Deceptive Title ...


No where in this film is any indication of "What If" scenarios. It is false in its advertising. It tells the story of "What Is" from the standpoint of both administrations.

I don't know a lot about anything but I know a little about practically everything
Vincent Price

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I think you missed something at the beginning, where the film shows various historic events going far back in the history of civilization. In that segment the film points out that things might have changed if these events hadn't occurred, but that there is no way to be sure. So the film gave fair warning that one cannot project too far into the future how things might have been different. The most we can do with a fair amount of certainty is to guess that the short-term future would have been different.

The film gave a lot of evidence that Kennedy almost always took the path toward diffusing military threats--especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco. And it did show that when JFK was assassinated there were few military personnel in Vietnam, and few casualties. So the likely case is that he would not have escalated the conflict the way LBJ did.

Near the end, by showing how the war completely ruined Johnson's presidency and his legacy, and also that Hubert Humphrey took the wrong path by supporting LBJ's policies when Humphrey ran for president, the implication is that none of those problems would have resulted had JFK lived. It is likely that he would have served a second term, perhaps followed by LBJ for another two terms, and/or another Democrat afterward. That is a future very different from the one that actually took place.

So the film sort of left it up to the viewer to finish the "what if" part, without forcing any particular scenario on the viewer.

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That's a total cop-out! The movie purports to be an alternate history and it's not. It's just a documentary about well-known events, adding nothing new at all. The damn movie is subtitled "Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived!!!" This documentary was crap and its filmmaker completely lied to the audience by passing the film off as something it's not. If you're setting out to make an exploration of alternative history, don't just say "well, things might have been different, maybe, who can be sure" and then go no further. What the hell?!?

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How much farther do you think they should have gone? They laid out some short-term ideas and invited the viewer to decide what might have occurred. Wouldn't going much farther have been just total make-believe? Then they would have been criticized for going too far. I personally felt they gave us enough background about events and about JFK's tendencies to let us flesh out alternative histories in our minds. To me, that's better than suggesting just one possible reality, which would seem arbitrary.

Having lived through that time, and having a father who was in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, my best guess is that JFK would have become disengaged from Vietnam.

He was the one who persuaded McNamara to help him persuade the Joint Chiefs of Staff to blockade Cube during the Cuban missile crisis instead of being more aggressive. A few years ago McNamara finally revealed that if we had attacked Cuba, it probably would have started WW III. Kennedy navigated the treacherous waters of the Cold War about as well as anyone could have, and he was not a warmonger. He always tried to find a nonmilitary solution after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

There's a great book called 'Sanity and Survival; Psychological Aspects of War and Peace,' written by Jerome Frank in 1969. One section of it explains Kennedy's consistent pattern of defusing conflicts, especially during the Cuban crisis. The book may be out of print, but if you can find a copy, I suggest reading it.

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Thought you may find this interesting:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC5nhzN2fHU


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/Douthat-The-Enduring- Cult-of-Kennedy.html

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Douthat's criticism is pretty much what I'd expect from a conservative. And Chomsky's opinion is what I'd expect from a self-described anarchist. Chomsky should have stuck to linguistics, where he actually knows something. What I read/heard from those two are nothing but unsubstantiated opinions, no facts.

When JFK was assassinated, there were approximately 16,000 U.S. advisors in Vietnam--and no actual combat troops. Under LBJ, U.S. involvement escalated after the questionable Gulf of Tonkin incidents in August 1964, involving a supposed attack on a U.S. Navy destroyer by North Vietnamese naval vessels. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was instrumental in presenting this event to Congress and the public as justification for escalation of the war against the communists.

As I said before, try to get your hands on Jerome Frank's excellent, objective book. It is based on scrupulous research and analysis, and it lacks any political agenda.

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