Alternate History

 

Recent intimations that the Kennedy assassination was indeed a conspiracy, by the Deep State make me start to wonder what they destroyed. What would the world look like today had Kennedy completed his term, and been re-elected?

Things went pretty crazy in the USA within a few years of his death. The culture got knocked into a cocked hat later in the Sixties, and has not recovered. Perhaps this was a reaction to the loss of Kennedy and what he represented: the idea of a brave and better postwar world. People stopped having kids at about the same time: a sure sign of pessimism about the future. And weren’t the Sixties the classic “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” reaction to a loss of hope? “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

We can be sure the Civil Rights movement would have continued: it was Kennedy’s initiative, and Johnson continued with it on the strength of his imprimatur. Perhaps the folk boom with its sincerity, concern for social causes, and ultimate respect for culture would not have been supplanted by the Beatles and more raucous rock and roll. Which was less about improving the world and more about getting drunk and getting laid.

Imagine all that energy being better channelled.

I think it is a fair assumption that the Republicans would still have nominated Goldwater. Kennedy would have won a second term. His brother RFK insisted that he would have pulled out of Vietnam had he survived. I suspect this is true; he did not have Johnson’s macho insecurities, and showed his ability to admit and learn from mistakes during the Cuban missile crisis. We might have avoided all that. We would have avoided LBJ’s vast expansion of government and his Great Society, which so devastated the black family.

I assume the Republicans would still go with Nixon in ‘68. Johnson would not run, due to health. The most likely Democratic standardbearer would have been RFK. Let’s assume Kennedy would still be popular enough that RFK would beat Nixon on his brother’s coattails. It was a close run thing for Nixon even against Humphrey, with the latter fighting the headwinds of Vietnam, a dubious nomination, a bitterly divided party, no charisma, and a raucous convention. 

Would RFK have been very radical? I think he was at base an opportunist. He would play it by the polls. He would probably, in these altered circumstances, be a relative centrist. And he would not have been assassinated; nor would Martin Luther King have been. These were copycat crimes. We would have been spared those two traumas, and have had King’s input in the years to follow. It could have been a glamourous time, with RFK in Washington, Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, Expo ’67 still recent, and civil rights passed.

Nixon would presumably not be back for another round in 1972; that would be one too many resurrections even for him. Whomever the Republicans ran that election, we would have missed the trauma of Watergate and the aura of “Tricky Dickie” in charge of the globe. They might well have run Ronald Reagan, who was by then well established as the standard-bearer of the party’s right wing, and was serving as governor of California. Imagine him winning this election—after three terms, the electorate is usually hungry for a change—and being able to govern in his prime.

Would Reagan have made the same deal with China that Nixon did? Perhaps. But without Vietnam, he would have had less need or incentive to do so. And subsequent events suggest we might have been better off had Nixon not made that deal. The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union would probably have collapsed anyway, for economic reasons, and China would not have been built up to replace them.

Give Reagan a second term, and he would have been in power during the Iranian Revolution. We can imagine him giving the Shah the backing that Carter did not; we can imagine the Ayatollah and the Iranian theocrats not coming to power. That might have saved much strife and anguish in the Middle East.

Although we’ll never know, it seems to me it could have been a happier century. As one left-wing British commentator remarked, before the Kennedy assassination, everyone admired America. After it, everyone fell out of love with America. 

Imagine that had not happened.