"How Bobby Kennedy Wins the 1968 Election" by Mitchell Freedman

[pragmatic liberal]

Mitchell Freedman is an amateur historian who has written a well-reviewed alternate history called "Disturbance of Fate" about an RFK victory in '68. The book is pretty realistic until the final few chapters, when it veers into the fantastic (the epilogue, for example, writes of a second American civil war in the 1980s and Jesse Jackson's victory as a Republican in the 1990s).

Freedman has published a more scholarly essay on an RFK victory on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Bobby-Kennedy-Wins-1968-Election/dp/B000L21EKC/ref=pd_ys_iyr_img/002-0149884-5694443). The piece can be purchased for 49 cents. More factual and less fantastic than his novel, the essay is a sober critique of the idea that Hubert Humphrey would have won the nomination whether RFK survived or not.

Has anybody else read this? I found it fairly interesting and plausible, though I'm not sure I'm willing to buy his conclusion completely. Freedman argues that an RFK victory in 5 out of the 6 major primaries he entered would have been followed by a defection to RFK by Daley. He imagines RFK picking either Florida Senator George Smathers or Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough as his running mate and defeating Nixon by a narrow margin.

I'd encourage all of you to read it. It's only 49 cents and I'd be interested in learning people's opinions/critiques of Freedman's essay.

[Verily]

I have a feeling Kennedy would have defeated Nixon by a wide margin, not a narrow one. There would have been the sympathy factor for JFK's assassination, the fact that RFK was anti-Vietnam from the beginning (unlike Humphrey, who ran as pro-war until near the very end of the campaign), and RFK's charisma, which would have contrasted starkly with Nixon's reclusiveness.

[True Democrat]

Thanks so much for posting this!

I bought and now I'm using it for my research paper for school.  I'm focusing on how Vietnam affected the 1968 Democratic and Republican nominations.  This article doesn't directly correlate, but for 50 cents it's well worth it.

[Dr. Cynic]

Oh c'mon... We know Bobby Kennedy had a great chance of winning in 1968... It's not like it wasn't a realistic scenario had he lived.