"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
RFK: What Might (Not) Have Been
Posted 1:55 p.m., June 6, 2008
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As much as any political event since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the murder of Bobby Kennedy is resplendent with what-ifs.
What if RFK had lived past that day in Los Angeles 40 years ago? What if he had become president? What if he had been given the opportunity to realize even one-tenth of the vision he articulated on that supernova campaign--a vision that was reflected back to him from his amazing, one-of-a-kind coalition of multiracial, low- and middle-income white, and college-aged voters who surrounded and adored him during those three amazing months in 1968?
"[Kennedy] raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised 'a new America,' and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.As he started to leave, waves of students rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust. They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his shirtsleeves. Herb Schmertz was left with a lifelong phobia of crowds. University officials opened a path to a rear exit, but Kennedy waved them off and waded into the crowd. Photographer Stanley Tretick, of Look magazine, watched the mêlée and shouted, 'This is Kansas, fucking Kansas! He’s going all the fucking way!'"
It's a vivid picture. But entropy being what it is, it might have been too much to expect that Bobby Kennedy could have cauterized the open racial wounds that have existed in this country since the first slave ship swapped a cargo of black "indentured servants" for a load of food on the docks at Jamestown in 1619, casting the curse of human bondage that still bedevils this country.
It might have been too much to ask one man, even a Kennedy, to overcome the fears of the emerging silent majority of traumatized middle-aged, Midwestern and Southern white voters who would propel Richard Nixon to the White House on his anti-hippy, law-and-order, secret-plan-to-get-out-of-Vietnam platform.
As I'll detail in a moment, it might have been too much to expect Kennedy even to have received the nomination of his own party for president in that turbulent year.
Nonetheless, RFK's brief campaign shone a flickering candle of hope on beautiful possibilities. Kennedy, the thin, frail, vulnerable candidate seemed to have emerged at age 42 newly formed. He had escaped the deep shadows cast by his dead brother, the president, and he had elevated himself above the skullduggery of his own thuggish political past, which had included a staunch defense of the communist-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, and a personally sanctioned attempt to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Casto.
Such was his reputation for political savagry that reporters accompanying him on a whistle-stop tour of Indiana in May 1968 made up a ditty, sung much to RFK's amusement, that the reporters titled "The Ruthless Cannonball."
But the tune was about the old Bobby Kennedy. The RFK of 1968 was a new man, a man for whom, by all appearances, a deep compassion and humility had been forged in a cauldron of public suffering, grief and sacrifice. A man who, to many Americans, appeared to be a perfectly humble servant in a perfectly devastated time.
We can't know what might have been.
We can, however, guess what likely would not have been. For all the comparisons between the insurgent Barack Obama campaign and RFK's invigorating '68 run, the likelihood is that Bobby Kennedy, had he lived, might have experienced an end result much closer to Hillary Clinton's than Obama's.
The Numbers Were Against Him
The narrative that many disappointed optimists such as myself like to carry in our minds is that the magnetic Bobby Kennedy would have parlayed the massive momentum he gained by winning the California primary and marched inexorably to victory against the candidate of perceived LBJ-policy stasis, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
The reality, I've concluded, is that Bobby Kennedy probably would not have overtaken Humphrey, and would not have won the '68 nomination.
Video clips on YouTube of TV network news coverage from the night of June 4, 1968, in the hours before Kennedy delivered his final speech and walked into the barrel of Sirhan Sirhan's gun, confirm that the primaries were viewed as virtually meaningless beauty contests, and their results could do little to forestall Humphrey's party-establishment steamroller.
Humphrey had not participated in any of the party's 16 primaries that year; he didn't need to. Most delegates at the time were selected at state party conventions. Primaries had little impact on delegate totals until the rules were changed between 1969 and 1972 (by a commission led by U.S. Sen. George McGovern, who would exploit his own reforms to secure the 1972 Democratic nomination for his own quixotic presidential bid--but that's getting ahead of the story).
According to a contemporary report by CBS correspondent Bill Plante, aired just hours before Kennedy's murder, the committed delegate numbers, as of that night, broke down this way:
- Delegates needed to nominate: 1,312
- Delegates committed to Humphrey: 1,067.5
- Delegates committed to Bobby Kennedy: 622.5
- Delegates committed to Gene McCarthy: 305
- Delegates committed to various regional "favorite son" candidates: 492
Kennedy himself told CBS reporter Roger Mudd that night that in order to have a chance at the nomination, he needed to convince Gene McCarthy and his supporters--backers who make the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama coalitions seem positively docile by comparison--that they should give up their fight and support him.
There is every indication that Kennedy knew that, as a result, he had only an outside shot at the nomination.
"I think it will be very difficult. I would like to work with those who are associated with [McCarthy]. Obviously, I would like to work with him personally. ... That's the only way we're going to be successful. Otherwise, the nomination is going to go to Vice President Humphrey...."
-- Robert F. Kennedy
interview with Roger Mudd,
CBS News
Ambassador Hotel
June 4, 1968
It would indeed have been difficult. As Plante added in his report, after the favorite sons and first-ballot commitments were discharged in the first round of balloting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, delegates figured to be distributed this way:
- Humphrey: 1,522 delegates (210 more than the number needed for nomination)
- Kennedy: 721 delegates
- McCarthy: 241 delegates
This suggests that Kennedy would have lost quickly, possibly on the first convention ballot. Even had he absorbed all of Clean Gene's delegates, Kennedy would still have remained 350 short of the number needed for nomination.
To succeed, then, he would have had to wrest committed delegates away from Humphrey. And as we've seen this year in the Obama-Clinton contest, that is no easy matter, particularly when it appears a candidate has nearly sewn up the contest, as Humphrey by that point clearly had.
Legacy of a Homicide
None of this suggests that Kennedy's presence in the race meant nothing, or that his death in no way altered the course of Democratic or national politics. Far from it.
In fact, I believe that Kennedy's death, beyond any lasting emotional scars it inflicted on the American people or the toll it took on U.S. racial unity, had a profound effect on the course of electoral politics thereafter. In fact, his murder left us with the legacy of a messy system of candidate selection that we are still encumbered with today.
Kennedy's death left Humphrey and McCarthy, both Minnesotans, as the only viable Democratic candidates. McCarthy had performed well in the primaries, at least until Kennedy entered the race in March, and even then Clean Gene scored an early May victory against RFK in Oregon. McCarthy's supporters were young, idealistic, and touched with a radicalism that many Democratic party stalwarts (read: bosses) found less than ingratiating.
McCarthy had no chance of wresting away Humphrey's delegates. Not that he didn't try. The convention was marked by bitter credentials fights that saw McCarthy supporters from 15 states trying to unseat Humphrey delegations. But Humphrey supporters prevailed every time. In the end Humphrey secured the '68 nomination with more than 1,000 delegates to spare.
My own belief is that, had Kennedy survived to fight on in Chicago, he would not have overtaken Humphrey either.
Of course, I could be wrong.
My very good, and very politically astute friend Steve Kaplan, editor at Minnesota Law and Politics magazine and a long-time friend of Gene McCarthy's, thinks I am wrong. I would never discount his opinion, particularly on this topic, which is dear to his heart. Kaplan supported both McCarthy and Kennedy in '68, and would have gladly accepted either as the Democratic nominee.
Kaplan believes that Kennedy's appeal was so broad, his momentum so terrific, and his following so fervent--Obamania is the palest of comparisons, he says--that he would have easily have won over McCarthy's supporters. Kennedy would then have wrested away a critical number of Humphrey delegates to win the nomination in Chicago.
"You have to understand the pandemonium that was going on in the country at the time. This was a guy who touched everybody. I always think of Kennedy as the last liberal hope. When he died, it all died."Anybody who would tell me that Kennedy couldn't have become president is just telling me something I don't believe, even though you have the numbers behind you. Because I know what the momentum was and what the feeling was. Kennedy's appeal was to everybody across the country. And he would have won that presidency in a snap."
-- Steve Kaplan
editor, Law and Politics
June 5, 2008
This, I should add, is exactly what I have always believed as well--until I saw the numbers. Now I have strong doubts that RFK could have won in '68. (Though 1972 might have been a very different story.)
What is clear is that Kennedy's death had a dramatic impact on the election, and on electoral politics going forward. Had he not died, it seems to me, he was at a minimum a lock for the vice presidency; the anti-war faction had to be dealt with and RFK as vice president would have done the trick. By contrast, the veep slot was an office that McCarthy could not have aspired to. McCarthy's appeal, while reliably anti-war as Kennedy's, was far more "esoteric," to quote Kaplan. Humphrey would have felt little pressure to choose him--as, indeed, he did not.
So, let's add up my scenario:
- Kennedy survives to Chicago, fails to secure the nomination, but wins a spot on the presidential ticket.
- The bitter McCarthy credentials floor fight never have happens.
- Unified in satisfaction with the result, the party never forms a commission to refashion delegate selection rules.
It goes without saying that, if Kaplan is right and RFK would have seized the nomination from Humphrey, the party would have felt even less pressure to reform its delegate-allocation procedures.
Their success, as is detailed in "Quiet Revolution," Byron E. Shafer's classic study of the reforms, bred some serious unintended consequences.
"The McGovern commission, chaired first by Senator George McGovern and then Congressman Don Fraser of Minnesota, ended the old boss system of choosing presidential nominees and helped create the modern presidential primary system. This led to a class shift in each party, as affluent liberals gained more power in the Democratic Party while working-class conservatives won more say in the GOP.Perhaps most importantly, the commission changed the rationale for choosing presidential nominees: Picking a candidate who was likely to win became less important than choosing one who represented the views of primary voters and special-interest groups."
-- Mark Stricherz
The Boston Globe
Nov. 23, 2003
McGovern had not intended that primaries become the chief mechanism for selecting presidential nominees. I have that on good authority: McGovern told me that himself, in an interview in late 2006.
New Rules
The problem is that the rules McGovern helped formulate were so Byzantine--aimed as they were at minimizing the influence of party regulars and maximizing the participation and influence of party outsiders who comprised McCarthy's jilted supporters--that state party bosses around the country opted to hold primaries instead of delegate selection conventions. It was the easiest way to comply with McGovern-Fraser's raft of complex and confusing new rules.
It was arguably the worst result possible. Primary elections are attended by small percentages of voters, usually the most fervent party activists--meaning party nominees are chosen by voters who hold the most impassioned--and often the most extreme--political views. Mainstream voters typically wait out the process until the general election.
Take California, which has held primaries for nearly 100 years, and where participation has held steadily below 50 percent since 1954. It dipped to just 23 percent as recently as 2006, and usually hovers at around 30 percent. Even during 2008's "Super Tuesday" primary, when energized voters had the opportunity to choose between Clinton and Obama, California's primary participation was just 39.5 percent.
Ironically, old-school party bosses and their officers had to take those mainstream voters into consideration when choosing nominees.
The old boss-party system, whatever its many flaws, imperfections and injustices, actually worked better than today's primary system, at least from this standpoint: Unlike the party activists who usually participate in primaries, party bosses could not concern themselves with ideological purity on hot-button issues--not if they were going to secure their standing. (The true believers who attend primaries and caucuses feel no such constraints.)
No, to maintain their privilege, the old-style party apparatchiks had to win elections, which meant they had to select suitable candidates capable of appealing to broad voter coalitions. The proof that the system worked is in the proverbial pudding. In its time, that system produced the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson.
I list Republicans here as well as Democrats because, after the 1972 election and the subsequent embarrassment of Watergate, both major parties switched to primary-dominated delegate-selection systems. But Republicans seem to have gotten the better deal out of the reforms. Post-McGovern-Fraser, Democrats have nominated a series of presidential candidates who, but for good fortune and some massive bumbling on the part of the GOP, probably would all have been losers.
Yes, Carter and Clinton won their elections. However, were it not for Watergate, there would have been no President Carter, and it's doubtful that any Democrat who could have overcome the GOP in 1976. (Remember, neither would there have been a weak incumbent President Gerald Ford, meaning Ronald Reagan would have had a clear path to the Republican nomination that year. My guess is he would have won the general.)
Meanwhile, had it not been for Ross Perot siphoning votes from the incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992, there never would have been a President Bill Clinton, and no Democratic incumbent to win an easy second term in 1996.
That means that, but for critical mistakes made by the GOP, the United States quite likely would have had an unbroken string of Republican presidents dating back to January 1969.
The primaries this year, meanwhile, have left the presumed Democratic nominee so battered and damaged that it's at best an even bet that Obama will lose in November--during a year when the stars are perfectly aligned and the Democrats seemingly cannot fail.
For all that, we can thank McGovern-Fraser. And for that, in turn, we can thank that rat bastard Sirhan Sirhan.
-- Kevin Featherly
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Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 -- Kevin Featherly
