For those of you who aren’t familiar with the word “hagiography” it refers to narratives of the lives of the saints. I hope that the exaggerated hagiographies of Robert Kennedy, presumably in recognition of the 50th anniversary of his assassination, to which we’re being treated don’t go on for too long. I realize that he’s seen as a lost opportunity by Baby Boomers but IMO that just illustrates how little they were actually aware of real events, even the real events of their youths.
By the time RFK was assassinated Hubert Humphrey already had the Democratic nomination sewed up. If RFK hadn’t been assassinated, I doubt it would have changed much about the 1968 election. What state carried by Nixon would have gone for RFK? Kennedy would in all likelihood have replaced McGovern in 1972 and would have lost just as badly as McGovern did for the same reasons. The main difference if he had not been assassinated is that his children would have grown up with even less respect for him than they did when he was a symbol of something that was lost.
But let’s play along and fantasize that Robert Kennedy was the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1968. IMO he would have been beaten by Nixon worse than Humphrey was because he wouldn’t have carried Texas.
He wasn’t a good guy. He was a bigot. He’d been thrown out of high school for cheating, a very bad habit of the Kennedys. He was just another entitled rich guy with a Hyannis Port accent.
If Kennedy had lived, though, what are the odds that he might have ended up as Humphrey’s running mate? Given the politics in the Democratic Party at the time, the pressure to do so would have probably been immense.
And, if RFK were the running mate what impact might that have had on the election itself?
What states would the Humphrey-RFK ticket have carried that were carried by Nixon? RFK had devoted so much attention to demonizing the Johnson Administration that it would have been hard for him to be Humphrey’s running mate and, had he accepted the job, he might actually have lost support.
What is most likely to have happened is that the Humphrey-Kennedy ticket would have lost, Kennedy would have gone on to be the Democratic nominee in 1972, and he would have lost.
If RFK has lived; would the democratic convention that year been as calamitous? Pat Buchanan wrote in the WSJ this year that he thought the convention left Humphrey too far behind, (Humphrey just came up short in the comeback; Illanois was a key swing state)…