ban missile crisis had made both JFK and Nikita Khrushchev intensely aware of the danger of such confrontations and they were determined to prevent them. Both leaders might have begun to wind down the cold war itself. They emerged from the missile crisis with a determination to do so.
Pure conjecture. Krushchev was politically emasculated by the Missile Crisis and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev, a neo-Stalinist who pursued Soviet advancement in Africa and Central Asia. JFK was an old fashioned cold warrior, as epitomised by his celebrated inaugural address pledging that the US would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend … to assure the survival and success of liberty ". If anyone was making "calls" to confront the USSR, it was JFK.
Nuclear weapons: JFK would have resisted those calling for the continued build-up of US nuclear arsenals, and worked with Khrushchev to reverse the nuclear arms race, limiting and eliminating redundant warheads and delivery vehicles. He and Khrushchev might have succeeded in achieving very low numbers of weapons, although the time available to them for such a monumental task would have been limited.
Yes, the time would've been very limited because Krushchev was already on his way out. Even if Krushchev had stayed in power, he was a big fan of nuclear weapons and wanted to shift Soviet military reliance away from conventional hardware and onto missiles. When a change in Soviet/US relations finally came in the early 1970s, it wasn't about reducing weapon stocks so much as containing their growth.
Cuba: The president would have resisted sustained and urgent calls for the US to liquidate the Cuban Revolution by means of military force and to instal a more Washington-friendly regime in Havana. He might have succeeded in working with Fidel Castro’s government to normalise relations between Washington and Havana. We believe that would have been his objective.
I can't wait to read what this idea is based on. After all, Kennedy was the man who gave the greenlight to the Bay of Pigs invasion and who tried to have Castro assassinated. Moreover, one of Kennedy's few strong points was the public's enhanced respect for his tough stance on the Soviets following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why would he have thrown that away by suddenly behaving like a dove?
It's telling that the historians seem to stick to foreign policy. In the domestic realm, Kennedy was rather mediocre with little to celebrate except a splendid tax cut. His approach to Civil Rights was to "go slow" (he put Johnson on the ticket partly to appease racial conservatives). What made the liberal reforms of the 1960s possible – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society – was JFK's death. This helped the Democrats to sweep Congress in 1964 and build up a large enough liberal majority even to overcome their racist Southern bloc in the Senate. Thereafter, Johnson proved a bolder and braver legislator than Kennedy ever was – undone, tragically, by Vietnam.
Then there's Kennedy's women problem. How long, realistically, could he have gone without someone blowing the whistle on his aggressive womanising – a sex addiction that was borderline security risk? Or how would he have handled the riots of 1965, which destroyed the mirage of peaceful liberal reform? Would Kennedy have attended the 1968 Chicago convention, where the cops beat up kids with flowers in their hair in a brutal parody of the Prague Spring? However long he had lived, JFK's reputation as a liberal superman would've eventually been tarnished. Regrettable though his death obviously was, it encased his memory in gold.
It would all have been different if Richard Nixon had won in 1960. Aside from being bolder on Civil Rights and tougher on the Cubans, we could've counted on Tricky Dick not to have slept with Marilyn Monroe. A road sadly untaken…
Britain doesn't need any constitutional conventions. It just needs better leaders
September 20th, 2014 11:59
Scotland votes 'no' and the Union remains 'bitter together'
September 19th, 2014 7:35
Ear