president david kennedy

i want to create a president david kennedy time line. robert kennedy lived and served as attorney general of a lyndon johnson adminstration that did not get us into the veitnam war. david kennedy served 18 years as a congress man married angela cartwright of lost in space worked for the washington post and served in the naval reserve. how would he defeat bush in o4?
 
This is a very difficult challenge. You have to start with a very early POD with David Kennedy; out of all the children of RFK, David was the one scarred most by his father's assassination. He got addicted to drugs, said some things he shouldn't have... So you have to get an early POD, to have him avoid those problems.

Reading up on it, the day before RFK's assassination, David came close to drowning. This near-death experience probably added to the negative mental state of David Kennedy a few days later - having two experiences like those are very, very scarring.

So I guess our POD should be that David Kennedy doesn't go swimming on June 4th, 1968. Two days later, RFK dies, and while David is horrified and depressed, he doesn't go to the extent he did IRL. He struggles with this reality throughout the '70s, and although it takes quite a bit of therapy, Kennedy doesn't get into drugs, and maybe he's disciplined a little more (I recall hearing that RFK's kids, after the assassination, were raised with very little discipline, leading to all the problems nearly all of Bobby's kids had).

So he graduates from Harvard in the early '80s, and after having spent a decade thinking nonstop about his father, he's very interested in the idea of following his father's footsteps career-wise. So he probably tries to.

Of course, David's career won't replicate RFK's; that just won't happen. However, he might come close. Maybe he has a law degree from Harvard, becomes a lawyer, and becomes Attorney General in Bill Clinton's administration. However, Kennedy can't replicate RFK's career any further: His uncle Ted probably won't step aside in 2000 so that David could run (though he might, I'm not really sure, though I doubt it), and Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she's running for the Senate in New York. So perhaps Kennedy stays politically active and challenges President Bush in 2004. Of course, his chances at victory are very slim; a former Cabinet member has never been elected to the presidency, and running only on experience as Attorney General doesn't get one elected President.

That, or David skips a law career altogether. He runs for the House in '84, and challenges Sen. Al D'Amato in '92. If he wins, which he likely would, Senator Kennedy is likely re-elected in 1998, and is likely a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2004. To be honest, this scenario is much likelier than the one before.

So there you have it: President David Kennedy in 2004. But again, it's a tough challenge; remember that 12-year-old David was heavily scarred by his father's death, and that's hard to get around. In an ATL, it's not something to treat lightly.
 
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