That Bobby Kennedy, if he had not been gunned down, would have become the 37th President of the US in place of Richard Nixon I have never had a moment’s doubt. True, his entry into the 1968 presidential race could hardly have been more badly botched. He brazenly announced his candidature in the immediate aftermath of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s humiliation of the incumbent President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in the New Hampshire primary of that March.

Try as he did, that barging in upon another man’s success served as an ugly reminder of his previous incarnation as the “bad Bobby” standing at his brother’s right hand and always ready none-too-fastidiously to do what ever dirty deed JFK wanted to have done.

Yet the road was a long one from the New Hampshire primary in March to the high noon of the Californian contest with McCarthy in June. Bobby had suffered his own reverses along the way, with McCarthy actually beating him in the Oregon Democratic primary held at the end of May (the first defeat suffered by any Kennedy since the future 35th President lost the vice-presidential nomination to the long-forgotten Estes Kefauver at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1956).

But after his narrow victory in California — he won merely by 46 to 42 per cent — the wind (before Sirhan Sirhan intervened) was clearly behind the then junior Senator from New York. By making open and fierce assaults on LBJ over the Vietnam War he had convinced all but the most faithful of McCarthy’s “peace movement” supporters that he had earned his right to be the Democratic Party’s chosen standard bearer at the November presidential election (at which LBJ had already announced he would not be a candidate). Even more important, his energy and outspokenness had left LBJ’s unfortunate Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, looking like a man totally bound and trussed by the “great manipulator” (as the outgoing President was widely known).

In the end, of course, with Bobby dead, it was Humphrey who got the nod over McCarthy at the Democratic convention again held that August in Chicago. But having been there and seen the notable lack of enthusiasm for the now bedraggled former liberal figure of Humphrey I am as certain as any outsider can be that Bobby, had he lived, would comfortably have carried off the nomination.

Admittedly, he had little or none of his elder or younger brothers’ come-hither charm. But I always found him remarkably frank and open, conscious of his vulnerable position as a kind of American Prince of Wales but never totally inhibited by it. Thanks to my friendship with his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, I probably saw him as regularly as any other British correspondent and one thing I found overwhelmingly attractive about him was his capacity for wry self-mockery, something evident but not possibly obvious enough in his public persona.

I had first got to know him on a national tour he made just ahead of the 1966 mid-term elections. Being a Kennedy he was accompanied by a vast press corps, most of whom started off with serious reservations about him but who found themselves gradually being won round.

It was a standing joke between him and his camp-followers that once he got to the bit in his standard speech — unlike both his brothers he was never much of a speaker — declaring “As George Bernard Shaw once said . . .” we could all safely run for the waiting plane. But on one occasion he deliberately (and, I believe, mischievously) left out the GBS quote and 40 or more of New York’s and London’s finest scribblers were almost left marooned on the apron of some obscure Mid-west airport.

When we finally and breathlessly scrambled aboard he was laughing his head off in one of the front seats.

He knew, of course, that he rated as American royalty — a member of, as Gore Vidal once derisively called it, the “Holy Family”. But he never, I found, had any “side”, being as ready cheerfully to chatter about his friendship with Roy Jenkins (the one British politician he genuinely admired) as about any of the political problems he faced in New York state.

In 1968 he represented in my view “the last, best hope for America” and, but for his murder in that Los Angeles hotel pantry on June 5, the entire odyssey of the US in the latter part of the 20th century would, I suspect, have made not only for a different but a much happier story.

Anthony Howard was Washington correspondent for The Observer, 1966-69

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