In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was visiting Texas Governor John Connally in Dallas. While there, an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald shot at a van taking Connally and Kennedy through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy survived the incident with only minor injuries while Connally was not so fortunate, suffering a fatal injury to the skull. What would have happened had Oswald's aim been a bit worse (or better, depending on if you believe Oswald was targeting Kennedy rather than Connally) and Kennedy been struck down before the end of his first term? And what would have become of Connally if he had lived?
DBWI: Connally lives, Kennedy dies
- Thread starter Anarcho-Occultist
- Start date
I’m 100% certain that Oswald was going after John Connally, he had tried to assassinate him in his office on a previous occasion.
Had Oswald killed Kennedy, I can’t imagine Johnson allowing the ‘60s to slip into such chaos. After his narrow re-election against Scranton, JFK’s liberalism seemed to increasingly get in the way of making tough choices and his attempts to find some middle ground between chaotic anarchism and a functioning society blew up in his face, as it very well should.
I wish we could have had somebody like Johnson in power. The Democrats forced themselves into irrelevancy under Kennedy and spent 16 years out of office, coming back unrecognizable and more like Dixiecrats.
Had Oswald killed Kennedy, I can’t imagine Johnson allowing the ‘60s to slip into such chaos. After his narrow re-election against Scranton, JFK’s liberalism seemed to increasingly get in the way of making tough choices and his attempts to find some middle ground between chaotic anarchism and a functioning society blew up in his face, as it very well should.
I wish we could have had somebody like Johnson in power. The Democrats forced themselves into irrelevancy under Kennedy and spent 16 years out of office, coming back unrecognizable and more like Dixiecrats.
Would Johnson really have stopped the slide towards Dixiecrats? He was a Texan who worked against civil rights in the 1950’s.
I can’t really fault the Dems for shifting like they did. Losing four times in a row (two of those times to someone like Goldwater) would inevitably lead to some re-evaluation. It could’ve gone healthier than it did with Byrd but change was inevitable.
It was Johnson who really did the leg work of passing a lot of Kennedy’s Civil Rights agenda in his first term. Dropping Johnson for Smathers was a predictable, if short sighted move by Kennedy. In that one debate held between Smathers and Scranton’s VP pick Jack Miller, Miller made him look like a braindead playboy and his time as VP pretty much proved that was the case. AG Robert Kennedy was no friend of Johnson but supposedly he wished he had stuck around after Smathers’ Miami Beach scandal.
Goldwater’s blowout was inevitable after that and the fall of South Vietnam. Clifford Case was the only Republican with the balls to even go against him in the primary.
John Tower’s two landslides against Pat Brown were enough of an embarrassment to really kill the party’s hopes of building a liberal coalition.
People say Tower’s time in office was Goldwater’s third and fourth term, but I think that credit should go to Byrd’s two terms (well term and a half... RIP). Tower gets a lot of heat from the left to this day but he wasn’t the one who nuked Hanoi, that was Goldwater, or Sarajevo, that was Byrd.
Overall, I sure wish he had been our biggest problem. You remember Robert Grant as POTUS? Now THAT was a nightmare. But I guess he gets a pass for being a Democratic and passing universal healthcare (which I guess is a pretty big accomplishment, especially for a one-termer with barely 10 years of experience in office including his presidency). Nevermind the school prayer amendment or the struggles the gay community had under him.
Edit: To be fair, I wasn’t alive for Tower’s War on Crime and I’m sure the fact he parked the military in most inner city ghettos really shook the country
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