It appears that people are in a counterfactual-y sort of mood. Maybe that’s related to how lousy the facts are.
Evan Thomas speculates on what might have happened if Robert Kennedy had become president in 1968 (rather than being assassinated):
It is one of history’s great “what ifs.” What if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated 40 years ago and gone on to become president of the United States? It’s safe to say that his presidency would have followed a different course from that of Richard Nixon. And it may just be that American politics would not be endlessly refighting the 1960s. Kennedy was a less polarizing figure than Nixon, who exploited the divisions that have now hardened into Red States and Blue States. But Kennedy himself was a complex and mercurial figure, so all we can really do is speculate. It’s an intriguing guessing game—if one does not get too dreamy about the mythology of RFK.
Oddly he never really answers the question, only hinting at his answer (it would have been wonderful).
For Robert Kennedy to have become president he would have had to avoid assassination, he would have had to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the primaries, and he would have had to defeat Richard Nixon in the general election. We’re beginning to stack up a lot of “ifs” here. I actually think it’s more likely that if he had not been assassinated very little else would have changed. He might have continued to serve as senator from New York for the rest of his life which would, presumably, have left Hillary Clinton out in the cold so there’s that.
But I’ll play along. If RFK had become president, I think we clearly we would have exited Viet Nam a few years earlier than we actually did, probably before 1970 and 20,000 or so fewer Americans would have died. We’d still have had the bad taste of Viet Nam in our collective mouth but otherwise I have no idea what impact it might have had on foreign policy. We probably would not have opened up to China when we did.
I’m guessing the Democratic Party would have remained more centrist than it actually became. See if you can figure out my reasoning on that.
They’d have had to swing back to the center after RFK.
And I’m wondering what planet he lives on to think the Kennedys are less polarizing than Nixon.
A lot of the people dreaming up these scenarios do not have a deep understanding of the subject matter, and many times they just project the present into the future. If we projected presidential candidates into the future, we would get very different presidents.
Candidate Obama is a very different person than President Obama, and this is true for all his predecessors. I am certain that pre-presidential RFK would not have been the same person sitting in the Oval Office.