What if…Bobby Kennedy had not been assassinated?: The environmental President

Bobby Kennedy was a far-sighted critic of the fetish of endless economic growth. What if he and Richard Nixon had made environmentalism a bipartisan cause célèbre, back in the early 1970s?

“George Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘Some people see things as they are and say why?  I dream things that never were and say, why not?’” – Robert Kennedy, Address to Kansas University, 1968.

There has been much speculation across the years about how the Vietnam War (or what the Vietnamese, as I discovered when I travelled to Vietnam some time ago, call, unsurprisingly, ‘the American war’) could have been stopped before it got fully started, if only Bobby Kennedy hadn’t been shot dead, and had gone on to beat Nixon, as he might well have done. The scenario pursued below is one much much less often speculated on, but with long-term consequences considerably weightier even than the avoidance of the Vietnam tragedy-and-crime would have been. For the younger Kennedy brother was ahead of his time in relation to the most determinative issues of our age: those of ecology, pollution, and quality of life. If he had become President, he could have helped make his times catch up to where they needed to be in relation to those issues. He could have gained us a generation, perhaps two. It might even, in its knock-on effects, have made the difference in heading off the collapse toward which we appear to be headed.

If this sounds an excessive claim, then read on, and bear in mind that everything I quote up until the day of Kennedy’s death is stuff he actually said and did, and that most of what I ‘quote’ after that point is, too: often verbatim; or is at least based very closely on things he actually said or did.

This dream of things that never were is a dream of things that could and should have been…