D.b.w.i . J.f.K . killed?

Why Dallas? He rode around in a convertible sure, but he did that 2 months later in Atlanta as well. Man seemingly had a death wish.

Don't you remember there was that guy in Dallas that took potshots at the motorcade? Lee Oswald, I think his name was. He hit and killed a couple of people in the crowd and got the electric chair. JFK refusing to give up use of his convertible after that was kinda dumb, I admit.
 
Don't you remember there was that guy in Dallas that took potshots at the motorcade? Lee Oswald, I think his name was. He hit and killed a couple of people in the crowd and got the electric chair. JFK refusing to give up use of his convertible after that was kinda dumb, I admit.
Yeah now I remember.
 
Oswald was arrested and later excited for killing a Dallas police officer on the day that the President visited the city. I don't know where the "potshots in the crowd"came from. This got some attention at the time, similar to the Charles Whitman killings three years later. You never know what will become sensational. Anyway there are lots of conspiracy theorists who argue that Oswald was at the center of the conspiracy of group x (there are something like half a dozen of them) to kill Kennedy, but I thought this type of speculation was discouraged here.

Given that Kennedy is know today mainly as being the only modern day President to lose his own party's re-nomination contest, after Lyndon Johnson successfully challenged him in 1964 following Kennedy trying to stab LBJ in the back in the Bobby Baker scandal, I'm not sure if much changes. Johnson becomes President a year early, though he may have to deal with rumors that he was somehow behind the assassination. He probably defeats Rocky in the 1964 election by about the same margin.

Having a President assassinated might be problematic to the public, but probably not, given that it had nearly happened with Truman only 14 years earlier.
 
A possibility like that: who knows?

I suppose we might ask what alternative course might have followed without Kennedy's decision to seek a formal Congressional approval for military action following the attacks on the destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in the summer of 1964. Though Johnson publicly supported the resolution at the time, Johnson's advisors always complained about this maneuver from a lame duck president just months before Johson's general election. We probably wouldn't be faced with as much conspiratorial speculation about that incident if it had been Johnson already serving and not his rival. In any event, that was a fateful commitment and it tied Johnson's hands. Perhaps a President Johnson in the summer of 1964, serving but not elected, might have tried to avoid a congressional resolution? That would be in keeping with what he later said was his greater commitment to domestic legislation. It would have been an opening to avoid all of the draft-related rioting he faced in his actual single term, anyway. There might have been no way around that, though.

I read in a history of the secret service, by the by, that there was an increase in presidential security following the so-called Oswald incident. The author argues this response was probably an overreaction. For all the justified outrage about the victims in the crowd, Oswald was about 90 yards away from the president. He was six stories up in a nearby warehouse. And he would have had time for only one aimed shot, or at most, two. To hit Kennedy in that moving car, much less to hit him fatally, would have required an extraordinary act of marksmanship. Still, it was a response the service welcomed.
 
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