November 14, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz posted about an upcoming film on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Josh has the impression that the film sees RFK as “the great white hope” who would have “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.” These promising developments are sometimes imagined to have been aborted only by the freak event of assassination. Josh is skeptical about that, pointing out that Kennedy merely offered the Vietcong a seat at the negotiating table, and he doubts that either Hanoi or Saigon would have agreed to any compromise. He also points out that Kennedy, had he swept the primaries, would still have lost the nomination to Hubert Humphrey.
I remember this recurring fascination with RFK surviving and saving the day for sixties liberalism—in fact, I was treated to a taste of it only a month ago—and I share much of Josh’s skepticism. But if you want to imagine Kennedy winning the nomination, it is pretty easy to do: Simply assume that the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Humphrey rather than Kennedy. After all, Kennedy was not famous for being a sturdier supporter of Israel than Humphrey. So what might have changed? Sometimes we suspect that a failed assassination would have change a great deal: Churchill was almost killed by a taxi in 1931, and a number of assassination attempts missed Hitler. How about this one?
I share Josh’s skepticism about RFK finding any magic way out of Vietnam, which was for a long time the core of the RFK myth. I doubt that there was any such magic way: Vietnam seems destined to have either been united by a Communist military victory or remained divided because of that victory’s being prevented by greater American tenacity. My guess is that RFK, scion of what was then a stalwartly anti-Communist political clan, would have been extremely unlikely to abandon South Vietnam any sooner than Richard Nixon did, if that is in fact what happened (Nixon claimed he’d compelled a compromise in 1972 and was unable to enforce that compromise after Watergate so weakened him). In any event, Republican pressure on RFK as a Democrat not to lose in Vietnam would have been very strong. The Vietnamese Communists would have been unable to take Saigon as long as there were significant numbers of American troops on the ground, or even significant elements of American airpower within range. My guess is that the election of Robert Kennedy would have meant South Vietnam was still there in 1976, when he left office, and maybe forever. If he had won, we might still have troops in Vietnam; after all, we still have them in South Korea.
Would he have produced a stable biracial coalition? Maybe he’d have kept Northern Catholic ethnics on board for a while, but it is very hard not to imagine a Republican South coming into being after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and at around the same time. That does not mean that Nixon would have won in 1968. That was a very close election, and my guess is that Robert Kennedy would have won it. But in the long run, how different would racial politics have been? By current standards, Nixon was actually an extremely liberal president on race and poverty: strong on affirmative action and strong on a relatively generous welfare state. I do not see Kennedy being stronger on either, given predictable Republican opposition, which would have been more militant than it was in the Nixon Presidency. And pressures on that biracial coalition would have continued to mount: rising crime would still have poisoned the atmosphere, affirmative action would still have been divisive, the successes of Great Society programs would still have been mixed. Kennedy magic might have worked wonders on northern Catholic voters in 1968, maybe even in 1972, but probably not forever. On the other hand, although it is still in my circles unfashionable to say it, racial politics is actually one of the successes of post-1945 American history It is perverse to assume that Robert Kennedy might have made this worse, but I don’t see how he could have made things come out all that much better or changed things much more quickly.
Assuming no Watergate-equivalent on Kennedy’s watch, and assuming no loss of South Vietnam, it is unlikely that anyone like Carter would have been elected President in 1976; the odds seem better for either a conventional Democrat or a Republican. That means that if the Iranian Revolution had proceeded on schedule, it is hard to imagine comparable irresolution during any hostage crisis. That still means an Iranian theocracy, but with no hostage crisis dragging on for hundreds of days and with no loss of South Vietnam, it is hard to imagine some of our future enemies so emboldened. And with no protracted hostage crisis, it is pretty hard to imagine someone who in 1978 looked as odd as Reagan did still winning a presidential election two years later. Watergate, the loss of Vietnam, and the hostage crisis all delegitimized our traditional political elites; undo those events, and that protracted legitimacy crisis might have been averted, or at least delayed. Still, after the Civil Rights Act, the Republican party would still have become more Southern and Western, and it would have had to win an election sometime.
As for the first RFK administration, a Democrat might not have had the leeway to make a deal with Communist China, which would probably have at least slightly retarded Chinese modernization. The Cold War would probably have stayed chilly, and the Russians would still have crushed the Prague Spring. With a Democrat in office, and Republicans in opposition, that might have slowed détente. When the Soviet Union approached the American President in 1969, canvassing the prospect of a preventive war with China, who knows what Robert Kennedy would have done? Very probably the same thing Nixon did, but maybe Kennedy would have bartered a free hand against China for an agreement to cut off military aid to North Vietnam. That would have changed our world unrecognizably. This is all, of course, absurdly speculative, but one thing seems clear: The two great hopes of the RFK fans, a happy ending in Vietnam and a New Deal coalition preserved in amber, seem extraordinarily unlikely.
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