On to 1968
Meanwhile. Kennedy—who seems to have made an admirable start to his South African tour--is engaged in the most extensive and long- range presidential campaign of any non- candidate in American history. Partly, no doubt, this represents conscious and legitimate ambition: but the overriding impression is of its inevita- bility: having picked up the torch from his dead brothei's hand he simply has to keep on running. This enforced timing could, I suspect, prove a severe handicap to him. Perhaps his best chance of gaining the Democratic nomination lies via a Republican victory in 1968—which, after two terms of a Republican presidency, might enable him to enter the White House in 1976 at the reasonable age of fifty.
All this, of course, is sheer speculation; but a Republican win next time is less-far-fetched .than it seems. Although no President in office has
lost for the past thirty-four years, the latest. Gallup poll shows President Johnson for the first time with less than 50 per cent of popular support. The Vietnam war has split the Demo- cratic party right down the middle, and left Johnson in the unhappy position where, with military victory impossible, further involvement in what is now nakedly an American war could simply lead to even greater moral and political revulsion, while unilateral withdrawal would be seen as an abject and shocking defeat and the admission of a criminal waste of life and treasure. It took a Republican President to end the war in Korea. Could Vietnam go the same way?
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