Nixon's The One: 1961-1969

Nixon-Lodge

Nixon picked Lodge largely for ticket-balancing considerations. Until Solid Democratic South ended in the 1970s, Republican national tickets generally had an East-West/Midwest balance. With Nixon being from California, he sought an establishment easterner for the Veep slot. With NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller unwilling to be his (or anyone elses) running mate, Ambassador (and former U.S. Senator) Henry Cabot Lodge was selected to fill the Veep slot.

As with Agnew in 1969-73, Nixon as president would have largely ignored Lodge. The damage that Lodge did to U.S. efforts in South Vietnam was as a new Ambassodor, who was appointed by JFK to tie a potential 1964 Republican rival to his Vietnam policy in case things went badly. Lodge didn't understand South Vietnam, didn't like Diem, and strongly encouraged the ARVN Generals coup against Diem. Without Lodge in South Vietnam, Nixon would likely have pursued his usual foreign policy realpolitick and backed the conservative strongman Diem due to the lack of any better alternative.

Diem and his regime were far from perfect. However, the North Vietnamese only shifted from guerrilla war tactics to major unit attacks as a result of the deteriorating political situation in South Vietnam in the aftermath of the coup and assassination of Diem. If Diem remain in place after 1963, the political/military situation would not have rapidly deteriorated to the point where ten or hundreds of thousands of U.S. grounds troops were needed in 1965 to stave off an otherwise certain loss of South Vietnam to the communists.
 
JFK Loses

JFK would have had a difficult time winning the Democractic nomination again if he had lost to Nixon in 1960.

Since the emergence of the U.S. two-party system and later advent of political party conventions in the late 1820s and 1830s, it is uncommon in U.S. politics for a major-party presidential nominee to lose a general election and then obtain the party's presidential nomination again. Only Grover Cleveland in 1888, William Jennings Bryan in 1900 and 1908, Thomas Dewey in 1948, Adlai Stevenson in 1956, and Richard Nixon in 1968 accomplished that feat. (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson did so before party conventions became the norm). One has to discount Cleveland (a former President) and Bryan due to the Democratic Party's self-defeating 2/3s rule for nomination, which made their nominating conventions lengthy and exhausting affairs until it was finally discarded after 1932 in favor of a simple majority for nomination. In the case of Dewey and Nixon, the GOP was the minority party struggling to come back after years in the political wilderness. Stevenson was given a second shot because Eisenhower was considered virtually unbeatable in 1952 and other potential Democratic candidates were not exactly lining up to challenge Ike in 1956.

In the aftermath of a narrow 1960 loss to Nixon, the media and his fellow Democrats would have blamed that loss on JFK's youth and Catholic religion. While 4 or 8 more years would have solved the youth issue, the religion issue would probably not have been dispelled as easily. JFK would have likely won re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1964, but his health wasn't great and Jackie might have divorced him due to his womanizing.

Therefore, I think it unlikely that 51 year-old JFK would have been able to win his party's 1968 nomination a la' Nixon. Unlike the GOP, the Democrats in the mid-to-late 1960s were the majority party with no shortage of potential alternatives to the 1960 loser.
 
People have underestimated the risks of Cuba. The overwhelming military advice was to invade. The Russians had tactical nuclear weapons which the US did not know about.

I think Nixon would have taken military advice and I would have been dead (being british and 6 at the time living in London)
 
Invasion of Cuba in 1961

I seriously doubt that the Soviets would have started a nuclear war over Cuba in early 1961.

Like Hungary in 1956 and, later, Czechoslovakia in 1968, where the U.S. did nothing more than condemn the Soviet invasions/crackdowns within the Eastern Bloc, the Soviets would not have done much more than talk if Nixon (or JFK in OTL) sent U.S. forces into Cuba to remove the Castro regime during the first half of 1961. Just 90 miles from Miami, FL, Cuba was clearly within the U.S. sphere of influence. The Soviets had done nothing about other U.S. interventions in the Caribbean (like the Dominican Republic in 1966).

If Berlin was not worth going to War over in the early 1960s, then neither was Cuba to the Soviets. Of course, things changed in OTL once Soviet missiles were sent to Cuba in the autumn of 1962.
 
The point about Cuba is that the Soviet forces there to defend the Island had tactical nukes. Of course the USSR did not plan to start such a war but in the circumstances it was very likely if an invasion were tried.
 
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