raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
JFK's assasination seems like a pretty historically delicate event, perpetrated by a lone nut at the right place and time. Is it inappropriate to posit JFK's assassination would be unchanged in any scenario with a PoD more than a couple weeks before Dallas, simply because of butterflies?
For instance, any significant alterations in US-Soviet relations, Cuban issues or Indochina, as well as all sorts of domestic issues taking place from 1961 to 1963 are likely to knock Kennedy and Oswald's personal schedules off track enough so that the former would not have been assassinated.
If you accept this premise, and I'm open to hearing counter-arguments, it actually makes having a President Lyndon Johnson a real challenge. It also means that in scenarios where you pick an alternate veep for JFK - I've seen Scoop Jackson and Al Gore the Elder mentioned - you are more plausibly going to end up with a Kennedy lives timeline instead of a "stand in for Jonson" timeline.
Also, it makes it very difficult to construct a "how would the Great Society done without Vietnam" scenario, because changes preventing escalation of the Vietnam war in the the 40s, 50 or 60s are going to conspire against the Johnson succession occurring, if they haven't already derailed a Kennedy administration in the first place.
the few years after Kennedy's assassination seem pretty poor in terms of plausible what-ifs because so many policy expectations had been set, in at least vague terms, for Vietnam, civil rights and other domestic reforms. To make major what-ifs happen in that timeframe would require most PoDs to occur outside the US.
Thoughts?
For instance, any significant alterations in US-Soviet relations, Cuban issues or Indochina, as well as all sorts of domestic issues taking place from 1961 to 1963 are likely to knock Kennedy and Oswald's personal schedules off track enough so that the former would not have been assassinated.
If you accept this premise, and I'm open to hearing counter-arguments, it actually makes having a President Lyndon Johnson a real challenge. It also means that in scenarios where you pick an alternate veep for JFK - I've seen Scoop Jackson and Al Gore the Elder mentioned - you are more plausibly going to end up with a Kennedy lives timeline instead of a "stand in for Jonson" timeline.
Also, it makes it very difficult to construct a "how would the Great Society done without Vietnam" scenario, because changes preventing escalation of the Vietnam war in the the 40s, 50 or 60s are going to conspire against the Johnson succession occurring, if they haven't already derailed a Kennedy administration in the first place.
the few years after Kennedy's assassination seem pretty poor in terms of plausible what-ifs because so many policy expectations had been set, in at least vague terms, for Vietnam, civil rights and other domestic reforms. To make major what-ifs happen in that timeframe would require most PoDs to occur outside the US.
Thoughts?
