RFK, the Original Johnny Unbeatable

The New Deal Democrats maintained power only because of their base of conservative, segregationist southerners. LBJ temporarily smashed the conservative coalition, but by finally putting the Democratic Party behind civil rights did this at the expense of both southern support and the support of some crucial working-class whites outside the South as well.

Because of his unfortunate assassination, a myth has grown up around RFK, namely that he was the one Democrat who could have appealed to both working-class whites and African-Americans, keeping the Democratic coalition together behind a progressive economic agenda without sacrificing strong Democratic support for civil rights. The problem, as Michael Cohen observes, is that there’s little-to-no actual evidence for this theory:

Kennedy had thrown his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for president in mid-March of 1968. His entry in the race, days after Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary to President Lyndon Johnson, pushed the president to end his bid for reelection. Over the next seven weeks, Kennedy aggressively campaigned to be his party’s standard-bearer. He mercilessly attacked Johnson, blaming him directly for the country’s growing divisions. And, as the myth-makers would later claim, directly challenged white voters about the moral urgency of civil rights — and yet still won their support.

“Kennedy’s Indiana Victory Proves His Appeal Defuses Backlash Voting,” wrote the reporting team of Rowland Evans and Bob Novak. The New York Times said he had run well in the white working-class wards that had voted for George Wallace during the Democratic primary in 1964. “Some of these voters,” wrote the Times, “indicated to reporters that although Mr. Kennedy had the Negro vote they looked upon him also as a tough-minded Irishman with whom they could identify.” Kennedy was, said the Village Voice, “the last liberal politician who could communicate with working class America” and create a blue-black coalition of white blue-collar and African-American voters.

In reality, reporters saw a mirage — one that distorted Kennedy’s legacy and deemphasized the toxic role that racism actually played in 1968 and continues to play today. Kennedy won just 30 percent of the white vote in Indiana — and largely among Catholic voters who had pulled the lever for his brother eight years earlier.

Kennedy fared particularly badly in places that abutted predominately African-American neighborhoods. For example, in Lake County, which included the gritty industrial city of Gary — and largely segregated white and black communities — McCarthy defeated him soundly. The key to Kennedy’s victory was his strong support among black voters — which represented nearly half of his backing in the state. A similar phenomenon would play out later in the Oregon and California primaries. Indeed, Oregon was the first election that a Kennedy ever lost and it happened, in part, because as one of his advisers ruefully noted, the state didn’t have any ghettos. In California, the state’s black and Hispanic voters would narrowly put him over the top, but as was the case in Indiana and Oregon, McCarthy fared far better among white suburban voters.

Kennedy’s close identification with black voters — and the problems that caused him with white voters — was not lost on the candidate. “I’m the Negro candidate,” he told his liberal aides. “I have to tell white people I care about what they care about.”

Indeed, while many today remember the inspired remarks he gave in Indianapolis before a predominately black crowd, on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Kennedy’s message in Indiana was a bit more nuanced. He began calling himself the candidate of “law and order” and boasted that he’d been the “chief law enforcement officer” in the country when he served as attorney general under his brother.

Kennedy was not wrong to focus on crime. By the spring of 1968, it was the most important domestic issue facing the country. But Kennedy’s appeals were sometimes a bit more loaded. He talked about the importance of “get(ting) away from the welfare system, the handout system, and the idea of the dole.” In his only debate with McCarthy, he falsely accused his opponent of wanting to move hundreds of thousands of blacks to predominately white Orange County. It’s the kind of line that one might expect from a politician intent on playing the race card to win over white voters.

Indeed, one of the more underappreciated aspects of Kennedy’s candidacy is that the more voters got to see the candidate, the less they liked him.

If RFK was capable of magically squaring the post-New Deal circle, there was no evidence of this in his primary campaign, and as Cohen said he almost certainly would not have won the Dem nomination anyway. Cohen has much more on this in his history of the 1968 campaign, which I strongly recommend.