How RFK Could Have Become President

[Jilly_in_VA]

To see him at the podium claiming victory in the crucial California primary, jokingly thanking his dog Freckles, passionately hopeful that the divided country could come together, flashing a peace sign as he exhorts: ‘So it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!” Knowing what is to come a moment later, it is hard not to assume that it was only Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets that kept Robert Kennedy out of the White House.

The cold political realities of June 1968 were very different. Despite his victory in the winner-take-all California primary—a victory that was well under the 50 percent mark the Kennedy campaign had hoped for—the primary season was ending, as virtually every TV analyst noted, with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had entered no primary battle, as the real winner. Big states without primaries, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, were lined up solidly in his corner, as were the Southern states, as was the leader of the AFL-CIO. And once the New York primary ended two weeks after California, there was no place else to go to win delegates at the ballot box.

“We were losing altitude,” de facto campaign manager Fred Dutton reflected later. looking back at the political terrain Kennedy was facing. In fact, the day of the primary, Dutton was skeptical enough of our chances to suggest that RFK would take the vice-presidential slot if offered.

“Bobby’s a Roman,” Dutton said. “He’ll go where the power is.” And a delegate analysis showed that Humphrey would end the primary season with close to1,000 of the 1,312 delegates need for nomination; Bobby and Eugene McCarthy together had fewer than 700.

So the question that has lingered for half a century—Could RFK have won the White House?—needs an unsentimental look at the prospects, even from someone who worked as a Senate and campaign speechwriter. Some years ago, I devoted 150 pages of an alternate history book to suggest how that might have happened. That scenario included some imagined twists and turns that a strictly “reality-based” view requires reshaping. Here is an unvarnished outline of how he might have won.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rfk-could-have-become-president?ref=home
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*cosmic sigh*