Yea having read Caro's book on LBJ and what I have learned of JFK it seems a reasonably good bet that JFK would have followed the same path LBJ took with Vietnam, but JFK would have floundered and failed to get the civil reforms passed, where LBJ succeeded. I still dont know what to make of Bobby Kennedy, he comes across as being a very angry person, even before his brother's death.Friend of mine stopped talking to me for four months because I observed that Democratic worship of the Kennedys was horrifically overblown, considering they stumbled into Vietnam, almost caused WWIII twice and did exactly fuckall for civil rights because we create these myths so we don't have to think.
I've now read like three different hot takes on the Diem assassination and all three of them were basically at "yeah so the adults were on vacation so we basically ended up destabilizing Vietnam because we were too stupid to not let our principal ally get murdered over the weekend." Fuckin' Cuban Missile Crisis? We had these missiles? And they sucked balls? So hard that while they were supposed to be joint Army-Navy-Air Force in the end the only force that would put up with them was the air force? And in order to be even vaguely threatening to Moscow they basically had to be in the next zip code? So we tried putting them in France and De Gaulle told us to fuck off? So we tried putting them in Italy? And the Italians insisted that they be Italian missiles? So the only ones we really had control over were in Turkey? Which shared a fucking border with the USSR? And the only reason these missiles even got deployed was that Kennedy fucking made up a "missile gap" out of fucking whole cloth? Two different accounts of Bay of Pigs hold that LeMay prohibited Bissell from having any decent imagery on Cuba so that the invasion would fail and Bissell would get booted because LeMay resented Bissell having the A12 and U2 under CIA control. Why is it an SR-71? Because 71 is the number that comes after 70, which stands for XB-70, which was LeMay's glorious supersonic penis-in-the-sky. Why is it "SR?" Because it was supposed to be "RS for "reconnaissance-strike" where "strike" was LeMay saber-rattling at the Soviets with the YF-12 and then LBJ announced as the "SR-71" 'cuz it sounded better and then McNamara fucked over LeMay because of course he did and the amount of infighting that the Kennedies didn't prevent? Despite two brothers being president and attorney general? Is fucking appalling. Kennedies seem to be principally useful for incompetence, rape, murder and dying young. That this is the family the East Coast liberal elite have decided to mantle over and over again says a lot about American politics.On four occasions between mid-October 1961 and August 1962, Jupiter mobile missiles carrying 1.4 megatons of TNT (5.9 PJ) nuclear warheads were struck by lightning at their bases in Italy. In each case, thermal batteries were activated, and on two occasions, tritium-deuterium "boost" gas was injected into the warhead pits, partially arming them. After the fourth lightning strike on a Jupiter MRBM, the USAF placed protective lightning strike-diversion tower arrays at all of the Italian and Turkish Jupiter MRBM missiles sites.
The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga. According to Ellsberg, who had access to the raw intelligence, during the Kennedy campaign, the CIA, navy, the army, and the air force each had their own estimates of Soviet ICBM numbers, which ranged from 100 to 1000. Whereas the actual number was known exactly, and that number was 4. F.O.U.R. He doesn't assert, if I recall correctly, that Kennedy knew that number, although he may have.
You think that until you dig into the Diem assassination. Or Bay of Pigs. Or any of the Castro assassination attempts. The Kennedy administration makes fucking Archer look like a documentary. Not to downplay the "we are fully aware of four missiles, but let's just round that up to a thousand" aspect of Kennedy foreign policy, just to point out that Democrats live in glass houses whose walls are already spidered with cracks. That's in a semi-functional intelligence community. Kennedy era was the opposite of.The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga.