Forty-eight years ago Sunday, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, hours after winning the California Democratic primary. In a year of extraordinary political upheaval — and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. had been struck down in Memphis — Kennedy’s death was the moment when it seemed when the country was coming apart at the seams.
Since Kennedy’s death, many have posited that, had he lived, he would have been the Democratic nominee in 1968, and possibly the next President. This is a dubious notion informed more by hagiography than history — and one that, in this election year, as liberals hurl charges about who’s politically pure and what’s politically possible, demands correction.
Today, Kennedy’s 85-day White House run is bathed in a cleansing light: Here was a white politician willing to challenge, even shame, Americans on the issue of racial reconciliation. Less remembered about Kennedy’s campaign was not only how overtly political it was, but also the many enemies he created.
In the fall of 1967, head-to-head polls showed Kennedy led President Lyndon Johnson, among Democrats, by double digits. By early May, he was running third, behind the party’s eventual nominee that year, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who had first challenged Johnson for the nomination.
Two-thirds of voters saw Kennedy as an opportunist — a 21-point jump from November 1967. Just under half thought he was too ambitious to be President, an 11-point increase.
Kennedy had even bigger problems within the party. Labor despised him, in part because of his interrogation of Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa as a Senate investigator in the 1950s. Southerners didn’t trust him because of his views on civil rights (the segregationist governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox, said he’d sooner vote for Fidel Castro than Kennedy).
McCarthy came to loathe him, and his anti-war supporters felt similarly, refusing to forgive Kennedy for entering the race and undercutting McCarthy. White voters increasingly didn’t trust him and viewed Kennedy as the candidate of black America. The Democratic establishment and the party’s elected officials, particularly Johnson, feared his rise and instead rallied around Humphrey.
Kennedy’s success with Democratic voters, first in Indiana and later in California, was a result of his broad support among blacks and Hispanics. Yet near the end of the California campaign, in the first debate with McCarthy, Kennedy accused his opponent of wanting to “take 10,000 black people and move them into Orange County” — a grubby effort to play on white fears of integration.
In Indiana, he talked about having been the top law enforcement official in the country as attorney general, and, presaging the third way of politics of Bill Clinton, spoke of getting away from the “welfare system, the handout system and the idea of the dole.”
Still, Kennedy’s reputation among Democrats and particularly liberals remains pristine. This speaks not only to the way we process history, but to the party he sought to lead. All too often, Democrats revere the supposed moral purity of their heroes, before breaking them down once they are forced to make the difficult decisions that are at the heart of being a politician. All too often the left’s greatest heroes are the politicians never forced to compromise or never required to lead a fractured, politically divided nation.
This is most ironic when it comes to Kennedy, who was a complex and courageous politician — but also a pragmatic, ruthless one, as committed to winning as he was to maintaining his ideological bona fides. If he’d ever made it to the Oval Office Kennedy would have been a fascinating President — but for many in his own party he likely still would have been a disappointment.
Cohen is author of “American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division.”
