If JFK lived

Book reimages what life would have been like

Give me a break folks. This month is the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. Guess what? I could give a rats behind.

Seriously, folks, what does it matter now whether JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald or not? It isn’t going to change history one whit.

You can make up all the stories you want about what JFK might have done, or might not have done, but guess what? They didn’t happen.

JFK is dead … and has been since about 1:30 that afternoon. I remember that day. I was in high school. It was about lunch time out in California when it first started filtering through our school. I remember drifting out to the front of the school to see them lower the flag to half staff.

I remember my English teacher running from my class (the first period after my lunch) when the announcement was made over the school’s public address system that it was official that the President of the United States had died of an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas. I remember the next four days either watching the endless TV reports or riding my bicycle endless miles through the orange groves (at the time) of Orange County, California, with my best friend talking about it … speculating about it and the death of Oswald two days later.

Over the years, I have interviewed various “investigators” as well as people related to people involved in the events in Dallas. And I came to a conclusion long ago.

It doesn’t matter who killed Kennedy. You can charge all the people you want and it won’t bring him back. It won’t change the course of the Lyndon Johnson administration. It won’t change what happened under Richard Nixon. It won’t change what happened to Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King. It won’t change a damn thing that has happened in the last 50 years.

JFK was not a saint. I think that should be obvious to everyone now. If it isn’t, then you have been willfully ignorant of all the other things he did in his life.

Robert Kennedy wasn’t a saint either. Nor was Martin Luther King.  All were fallible human beings torn by the currents that tear at all our lives. Sometimes, I think we want to make them into Gods, but they are not.

So, does it matter if, had JFK lived, that history might have been different? No.

Yes, it would have been different because a different person would have been in the Oval Office making decisions, but would that history have been better than the history we (who are old enough) lived through? We don’t know, we can’t know and it is silly to speculate otherwise.

Let’s deal with the here and now. No matter how perfect our hindsight is, it is irrelevant.  History is what it is. We have to deal with the now, with what we think we know now and make our decisions as best we can.

I think, like the American Civil War, it is time for the American people to get over the JFK assassination. It doesn’t matter any more.