In early 1968, at Hickory Hill in Virginia, two brothers faced a question that would divide them. Should Robert Kennedy run for president?
Ted Kennedy, the youngest brother and a senator from Massachusetts, urged Robert directly not to run. This is not a story most people know.
The popular memory of Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign is one of passion, crowds, and hope, ending with an assassin's bullet. Less well known is that before any of that happened, Ted Kennedy sat with Robert and told him that running in 1968 was a mistake.
To understand Ted Kennedy's opposition, you first have to understand the landscape of 1968. America in early 1968 was not a normal political year. It was visibly coming apart.
The Vietnam War had already killed more than 20,000 Americans by then, with no clear end in sight. President Lyndon Johnson was deeply unpopular, but he was an incumbent backed by the full machinery of the Democratic Party.
Major American cities had burned in riots the previous summer. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive in January 1968, but the country he was fighting for looked increasingly ungovernable. The climate of violence and unrest had grown so severe that the president's public movements were increasingly shaped by security concerns.
That was the environment Robert Kennedy was considering entering as a presidential candidate.
The first documented reason for Ted Kennedy's opposition was the most painful and the most obvious. He feared for his brother's life.
Both Teddy and his sister-in-law Jackie feared for Bobby's safety on the campaign trail, as The Hill documented in its 2018 analysis of Ted's oral history account. "A sense of dread" is how Ted's chief of staff described the senator's expectations of disaster.
This was not an abstract worry. It was a specific, bone-deep fear for a family that had already buried two brothers. Joe Kennedy Jr. died in a wartime explosion in 1944. John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas in November 1963.
Ted watched his brother Bobby reach into crowds to shake hands with strangers wherever he went. He watched him move through surging crowds of supporters pressing in from every direction. He understood exactly what a determined person with a weapon could do in that environment.
This fear was not irrational. It was grounded in documented reality. Presidential candidates and prominent political figures in 1968 did not receive guaranteed Secret Service protection. Secret Service protection for major presidential and vice presidential candidates was only authorized after Robert Kennedy's assassination, when Congress passed the measure on June 6, 1968.
In early 1968, when Ted was urging Bobby not to run, any prominent Democratic candidate could move through a crowd with minimal organized protection, surrounded by enthusiastic supporters pressing in from all sides. Ted Kennedy had watched his brother Jack campaign. He had watched the world that killed his brother. The documented record of his oral testimony shows he saw what was coming in ways Robert refused to acknowledge.
Jacqueline Kennedy also tried to dissuade Robert from running. Her own experience in Dallas had made the danger a painful fact, and accounts from that period describe her as deeply worried about what another Kennedy campaign might bring. She had sat in a moving car in Dallas and held her husband's head in her lap. The pink suit she wore during Lyndon Johnson's oath of office aboard Air Force One, the suit she refused to change so that, as she said, they could see what they had done, remained a vivid image for everyone who knew the family.
Jackie and Ted were united in their fear, representing between them the two people closest to what had already been lost.
The second documented reason for Ted Kennedy's opposition was strategic and political. He urged his brother to wait until 1972.
The argument, as recorded in the Epsco Research Starters report on the assassination and in accounts drawn from Ted Kennedy's oral history, was that 1972 would be a better year. Johnson would have retired, and the path back to the White House for a Kennedy might be clearer, as The Hill documented from Ted's oral testimony.
The specific strategic logic was sound. Johnson, however unpopular, was an incumbent with enormous institutional leverage. Challenging an incumbent president of your own party for the nomination had almost never succeeded in American political history. It meant challenging not just Johnson but the entire Democratic Party establishment: party leaders, labor leaders, and big-city machine politicians who controlled delegate counts and had been Johnson's base for years.
By 1972, the calculations would be entirely different. Johnson would be gone. The party would need a new direction. Robert Kennedy would have four more years of Senate experience and four more years to build relationships with constituencies beyond those who loved him as his brother's brother.
Ted also argued, according to the documented account in Epsco, that 1968 would not give Robert enough time to devote to his large family, which included not only his ten children but also John and Caroline Kennedy, Jack's two children, for whom Robert had become a surrogate father after November 1963.
Robert Kennedy took his responsibility toward Jack's children with complete seriousness. He was present in their lives in ways that went far beyond formal obligation. The argument that a grueling presidential campaign would take him away from those children, from his own children, and from Ethel and the family life he had built at Hickory Hill was not a minor consideration. It was a genuine concern about what the campaign would cost the family, regardless of its outcome.
The third documented area of Ted Kennedy's concern was the political miscalculation that a 1968 run represented in the existing political landscape. Eugene McCarthy had already entered the race.
McCarthy entered the Democratic primaries as an antiwar candidate in November 1967. He built a real campaign organization. He attracted college students, idealistic young volunteers, and the energy of the antiwar movement.
Then, on March 12, 1968, McCarthy did something that shocked everyone. He won 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary against the sitting president of the United States. Johnson won 49 percent. A sitting president had nearly lost his own party's primary to a challenger most people in the country had not heard of six months earlier. The result was an earthquake.
Before New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy had publicly stated he would not run. In January 1968, he told reporters at a National Press Club breakfast that he did not plan to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic nomination. He went further in an earlier statement, saying he saw no foreseeable circumstances that would push him to run.
McCarthy, who had asked Kennedy about his intentions and understood he would stay out, went ahead and built his campaign on that understanding. When Kennedy reversed course four days after New Hampshire and announced his candidacy on March 16, 1968, McCarthy's supporters reacted immediately and angrily. They accused Kennedy of opportunism. They said he had waited until McCarthy did the dangerous and unpopular work of confronting Johnson, then stepped in to harvest the results.
That accusation was entirely understandable from McCarthy's perspective. It damaged Kennedy's image and created a split within the antiwar movement that never fully healed.
Ted understood this problem in advance. In fact, Bobby had delegated Ted to meet with McCarthy before any decision was made, as documented in Ted's oral history. The meeting was an attempt to find a way for the two campaigns to coexist. Ted was trying to determine whether an agreement could be reached that would allow Robert to stay out of the race.
But McCarthy was not interested in a deal, as Teddy documented. The negotiations failed. Now Robert faced the choice Ted had wanted to avoid: either enter the race in a way that made him look opportunistic, or stay out and watch McCarthy carry the antiwar banner alone.
There was a fourth documented dimension to Ted's opposition, one rarely discussed: the practical matter of delegate math. By early 1968, Johnson had amassed enormous delegate support through the traditional mechanisms of Democratic Party politics, state party organizations, labor unions, and elected officials.
Even a strong primary challenge would not automatically translate into enough delegates to win the nomination at the national convention. The convention system in 1968 relied far less on primary results than it would after party reforms in later years. A candidate could win primaries and still lose the nomination to another candidate who performed better among the party regulars who controlled state delegations.
These were not theoretical concerns. They were documented political realities that Ted clearly recognized as a senator with a deep understanding of Democratic Party mechanics. Running an energetic, high-profile primary campaign and then losing at the convention to Hubert Humphrey, who ran in no primaries but had the party establishment's support, was a real and expected outcome. It would have inflicted devastating political damage and personal pain.
In the end, Robert Kennedy chose to move forward despite these concerns. In documented conversations with aides, he said he was aware of the risks. He told journalist Jack Newfield he was playing "Russian roulette" every time he went out in public. He also told aides he knew he would probably be shot at some point.
These were not the statements of a man who had convinced himself he was safe. They were the statements of a man who had made peace with danger and decided the cause was worth the gamble. The documented record of his thinking, drawn from Schlesinger's biography and the accounts of many aides, shows a man who believed the country was on a dangerous path, in his words, and felt a moral obligation he could not abandon, whatever the personal cost.
Kennedy had already posed a direct question to his adviser and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1967: "How can we possibly survive five more years of Lyndon Johnson?" That question, months before formal campaign discussions, captures the depth of Robert Kennedy's conviction that staying out of the race was not an option.
The Tet Offensive in January 1968 publicly proved what Kennedy had been saying privately for months: that the Vietnam War was not being won, that the official narrative was built on illusion, and that American lives were being spent in service of a policy the military and the administration knew was failing. The Kerner Commission released its report on racial unrest the previous summer in February 1968, and the Johnson administration largely ignored its findings.
Kennedy could not stand by watching what he saw as mounting failures of the Johnson presidency and conclude that his brother Ted's strategic patience was the right answer.
On March 16, 1968, Robert Kennedy entered the Senate Caucus Room, the same room where John Kennedy had announced his presidential campaign in January 1960, and declared he would run. He said he could not stand aside from the battle that would decide the nation's future. He said he was convinced the country was on a dangerous path and that he was bound to do everything he could to change it.
Ted Kennedy, who had opposed the run, appeared alongside his brother. Despite his documented reservations, once Robert made his decision, Ted threw himself into the campaign with full commitment. He traveled the country campaigning for Robert. He spent his own political capital in support of the effort. Personal reservations were set aside. The public face was unified.
On March 31, 1968, fifteen days after Robert Kennedy entered the race, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. The political landscape changed entirely. The incumbent president, whose institutional power had made a challenge look so daunting, was out. Hubert Humphrey entered as a new establishment candidate. The race was now genuinely open in ways it had not been on March 16.
Robert Kennedy won the California primary on June 4, 1968. He was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5. Ted Kennedy flew to Los Angeles. He had feared this. He had carried a sense of dread from the moment Robert announced his candidacy. Now that dread had become fact.
He had to find a way to stand at the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and deliver a eulogy for his third brother. The eulogy he delivered, written with his adviser Milton Gwirtzman, described Robert Kennedy 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.
Robert's death left questions behind that history will never answer. Would he have won the nomination? Could he have won the presidency? And for Ted Kennedy, there was a more painful counterfactual. What would have happened if Robert had listened to the advice?