re: #294 Jay C

Assuming Bobby Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated - and (BIG “if”) he had won the Dem nomination in 1968, my guess is he would have picked someone like Stuart Symington as VP on his ticket: a Party “regular” - but without much Vietnam baggage. I think Gene McCarthy would in any event, have likely faded away into history as the footnote he eventually became.

Mind you, I also think, in this scenario, that Nixon might have won anyway: if the Humphrey nomination tore the Democratic Party apart, an RFK candidacy would probably have had much the same effect, Bobby’s “Kennedy charisma” notwithstanding. The Vietnam War was too raw a wound for the Party (and, rosy ’60s-nostalgia aside, not quite, in 1968, as unpopular as it should have been): any Democrat was looking at an uphill battle. And of course, Nixon and the Republicans’ ratfucking would still have been active….

Nixon’s paranoia can probably be traced to 1960 and his interactions with the Kennedys (he and JFK were cordial and even friendly when they served together in Congress and I think on some level he felt betrayed by his “friend” after that election). I think had RFK been the nominee in ‘68 it might have completely broken Nixon.

But then as you mention, Americans still believed at the time that we were fighting a just cause (and I think we were, we just couldn’t get an outcome like Korea to hold).