Meanwhile, in the Timeline Where JFK Lived…

What would have happened if
the CIA
the KGB
you and
me the OswaldBot 2000 missed his target on November 22,
1963, allowing John F. Kennedy to finish out his term? You can
never prove a counterfactual, but I think the evidence is pretty
strong that (1) the country would have
suffered through the Vietnam War anyway, and (2) the president
probably would not have been able to
pass a domestic agenda that was anywhere near as sweeping
as LBJ’s. Put another way, the liberal nostalgists who dream of
bygone Camelot would probably like that timeline even less than
they like ours. (A question to ponder: How would it have affected
the ’60s protest movements to have a Kennedy instead of a Johnson
in the White House?)

If all that New Frontier nostalgia is
getting you down, I’ve got one Kennedy link for you that is
mercifully devoid of reverence: Paul Krassner’s classic hoax
“The Parts That Were Left
Out of the Kennedy Book,” which many readers took to be true
when it first appeared. Published in 1967, the piece pretended to
be a series of outtakes from William Manchester’s popular tome
about the assassination,
The Death of a President. It begins with some material
that was well known to journalists but had not yet been reported,
such as the president’s infidelities, and then it grew steadily
less reliable, culminating in…oh, I won’t spoil the ending for
you. But I will warn away anyone who doesn’t want to read anything
involving Lyndon Johnson’s genitalia.

Bonus link: I talked about JFK conspiracy
theories on
Canadian TV this morning.