found online by Raymond
From Jonathan Bernstein:
We just passed the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. It’s not hard to argue that this might have been the assassination with the largest political consequences of the 1960s. Let’s play a little What If.
It’s virtually certain that Kennedy would not have won the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago. In the pre-reform system, winning a few primaries just wasn’t that important. As long as Lyndon Johnson backed Hubert Humphrey, Humphrey had the delegates necessary to win.
But with Kennedy alive, the disastrous convention might well have been very different, especially if (as Nelson W. Polsby once speculated) Kennedy had been offered and accepted the vice presidential nod.