November 13, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Later this month, Emilio Estevez’s new film chronicling the last day of Robert Kennedy’s life is set for general release. While I’ve not yet seen the film, the trailers would appear to suggest it follows the standard narrative line about Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, namely that had he lived, RFK would have emerged as the great white hope, forged a coalition of working-class ethnics and black urbanites, won the Democratic nomination, defeated Richard Nixon in the general election, and pulled America out of Vietnam.
There’s always been a lot wrong with this story. For one, neither Kennedy nor his chief opponent in the Democratic primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy, called for a withdrawal from Vietnam. They were simply calling for a halt in the U.S. bombing campaign and for allowing the Vietcong/National Liberation Front a seat at the negotiating table. There is little reason to believe that the governments in Hanoi or Saigon would have agreed to a quick resolution of the conflict. For Saigon, any settlement involving a coalition government with the NLF was tantamount to defeat; for Hanoi, a protracted war increased the odds of a more favorable peace.
Diplomatic concerns aside, Kennedy could not and would not have been nominated by his party. It is true that by August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, 38.7 percent of Democratic primary voters had cast ballots for McCarthy and 30.6 percent had cast ballots for Kennedy, meaning that over two-thirds of primary voters had supported candidates who called for a negotiated settlement of the war in Southeast Asia. By contrast, only 2.2 percent of primary voters had supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who initially adhered to the administration’s hard line on Vietnam
But in 1968 only 15 states chose their delegates by primary. At least 57 percent of convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. As early as June 2, even before Kennedy’s assassination, the vice president’s advisers had sewn up enough delegates to secure the nomination. Humphrey did not need grass-roots support to win; all he needed was the party bosses.
That said, I’m looking forward to the movie.
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