"Kennedy Survives" Topic

Listening to a BBC program over the weekend got me wondering how differently the 60's and 70's woudl have panned out if Kennedy had survived. For arguments sake lets assume he survives, and on a wave of sympathy is re-elected in '64. Would the US have become so deeply involved in Vietnam ? Would his extra drive mean we would have permanant moon bases by now ? Would Mars bases be imminent ?

Well if we assumed Kennedy survived by with no Brain Damage and everything else happened as per events.

Jack Ruby connection? Would the Mob have come out in the Wash? Would Jackie O divorced him due to infidelity with Marilyn Monroe going Public? Would Vietnam have taken a different course? The Chiefs of Staff hated him, Curtis Lemay was a warmongering sociopath.

The truth is I think Kennedy would have imploded he had serious Skeleton's in the Cupboard and god knows, maybe Nixon would have won in 64?

Anyway given Kennedy won as per your take, Moon-bases? No.

He would have had a good final months in Office as Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. He would have been affectionately held. But the extra resources for moon bases? No he only committed to the Man on the Moon to make up for the Satellite Advantages of the USSR. He wouldn't have committed to more spending when they demonstrably showed they were superior by landing on a Heavenly body!

JFK became Saint John after the assassination, but the luster was coming off Camelot by then. And he was every bit the Cold Warrior that LBJ was; check his involvement in the assassination of Diem, which was the point that VietNam became OUR war and not theirs.

Washington D.C., November 5, 2003 – A White House tape of President Kennedy and his advisers, published this week in a new book-and-CD collection and excerpted on the Web, confirms that top U.S. officials sought the November 1, 1963 coup against then-South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem without apparently considering the physical consequences for Diem personally (he was murdered the following day). The taped meeting and related documents show that U.S. officials, including JFK, vastly overestimated their ability to control the South Vietnamese generals who ran the coup 40 years ago this week.

One possibility of JFK's survival is delay in passing the Civil Rights Act; it was going nowhere until LBJ started twisting arms. (I do believe it would have passed eventually -- but perhaps not for years.)

Would the US have become so deeply involved in Vietnam ?

Of course we would have. Any suggestions to the contrary are special pleading by worshipers of Saint Jack, years after the fact.
JFK is the one who escalated Vietnam way beyond Eisenhower, and the war was his baby.
It took Liberal Democrat icons to make the mess out of it, and it took Nixon to get us out.

…But not until Nixon ran (and won) a SECOND term promising to do the same thing he promised but never did in the first, "get out of Vietnam."

One possibility of JFK's survival is delay in passing the Civil Rights Act; it was going nowhere until LBJ started twisting arms. (I do believe it would have passed eventually -- but perhaps not for years.)

Actually, it was the Senate Republicans and LBJ that got the Civil Rights Act passed. Majority of Democrats in Senate opposed the Act even with pressure from LBJ. However, revisionist history writers have hidden that fact.

RWR – "Facts are stubborn things."

The Red Dwarf explanation: YouTube link

There's a good chapter in 'What If? America: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been' edited by Robert Cowley about Kennedy living beyond 1963.

To get the tag "Eminent Historian: and be invited to participate in that project, you have to toe the Party line.
I have not read it, but I can guess what they would have said about JFK and Vietnam.

Read the newspapers from the weeks before the assasination. Kennedy was on his way out, He was going to be a one term president like Coolidge and Hoover.

As for Nam, if people would actually read the Pentagon Papers (the whole thing, not the New York Times hack job), they'd know that it was Jack and Bobby's war. When Bobby became anti-war was when he was kicked out of the Cabinet by LBJ.

And StoneMtnMinis is right, the Civil Rights Act was the work of LBJ and Ev Dirksen, not the Kennedys.

"Would the US have become so deeply involved in Vietnam ?"

Yeah. Only maybe the Green Berets might have been given a bigger role since they were his favorite children.

Probably less action on civil rights since LBJ was the main ally of the civil rights movement in the administration, in spite of what most people at the time (including me) believed.

Moon bases? Depends on what you like to smoke.

There is a beautiful but haunting and very sad "what-if" short story called "The Winterberry" by Nicholas DiChario that posits a brain-damaged JFK, his survival kept secret from the public. Even if you're no fan of JFK, it's still a heart-breaking story about the loss of mental faculties.

You can find it, along with other excellent alternative history stories, in Harry Turtledove's The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century.

More on-topic, I think the other posters have covered the actual what-if of JFK's survival pretty well.

Depends on how he survived the assassination attempt. If it was that the head shot never occurred (leaving out the grassy knoll and similar conspiracy theories for now), it's likely he would have had severe damage from the other hits and likely would have been wheelchair bound. So if he's left where he can talk (after surgery) and had no brain damage, then he would still have been a sympathetic character and likely to have won reelection (especially if Goldwater had been the candidate). Civil Rights Act may still have passed depending upon whether Kennedy gave Johnson the go ahead to press for it. Re: Vietnam, an objective view of his brief presidency shows that JFK learned from mistakes and it would have depended upon how he viewed the Diem coup after a few months had passed. If he had decided that he was making a mistake in how he was handling Vietnam, I suspect we would have continued our involvement, but remaining solely on the advisory level and not the semi-full commitment that LBJ went to. Given his fondness for counterinsurgency, he may have favored the ARVN fighting the North/VC while Green Berets and such trained units and guarded hamlets (reverse of what actually happened). I simply don't think we can tell for sure. I agree there would have been no moon base or mission to Mars without further Soviet space efforts.

For those who may think JFK was pacifistic in nature, he oversaw one of the largest expansion of US forces in peacetime and committed the US to installing a 1000 Minutemen ICBMs. He came close to ordering an invasion of Cuba. He would not have fully withdrawn forces from Vietnam and would have continued to counter Soviet movements as they occurred.

link

In 1960, there were 900 American troops. That was the last full year of Eisenhower's involvement.
In 1963, there were 15,300.

Now, had ROOSEVELT lived… He wanted to dismantle the French and British colonial empires. No way would he have allowed LeClerc to go back and try to regain French control.

@mwnciboo

I must take issue with your characterization of Curt LeMay. He was not a warmongering sociopath. Too much Hollywood in your "observation." Instead of watching 13 Days read Graham Allison's "Essence of Decision".

It took Liberal Democrat icons to make the mess out of it, and it took Nixon to get us out.

That's funny. LBJ was hardly an "icon" and Kennedy was dead some time before we were so invested that we could not have gotten out. And as Mardaddy pointed out, Nixon ran on the "I'll get us out of Viet Nam" platform, then promptly escalated the war, then had the stones to run on the same platform again in '72. Ultimately our exit from Viet Nam looked more like a jail-break. LBJ did a miserable job getting us into and conducting the war, and Nixon did an equally miserable job of getting us out.

Had Oswald missed, I really don't think anything much would have changed. Kennedy, LBJ, and to an extent Nixon were all doing the public's will, they were fighting Communism and the domino theory. Until 1968 Viet Nam was largely considered a just war. It wasn't until the Tet that Americans really started to have concerns and then doubts about the possibility of a favorable outcome.

Not until the American press comprehensively misreported Tet, turning a military victory into a political defeat. See Peter Braestrup, BIG STORY, for details.

Actually LBJ was looking for a way out of Vietnam. The LBJ library released some tapes a few years back that showed it was Nixon who scuppered the Paris peace talks.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.

So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, LBJ learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.

Question for another topic, is what would have happened if Nixon had won in 1960 instead?

"the American press comprehensively misreported Tet"

Might the mis-reporting have been related to the steady diet of lies that MACV fed the press for years? The press assumed they were getting the usual bull.

The myth that the US media "lost" the Vietnam War is just that, a myth.

I would counter Peter Braestrup's Big Story (which focused almost solely on Tet) with Daniel C. Hallin's much more comprehensive The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam.

Far from being a consistent adversary of government policy in Vietnam, Hallin shows, the media were closely tied to official perspectives throughout the war, though divisions in the government itself and contradictions in its public relations policies caused every administration, at certain times, to lose its ability to "manage" the news effectively. As for television, it neither showed the "literal horror of war," nor did it play a leading role in the collapse of support: it presented a highly idealized picture of the war in the early years, and shifted toward a more critical view only after public unhappiness and elite divisions over the war were well advanced.

In short, the US media in fact *lagged behind* the American public in its criticism of the war.

I'm so glad we're all in agreement here!

The one thing the 'media betrayed us' types never address is the effect that Tet had on South Vietnamese morale. Indeed – like doc's post – they often do not mention the South Vietnamese at all.

Their implicit assumption that the war was all about a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, rather than Vietnamese, is 180 degrees wrong, and unintentionally speaks volumes as to the actual cause of the loss of the war. Seeking to explain 'why America lost' is an exercise in absurdity. The USA did not lose. South Vietnam lost.

Tet showed the South Vietnamese they were not safe from the North anywhere, or at any time. The North's used terror as a highly effective weapon in the massacres they carried out in areas they temporarily held during Tet. Never mind what Americans thousands of miles away thought. What did they think in Dong Nai? They were scared. Too scared to want to be seen helping the US in any way any more.

My central point is this:

If the war was to be won, it had to be won by Vietnamese, with US/international help. It could not be won by the USA with South Vietnamese as bystanders/victims.

The US/UN made a huge and heroic effort in Korea, but no one fight harder than the South Koreans themselves. They fought for and won their own freedom. Vietnam? With exceptions, I would argue otherwise.

There were many in the military – including General Frederick C Weyland, last US commander in Vietnam and the man largely credited with turning Tet into a military disaster for the North, who believed the war was un-winnable. I do hope no one thinks he was falling for media lies.

Here is his analysis:

"I've destroyed a single division three times . . . I've chased main-force units all over the country and the impact was zilch. It meant nothing to the people. Unless a more positive and more stirring theme than simple anti-communism can be found, the war appears likely to go on until someone gets tired and quits, which could take generations." – General Frederick C Weyland.

Generations? Knowing many Vietnamese quite well, I agree with him.

So, how would you like to be still there, still fighting? Any 'strategy' which required the US to be more patient than the Vietnamese in a battle for Vietnam had no chance of succeeding.

For the USA, this was one battle in a war they eventually won. For Vietnam, it was the whole war. Like the chicken and the pig, the USA was 'involved', the Vietnamese were committed.

Reminds me of something I read on the Vietnam Motivation and Morale Project. The project would interview captured Viet Cong. The project leader Leon Goure would report back the projects findings and he repeatedly said the same things:

1) the Vietcong were utterly demoralised,
2) that the VC they were about to give up &
3) that if pushed a little bit more, if bombed just a little bit more, they'll throw up their hands in despair and retreat back to Hanoi.

However, another project member (Konrad Kellen) read the same interviews and reached the exact opposite conclusion. In one memorable interview with a senior Vietcong captain, the captain was asked very early in the interview if he thought the Vietcong could win the war, and he said no.

However, later on he was asked if he thought that the US could win the war, and he said no.

The second answer changes the meaning of the first. An enemy that didn't think in terms of winning or losing at all, which is a very different proposition. Unfortunately, Kellen didn't have the access to those in power that Goure did, so the overall policy didn't change.

I've read that, too, Norrins. Very eye-opening.

Good points. It seems the VC Captain and General Weyland were in agreement.

For the USA to accept perpetual stalemate was not a realistic proposition. For the NV / VC, perpetual stalemate with much higher losses than the USA was perfectly feasible.

The USA had no strategy to break the stalemate, which is what the 'We won but were betrayed by our media.' crowd do not get.

Winning militarily would be in the eye of the beholder … Regardless of how many engagements the US "won" or didn't … The VC/NVA just had to wait the US out. They'd leave eventually. I very much agree with what you posted whatisitgood4atwork …

The ARVNs were largely useless (and in some cases, worse than useless!)- and therein lies the rub. I can't see an independent Republic of Vietnam existing without us nudging it along.

From what I'd read, LBJ v JFK v Nixon, Johnson was probably the bigger fan – of the three of them – of space (and Tricky Dicky the least enthusiastic).

We didn't get (albeit quite modest) Lunar outposts in the immediately post Apollo period not because of the loss of JFK but by the rise to power of Nixon teamed with the cost of Vietnam. Less arguments for US democratic leadership, perhaps leading to another LBJ term might have done it (though whether the quite minor/fragile 'LEMs converted into habitats' wouldn't have subsequently been abandoned leading to no long term 'proper' bases who knows) but I'm not sure either of the Kennedy boys surviving would have helped the US get a base on the moon.

The only thing that'll do that is the Chinese or the Indians looking like they have a real chance of doing it first…

John T