The president appeared to distrust his military advisors -- particularly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -- and appeared to be taking their advice less and less into consideration. As Kennedy later told Benjamin Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, "The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.
His brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy worked hard to keep them out of the press. Kennedy: An Alternate History," journalist and political analyst Jeff Greenfield argues that JFK may have had to confront these allegations if he had lived. At the time of the assassination, Johnson was facing two serious allegations: one from a Senate committee that he had taken kickbacks and another from Life magazine that he had earned his fortune in a less than civil manner as a public servant.
These investigations ended when Johnson was sworn in to replace Kennedy: "No one wanted to inject more trauma into an already shocked and shaken nation," Greenfield wrote. Because of this, George Wallace was elected president in Wallace was the pro-segregation governor of Alabama who pronounced, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
In King's fiction world, Wallace raised the conflict in Vietnam to nuclear proportions that triggered a domino effect with wars around the world, creating an atomic dystopia. According to Wilentz, the conservative support that brought George W. He also would have struggled to do so without Johnson, "a Southerner who could speak to Southerners in their own language, and a legislator in chief par excellence," writes Brands.
Johnson helped sell civil rights; Kennedy couldn't have done it by himself. An alternate to these alternate histories is that Kennedy never even gets to a chance to do any of these things, because he doesn't get re-elected in Even assuming all of those things are true — he isn't killed, he gets his second successful term, and retires comfortably — it's still likely that he wouldn't be viewed nearly as warmly by the general public today.
One of those difficulties just might have been exposure of Kennedy's rampant dalliances, which would have had major consequences on his personal and political life. Greenfield suggests that Jackie would have contemplated a separation if the affairs continued. The White House press corps had a close relationship with Kennedy and so didn't expose his affairs in those days, but that wouldn't have lasted that long.
My bet is after the second term. A post-Watergate assuming Watergate even happened! JFK's medical problems would have caught up to him as well, and Greenfield suggests that his well-documented spine issues would have eventually robbed him of his ability to walk. Would he have tried to hide that handicap from the public like Franklin Roosevelt did? Would a wheelchair-bound president have inspired the same mythology? There are many other speculative fictions surrounding the Kennedy story, including fanciful tales made specifically for fiction , and not serious historical scholarship.
The result? Spoiler alert. No Civil Rights law, President George Wallace in , hyper-escalation to nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and a modern world besieged by nuclear holocaust and rampant natural disasters. Not exactly the feel good ending we were all looking for. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Popular Latest. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle with an argument that straddles both camps. He would also have wanted a quicker timeframe to get out, leading to a phased withdrawal strategy.
Ultimately, this would still have left the South to fall to the North as in our timeline just at an earlier date. This approach would have saved countless lives and prevented the explosion of counterculture back in America. The s without the anti-war movement would have been a very different place. From to , the world was gripped by the dangerously icy tensions of the Cold War. Could everyone have breathed a slight sigh of relief a decade earlier had Kennedy remained in charge?
As already touched on, Kennedy was a staunch anti-communist who had already taken the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust during his face-off against Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis of At first glance, it might be easier to believe that had Kennedy not been shot he might have escalated the Cold War further, especially with the tensions over Vietnam getting worse around that time. However, most historians believe the opposite is true.
Having come so close to obliterating the world at the push of a button, Kennedy looked to work with the Soviets more than ever before. At a speech in delivered in Washington, Kennedy spoke of peace between the two nations and pushed for a limited ban on nuclear weapons. At another speech later in the year to the United Nations General Assembly, Kennedy proposed a joint manned lunar program with the Soviet Union.
Relations with Cuba would also have thawed, cancelling the long period of alienation we witness in our own timeline.
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