Would the world have been a better place if John Kennedy had lived?
We're fast approaching the 50th anniversary of the tragic Kennedy assassination, and the cult of JFK is already in full swing. The New Statesman is running a cover story asking what might've happened if Lee Harvey Oswald had changed his mind – and the answer seems to be "world peace by 1965". Of course, we're debating hypotheticals here but – hypothetically speaking – the New Statesman is talking nonsense. Kennedy was a significant president but far from a great one.
The full article isn't available at time of writing but, according to the press release, historians James G Blight and janet M Lang make the following claims – followed by my fisking:
Vietnam: JFK would have continued to resist a US war in Vietnam. Even though the Saigon government, weak and corrupt, was destined for the dustbin of history, he would have resisted those calling on him to send US combat troops to Vietnam. He might have ended all military involvement. We believe that would have been his ultimate objective.
Yes and no. It's true that Kennedy famously recommended withdrawal of direct US military involvement shortly before his death – but the meaning of his instruction is disputed and is contradicted by public statements to the contrary. In September 1963, he was asked by David Brinkley on NBC if he believed in the domino theory that necessitated involvement in Vietnam, and the Prez insisted, "I believe it, I believe it." He may have flirted with withdrawing military advisers as a way of securing regime change in South Vietnam, something that eventually happened in bloody style with the full knowledge of the Kennedy administration. The bottom line is that Kennedy believed Vietnam was too important to lose and he was the man who put military advisers on the ground. Most of his staff stayed on to serve Johnson, so LBJ's policy was more of a continuation rather than a break from JFK's.
Cold war: He would have resisted calls for confrontation with the Soviet Union. The 1962 Cuban 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