Kennedy in 1964

samcster94

Banned
Can Kennedy win in 1964 if he lives and essentially continues what he was doing??? The Reps are likely to run Goldwater anyway just like LBJ.
 
Can Kennedy win in 1964 if he lives and essentially continues what he was doing??? The Reps are likely to run Goldwater anyway just like LBJ.

FWIW, the final Gallup poll before JFK's death (after his popularity had declined from its Cuban Missile Crisis highs, after civil rights cost him support in the South) showed him with a still healthy 59-28 percent job approval rating https://plus.google.com/u/0/1177130...5951181922493340962&oid=117713002461778944960 and leading Goldwater by sixteen points.

JFK would not have defeated Goldwater quite as overwhelmingly as LBJ did, but he would have defeated him decisively enough. The economy was doing well; US involvement in Vietnam was still sufficiently limited that most people were not too concerned about it, etc. And then there were Goldwater's negatives...
 
Can Kennedy win in 1964 if he lives and essentially continues what he was doing??? The Reps are likely to run Goldwater anyway just like LBJ.

He probably does worse than LBJ because he won't run as nasty a campaign (he and Goldwater were friends), LBJ benefited a lot from sympathy about Kennedy, and Goldwater didn't bother to campaign well against Johnson.

Goldwater-Scranton is the likely ticket I think. Kennedy meanwhile wanted to replace LBJ. I say it'd be a liberal southerner like Ralph Yarborough or Terry Sanford.

Kennedy and Goldwater were planning on doing a series of friendly debates with each other all over the nation (moderator free, conversational-style) about all of the issues (each debate being focused on an issue). It'd likely have been fairly transformational.

I figure Kennedy wins by 12 points rather than 22 like LBJ.

Kennedy-Yarborough/Sanford 425 (56.1%)
Goldwater-Scranton 113 (43.5%)

I give Goldwater every state he lost by under 10 points here.

Untitled.png
 

samcster94

Banned
He probably does worse than LBJ because he won't run as nasty a campaign (he and Goldwater were friends), LBJ benefited a lot from sympathy about Kennedy, and Goldwater didn't bother to campaign well against Johnson.

Goldwater-Scranton is the likely ticket I think. Kennedy meanwhile wanted to replace LBJ. I say it'd be a liberal southerner like Ralph Yarborough or Terry Sanford.

Kennedy and Goldwater were planning on doing a series of friendly debates with each other all over the nation (moderator free, conversational-style) about all of the issues (each debate being focused on an issue). It'd likely have been fairly transformational.

I figure Kennedy wins by 12 points rather than 22 like LBJ.

Kennedy-Yarborough/Sanford 425 (56.1%)
Goldwater-Scranton 113 (43.5%)

I give Goldwater every state he lost by under 10 points here.

View attachment 378204
Well, how does NC stay democrat?
 
Well, how does NC stay democrat?

1) Sanford was Governor of the state.
2) Goldwater lost the state by 13 points in 1964. Assuming an Eisenhower-1956 level victory for Kennedy, that means Goldwater losing by 12 rather than 22 points, so that's closing the gap by 10 points. Goldwater could feasibly do better against Kennedy (or Kennedy's health could take a turn for the worse and details could come out about how drugged up the man was) but I just figured let's have it be a normal landslide.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Can Kennedy win in 1964 if he lives and essentially continues what he was doing??? The Reps are likely to run Goldwater anyway just like LBJ.
Yes, he wins, he was probably heading into some bad polls territory by 1963 but Goldwater is pretty extreme and JFK charismatic and an incumbent and nothing bad was happening in America yet, JFK wins second term
 
LBJ beat Goldwater there by 56.15-43.85--well over ten points. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1964

Anyway, a JFK-Yarborough ticket is very unlikely. If JFK does dump LBJ, the replacement usually named is Terry Sanford, who could help in NC, though just how much "home state advantage" a candidate for VP provides for the ticket is debatable.

I'd say it's a .5-.75 point swing (ergo the gap closes or grows by 1 to 1.5 points). The big advantage of a VP is the signalling aspect I think, and Sanford as a liberal southerner works very well.

Kennedy-Sanford may lose much of the south, but I doubt they'll lose NC.


One factor to think about is civil rights. I'm not sure Kennedy would be able to get a Civil Rights bill through in 1964 the way Johnson did (1965 is another matter) and without LBJ running ads in the north more or less calling Goldy a klansman, his public perception would be a bit different.
 
Also, Kennedy and Goldwater planned on doing spontaneous debates across the country during the General Election season, which would only have played right into Kennedy's hands.
 
Also, Kennedy and Goldwater planned on doing spontaneous debates across the country during the General Election season, which would only have played right into Kennedy's hands.

Actually, it would probably have helped Goldwater (though not nearly enough to have him win). Debates are at least marginally helpful to a challenger/underdog in that they elevate him--he is debating on equal terms with the incumbent. But in any event, precisely for that reason, the debates are not gong to happen, no matter what JFK and Goldwater had told each other. JFK will find some excuse for not going through with them. ("Sorry, the equal rime rule stands in the way of the debates, and I cannot persuade Congress to suspend it...") It's not an accident that LBJ in 1964 and Nixon in 1968 and 1972, all running far ahead in the polls, refused to debate. The only thing that revived presidential debates was the fact that in 1976 Ford was the incumbent but also the underdog, so had nothing to lose by challenging Carter to a debate--while Carter felt that he couldn't show he was up to the job of being president unless he accepted.
 
As others have said he wins but not by as much, the big question is the Addison's disease, as nobody is entirely sure just how sick JFK actually was at the end of his life but the one absolute certainly was that for all the image that was projected he was not a well man. While he probably will be able to run (he's not bedridden or anything) I expect any VP pick will have to at least consider the fact he might have to quit early (say around '66 or so) if the disease flared up to much (or his bad back got really bad). It would have to be someone who can step into the presidency and has a good chance of winning in '68 and while OTL showed LBJ could do that JFK hated him and wanted him off the ticket so who would be the best alternative?
 
I realize that some people take for granted that JFK would have dumped LBJ in 1964 but the evidence is mixed at best. See my post at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/EOXdhbIlzaU/BqS-SEiRD6AJ (my apologies for any links that may no longer work):

***

There was a lot of talk in late 1963 that LBJ might not be on the ticket, especially in the wake of the Bobby Baker scandal. Evelyn Lincoln in 1968 claimed to remember a conversation with JFK in November 1963 where he told her that he was thinking of having North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford as his running mate in 1964, but that in any case "it will not be Lyndon." http://books.google.com/books?id=0xqrU5lnD7AC&pg=PA605 OTOH, Ben Bradlee claims (in *Conversations with Kennedy*) that in an October 22, 1963 conversation, "As for dumping Lyndon Johnson from the ticket in 1964, the president said 'That's preposterous on the face of it. We've got to carry Texas in '64 and maybe Georgia.'"
http://books.google.com/books?id=E5y77o-G2SYC&pg=PA217

It was undoubtedly unrealistic for JFK to think he might carry Georgia in 1964 (maybe he had in mind that it was the only Deep South state to go for Truman rather than Thurmond in 1948) but Texas was another matter. Polls showed a close Kennedy-Goldwater race there, and I can't see JFK writing off such an important state. For that reason, I don't think he would have dumped LBJ unless some scandal made him really a liability. FWIW, when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. asked RFK about Lincoln's account, RFK supposedly replied not only that there had never been any intention of dumping LBJ, but "Can you imagine the President ever having a talk with Evelyn about a subject like this?" Schlesinger, *Robert Kennedy and His Times,* p. 605.
Also, JFK supposedly told George Smathers that dumping LBJ would be foolish because it would make the Bobby Baker affair look like a really serious scandal--which JFK insisted it wasn't--that would reflect on the president. LBJ himself wrote his brother that he expected to be re-nominated, that while there were some people around JFK who disliked LBJ, the president himself had always been fair to him. http://books.google.com/books?id=0xqrU5lnD7AC&pg=PA605 (Of course one must note that it was in the interest of RFK in 1968--and of his friends and supporters like Schlesinger--to say there had been no such "dump LBJ" plan in 1963; otherwise, RFK's 1968 campaign against LBJ would look too "personal", too much a "let's dethrone the usurper" campaign, rather than one based on principled differences.)

There is in any event a good reason why despite talk of presidents dumping their vice-presidents in a re-election year, it very rarely happens. Choosing a running mate (yes, technically, the convention does it, but in recent decades the presidential nominee's choice is almost always nominated) is the first and one of the most important decisions a presidential nominee makes. (Although it almost never makes a difference in the election results, since as Steve Chapman points out at http://www.slate.com/id/84823/ "Nobody Votes for the Veep.") In effect, he is choosing his successor should he be elected and die in office. To admit to a misjudgment on such a serious matter would be a huge political embarrassment--normally a much greater one than retaining the vice-president. (Ford-Rockefeller was an unusual situation, Ford never having been elected president and facing a formidable primary challenge, and Rockefeller in any event not being too enthusiastic about the vice-
presidency.)

So all in all, I am not convinced that JFK would have dumped LBJ. The best discussion I know of the issue is by Robert Dallek in *Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973*, pp. 43-44. http://books.google.com/books?id=G_J3PEegwdYC&pg=PT58 Dallek thinks that JFK may have had *contingency* plans to replace LBJ if the Bobby Baker scandal got too serious. Moreover, he thinks that JFK's alleged words to Evelyn Lincoln may have been authentic, because on November 20, 1963, JFK was angry with LBJ for not doing anything to "iron out any of the problems in Texas" (presumably referring to the split between the Tory Democrats led by John Connally and LBJ himself versus the liberal Democrats led by
Ralph Yarborough). "Kennedy's remarks to Lincoln (if he actually made them) may have been no more than a spontaneous expression of his anger toward LBJ. His larger design, especially once it seemed likely that Johnson would ride out the Baker scandal, was to do the politically necessary thing and keep Johnson in place..."

***

I know that since I wrote that post several years ago, Robert Caro has come out in support of the "JFK was going to dump LBJ" position, but I still think the evidence is far from conclusive.
 
Last edited:
Top