Challenge: Save President Kennedy!

Soundgarden

Banned
November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas.

President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connelly along with the first ladies of The US and Texas, Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connelly are driven in the Presidential Motorcade in front of thousands of adoring spectators cheering them on. As they approach Dealey Plaze right by the grassy knoll, shots are fired from an unknown location.

In this alternate history, lets turn the three changed that changed America(and the World) into a footnote(assasination attempts are usually forgotten or not as known as the successful ones).

For extra credit, you can also write the aftermath and how it can affect the future.

I'll come up with mine after a few replies.
 
Emperor Norton I

Emperor Norton I

  • It rains (which it looked like it would) and the Bubble top is put on.
  • The route is unpublished.
  • The route is amended.
  • Oswald misses all three shots or at least the killing shot.
 

Alternatehistoryguy47

Soundgarden said:
November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas.

President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connelly along with the first ladies of The US and Texas, Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connelly are driven in the Presidential Motorcade in front of thousands of adoring spectators cheering them on. As they approach Dealey Plaze right by the grassy knoll, shots are fired from an unknown location.

In this alternate history, lets turn the three changed that changed America(and the World) into a footnote(assasination attempts are usually forgotten or not as known as the successful ones).

For extra credit, you can also write the aftermath and how it can affect the future.

I'll come up with mine after a few replies.
Click to expand...

The PoD is a simple one.

LHO misses. Period. He doesn't hit anybody.

After that, I have no idea how Kennedy would do, or if he would do better than Johnson.
 
modelcitizen

modelcitizen

A kid runs out into the street and gets hit by the limo --not fatally, mind you, but enough to get attention from onlookers-- and the First Lady insists that they stop to make sure the child is all right. The child is fine, thankfully, just bruised and a touch shook up, and is taken to the hospital --in the limo itself-- just to make sure.


With LBJ's behind-the-scenes intense wrangling, JFK gets to sign civil rights legislation.

In 1964, JFK defeats Goldwater by a respectable margin.

The survival of Kennedy leads to a foreign policy crisis that butterflies away any maneuvering to increase US involvement in Vietnam. We get a pretty fierce scare out of fill-in-the-blank (Taiwan v PRC, N Korea provocation, an additional Berlin Wall speech, ?) but we (the United States) don't send over two and a half million soldiers to kill many many Vietnamese with over fifty thousand American soldiers killed concurrently. Protests over civil rights don't have the anti-war Vietnam angle as a polarizing factor, making it a more (so to speak) black and white endeavor.

The lack of people and resources and political momentum diverted to Vietnam is a bonus for the forces of progress in the United States, along with JFK's penchant for fancy stuff like putting people on the moon and American supersonic airliners and big-ass hovercraft and turbine-powered cars and monorails in our cities and lots and lots of other very neat things.

The folks in Vietnam who didn't get killed by American soldiers and their allies include an opera singer, several world-class medical researchers, and the inventor of an inexpensive practical flying car that becomes very popular in the 1980s. Oh, by the way, the researchers include folks who do ground-breaking work leading to substantial progress in how to treat cancer and auto-immune diseases such as otl's AIDS.

The Americans who weren't killed in Vietnam include the inventor of a "private usage" computer operating system that predates Microsoft by well over a decade, the developer of a safe lightweight American-made sports/commuter car that successfully forms the foundation for an independent auto-manufacturer, and a person who makes sure that the set of Michael Jackson's Pepsi commercial is ultra-safe and combustion-free.

John Kerry, George W. Bush, Albert Gore and Dan Quayle take up surfing and get laid a lot and in general stay out of politics. :D

In 1969, the 22nd Amendment is rescinded, too late to apply to JFK, but, just in time to apply to Richard M. Nixon... :)


Edit: Ah yes, btw, World War Three breaks out around 1982 and about five billion people die.
 

Deadmeat

and then a well meaning time/jumper alt timeline char comes and does shoot JFK from the grassy knoll and so saves 5 million lives and resets the whole timeline.
 

thevaliant

Deadmeat said:
and then a well meaning time/jumper alt timeline char comes and does shoot JFK from the grassy knoll and so saves 5 million lives and resets the whole timeline.
Click to expand...

And that well meaning time/jumper character is of course JFK himself.......

((Hey, it's not my idea!))
 

Soundgarden

Banned
How about this one? When they approach the grassy knoll, the presidential motorcade runs over a pothole and the bullets hit the vechile instead of JFK.

Another one can be Oswald's hands get too shaky which screws up his aim.

Somebody walks into the room Oswald was(allegedly) in and sees him with a rifle and calls him out to get his attention, forgetting to shoot at all.

After that, JFK easily defeats Goldwater. Finishes up his second term, Vietnam War winds down. Nixon wins the 1969 election, and for the most part, history proceeds as normal.
 

StevenAttewell

Has anyone ever done a Timeline where all the major assassination attempts of the 60s just barely fail? LHO misses/gets caught, MLK goes to tie his shoe, Malcom X takes cover behind the podium just in time, etc.

A lot of butterflies, but I think it would be interesting to have the cultural and political impacts of the attempts but not the successes - i.e, that tension and anxiety that the Birch Society et al. created, without the despair, cynicism, and fatalism that we got OTL.
 
Emperor Norton I

Emperor Norton I

StevenAttewell said:
Has anyone ever done a Timeline where all the major assassination attempts of the 60s just barely fail? LHO misses/gets caught, MLK goes to tie his shoe, Malcom X takes cover behind the podium just in time, etc.

A lot of butterflies, but I think it would be interesting to have the cultural and political impacts of the attempts but not the successes - i.e, that tension and anxiety that the Birch Society et al. created, without the despair, cynicism, and fatalism that we got OTL.
Click to expand...

Well, general rule of thumb is that if you avoid one assassination, you can avoid them all due to butterflies, so that's already been done if only out of laziness and excusing not having anyone get shot (Jesus, there should be at least some alternate assassinations in any scenario. Bobby may not get shot, but maybe someone can randomly take out George Romney and Andrew Young).
 
modelcitizen

modelcitizen

Cook said:
US presidential elections are like leap years, in fact they are leap years.
Click to expand...


The sumbitches don't make it easy. The freaking elections are in the leap years/olympic years/even years, but then the terms served start and end the year after the freaking elections. So it's like, okay, Reagan won in 1980, he won again in 1984, and this means he served from 1981 to 1989. I'm a ****ing history teacher, and it still bugs me. In other countries it's so much simpler, afaik, you lose and then you take your shit and split. None of this hanging around for months to mess with the keyboards and what-not. Keeps the parties on their toes, "shadow cabinets" pre-arranged and what-not. Oh hey.
 

1940LaSalle

Hell, getting Oswald to miss is easy. All it would take is some dust blown up his nose causing a sneeze at an (in)opportune time--nothing more. Likely he doesn't fire at all given that a sneeze temporarily incapacitates the sneezer. Opportunity missed becomes opportunity lost, and the name Lee Harvey Oswald pretty much gets buried in total obscurity.
 
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