What if JFK hadn been assassinated?
Seriously? It’s all just that simple in your mind?
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/vietnam.htm
Maybe you should read the above link, take a step back from yourpartisan rhetoric and propaganda, and think critically and logicallyabout what was going on in global politics then… and now.
Maybe we wouldn’t have made the same massive commitments that we did inVietnam, but we assuredly would have been involved. No one can saywith certainty how much difference in our involvement in Vietnam wouldhave been necessary to change the feel of the political environment inthe 60’s and 70’s, or how much of a difference that would have had onthe Reagan election, the Bush election, America’s foreign policy, etc. It sure is easy, though, to blame all of our problems on a singletragic event that occurred over 40 years ago. My opinion is thathistory would have unfolded much as it has, or that even if it hadn’t,we would just be dealing with a different set of problems.
I think that if President Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, he would have definitely been reelected in 1964; in fact, he would have won in a landslide (perhaps 65% to 35% margin or even 70-30). He also would have pulled our forces out of Vietnam at some point in 1964, so we would have avoided the mess we later experienced in Vietnam. Also, without the Vietnam issue, the Counterculture of the late 60’s would have occurred more gradually, because the Vietnam issue wouldn’t have been there as a catalyst for rebellion among the young college students of the time. Since the social revolution would have occurred more gradually, there would have been no real conservative backlash against it in the 1980’s and Ronald Reagan probably wouldn’t have been president and, as we all know, No Reagan = No George H. W. Bush = No George W. Bush = No Iraq War.
