If JFK was not assassinated . . .

I didn't look at the story, but I've always figured JFK would be much less popular. Would have gotten dragged down by Vietnam, and no bonus sympathy for getting wacked.

jfkrfkstation wrote:

I didn't look at the story, but I've always figured JFK would be much less popular. Would have gotten dragged down by Vietnam, and no bonus sympathy for getting wacked.

You assume he would have made the same decision to get deeper involved in Vietnam that LBJ made.

wineturtle wrote:

https://www.livescience.com/41412-jfk-best-alternate-histories.html

other thoughts?

Alternate history is fun because you can never be wrong, right?

I think that civil rights still gets passed. LBJ would still have been VP and worked his magic in Congress to get it passed.

The bigger questions to me:

1) Does JFK really make the same decisions to keep pushing the US deeper into Vietnam? It is one thing to support a coup and another to send 100,000s of men into battle after it is clear the US will not win. Vietnam does become a communist country.

2) RFK does not run for president in 1968 because no way the US elects the brother of the outgoing president. RFK lives.

3) Because JFK is around, Mary Jo Kopechne lives.

4) Under JFK tax cuts, the economy is rolling and campus protests are virtually non-existent because Vietnam is not really an issue. That gets a Democrat (no idea who) elected but just to one term as economy takes a turn. Nixon never gets elected so no Watergate and no Gerald Ford as president. Americans still trust government. Jimmy Carter is never elected since there is no need for his squeaky clean image to clean up after Watergate since there is no Watergate (except as the hotel). (Another upside here is that no "scandal" has "-gate" added to it).

If JFK WERE not assassinated.

Mrs K doesn't marry that ugly bloke

Texas School Book Depository is a Wendy's

No Camelot farce

Bob Dylan reads a poem at his 1965 inauguration and gets his Nobel prize 20 years earlier

grammarly wrote:

If JFK WERE not assassinated.

Dude, these type of posts waste people's time. They are worse when they are wrong.

grammarly wrote:

If JFK WERE not assassinated.

Thank you for the correction

What’s more, I learnt that fall is officially 2/3rds over. Yup, 60 days done and 30 to go.

Six hours to go .. . let's hope for a third.

.

The Beatles would not have been as popular.

No Where Man wrote:

The Beatles would not have been as popular.

: Vaughn Meader would have been more popular.

JFK would not have been included on Mt Rushmore.

hmmm, things might have change but how much?

Assume that he'd win the re-election in 1964.

Civil rights - I think he'd have followed a path similar to Johnson's Great Society civil rights changes, but maybe not as ambitious as what we saw in 1965-66.

Viet Nam - he was getting in pretty deep and more than anyone had known. This will always be the great conundrum. He was more versed and savvy on this than Johnson, but had the same advisors. Would he have been astute enough to not escalate the war, or would he be concerned about the political fallout about the expansion of communism (when history bore out that it was nationalism, not communism that flamed the civil war there)? We'll never really know. If he had pulled out, I'd say our history would be very different. But if he'd fallen into the same path as Johnson-McNamara then I think our history would have continued more or less as it has. Growing anti-war movement, reactionism from the right, Nixon, and a deeply divided nation where two sides basically hate each other.

The moon landing would have been faked even earlier.

The Beatles were just about to invade America. JFK could've prolonged the agony (in the eyes of the eldest population) until 1966 but the landscape of American music would've been much darker (soul oriented) and the summer of love would've been

irrelavant. But in reality 1963 towards the end was an instant fade out to technicolor in 1964.

JFK would not have escalated the war the way LBJ did.

Nixon would never have been president