1964 Redux

Caroline Kennedy’s potential Senate-seat-via-fiat has once again given rise to the classic armchair-historian question: JFK v. Goldwater?

This happens every few years, most notably when Oliver Stone’s retread of It’s A Wonderful Life debuted in 1991 and he was saving the children from having to read those oh-so horrible books about history to get their information and opinions. The Iraq War and its similarities to the Rusk-McNamara deceptions brought it up again.

And now Mrs. Schlossberg has a shot at the brass ring of carpetbaggers and we wonder what the world would be like had JFK not been slain.

First one has to ask if Goldwater would have taken the nomination at all. For the Republicans, it was election for the heart and soul of the party itself. Would it become more moderate under the Rockefeller wing? Or would it go hardline with the Goldwaterites? His candidacy makes sense when one figures that LBJ was going to mop the floor with whomever ran in 1964 after JFK’s death. Herbert Hoover confided to Richard Nixon that year that once in a while you have to let the kooks take over, get destroyed, and the party realigns. Nixon himself was still not around to kick, his Phoenician rise was years away (he was also just admitted to the bar in NY). Ronald Reagan was still hosting GE Theater and not even in the arena. Favorite sons such as William Scranton and George Romney might have had a better shot at the VP slot. Nope, this is still a Goldwater-Rockefeller contest.

Simply put, Goldwater had the infrastructure in place and the delegates to squeak it out. Rockefeller used George Washington’s old tactic of denying he was running in the hopes a groundswell would form for his candidacy. It always backfired. Once he seriously ran, it was too late in the process. It is safe to say Goldwater would have it on the first ballot.

Kennedy, as incumbent, would have won the nomination handily this time. Again, there would be favorite sons here and there and George Wallace would poke his head out of the gopher hole, but nothing serious.

Kennedy, while well-liked, was not the wildly popular president Camelot made him out to be. His legislative record was uninspired and it can best be said that he learned on the job in foreign affairs. The Cuban Missile Crisis might have given him some points. America was in space. The economy was all-right.  The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty passed. The Cold War was quiet, for now.