November 14, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:20 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes a fascinating exercise in counter-factual history: “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 think the answer is still no. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Eugene McCarthy would have garnered enough delegates to win anything approximating a majority. Together, their delegates might have constituted a large enough bloc to swing momentum in favor of an antiwar nominee, but as Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent biography of Eugene McCarthy makes clear, the two men despised each other. “Under no circumstances would I join with Kennedy to stop Hubert Humphrey,” McCarthy said. “I would have given my delegates to Hubert.” Had there been no Hubert, it seems likely that McCarthy would have brokered a deal with someone else. For his part, Kennedy thought of McCarthy as a dilettante or worse. As one of his aides explained, “We regarded Gene as a dangerous man. . . . He raised enthusiasms without following through.” A more likely scenario would have been an eleventh-hour reversal by Lyndon Johnson, whose relationships with both Kennedy and McCarthy were so strained as to make a deal with either man highly unlikely. As the incumbent President, LBJ enjoyed tight control over the unelected delegates and could have engineered renomination. How that would have played out in November is anyone’s guess. Which is the folly and fun of counterfactual history.
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