JFK Assassinated in '60: LBJ's Cabinet?

Regardless of the motivations, Catholics would be absolutely crushed that one of their own was elected president, but was killed before he could serve. So, there would probably be a Catholic in a prominent position in the cabinet.
I could see VP Eugene McCarthy. Which would be interesting if Vietnam still escalates like OTL...
 
Anti-Catholicism was rampant in the United States at the time. Finding a crackpot to assassinate "the papist," as some referred to JFK, wouldn't be difficult and in fact happened, as wargamer6 notes. I didn't get involved in politics until the 1964 race, but I remember the stories I heard from those who were around in 1960. Some of them were pretty hard-core.

Without McNamara and his whiz kids at the Pentagon, what happens to the M-16? As I recall, many of the -16's early problems were directly related to meddling by Harvard grads who had never fired an automatic weapon, such as over-tightening the tolerances and eliminating chrome-plating in the chamber and action.

LBJ and Vietnam raises some interesting possibilities. Much depends on who he picks for State and Defense. Anticommunist fervor was still very strong, even among Democrats, so there would be some involvement. Whether it grows as it did OTL would depend on how much LBJ felt he had to prove his bona fides to the hawks in Congress.
 
Rusk for State, dunno about Defense.

McCarthy would never be chosen for Veep, he was too independent-minded. The only reason he was discussed IOTL in '64 was as a very public "up yours" to RFK. "I want his pecker in my pocket" was LBJ's criteria- fulfilled neither by McCarthy nor Kennedy, though amply by Humphrey.
 
The book "Then Everything Changed," by Jeff Greenfield has a very plausible and interesting scenario describing what would happen if that attempt succeeded. I can tell you, after reading that section of the book, I felt very uneasy about what could've happened, and very greatful that that lone extremist failed. Up until now, I had no idea that there was an attempt on JFK before he entered office. I did wish that Greenfield expanded his RFK Scenario a bit, since I was dying for another detailed take on an RFK Presidency after reading A Disturbance of Fate and RogueBeaver's The Impossible Dream. Still, I'm a bit peeved that in Greenfield's timeline, MASH isn't a success and neither is Patton, since those films were classics, with the former establishing Robert Altman as a good director. I will not say anything about Gerald R. Ford getting a second term, or Gary Hart becoming president, and being "caught in-flagrante" by, none other than, Deputy Chief of Staff Hillary Clinton. I am curious, was there really an assassination attempt on the Ayatollah in 1978?
 
Greenfield's take is probably quite liberal given that he was one of 2 speechwriting liberals (balanced by the older centrists, including the boss himself) on RFK's staff. Much less abrasive than Walinsky but just as liberal: one's more Grayson, the other more Perriello.
 
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