Okay, I'll do one more blog entry on the JFK assassination, and try to leave it at that, I swear!
Yes, I've already mentioned that it is an addicting topic. There are so many aspects to the Kennedy assassination that you can approach it from, that it boggles the mind that something with such obviously huge ramifications could literally take place and be done within mere seconds.
Ever since then, this incident has become a source of fascination and endless speculation. It gave birth to a world of conspiracy theories. Since really looking into this matter as the 50th anniversary approached, I have heard all sorts of theories. Some really have some plausibility, while others are really, really out there. Here are just some of them:
*Oswald did it, and acted alone.
*Oswald was part of it, but did not act alone.
*Oswald was nothing more than a patsy for those really responsible.
*It was the CIA.
*It was the mob.
*Anti-Castro Cubans was responsible, feeling Kennedy was never really going to be serious about ousting Castro after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
*Pro-Castro Cubans were responsible, since he had tried to oust their man.
*Lyndon B. Johnson himself was the man who set the whole thing up.
*Richard Nixon was at least involved, if not outright the orchestrator.
*George H.W. Bush was the one who engineered it, and was in Dealey Plaza on that day. According to the movie "Dark Legacy", the view was actually that this event was a continuation of World War II, with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers essentially orchestrating the coup, and setting up a dictatorship in the United States.
*If John F. Kennedy had chosen Adlai Stevenson for his Vice-President instead of Lyndon B. Johnson, he would not have been assassinated.
*The limo driver did it.
*The limo driver did it, and then himself was shot by Governor Connelly, and his dead body removed secretly from the vehicle.
And those are just some of the theories that have been pushed forward, which I have actually seen. I'm sure there are plenty of others out there.
So, the questions remain, of course.
But the question also remains as to what kind of a president Kennedy would have been had he somehow survived that assassination attempt, because it is an intriguing one. The sixties were tumultuous, but a large part of that was a result of the Vietnam War, which many people insist Kennedy would have kept us out of.
What might his presidency looked like?
There was a television show that explored this question. it was an episode of Amazing Stories, I think. And Kennedy survived the attempt, and remained as president. But there was some horrific thing that happened as a result of Kennedy being president, and with a chance to go back in time, Kennedy, knowing that his presidency was detrimental to the world, literally, went back in time and went through with his own assassination knowingly.
More recently, Stephen King wrote a book, "11/22/63" all about the Kennedy Assassination, in which a man living in the present day is able to travel back in time. He is given a mission by the man who originally found this means of time transport, because this original man is dying of cancer. The mission is to stop the Kennedy assassination before it happens.
In the book, Stephen King argues in favor of the official account, that as hard as it may be to believe sometimes, all of the real evidence points to Oswald having fired the shots that killed the president, and of having acted alone. When Oswald is stopped from killing Kennedy, history is changed. But it is grim. Not immediately, but on down the line, well past the next five years, after Kennedy has served his second term that he barely won the 1964 election for (remember, he was in real trouble at the time politically). What King seems to be trying to say is that maybe, in some weird way that we cannot understand or grasp, these things are meant to happen, and we have to accept them, rather than scrutinize these things to death, in hopes of having somehow changed the outcome.
The fact of the matter is that Kennedy might not have won the 1964 election, although LBJ did. The main points of debate usually focus on the 1964 election, the civil rights acts that LBJ signed into law, and which some feel Kennedy would not have done. Finally, the matter of the Vietnam War, which many insist Kennedy would have managed to avoid before it became such a huge, involved, highly complicated and deadly mistake.
Kennedy's Civil Rights Act was stalled in Congress at the time of his assassination. Would he have put it on the backburner for the 1964 election year, since it was unpopular in the South, and he needed to enjoy some success there in order to secure another four years in the White House? That might have allowed him to pursue it with greater leverage afterwards. Or, would he have tried to force it through in 1964 itself, as LBJ did?
And what about Vietnam? Many believe that he was already in the process of getting the United States out of that war before it escalated in the way that we know it obviously would do very shortly.
According to this article by Scott Bomboy of the NCC (see link below), Kennedy was clearly having doubts about the situation in Vietnam:
“On the one hand, you get the military saying the war is going better, and on the other hand, you get the political [opinion] with its deterioration . . . I’d like to have an explanation what the reason is for the difference,” Kennedy asked.
Filmmaker and Brown scholar Koji Masutani tried to come to a conclusion on this very topic in a film on how history might have been different is JFK had lived, in his film: "Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived". Here is what they believed would have happened:
"Masutani and the researchers concluded that Kennedy would have sought a more diplomatic solution than Johnson, who committed more troops to the Vietnam War in 1964, and that Kennedy wanted to be out of Vietnam entirely by 1966."
Pretty interesting stuff to speculate on. Much like the assassination itself.
But one major difference is that, unlike the assassination, which actually took place, and which has a whole bunch of different theories on what the truth was on that day, with each side trying to "prove" what happened, speculation over what might have happened had Kennedy lived is just that: pure speculation.
It is obviously fun to debate and think about. How different might the sixties have looked if John F. Kennedy had survived and been president for five more year? What if he managed to get us out of Vietnam? How different would things have been then? Presumably, no anti-war demonstrations, and that might have made campuses a lot less revolutionary. Perhaps even the music scene might have been altered. Would there have been a Woodstock?
Or, for that matter, what if the Vietnam War went on anyway, and the lies that ultimately undermined and defined the Johnson administration beset Kennedy instead? Surely, we would not view him as the almost mythologically heroic figure that many see him as today. But ultimately, it did not happen, obviously. So, it can only remain exclusively in the domain of speculation.
We will never know what would have happened, or what might have been. Kennedy, during his brief thousand or so days in office, spoke in a highly intelligent and inspiring manner. But by way of comparison to modern standards, those speeches often seem quite vague, and were the product of a more naive time. Maybe the golden glow of Camelot would have continued. Or, maybe Vietnam would have been the albatross with Kennedy, rather than Johnson, as president, and the skepticism of America's own government would have started with Kennedy in an entirely different way: his actions, rather than the suspicious circumstances of his assassination. Maybe his speeches would have sounded a lot less rosy if people associated him with that war, in the way that people associate Johnson and Nixon with it.
Whatever would have happened, it is interesting to think about. And below is an article that allows you to do just that even further:
"What if JFK had survived his assassination?" By Scott Bomboy | National Constitution Center – Thu, 22 Nov, 2012
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/jfk-had-survived-assassination-100212215--politics.html
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