What If JFK Had Lived?

It's an interesting conclusion, but I don't think it is realistic. Neither Johnson nor Nixon had military experience. Kennedy was a legitimate hero who, despite his flaws (adultery, perhaps drug abuse related to his health problems) loved this country and, I believe deep down inside himself, wanted to to do the "right thing," and risked his life and health just to qualify for the military, much more so to be the true hero he was when the Amigiri sliced his wooden patrol boat in half that night in the Pacific. Say what you will about his character, a man with a broken back taking the life jacket strap of a badly burned crew member in his teeth and swimming three and a half miles to a postage stamp of an island to save him and the rest of the crew is heroic by anyone's description.

That was also the kind of president he was. The truth is, he had little life to live. He knew he would be dead by 50, given his health problems. He needed to get done what he wanted done in the short time he had left, and again despite his flaws, the man was a conservative with the best interests of his country at heart.

I don't believe Vietnam would have lasted two years under Kennedy's presidency. He would have let the military fight the war, lived with the consequences of having cameras recording the carnage, and been out of there with a victory by 1967, and today, Vietnam would be an Asian democracy, perhaps even on the scale of Japan. The growth of Chinese adventurism would have been curtailed by the reality of having two powerful free-enterprise democracies on her doorstep giving the lie to her socialist hegemonistic proclivities.

I don't believe socialism would have become so rampant in our government. Certainly the "Great Society" of LBJ would not have happened, at least not on the scale that reprobate managed to institute it, citing "the Kennedy legacy" -- falsely and with forethought of the lies -- with the sole intent of building a captive voter base for the Democratic Party. I don't believe Kennedy wanted anything like that. He never got a chance to prove it, but I believe he was a benevolent and honorable leader along the lines of Truman. It's a shame that communist-sympathizing fool cut his life so tragically short.

 

I don't believe we would have advanced the role of Socialism in this country as LBJ was able to do with his Great Society! I am not sure we would have had Medicare in its current form. LBJ frequently used the term "Do this for Jackie." when twisting Senators arms. Of course the House was compliant being democrat.

LBJ was ruthless as president when it came to twisting arms of Republican Senators like Dirkson of Illinois {I believe}. I have always wondered if LBJ had something on some Senators. He had been there a long time. Of course Hoover was head of the FBI at that time so who knows!

LBJ was also a pathological liar {sound familiar}. I have read that eventually caused him problems in the WH whereas in the Senate he used that trait effectively.

 

Sound familiar...lol

 

Agree!

John F. Kennedy: Right Wing Hero

"Liberals who lionize President Kennedy and demonize Joseph McCarthy are reluctant to mention that the two men respected and liked each other. In actual fact, McCarthy was on good terms with the whole Kennedy family. Patriarch Joseph Kennedy was an “admirer and backer”3 of McCarthy during his confrontations with various government figures in the early 1950’s. Two of Joe’s daughters (JFK’s sisters) dated McCarthy.

When John Kennedy was in the House of Representatives from 1947 through 1952, he often broke with his party to vote with the Republicans. During his time in the house he also vocally denounced some of the same suspected Communist agents McCarthy would go after in the early 1950’s.4

When Jack Kennedy first ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 1952, leaders of the Republican Party pressured McCarthy to campaign for Kennedy’s Republican opponent, incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. McCarthy refused,5 and John F. Kennedy took a Senate seat from the Republicans during a year when the Democratic Party as a whole was losing congressional seats."

 

If this is true why was Ted such a liberal?

 

Because Ted was an idiot, and he probably had skeletons in his closet bigger than Chappaquiddick that let the Socialists ... uh, sorry, I meant the Democrats ... keep him in line.

 

Several years ago BBC ran a series on world leaders in the past. One episode was on Kennedy. Several doctors said that because of his pain and the medications he was on that he probably would not have lived out his second term in office. Of course, we will never know.

 

I don't buy that......he was a socialist all on his own.

 

Could be, but given his older brothers, Joe (who died in WWII) and Jack, I doubt it. Unless his dad was a closet socialist, which though speculated upon is, in my opinion, unlikely.

 

I don't think even so enlightened a world as 1968 was ready for that. Never would have happened, especially given the old-line Dixiecrats who were adamantly against desegregation.

 

That's confusing. If RFK had lived...then MLK becomes President when RFK is assassinated later. Huh? Is that article in that speculation saying that RFK would have been killed --only later? In reality MLK Jr. died in April of 68 and RFK died two months later. Kind of hard for an already dead person to become President.