What if robert kennedy lived

Now it is the turn of the Republican Party to go through an identity crisis as it grapples with the impact of Trump's unorthodox approach. Both Bennet and Witcover remember Kennedy warmly as a politician who had a Midas touch with people from all walks of life.

Image source, Getty Images. Image source, Ron Bennett photographic archive. Bennett helped to secure the gun then started taking photos. Who was Bobby Kennedy? Family gather at Robert Kennedy's grave, 11 years later. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Kennedy meets voters in Harlem, New York, in Related Topics. We would not have overthrown the democratically elected government of Chile. The world would have been very different, if not for the veto of a gunman. We'll never know how his mix of radical ideas, and somewhat conservative personal values — of self-sacrifice, and self-discipline, and stoicism, and patriotism — how that would ever play out in power Would he really have gotten us out of Vietnam?

Would he really have dealt with poverty and racism in the cities? He was a singular figure, who was cheated out of his chance to test his ideas, and his values in the White House. He believed that. He wanted — not just to change laws — but he wanted to change people. He wanted to change the mind-set. He wanted to build a sense of community.

King called it 'the beloved community,' some of us call it an interracial democracy, some of us call it one house, the American house. But he wanted to see all of us make that great leap. Under his leadership we would've made that great leap. And I think he is an example which continues to inspire people, to interest them. They wonder how and why he was so effective, and they mourn the loss of his leadership.

Had he been elected president in we would have gotten out of Vietnam in Certainly in the Nixon years it never did. So there's that sense of unfulfilled promise. He was deeply human, and flawed, and vibrated with human weakness and fear, as well as human courage and strength, and so that I think that people — whose lives, of course, are complicated — can relate to him as a human being in a way that it's hard to relate to great leaders.

Not simply because he was a martyr, like his brother. Not simply because the family has an extraordinary grip on the public's imagination. But also because he and his brother represented a kind of hope, a kind of vision of the future. And that was snuffed out with JFK's death in And then it was snuffed out again with Robert Kennedy's assassination in There is this faith, this belief, that if only he had lived, he would've won the presidency in And he would've served for eight years, and brought the country into a kind of golden age, with a volume of liberal laws.

So it's the hope that was lost. But that in a sense, by remembering him, by enshrining him in our memories, we keep the hope alive. As Kennedy finished his remarks and left the platform at AM, Sirhan opened fire. One of the bullets struck the senator in the head and left him grievously wounded. He died about 24 hours later. And already by then, the question was being asked: what if Kennedy had not been killed on the night on his crowning triumph in the primary campaign? One thing for sure: he no longer would have had to worry that much about McCarthy.

The stakes in California were as vital to his candidacy as they were to Kennedy's, and there was widespread agreement that the winner of that primary would assume command as the clear leader of the antiwar forces that were gathering strength across the country. But prevailing over Hubert Humphrey was another matter altogether. Even though he did not run in any of the primaries, Humphrey had he core apparatus of the Democratic Party behind him, as well as the power of the White House and all that it entailed.

But that was the conventional wisdom, and if the turbulent events of taught us anything, it revealed how shaky and unreliable a barometer the conventional wisdom was that year. And had he lived, Kennedy would have brought to the next phase of the campaign certain advantages that he was ready and eager to exploit.

First of all, he would have come out of the California primary with a huge burst of momentum. And he would have spent the next two months putting the pressure on party leaders who controlled delegates in the key non-primary states to persuade them that his victories on the primary trail should not be ignored if the Democrats truly hoped to win in November. In addition, the antiwar sentiment grew stronger and more intense during the summer months of , and that, too, would have played to Kennedy's advantage.

Even with Kennedy gone, the rising tide of antiwar feeling had an adverse effect on Humphrey's candidacy, in large part because the vice president was having trouble separating himself from Johnson and the war policies that had destroyed his presidency.

A living and combative Kennedy would have relentlessly drawn attention to that contrast. The Humphrey slide that summer was so dramatic that by the time of the Democratic convention in August, polls showed him losing to Nixon in November.