Do you think Robert Kennedy was the best president America never had?

25 comments

1. Henry A Wallace gets my vote

   Got shafted by the dnc so they could install their little puppet named Harry Truman. Pretty messed up, the world would be a much different place if they didn’t gaslight Wallace.

   https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/henry-wallace-the-president-america-never-had.811425

   Edit: thing is, Ben Franklin never wanted to be president to begin with, guys… he was too busy banging hookers in France and having fun to want to be a president.

   Edit 2: you guys are so misguided lol how many of you even know who Henry Wallace was? Let alone researched his background, why he was Vice President or his policies?

   https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/henry-a-wallace

   “Though his family had traditionally been Republican, Wallace turned his support towards the Democratic party in supporting Al Smith against Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928, seeing the harm inflicted on American farmers by the “laissez faire” policies of Republican administrations. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he appointed Wallace to serve as Secretary of Agriculture. Wallace designed sweeping New Deal farm legislation, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which sought to raise farm income by regulating overproduction. Later, as U.S. Vice President, he recommended fellow Iowan Norman Borlaug to the Rockefeller Foundation to establish what would become a historic hybridization project in Latin America. Building on Wallace’s hybridization experiments, Borlaug would eventually win the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for work that saved billions of people from death by starvation.

   Wallace stood loyally by Roosevelt, even supporting his controversial 1937 plan to increase the number of Supreme Court Justices (referred to as “court packing”) to defeat legal challenges to his legislation. In 1940, Roosevelt yielded to entreaties to run for a third term, but said he would do so only with Wallace as his running mate. When the party bosses balked at Wallace’s idealism and lack of machine political experience, FDR sent his wife Eleanor to the convention. She won the the political bosses over with her most famous speech. They must give the President what he wants, she said, because, with Hitler on the march and war looming, “this is no ordinary time.”

   The ticket won in a landslide. As the U.S. entered World War II, Wallace became a key member of the President’s war cabinet and oversaw the Bureau of Economic Warfare. He quickly became a world leader whose motto was “Peace, Prosperity, and Equality” and famously articulated the “common man” philosophy of the New Deal Democratic party. Wallace was opposed to both economic and military imperialism and strongly in favor of what would become “detente” with the Soviet Union and international cooperation through the United Nations. Serving as a goodwill ambassador, Wallace went on extensive tours through Latin America, China, and the Soviet Union.

   In 1944, Wallace was the overwhelming popular favorite for re-nomination as Vice President, but the party bosses had grown distrustful of Wallace, especially when he used his speech seconding FDR’s nomination to speak passionately against Jim Crow laws – against racial segregation and poll taxes and in favor of anti-lynching laws – positions they feared would alienate the southern Democratic base that FDR had counted on to win. They replaced Wallace with Harry Truman on the Democratic ticket.

   FDR said to Wallace, “You know, Henry, the things you believe in are all going to come someday. Your problem is that you’re just too far ahead of your time”

2. We’ll never know. The answers to this sort of question depend 100% on personal bias and prejudice

3. Ben Franklin. So good of a not president that we put him on our biggest bill anyway.

4. My personal opinion… no.

   Robert Taft may have been a good President though.

5. No. I’m not big on the kennedys though.

6. Ben frank dude

7. I honestly don’t know, alternate history being inherently iffy.

8. Not Sure was the best an I’ll die on that hill.

9. This is an impossible question to answer, but my vote is for Eugene Debs.

10. You’re forgetting about our good friend Kanye

11. William H. Seward was narrowly beaten by Lincoln to be the Republican nominee in the 1860 election (largely because he was much more vocally anti-slavery than Lincoln, which the delegates thought might hurt his electoral chances) and went on to be Lincoln and Johnson’s Secretary of State.

    Dude was a powerhouse as SoS and more or less handled all foreign affairs for the Lincoln and Johnson administrations. He managed to convince the European superpowers not to politically recognize the Confederacy, and negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, which is to this day one of the best deals the US has ever made.

    It’s also interesting to note that he was so feared by the Confederacy that when Lincoln was assassinated, the conspirators also tried to take out Seward at the same time. He was stabbed in the face and only survived because he had been injured in a carriage accident a few days before and was wearing a neck brace that stopped his throat from being cut.

    I think he would have been a fantastic president if he’d gotten the chance.

12. No. He might have been in the top 10, but certainly not the best. Ben Franklin might have been the best, or William H. Seward. Franklin was a very good career diplomat, and Seward’s the guy who bought Alaska for 7 million dollars (about 2 cents an acre.) He was also much more anti-slavery than Lincoln, which probably cost him the nomination.

13. Henry Clay in 1840. Whigs had both houses of Congress and instead they elected Harrison who promptly died and let Tyler become president. We could have seen the American System in action. Maybe no annexation of Texas or war with Mexico.

14. I already consider JFK very overrated as president, so any other Kennedy I probably doubt it. At least if they all had similar political opinions as the Kennedy who became president, but who knows. I don’t know what his policies were.

15. Al Gore was the best President America never had. We were cheated out of having him by the United States Supreme Court.

    Instead we got stuck with George W. Bush, who held the record for Stupidest President of the Modern Era until Trump came along and made Bush2 look like a statesman and a scholar.

16. Obviously not, because Barry Goldwater exists.

17. Why not George McGovern? Read “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” by Hunter Thompson.

18. The correct answer is Harrison Ford.

19. That honor goes to Sarah Palin.

20. Not even close, that would be Henry Clay.

21. I doubt he would have been a good or successful President. Before I get a blizzard of downvotes for saying that, let me add that I’m not sure anyone in that age could have been. By the time RFK was ready to run for President, we were deeply involved in Vietnam, the war was already lost, and the 60s riots were well underway. Any President who got stuck trying to clean up the mess was likely to go down as a failure and hated by a substantial percentage of the country to boot. Kennedy would have gotten the nomination had he lived, but it was Nixon who got the job and the mess that went with it. Nixon was a flawed man in many respects, but no one was going to succeed in that job at that time.

    Kennedy probably couldn’t have been elected even had he lived. That’s speculation, but George Wallace would still have run as an independent on a pro segregation platform and split the Democratic vote, pulling enough votes away from Kenndey to throw the election to Nixon. That’s a personal opinion, of course, and there’s no way ever really to know.

22. He was certainly a good man.

    I have an affinity for him because of [this speech](https://youtu.be/A2kWIa8wSC0).

    It was likely the reason that Indianapolis was one of few major US cities with significant black populations that didn’t riot that night. He wrote it himself and fairly off the cuff and delivered it from the back of a truck surrounded by a huge and potentially riotous crowd.

    No idea whether he would have been a good president. Giving good speeches doesn’t necessarily make you a good executive.

    The rest of the Kennedy’s I could do without though.

23. It’s certainly hard to quantify, but I am not a huge fan of the idea of political dynasties. Too close to royalty for my liking.

    In terms of people who ran unsuccessfully for president, Robert La Follette was probably the biggest proponent of the average American worker. He’s essentially a more progressive (in his eyes, at least) Theodore Roosevelt, but one who wasn’t born in society’s upper crust.

    In terms of people who never made it past the nomination phase, Earl Warren would have been an interesting president. In the end it might have been better, as he was incredibly influential in his run as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, overseeing many of the most influential cases in our history (in particular, *Brown v. Board of Education*, *Gideon v. Wainright*, *Miranda v. Arizona*, and many others).

24. He was no Alexander Hamilton…

25. Absolutely not. The only reason for the hype is the assassination.