Fifty years after he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Robert F. Kennedy retains his pull on the nation’s political imagination.
What if he hadn’t been killed?
One of his sons, Robert Kennedy Jr., stoked the flames of remembrance of remembrance recently when he said he doubts Sirhan B. Sirhan was the only gunman in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that June night in 1968. He wants the killing reinvestigated.
More retrospectives are expected Wednesday during a public memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery, where Kennedy is buried. Former President Bill Clinton and Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, will be among the speakers.
The 42-year-old senator from New York had entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on March 16, just 80 days earlier, with a call for the nation to “stand for hope instead of despair.” He’d been sprinting around the country, winning primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, and losing in Oregon.
California was crucial to his hopes because its size and diversity made it a microcosm of the whole nation. He told those close to him that if he didn’t win the state’s 174 delegates, he would drop out. His Democratic foes, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were doing everything they could to make that happen.
Kennedy had already been to San Diego several times that spring, drawing enthusiastic crowds, and now he was back, at the El Cortez Hotel.
It was June 3, a night rally. Kennedy started giving his usual stump speech, calling for an end to the Vietnam War and an end to racial injustice.
“I think we can do better for this country than that,” he said.
Then he stopped. He sagged to the floor and sat near the edge of the stage. He put his head in his hands.
“He was so fatigued he passed out,” said George Mitrovich, a longtime San Diegan who worked as a press aide on the Kennedy campaign.
Ushered backstage, into a bathroom, Kennedy splashed water on his face. Minutes passed. Then he went out and finished his talk. The crowd of about 3,000 people cheered.
A day later, Kennedy won the primary. And lost his life.
Mitrovich is among those who think Kennedy would have gone on to capture the Democratic nomination, and then the White House.
“And every terrible awful thing that happened after would have been avoided,” he said. “But that’s not how it’s gone.”
Kennedy’s death came almost five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, and just two months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis, Tenn.
Riots rocked several American cities that summer. At the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago, where Humphrey won the nomination, protesters outside battled the police and the National Guard while network TV cameras captured the mayhem.
Humphrey lost the election in November to Richard Nixon, who escalated the war in Vietnam, won re-election in a landslide in 1972, and was forced out of office two years later by the Watergate scandal.
Along the way, the despair Bobby Kennedy had campaigned against took hold, said Mitrovich, who remains friends with the slain candidate’s family. At Mitrovich’s request, Kennedy Townsend gave a talk Saturday about her father at the City Club of San Diego.
Mitrovich still remembers the throngs that greeted Kennedy wherever he went, pressing forward to shake his hand. At one May rally, in Los Angeles, where the candidate sat in a convertible as it moved through the streets, admirers tore off his shoes as keepsakes.
“More than any candidate I’ve ever seen, Bobby Kennedy had an ability to relate to people, to connect with people, on a deep, moral and even spiritual level,” Mitrovich said.
Joseph Palermo, a history professor at Sacramento State who has written extensively about Kennedy and the 1968 campaign, also thinks the candidate would have won the nomination and then the presidency.
“It’s impossible to know how all that would play out,” Palermo said in an email interview, “but in many ways he appears to have been the right leader at the right time” — stitching together a coalition that crossed the usual political and cultural boundaries.
“RFK had a sense of moral outrage at injustices in the United States,” Palermo said, “yet he did so in a way that was patriotic, calling out in 1968 that the country was not living up to its own creed and ideals.”
James Rogan was in the fifth grade during the 1968 California primary. He had a teacher who urged the students to follow the campaign.
“It lit a fuse in me,” Rogan said, “and I became a political junkie.”
He grew up to be a lawyer, a judge, a Republican state legislator and then a two-term U.S. congressman who was one of the House prosecutors in the Clinton impeachment trial. He’s now a Superior Court judge in Orange County, Calif.
He’s also the author of “On to Chicago: Rediscovering Robert F. Kennedy and the Lost Campaign of 1968,” a new book that imagines what might have happened if the bullet from Sirhan had not been fatal.
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Rogan said the idea for the book took hold in 2015, as he watched a debate for the Republican presidential nomination that included 17 candidates. Donald Trump was there, and Jeb Bush — both well-known. The others?
“I don’t mean this in a negative way,” Rogan said, “but from a national political standpoint, it was a bunch of nobodys. Campaigns didn’t used to be that way.”
He thought back to 1968, when “giants” walked the field: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Humphrey, Romney, McCarthy, Rockefeller, Wallace.
“I saw it as a chance to reintroduce people to that campaign,” Rogan said, a notion that was reinforced when young lawyers he saw in his judge’s chambers would ask him what outside project he was working on and then give him blank stares when he told them.
“I have attorneys who don’t know who Robert F. Kennedy is,” Rogan said.
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Rogan is suspicious of the conventional wisdom that if Kennedy had lived, he would have become president. “He had a path to the presidency, but it was a tough path, and he knew it,” Rogan said.
The party insiders had more control of the delegates and the nominating process than they do now. That’s how Humphrey was able to wait until April to join the race, not enter any primaries, and still get the nod.
Even though President Lyndon B. Johnson had bowed out of the election, he still controlled a lot of the party strings, and he loathed Kennedy, Rogan said. (“The feeling was mutual,” he noted.)
He thinks there’s a good chance Kennedy would have wound up as Humphrey’s vice president, which would have altered Nixon’s choice for running mate. And that George Wallace, running strong in the South, would have played a key role in deciding the outcome at the Electoral College.
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