What If Revisited

Fifty-seven years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy died. A look back at his ill-fated 1968 campaign and his political legacy.

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June 6 is best known as the anniversary of D-Day. Still, it’s also the day, 57 years ago, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy died.

A couple of years ago, I penned a post for Truth and Consequences on RFK’s legacy and why, even if he had lived, it’s unlikely her would have prevailed as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968. I wanted to take the opportunity to re-up that piece, with some further thoughts on one of the more fascinating political figures of the second half of the 20th century.

Since his untimely death, Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential run has been wrapped in mythology. Here was the potential savior of the Democratic Party who could unite the white working class and Black Americans in a black-blue coalition that would reorient national politics.

But as I wrote in my book, American Maelstrom, this theory of political change was more fiction than fact.

I’m going to use as a jumping-off point a piece I wrote about this issue in 2013 for the Guardian.

The first and most pervasive myth that has developed around Bobby is that if he had lived, he would have won the Democratic nomination that summer in Chicago and gone on to win the presidency over Richard Nixon.

But Kennedy was, at best, a long shot to wrest the nomination away from Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. Not only did Humphrey have the lion's share of delegates to the convention, but Bobby was also not a terribly popular figure within the Democratic party. Southerners didn't like him; the unions were no fans either; many of the old Democratic bosses resented him; and President Lyndon B Johnson would have likely sawed off his arm before he allowed "that little shitass" Kennedy to win. When Kennedy himself told aide Dick Goodwin that he had, at most, an "outside chance of winning the nomination from Humphrey", he was likely over-estimating his chances.

Although Bobby had extraordinarily loyal support among blacks and Hispanics, it was precisely this support that alienated many working-class whites. That would have been a liability for Kennedy in a general election against Nixon, even if he had somehow captured the nomination.

Indeed, one of the more striking elements of Kennedy's much-mythologized run for the White House in 1968 was that the more voters got to see him, the less they liked him. In a May poll that year (Gallup), 67% of voters saw him as an opportunist; six months earlier, only 46% viewed him in such negative terms. In November 1967, a majority of voters (54-34%) agreed that he had the same "outstanding qualities" as his brother, the former president. By May 1968, a majority saw him as a pale substitute of his brother. Perhaps most dramatic was his slippage in head-to-head polls with Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy – a May Gallup survey found that only 25% of voters wanted to see Democrats pick him as their nominee in Chicago.

One of Kennedy’s biggest political problems was that white voters saw him as a politician who, first and foremost, represented Black America. This argument isn’t 20/20 hindsight. Kennedy acknowledged the issue at the time, telling aides, “I’m the Negro candidate. I have to tell white people I care about what they care about. I’ll talk about racial reconciliation for ten minutes, and it’s as cold as can be. I’ll talk about (how) we’ve … got to enforce the law, and they’ll break loose.”

It’s why, as Kennedy campaigned in white communities during the Indiana primary, talk of racial reconciliation faded, and instead, he boasted about his previous incarnation as “chief law enforcement officer in the land” when he served as US attorney general. In addition, he regularly spoke of the need for “law and order” and a stern hand in dealing with race riots.

Although Kennedy won in Indiana, his victory was primarily the result of strong support from Black voters — about half of his votes in the state came from them. Among white voters, he only won around 30 percent, and did particularly poorly with white affluent voters and in communities abutting predominantly African American neighborhoods. As I note in my book, “In Lake County, Indiana, which included the gritty industrial city of Gary, Kennedy’s dreams of a multiracial coalition came face-to-face with the reality of the white backlash. He lost fifty-nine out of seventy of the county’s predominantly white precincts—scoring 34 percent of their vote against 49 percent for McCarthy.”

His problems with white voters worsened as the campaign progressed. In Oregon, he lost to Eugene McCarthy in large part because the state simply didn’t have enough voters of color. As the California primary campaign began he held a double-digit lead over McCarthy, but internal polling showed that white voters continued to identify him as “the Negro candidate.” He went on to victory there, but only by 4 points, as McCarthy again dominated the vote in white suburbia.

But Kennedy’s problems with white voters only scratched the surface of his political dilemmas. Because of the structure of the nominating system in 1968, he could only win a handful of delegates in state primaries. Most delegates were awarded at state conventions where establishment and elected Democrats, who preferred Humphrey, dominated. They were all too happy to stick it to Kennedy.

Ironically, for all the reverence Kennedy holds among liberal Democrats, they were another source of trouble for him in 1968.

The day after McCarthy's stunning performance against Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in March 1968, Kennedy told reporters that he was "actively reassessing" his decision not to take on LBJ. It was, said one McCarthy staffer, like waking up Christmas morning and finding that Bobby had stolen all their presents from beneath the tree. Few on the antiwar left forgave Kennedy (McCarthy himself included), and most stuck with McCarthy through the rest of the primary season.

Outside of Black and Hispanic voters, as well as ethnic whites who revered his slain brother, Kennedy had little solid support within the Democratic Party.

Part of the problem for RFK was that in the spring of 1968, he still didn’t know who he was or what he believed in. The man who hawkishly counseled his brother to send bombers to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis would enter the ‘68 race in large measure out of moral anguish over the war in Vietnam. A man whom the novelist William Styron once said “could put people off horribly” tried to run a presidential campaign as the candidate who could bring the races together and unite the country.

One day, he would speak passionately about the need for racial reconciliation, but on another day (specifically his only campaign debate with McCarthy), he would race-bait his opponent by accusing him of wanting to send tens of thousands of black people to predominantly white Orange County.

Kennedy was constantly torn between the desire to win (a trait instilled in him by his domineering father) and a yearning to do the right thing. In 1968, he never quite figured out how to balance those two impulses.

Still, Kennedy was a candidate ahead of his time, who I think understood better than most that the Democratic Party needed to change and evolve.

Kennedy’s ideological flexibility is what made him a uniquely compelling figure—and his untimely demise so particularly tragic. Rather than the embodiment of New Deal liberalism, Kennedy’s politics represented a “third way” for Democrats, a generation before that term entered the party’s lexicon. A blue collar–black coalition didn’t exist in 1968, but the need to find a new political vocabulary for those who were being left behind (blacks, Hispanics, and the increasingly angry and anxious white lower class) could not have been more vitally important. Kennedy was ahead of his time in seeking to bridge this divide, even if he was an imperfect leader for such an effort. The hostility that existed between Kennedy and many in organized labor, for example, risked alienating the most mobilized and engaged constituency of any successful Democratic political coalition. Still, unlike other Democrats, he recognized that the party had to do a better job of responding to the larger political shifts taking place in American society, rather than simply falling back on familiar and increasingly tired liberal nostrums.

Had Kennedy lived, he likely would have matured as a candidate — and as a person. He would have become more disciplined and steady in his approach to campaigning, as his brother eventually did. The tragedy of Kennedy’s death is American politics’ ultimate “what if?” It’s not hard to imagine that he could have been elected president one day, just not in 1968.

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Musical Interlude