Robert Kennedy: What if US presidential hopeful had not been killed?

[malaise]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44306240
<snip>
After Martin Luther King was killed, many believed senator and presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was going to carry on the reforming fight. Fifty years on, some argue Kennedy's assassination had a profound impact on the direction of America.

Kennedy died of his wounds 26 hours later, leaving the question 50 years later of how America might have been different if Kennedy had lived and gone on to win the presidency.

Coming less than two months after Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, for many Kennedy's death ended the revival of American liberalism.

"King had prepared us for his death, and after it [MLK's death] happened, there was no weeping, we immediately started figuring out how we were going to carry on the Poor People's Campaign," says Andrew Young, one of King's closest aides.

But that maintenance of effort was scuppered by Kennedy's death.

"That was when I broke down," says Young. "I think that the rational liberal democratic socialist view of the world, from Franklin Roosevelt all the way to Lyndon Johnson, was really cut short by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy."

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. It's really, really important to remember that

he was not as likely to get the Democratic nomination as the myth that has grown up around his candidacy supposes. He was trailing Humphrey significantly in delegates as well as in the vote totals for the few primaries there were that year.

Maybe he'd have been the VP nominee, and maybe that would have turned voters to the Democratic Party in large numbers. Probably not. The electorate was war-weary, and Nixon sold a convincing "I have a Peace Plan" mantra.

But citizen Kennedy (who would still have been Senator Kennedy I believe) would have been a sufficient thorn in Nixon's side that maybe the war would have ended earlier. Or maybe he'd have gotten the Democratic nomination in 1972 and won that year. Maybe.