"a Southerner who could speak to Southerners in their own language, and a legislator in chief par excellence,", . One of the bullets struck the senator in the head and left him grievously wounded. He brandished the theme of law and order, and offered solutions that relied less on Great Society programs than they did on plans to empower individuals through incentives. In which case, the strong progressive tradition that we associate with some of our best presidents -- the two Roosevelts and Wilson and Truman, as well as JFK and LBJ -- would be alive and well in America today. His platform featured modest planks: job training, investing in the cities, forging public-private partnerships that would help provide African-Americans with a modicum of economic independence. Would he have tried to hide that handicap from the public like Franklin Roosevelt did?

Johnson’s announcement that he would step up peace negotiations with North Vietnam further let some of the air out of Kennedy’s campaign. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. A 102-year-old veteran went for the ride of a lifetime by jumping out of an airplane, and she still has another thrill on her bucket list. JFK's medical problems would have caught up to him as well, and Greenfield suggests that his well-documented spine issues would have eventually robbed him of his ability to walk. He was convinced that it was all but impossible for an incumbent president to be ousted from office by a member of his own party. All of this led to Kennedy’s decision to run for president in 1968. Nor did matters improve that much when, on March 31, President Johnson stunned the nation with his announcement that he would not be a candidate for re-election. This is how she got it back. What if President Eisenhower had embraced the Brown vs. Board of Education decision the day after it was issued and ordered school desegregation to start within a year? Would a wheelchair-bound president have inspired the same mythology? It was the start of a series of assassinations (including JFK’s brother Bobby and Martin Luther King Jr) that profoundly unsettled America’s sense of domestic security.

But Kennedy rejected their entreaties and in doing so, he cited two main reasons: That decision provoked a barrage of criticism from both wings of his party. Scientists at Washington State University's Bear Research, Education and Conservation Center are studying what goes on before, during and after grizzly bears hibernate over the winter months. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a pivotal point in American history, which is why historians, both amatuer and professional, often wonder – what would have happened if that pivot had gone the other way?

On March 16, 1968, however—four days after Sen. Eugene McCarthy nearly defeated LBJ in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary—Robert Kennedy declared that he, too, was seeking the Democratic nomination. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb appear on Sunday's "Face the Nation". The Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, draped over nearly one million acres of wilderness areas and the Sawtooth National Forest, is a major draw for amateur astrophotographers capturing the heavens. © 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC. Senator Robert F. Kennedy shakes hands with voters during his presidential campaign in Indiana, early 1968.

On that basis, it is hard to imagine that Kennedy would have miraculously done all these things that he’d not been able to do in his first term.

And already by then, the question was being asked: what if Kennedy had not been killed on the night on his crowning triumph in the 1968 primary campaign? Not exactly the feel good ending we were all looking for. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. That explains why Fidel Castro himself was so distraught by JFK's death, as The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled on Wednesday. Kennedy believed his candidacy would only deepen the divisions that plagued the Democrats and thus make it easier for a Republican to capture the White House in '68. For the last 50 years, writers and scholars have penned "alternate histories," dreaming up … Slaves in the Viking Age: how prevalent were enslaved people in Viking societies? Kennedy read authors like Albert Camus, who explored how one could remain a moral person in an immoral world. Ending the Cold War, for instance, depended on generational change in the USSR – Gorbachev was of a different era and outlook from Khrushchev, let alone Stalin – and also in America.

I can’t think of anyone else as energetic and far-sighted.

And he would have spent the next two months putting the pressure on party leaders who controlled delegates in the key non-primary states to persuade them that his victories on the primary trail should not be ignored if the Democrats truly hoped to win in November. That Kennedy would not have escalated in Vietnam is perhaps the most tantalizing "What If" in JFK fan fiction pieces. Johnson was less well-educated, less sophisticated and more folksy than his Harvard-educated, urbane and polished predecessor. Q&A: If President Kennedy hadn’t been wearing a back brace when he was assassinated, would he have lived? After being appointed attorney general by his brother, he pursued the Mafia with the same intensity. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. Yet he did remind white working-class voters that as a former attorney general, he was pro-law-and-order. Please enter your number below. What if he had continued his 1968 presidential campaign 50 … Although personally ambitious, Robert dedicated his life primarily to serving his brother’s political aspirations. Could he have forged a working-class political coalition that might have cauterized the nation’s racial wounds, arrested the slide into polarization and won working-class white support for the Democratic Party? Partly out of distrust for his military advisors, Kennedy saw deescalation with Cuba as the only solution to their issues.