected working class voters that went for Wallace in a way that Humphrey never could have. Makes little sense, I admit, but there was in 2016 a certain segment of voters that started out w/Bernie and ended up voting for trump.
I think the big thing that argues against RFK winning in '68 is that JFK won in '60 and LBJ in '64. Three successive administrations from the same party are (and were) real unlikely. Voters get tired of the same sense at the top. To be sure, this situation of potentially 3 successive administrations by 3 different D presidents is not something we’ve ever seen.
A loose analogue might be Hillary Clinton running after two terms of Obama. Obviously trump was the big wildcard/joker on the deck there in 2016, but nevertheless we all remember a lot of punditocracy that the public was simply tired of 8 years of D rule and wanted a change, even if that change might prove to be wacky. Which it certainly did.
These arguments essentially discount any magic RFK may have had as an individual politician or as somebody getting a boost from his name / dynasty. But a bit like the EC advantage of the Rs, the concerns about the voters generally preferring to alternate parties in power every 8 years at most is a real factor that weighs on the results. It is not necessarily decisive, but it does stack the deck mildly one way or the other. In this case it stacks against RFK winning in 1968.
Had the '68 election come to Nixon vs RFK and had Nixon won, it’s plausible RFK would still be the D heir apparent then nominee in 1972. And might well have defeated Nixon then. The years from '68 to '72 were hardly calm or nirvana in the USA. Lots of reasons for lots of people to want a major change of course. Shame it fell to feckless George McGovern to try to embody that desire for a new direction.
Not necessarily. Earlier in the century the Republicans had four straight terms with three different men, then three straight with three different men. Then the Democrats had FDR and his controversial decision to run four times, and even were able to land a fifth with Truman.
After Truman Ike was courted by both parties. Then JFK won over Ike’s veep. THEN the Democrats had another historic surge in popularity, with huge majorities in Congress that allowed passage of the Civil Rights Act etc. Those majorities outlasted LBJ by quite a few years. I think the consensus going into 1968 was that the presidency was the Dems’ to lose. That wound up happening, but at the beginning of 1968 LBJ was still in the picture for being the 1968 candidate. Even with Humphrey, Nixon’s Southern Strategy was countered by Wallace winning 5 southern states. Humphrey could have won with a better performance in the Midwest (Humphrey actually won Texas, Nixon won California, but it was his home state and the Republicans ran pretty well in California at the time.)