DBWI: President John F. Kennedy

The race of 1960 was extremely close. Nixon won Illinois, Hawaii, Missouri and New Jersey by less than 1% of the vote. What if Senator John F. Kennedy won instead?
 
When you say "fiasco", I assume you mean an offshore nation that effectively resembles a tropical Nevada with sugar cane farms instead of ranches? :D

Don't forget that the '60 election was the beginning of the end for the Democrats' machine in Cook County (IL) and environs: despite voting every tombstone available, the machine still couldn't deliver for Kennedy. That produced a lot of alienated defectors. Had Kennedy won, well, that machine might still be alive and well.

One wonders how effective Kennedy might have been in getting civil rights legislation passed: as a northeastern urban Democrat, that may have been an uphill fight. Nixon as a western suburban Republican got cooperation that Kennedy might not have had. Don't overlook the return of sizable numbers of black voters to the GOP as a result of that civil rights legislation that might not have happened had Kennedy been elected.

One of the smartest moves Nixon made was dumping the ineffectual Lodge from the ticket in '64 in favor of Thruston Morton of KY. That was the beginning of a strategy that saw Republicans making inroads in the more moderate/progressive border states and upper south. Nixon's successor, SecState Nelson Rockefeller, was also wise in keeping Morton as his VP, and integrating him into the cabinet, similar to Nixon. Had Kennedy won, the south might well still be a solid Democrat province.
 
I'll bet Cuba wouldn't be such a fiasco with Kennedy in charge.

And the second invasion in Jul. '64 wouldn't have lead to the German Missile Crisis which almost caused WWIII(Which lead to the splitting of Cuba, into a Communist East and a capitalist West, and Haiti going Marxist in '65).......probably because there wouldn't have been a second invasion under JFK.....
 
Well, he certainly wouldn't have been assassinated.

I think Lee Harvey Oswald tried to off Nixon back in October '64 when he was going thru Austin on a publicity tour. He missed, but ended up badly injuring VP Morton(for those of you who don't recall, VP Lodge was asked to resign in November '63 ahead of the elections.). There was a mini Red Scare after that, and I believe Oswald's supposed Marxist connections was one of the reasons we invaded Vietnam that very next month(Bobby Kennedy ended the war in '74, though. Too bad he was offed in '75 though, he had lots of potential)

@The Oncoming Storm: What do you mean? R.F.K. was one of the greatest presidents we ever had! He cracked down on Southern corruption, ended the Vietnam War, and helped fully institute the "War on Poverty" as suggested by Texas Sen. Johnson back in '62.
 

JoeMulk

Banned
This is Alternate History. I'm pretty sure we've done our research. Besides, didn't Lodge resign for personal reasons?

Yeah, no need to state the obvious. The way you just threw that fact in there for no reason made it seem as if you were writing this from another universe as a DBWI and felt the need to inform us of historical details of this timeline.

OOC: ;):p
 
We probably would have made it to the moon a couple years sooner. For everything else Nixon did, he couldn't have let the soviets get that large of a jump on us.
 
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