Robert F. Kennedy

Hi
I'm interested in doing a piece on Bobby Kennedy.

I tried to read Rogue Beaver's story but a lot of it seemed to be hard boiled conservative projection onto a progressive man, particularly when it came to economics.

Is there anyone willing to help me write my piece?
 
Hi
I'm interested in doing a piece on Bobby Kennedy.

I tried to read Rogue Beaver's story but a lot of it seemed to be hard boiled conservative projection onto a progressive man, particularly when it came to economics.

Is there anyone willing to help me write my piece?

Have you ever read "The Everything Changed" it has a Robert Kennedy TL that is quite good.

What exactly do you want in your TL to focus on. I am not the most knowledgeable in the era, but I do know a decent bit and just took a college class on the history of America in the twentieth century.

Out of all of the kennedy's Robert is my favorite one.
 
RFK's an interesting figure and really can't be ideologically pigeonhold. There was a good description of Bobby in Jack Newman's biography of him in which he was described as simultaneously a radical liberal, Jeffersonian individualist, and puritan moralist. That seems to describe him pretty well considering my research. RB's timeline is very interesting, but features too much ideological fulfillment (RFK reading The Road to Serfdom and embracing monatarism for instance) and parallelism. There's a thread somewhere on the forums (RFK: A New Democrat? or something like that) which addresses his ideology in an interesting way. He wasn't a centrist, a liberal, or a conservative. He held unique and at times contrary views, and was extremely ideologically unique.
 
Since his assassination, RFK has become something of a blank slate upon which liberals/progressives of the baby-boomer generation project their dreams of a post-1968 golden age without a President Nixon, Watergate, a President Carter, a President Reagan, etc.

But RFK was a real human being, with a record as U.S. Attorney General and as a U.S. Senator. Prior to 1964, RFK was not all that liberal. He was a centrist Democrat like JFK in the early 1960s, and even somewhat of a conservative Democrat like their father before that time. From 1964 to 1968, his political movement to the Left and his genuine concern for, and outreach to, racial minorities and the poor was not necessarily a political plus.

As JFK's campaign manager in 1960 and as Attorney General, RFK made significant enemies inside the Democratic Party. He occasionally made political mistakes.

The odds were against his winning the 1968 nomination. On the night of June 4, 1968, after he won the California and South Dakota primaries, RFK estimated his own changes of winning the nomination at no better than 50-50%. After those wins, the estimated delegate totals were: Vice-President Hubert Humphrey 561; RFK 393; Senator Eugene McCarthy 258. Out of a total 2607 delegate votes, it took at least 1304 delegate votes to win the 1968 Democratic nomination.
 
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Something that hasn't been mentioned so far is how much of RFK's stances during the Johnson Administration were influenced by his hatred of Johnson. I think leaving out that variable would be a mistake in analyzing his politics.
 
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