WI: Assume Kennedy Does These Three Things

Assume John F. Kennedy does all of the following during his time in the White House.

1. Passes at least a form of the Civil Rights Act.
2. Withdrawals all US advisers from Vietnam. There is no further foreign aid to South Vietnam.
3. Convinces Congress to invest in a joint Moon mission with the Soviet Union.

What impact would any of this make as part of his legacy and the Cold War?
 
3. Convinces Congress to invest in a joint Moon mission with the Soviet Union.
Doesn't that kind of undercut the whole purpose of the programme - to beat the Soviets in the technical endeavour to demonstrate their, and their system of government's, superiority?
 
2. Withdraws all US advisers from Vietnam. There is no further foreign aid to South Vietnam.

The man who was going to "Bear any burden, pay any price" is not going to abandon South Vietnam. He may not commit large numbers of troops, but will continue some presence.

The Kennedys kept up covert actions against Cuba long after the Bay of Pigs.
 
The man who was going to "Bear any burden, pay any price" is not going to abandon South Vietnam. He may not commit large numbers of troops, but will continue some presence.

The Kennedys kept up covert actions against Cuba long after the Bay of Pigs.

Oh for criminey...context. How many potential proxy wars did we fail to go into during that period? Taking that out of context, you could say anything would have happened and we'd fight every potential conflict in the world with direct American ground action. The reality was rather more pragmatic.
 
Assume John F. Kennedy does all of the following during his time in the White House.

1. Passes at least a form of the Civil Rights Act.
2. Withdrawals all US advisers from Vietnam. There is no further foreign aid to South Vietnam.
3. Convinces Congress to invest in a joint Moon mission with the Soviet Union.

What impact would any of this make as part of his legacy and the Cold War?

JFK's speeches from the era are WAY to the right in present day terms. In present terms he was militaristic - staged the biggest peacetime military build up in US history, 'Pay any price, bare any burden' - and anti-communist. The Washington protest where Martin Luthor King give his 'I have a dream' speech was originally a protest AGAINST Kennedy who was seen as uncooperative and unhelpful.

Kennedy turned the assistance to the Republic of Vietnam from deliberately small enough to be evacuated in the ship kept in Saigon harbour for that purpose to 12,000 men, along with modernising the ARVN's equipment, replacing half-tracks with M-113 APC's for example.

Kennedy giving up the RVN voluntarily was not on the cards, he sent most of the advisers there in the first place, turning it into a commitment that just kept getting bigger as the situation got worse. His administration called it "The right war in the right place at the right time", Counter Insurgency being the military fashion of the time.

As to a joint moon mission, might I recommend a reading of 'The Right Stuff', where the somewhat hysterical public and political atmosphere surrounding the space program of those days is well covered. Overcoming the humiliation of the USSR being first to launch a satellite, then first to put a man in space - actually two men on two missions - before the first American by setting the moon landing goal was seen as critical to the Cold War at a time when economics texts printed in New York were proclaiming Soviet Communism's clear superiority in results (Samulson's Economics, the high school text I had in the 70's).

This was an issue of the era, when Kruschev said 'We will bury you!' he meant economically, and one of the attractions of communism was that so many people took its superior efficiency for granted. I know it looks crazy now but the hardline pro-free market types were a minority even in the west up to Reagan and Thatcher.

The past is another country, they do things differently there.
 
As to a joint moon mission, might I recommend a reading of 'The Right Stuff', where the somewhat hysterical public and political atmosphere surrounding the space program of those days is well covered. Overcoming the humiliation of the USSR being first to launch a satellite, then first to put a man in space - actually two men on two missions - before the first American by setting the moon landing goal was seen as critical to the Cold War at a time when economics texts printed in New York were proclaiming Soviet Communism's clear superiority in results (Samulson's Economics, the high school text I had in the 70's).

Don't read The Right Stuff, well, I mean its a good read, but if you want to know want was really going at that time, start with Red Moon Rising and then read Rocket Men. The public hysteria over the space program was a Democrat creation. The Democrats accused Eisenhower of ceding American leadership in an important emerging field of technology on the basis of highly inaccurate CIA reports which estimated that the Russian had hundreds or maybe even thousands of missiles.

The launch of Sputnik in October, 1957 seemed to confirm that the Russian missile program was far in advance of the Americans, when the opposite was the case. The satellite that the Russians launched and the satellite that they had originally planned were very different. The Russians' planned spacecraft would have weighed over 2,000 pounds. When the Soviets announced the launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower's reaction was very muted because he knew that the Russian missile development program was virtually non-existent, save for the Russian space program, but he couldn't admit it because it would have been ad admission that the United States was spying on the Soviet Union and the Americans would have had to answer awkward questions, which would have necessitated the acknowledgement of the U-2.

By the time 1963 rolled around everyone had had a shock in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy was looking for a way to de-escalate the Cold War as a result and decided that the space program would serve well in that capacity, however, he was not happy with rising cost of the Apollo Program and seriously considered reducing its funding or cancelling the program all together on at least three occasions in 1963, It was also on this basis that he proposed a joint Russian-American moon program.
 
Kennedy deserves credit for the space race, while Johnson deserves credit as the engine of the space race.

Eisenhower was absolutely apathetic to space. He did not care. He'd have rather avoided it, and it didn't much matter to him if a man ever went to the moon. Let the Soviets have it. But pressure was such that he founded NASA, which in those days had the basic plan of Mercury in the 60s, a vague idea about a space station maybe somewhere, and a moon mission circa I think 1975. And not even necessarily a landing -- potentially just circumlunar travel. Apollo (or what that stood for in those days) was a vague far off thing. And in terms of politics, what that plan and all it's long term ideas meant was that you weren't gonna see half of it in the real world. That would concern me about Nixon winning in 1960: a weaker space program.

Kennedy would also have rather focused on earth than space, but he did genuinely take up the baton of a space race because he believed it was necessary. And it was necessary either to show supremacy over the Soviets, because the United States was being embarrassed by their space achievements and could not claim superior science with that example. Or it was to cooperate with the Soviets to usher in detente. Either/Or. Johnson was the driving force for a moon landing rather than something like a space station. There's other factors too, and other individuals, but that's the matter in simplest terms. NASA would have probably preferred a space station and then a moon landing, because asking us to go from monkeys into suborbit to landing on another world in a decade was insane if you were closer to the monkey-into-suborbit era of that timeline. But Kennedy was not in it for that. He wanted the moon, and would get the moon, or there wouldn't be any reason to go to the moon at any point for him.

That said, the problem with the US-Soviet Joint Lunar Mission is that Kennedy did propose it, but Congress would not have allowed it. Congress passed legislation in response to that speech that if NASA cooperated with the Russians in any way, it's funding would be cut.
 
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