The heck was with that ending for Mitchell J. Freedman's "A Disturbance of Fate"?!

Hi, new poster here. I don't have any friends who are interested in alternate history stuff (or really any friends at all) so I decided to post here.

Anyway, what the heck was with the appendix of A Disturbance of Fate by Mitchell J. Freedman? I don’t really know much about 1970’s US history (or really any history of any place in any time period), so the only person I recognized in this entire 687-page book was Kennedy himself. And Phyllis Schlafly. And Steve Jobs, too, I guess. Instead of trying to figure out if anything was plausible, I just decided to see the entire thing as like a allegory for things people shouldn’t do and should have done, like a dystopia book (the acknowledgements seem to imply that it was an actual dystopia book at one point, in fact). But the problem is that this book isn’t supposed to be a dystopia. In fact, things seem to be going better than in reality, what with the de-escalation of the cold war and tax reform. Then a bad Marvel event comic happens? Civil War II?! Where did that come from? And it’s not even about race?

I know that books without any conflict are boring, but, wow, this seemed forced to me. Was there even any build-up to that? Fiction has gotta go somewhere on a scale from “mind-numbingly realistic” to “wish-fulfillment fantasy”, but whose wish was this fulfilling? I don’t know much about the world at that time, so am I missing something?

Also, the United States in the book is still somehow better off than the US in our reality despite that massive war killing millions of citizens. So… the moral of the story is that the end justifies the means?

(Also, also, did Robert F. Kennedy actually have an affair with Jacqueline Onassis? The book sure does imply that, if not outright state it.)
 
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