Reviewed by Chris Sautter | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.1

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Reviewed by Chris Sautter | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary

By Ray E. Boomhower

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Pp. xii,173. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $21.95.)

At the outset of the 1968 campaign, Robert Kennedy remarked that he was the only serious candidate ever to run for President opposed by business, organized labor, and his own party's leadership. That was certainly the case during the Indiana primary, the first contest on the calendar for Kennedy after his late entry into that tumultuous year's fateful presidential race. In Indiana, Kennedy took on the state's Democratic establishment in the name of Governor Roger Branigin, who had put himself on the ballot as a stand-in for the soon-to-be lame duck President Lyndon Johnson. He also confrontedThe Indianapolis Star, which attacked Kennedy on its front and editorial pages almost daily. Add the fact that Senator Eugene McCarthy had already won over many of Amer-ica's young activists for his willingness to challenge LBJ in the New Hamp-shire and Wisconsin primaries, and Kennedy was, in a sense, on his own in Indiana, forced to write a new play-book.

Ray Boomhower's excellent Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary details how Kennedy navigated his campaign to victory through this singularly inhospitable terrain. Indiana was an even more unlikely state in which to lay down his presidential marker than West Virginia had been for his brother in 1960. Indiana was known as a conservative Republican state. "Hoosiers are phlegmatic, skeptical, hard to move, with a 'show-me' attitude," wrote native Hoosier reporter and campaign advisor John Bartlow Martin in a memo to Kennedy. George Wallace had carried almost one-third of the Indiana Democratic primary vote just four years earlier. To win, Kennedy needed to mold together a new coalition of voters comprising what syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft called "Black Power and Backlash."

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