What if Bobby Kennedy had skipped the 1968 race, as brother Teddy advised?

When Robert F. Kennedy died 50 years ago today, the victim of assassination like his brother, President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Edward Kennedy received word of the unfathomable historical repetition while completing a campaign swing through northern California. Just when they had achieved victory in the Golden State’s 1968 Democratic presidential primary, the Kennedys’ world collapsed, as it had on that horrific November day in 1963. The clan’s matriarch Rose Kennedy explained, “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years. If I had read it in fiction, I would have said it was incredible.”

At age 36, Teddy Kennedy now became the family’s patriarch, with all three of his older brothers lost to violent deaths and his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., rendered mute by a stroke. From 2005 to 2008, the senator provided 29 oral history interviews for University of Virginia’s Miller Center, offering fresh insights about this tumultuous period for the nation and the Kennedy dynasty.

{mosads}Separated by seven years in age, Bobby and Teddy were not especially close as youngsters, although they shared the family’s adventures in pre-World War II England when their father was U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Young Teddy was impressed by RFK’s devotion to principle, as when he opposed a conservative priest at Harvard’s Newman Club who preached that only Catholics could achieve eternal salvation. Bobby’s crusade, encouraged by his father, ultimately led to the cleric’s removal.

In 1963, all three surviving Kennedy brothers (the eldest, Joe Jr., was a World War II casualty) gathered in Washington at the apogee of the family’s power: with Jack in the White House, Bobby his attorney general, and Teddy as the new senator from Massachusetts. In a historic first, the brothers advanced, from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their troika ended all too soon, however, with the president’s assassination in Dallas, but in 1965, Bobby joined Teddy in the Senate, representing New York. Now the youngest Kennedy sibling outranked his brother in seniority.

They both served on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee. Teddy worked on education and health, and Bobby focused on community development, especially a public-private partnership to revitalize Brooklyn’s blighted Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. They collaborated to end racial and income inequities in the draft by proposing a random lottery system. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had addressed policies aimed at improving the lives of American Indians, and he carried this concern to his chairmanship of the Special Subcommittee on Indian Education.

As JFK’s closest advisor, Bobby had developed an international reputation and, from the Senate, he used his fame to oppose South Africa’s apartheid. His speeches during a 1966 visit there, including his “ripple of hope” refrain, bolstered the modern movement against racial segregation. “He had such credibility emerging from his battles on civil rights issues here in the United States,” Teddy observed.

Although both brothers initially supported the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy, by 1967, they were growing increasingly skeptical of President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war. Teddy remembered that Bobby “began to pick up wisps directly from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara [who] was beginning to have very serious second thoughts” about the war. Withdrawal from the Southeast Asian quagmire became the centerpiece of RFK’s politics. According to Teddy’s oral history, RFK even suggested that Johnson appoint him ambassador to France so that he could engage in peace talks. LBJ, with whom Bobby had a fraught relationship, declined.

Now the New York senator had to decide whether to challenge the incumbent president for 1968’s Democratic presidential nomination. The calculus became more complex when Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy joined the race as the peace candidate. Bobby deputed his brother to meet with McCarthy. If he would agree to add poverty amelioration to his agenda, RFK might remain on the sidelines. But McCarthy “just was basically uninterested” in the deal, Teddy reported.

Edward Kennedy urged his brother to wait until 1972 to try to restore Camelot. Johnson would be in retirement, and the path back to the White House for the Kennedys might be clearer. Moreover, both Teddy and his sister-in-law Jackie feared for Bobby’s safety on the presidential campaign trail. “A feeling of dread” is how Teddy’s chief of staff described the senator’s premonition of doom.

Dismissing such concerns, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced on March 16, 1968, his presidential candidacy in the Senate Caucus Room, where Jack had entered the 1960 race. Despite his misgivings, Teddy enthusiastically campaigned for RFK across the country. When word reached him in San Francisco that his worst fear had materialized, the Massachusetts senator simply couldn’t believe that his brother would succumb. Teddy’s arrival at the Los Angeles hospital proved otherwise. “Then it’s the reality, and you have a difficult time letting him go,” he mournfully told his interviewer even 40 years later.

Grief-stricken and sleepless, Teddy somehow summoned the strength to deliver a eulogy for Bobby at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. With a heartbreaking quaver, Teddy voiced the eloquent tribute written by his advisor and wordsmith, Milton Gwirtzman, summing up Bobby as “a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

What if Bobby had listened to his brother and waited until 1972? Whether he could have defeated President Richard Nixon that year is uncertain, but he might have blunted the incumbent’s Southern strategy that pitted black against white, rich against poor, labor against elites — and diverted the country from the path that has led to Trumpian populism. And Bobby’s loyal assistants, joined by Sen. Edward Kennedy, wouldn’t have gathered to mourn RFK on Chappaquiddick in 1969.

Barbara A. Perry is the the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where she co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. She served as a U.S. Supreme Court fellow and has worked for both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate. Her book, “Edward M. Kennedy: An Oral History,” will be released this fall. Follow her on Twitter @BarbaraPerryUVA.