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This can be an interesting discussion, but let's make sure we keep it in the realm of "History," since that is the topic for this forum. In order to keep focused on History and not on Politics or Current Events (which have their own forums), we have consistently forbidden discussions of the current administration and the immediate past administration. Therefore, all posts in this thread must apply to elections BEFORE 2008. No exceptions. No excuses.
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I don't know if he would've been the greatest but RFK may well have changed the course of much of our history by getting us out of Vietnam earlier, perhaps we wouldn't have remained as willing to stick our nose in so many places it never belonged. As a side note to that turbulent era, today is the 49th anniversary of students being gunned down by government troops at Kent State University.
I know, if Goldwater had been elected he would have gotten us mired down in a war in Vietnam costing maybe thousands of lives. Sure glad Johnson was reelected!
I don't know if he would've been the greatest but RFK may well have changed the course of much of our history by getting us out of Vietnam earlier, perhaps we wouldn't have remained as willing to stick our nose in so many places it never belonged. As a side note to that turbulent era, today is the 49th anniversary of students being gunned down by government troops at Kent State University.
I don't know. There is a faction that believes a two-term JFK would have become, if not a disastrous administration, at least a far, far less highly regarded one. "Being a hero is dying at the right time." - perhaps never more true than with JFK. I have a colleague who is very, very knowledgeable about spaceflight history, and he maintains the man who put us on the Moon was... Oswald. JFK was already preparing to cut funding for NASA and the lunar missions, pushing them out ten years despite his stirring speeches. With his shocking death, Johnson had no choice to but make it his monument, and "one small step."
RFK never had a chance to lead, but not everything about his policies and intents was as wondrous as those of his brother's earliest years. I think the times would have dragged him down to, if not Nixon level problems, at least the mire that Eisenhower had to navigate. Both K's had the idea that not all the rules applied to them, which is not going to turn out well.
(I'm not the only one. In his novel Timescape, Greg Benford postulates a two-term JFK followed by RFK, who got caught in a dreadful scandal involving Oval Office taping... the idea that "you can't motorboat until it's time to motorboat, but you can't avoid it, either.")
Good one! I was thinking, it's hard to predict who would have been "the greatest", but I think you nailed it.
My thoughts went to Kerry (whom a congressional investigation showed, actually won the vote); IMO he would have been very good. Great? IDK. "The greatest"? Well, that's a tall order for anyone. The public didn't know Kerry very well; he failed to get the word out about his values, his history as a lawyer in setting up advocacy programs for the poor and for women and minorities, and so on. RFK had plenty of media attention on his efforts in bringing poverty to the attention of the mainstream public.
The interesting "what if" is "what if John C Breckinridge had defeated Abraham Lincoln for President? Vice President before the war, he wanted compromise to preserve the union, but once war came, fought for the Confederacy. Would there have been no Civil War? Would it have come later? What would have happened with regard to slavery? What would our current national condition be today? Think of how much of our current situation stems from the results of that one election.
he would have won if he didn't fall off the rails on 60 minutes...
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