RFK if Jack dies in the senate?

So, what happens if JFK dies while serving as a senator, let's say during that long period of wicked medical trouble he had from his near-fatal back surgery during '55?

MA has a Republican governor at this time, so Bobby has a good chance to run for the Democratic nomination for the special election that has to be held in November, 1956 (which is probably a more realistic angle for him than having to seek appointment under a Dem governor). Even if he loses that primary, or the general election, the seat being Class 1 means it's up again in 1958.

Actually, the latter year does strike me as the best bet for him, as I think his still-formative political maturity, the lessons Kenny O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien will need to teach him, and the ambitions his father has for him, all those will need more than one cycle to succeed at winning back his late brother's seat. (I think this seat really does seem the best course of action for Bobby rather than trying for a House district, or him somehow deciding to give up on all that time he's spent in DC just to try for a political career change to Beacon Hill.)

But whither Bobby as the sixteenth Dem freshman senator elected in the anti-GOP landslide of 1958? Though, yes, he would be the youngest man elected in that particular year, however Frank Church was younger when he arrived in the senate in Jan, 1957. So he can't really claim to be the sole wunderkind of the party in that chamber.

I think he had a lot of potential, but I'm just not seeing the world beating qualities of US Senator Robert Kennedy sans Camelot.

He's not a combat vet or glamorous playboy, he doesn't have an inVogue wife, he's still developing his whole media persona [Addendum: Nor is he much of an intellectual Renaissance man, something which was pivotal to Jack's ability to build a political base outside Massachusetts]. But he is a workhorse, he's inherited a smart crew from his brother, and he has heaps of financial resources backing him up.

Down the line I think he has some chance to make it to the national ticket, but no way does he have the edge in presidential primary politics in OTL over all those other senators, an edge he had in even such a crazy longshot race as when he ran for the nomination in 1968 (after all, his only hope for the nom if he'd lived was for some kind of convention demonstration--I mean of the traditional kind--to emerge and whip up a frenzy of Camelot revanchism).
 
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In '55 RFK is working for McCarthy, so if he runs he'll have the image of a conservative Dem rather than the labor-friendly image he got from working on the Teamsters investigation. He's still the scion of a famous family so the name ID will be there, but not as much as OTL. Plus Bobby will be the lone Dem in a GOP fortress run by Rocky and Jake Javits, also as per OTL. If he wants on a national ticket then sometime between 1972-80 seems most likely.
 
The need to finesse & expand his senate aide career is why I see '58 as being a more attractive year than '56; luckily Tail Gunner Joe is dead by then, and Bobby's had time to turn his Capitol Hill efforts towards more inclusive Democratic Coalition work (this is one reason I suspect he doesn't run against the GOP appointee/incumbent in '56; the other one being that '56 is Ike's general reelection year, which is a toughie. Also, in OTL Bobby used '56 to gain much needed experience for his brother's ambitions by serving with the Stevenson campaign; logically, I think he would want to do a similar thing for his own needs in this TL, which entails either taking a leave of absence to work with the DSCC, or working on one of the statewide races back home in Massachusetts.)

As for his McCarthyism, it's not necessarily a huge negative for him, not as long as he can sell different narratives about it to different sections of the MA electorate--he would tell the liberals he was the guy who punched Roy Cohn in the nose, while he tells the anti-Red obsessives he's damn sorry he won't be joining a senate which has a still-living Senator McCarthy in 1959. I think JFK had a similar cynical approach to the issue, albeit it was pretty second string issue for him, as he was never a real McCarthyite like his brother was.

Labor issues? I think in this scenario he doesn't go after Hoffa and Hoffa's friends if he's senior counsel to the Maclellan committee. He uses the job to network for his electoral career. Sure, he may want to be a headstrong crusader against crooked unionists, but he has to face the realpolitik of being the family's great electoral hope.

My guess is his medium term strategy is to be the hardest working aide on the Hill in '55-'58, possibly even turning these efforts towards getting a brief appointment in the Eisenhower administration, just like how Pat Moynihan was in the Nixon administration before his run for the senate.

He and dad and the Irish Mafia would aim for '58 against the appointee GOPer who's now seeking a full term, with Team K also planning a possible later run against Leverett Saltonstall in '60 should they lose this first race. '58 being such a good year for Dems they shouldn't need that two-election strategy.

Long term, I don't think RFK is hugely attractive for national office, not in this world.

But he's smarter than Teddy, and Jeebus, just look at how EMK was able to use that seat to become a lion of the senate.
 
Plus Bobby will be the lone Dem in a GOP fortress run by Rocky and Jake Javits, also as per OTL.

Oh, when I first skimmed this I thought you'd accidently transposed the New York GOPers over Saltonstall and Volpe, but reading this a second time I see, no, you're referring to Robert Kennedy running in NYS.

JFK dies in the fifties>RFK isn't going to have an avenue to run in any state other than MA.

I thought that was self evident.
 
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