RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

[Satchmo Distel]

This murder changed the US almost as much as MLK's did. RFK was the last hope that the Vietnam War might end in a dignified manner and that the US would avoid four years of Nixon demagoguery and racial dog-whistle politics. LBJ's domestic achievements might have been built upon rather than largely squandered. Maybe the display of Chicago police fascism in 1968, and Kent State murders of 1970, might have been avoided.

RFK might have been Woodstock to Nixon's Altamont.

[Amor de Cosmos]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

With Gene McCarthy as Monterey?

[WOM]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

Interestingly, Sirhan Sirhan is still in jail for the murder. But Robert Page Anderson, upon whose death sentence the California Death Penalty was repealed, was paroled after 11 years (also for murder).

[Amor de Cosmos]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

RFK would have run head-on into the military-industrial guys running the Viet-Nam war. With few friends there, it's hard to say how successful he'd have been. He didn't favour an immediate withdrawal, so probably at best a year or two would have been spent in negotiations accompanied by some de-escalation perhaps.

[ursus arctos]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

At least at the time, there was a real uncertainty as to whether RFK would have gotten the nomination. Gene McCarthy had been the original anti-war candidate, and the party establishment that eventually imposed Humphrey was far from completely comfortable with Bobby.

And while RFK was certainly much more charismatic than HHH, he would have faced the same issues in the South in the general election.

[Patrick Thistle]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

I've had the DVD of Bobby for a few years now and have never got round to watching it.

[Satchmo Distel]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

It's true about the South, but recall that Wallace was splitting the racist vote. Nixon ran on law and order rather than race (although the former is a dogwhistle for the latter), but RFK had a law and order side, having been AG.

[jwdd27]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

He and Ethel had 11 children together, which proved his Irish Catholic credentials and has certainly helped keep the clan in the news over the years.

He has a grandson in Congress, I learned today.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

I've got a book about RFK, written during the campaign, which makes for poignant reading as its closing chapter is a confident prediction that he will indeed secure the Democratic nomination, and go on to become President. It was published about a month before he died.

[Flynnie]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

My high school history teacher (who was a phenomenal teacher, easily the best I've ever had) volunteered for RFK.

He'd moved to the centre over the years, being a farmboy from the Central Valley whose Portuguese grandparents didn't speak English, but he was adamant that RFK would have won the nomination.

[Incandenza]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

When I was a grad student in college, I was a TA for a few discussion sections of a 20th C US history lecture. The professor gave the students a basic oral history assignment, asking them to interview an older adult who had some sort of connection to or memory of a part of American history in the 20th century. Many were pretty average, some had really interesting interviews with recent immigrants, etc. But one student interviewed her father, who was a volunteer for RFK's campaign in California, and he was in the Ambassador Hotel the night of the assassination.

[WOM]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

I always enjoy re-learning that Rafer Johnson, Rosy Grier and George Plimpton were three of the four or five people who jumped and subdued Sirhan Sirhan.

[NHH]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

In the absence of a primary system that anyone knew the rules for, there's no way to say Bobby Kennedy would have won. The vast majority of delegates would have been there via the old systems and essentially at the bidding of the party bosses.

Those party bosses have always hated insurgents who seem to be on the edge or beyond the overton window and/or not understand the rules of the game about they were to be included in the system. They hate the idea of Sanders now, hated the idea of McGovern in 72 and hated the idea of Kennedy in 68.

Kennedy's decisive move into the field as the anti-war candidate aligned him with the very forces who the people who decided the 1968 nomination despised beyond words. When Dick Daley's cops beat the crap out of the hippies, they were cheered by the people who brokered Humphrey's accession.

The idea that those people's attitude to the war, peace, hippies, culture wars and stuff would have been changed had Kennedy not died and campaigned for another 7 weeks seems a massive case of wishful thinking (the same kind of liberal fantasising that attached to his brother).

[Lang Spoon]

RFK: Murdered 48 Years Ago Today

Aye the smoke filled rooms at the convention would probably do for him anyway. The idea he would have preserved the Great Society and ended the war aren't a given either. I'd peg both the Kennedys as much further right than LBJ on inequality and race, and RFK's devotion to the centre left seemed a very sudden and opportunistic conversion.