Reflecting on the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas muses at Newsweek over what might have happened if RFK had been elected president?
IMO that’s getting ahead of ourselves. If he had not been assassinated, Robert Kennedy probably still would not have been the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1968. The political apparatus was a lot different then than now and the fix was in—Hubert Humphrey would still probably have been the Democratic nominee. Even if RFK had been the nominee he would probably have been defeated by Nixon.
I think it’s much more likely that he would have been elected president in 1976 and, given the many foreign policy errors of the Carter presidency, a lot might well have been different.
But what if he had been elected in 1968? I think the biggest differences would have been in the domestic economy rather than in foreign policy. I think that the illusions of Kennedy’s supporters notwithstanding he would have maintained our forces in Viet Nam and that would have unfolded much as it did regardless of who the president did.
What I think would have been different is that Nixon’s wage and price controls would probably never have been put in place. That set the stage for, among other things, the decline of American manufacturing, particularly the decline of American textile and clothing manufacturing.
I kind of think that the wage and price controls was mostly an Arthur Burns thing. If we had someone else in charge that might have been different. I have never had a good feel for whether or not his ideas were seen as mainstream at the time. On the foreign policy front, I do have to wonder if RFK would have been willing to talk with China. I doubt that Vietnam would have been much different.
Steve
OT, but no one else commenting upon this much. At the link is the NYT story on opioid deaths in the country. Still, IMO, much undercover by the press. Even more unaddressed by the political class. Almost like they don’t care about poor people, or blame the victims for their own problems. Probably both.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdose-deaths-are-rising-faster-than-ever.html
That’s really terrible, steve. I guess that explains all of the articles I’ve seen or features I’ve heard over the last few months about Narcan.
Trump ran on the idea that he was going to try to help people suffering from opioid addiction. Of all the things that had potential bipartisan support trying to deal with people ODing was it. So far there’s been nothing except destroying health care and Jeff Sessions, who thinks weed is a gateway drug. It’s nonsense.
Where I grew up in Pa had a huge spike in ODs last year. But if you read the local papers, they are going on about trying to prosecute some sorry-ass drug dealer for homicide. That’s about it. There’s such a lack of knowledge about how heroin/opiate addiction works. The people I’ve known who were into heroin sought out what was causing ODs. Addicts will do methadone for two weeks just to lose their tolerance for the real stuff, and then go back
Dave- The EMS guys are kind of freaked out by the amount of Narcan they have to give. For years I have had to teach residents to be careful with Narcan. Giving too much too quickly to the wrong patient can put them in pulmonary edema. Now, you have to give more Narcan than an entire OR, granted a smaller one, would even stock. It is giving us more organ donors at least.
Steve